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Chris Bordenca: 80’s Kid

Hope & Feathers

March 4th – April 26th, 2021

See the paintings by Belchertown artist Chris Bordenca!

The nostalgia and sense of fun is clear in Chris Bordenca’s vibrantly-colored paintings of toys, action figures, and other treasured memorabilia from the 70’s and 80’s. His subjects are iconic and familiar: Star Wars characters, Batman villains, Rubik’s Cubes, video games, sea monkeys, and more, that immediately evoke that pre-internet era, especially for 80’s kids. Chris says: Almost nothing gets forgotten anymore. The past exists in the collective memory of the internet, and we can reach in and physically bring those memories into our present. These paintings are tangible and joyful reminders of the most recent pre-internet past, even if you weren’t an 80’s kid.

10% of sales from this exhibit will be donated to the The Belchertown Education Foundation. BEF is an independent, volunteer, non-profit organization committed to enriching the educational opportunities of students in Belchertown public schools.

About Chris Bordenca:
Chris’ work focuses on personal connections to objects and places from his youth in the seventies and eighties, including paintings of action figures, toys, and video games from that era. After a ten-year hiatus he returned to painting in 2018. Since then, he has shown his work around the valley in group shows, and a show in Australia to benefit victims of the wildfires. His painting “Starless Sea With Keys” won first place for acrylic painting at the 2020 Northeast Fine Arts Exposition. Chris has a BFA from UMass Amherst and lives with his family in Belchertown. bordenca.com

PLEASE NOTE: walk-ins are welcome for the gallery. Masks required. Currently we are allowing four customers in the shop at one time.

Q&A with Chris

How has your style changed over the years?
I started painting album covers and comic book art on people’s leather jackets in and after high school. In my 20’s I began painting murals in homes and businesses of whatever was asked, but my personal work turned to abstract figurative paintings. I then moved to large non-representational paintings, while still painting murals commercially. Eventually painting other people’s ideas in the murals became tedious, and I became turned off from painting all together. Ten years later, I decided to approach painting the same way that I approached art when I was young. I would paint whatever I wanted. Anything that made me happy. That is what I do now.

When did you know you wanted to be an artist?
1982. When I was seven years old I had a coloring book based on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. One of the images inside included a relatively realist drawing of the dog from the movie. I copied the drawing of the dog, and it was the very first time I felt what it was like to really see the thing I was looking at. I suddenly understood how to look at something and draw an accurate representation of it. It felt like real magic, and I was hooked.

What inspires you?
I love tapping into the toys and pop culture from the 70’s and 80’s. I also love old books, abandoned buildings, and beat up vehicles. I like the idea of things managing to survive through time to the present and capturing their magic before they disappear.

What is your creative process like? How do you work?
In the studio I basically play with toys for hours until I find the right feeling. I take a ton of photos with different lighting and arrangements.

What is your favorite piece that you’ve created?
My current favorites are Toy Chest, Space Invader, and Mission: Unknown

Any advice to young or emerging artists?
Make art for yourself, not what other people think you should make, or what you think other people will like.

Images above cropped from:
Space Invader, acrylic on canvas, 20×16″
Smile, acrylic on canvas, 20×16″
Hitchhiker, acrylic on canvas, 20×20″

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Starless Sea & Keys – 1st place and Prints!

“The Starless Sea & Keys - Print 14" x 17" - Archival Hot Press Paper 2020

Prints! A small batch of “The Starless Sea & Keys” giclee prints are now available in my shop. Over the next couple of weeks I will be adding small batches of various prints, and an original or two as well. I spend whatever free time I can painting, so I don’t get to the prints often. If you or someone you know is interested, grab ‘em while they’re available!.

“The Starless Sea & Keys”

“The Starless Sea & Keys”. 14”x11” acrylic on canvas. Winner 1st Place Acrylic – Northeast Fine Arts Show 2020. These keys belonged to my great grandfather. The last few things I’ve read have coincidentally featured keys prominently. First was the The Locke & Key series by Joe Hill that I’ve been told to read by a lot of friends who knew I’d enjoy it. Halfway through that series I learned that Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus, had a new book titled The Starless Sea. Inside the cover are illustrations of all these different keys. In the beginning of the story there is even a reference to Locke & Key. These fantastic stories linked by keys found their way to me at the same time and I remembered that years ago my father gave my son a set of old keys. It wasn’t until I started photographing the keys on the books that I could read the brass name tag. T. J. Kelly or Thomas John Kelly, my great grandfather, after whom my father was named.

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Skull Harbor

“Skull Harbor” 14”x16” acrylic on canvas.

I have a small collection of various octopus figurines made of plastic, glass, and rubber. A few of them have crept into the background of some of my paintings. The realistic one can be seen behind King Kong and its tentacles are curling into view beside the Creature from the Black Lagoon. There’s something so alien about the shape, movement, texture, and intelligence of octopuses (or octopi) that I’m totally fascinated by them.

Skull Harbor - acrylic on canvas - by Chris Bordenca
Skull Harbor 14”x16” acrylic on canvas

Last month my family and I were in Plymouth, MA, where I’ve gone every summer my whole life. We went to one of the many kitschy gift shops on the waterfront and I found a basket full of these weird red rubber octopuses. They were straight out of the 80’s and had to have been sitting there in that store for the last 30 years untouched, no kid would have wanted one of these oddly designed creatures.

With that purchase I knew it was going to make it into the next painting along with the rest of the collection. As I started getting the octopuses together, I found a couple of rubber sharks, and remembered the countless times I had my parents buy me the same rubber shark toy souvenir year after year. It also reminded me of a restaurant we used go to in Plymouth called Souza’s Seafood.

Souza’s was the quintessential old school seaside restaurant. The ceiling was covered in a huge fishing net full of plastic lobsters, crabs, starfish, fish, shells, buoys, etc. it even had the huge tank full of lobsters at the entrance from which you could choose your dinner. As a kid it was magical. It was a place SpongeBob would have worked.

When I was thinking of a way to set up this array of fake sea creatures I was originally thinking I’d set them up in the sand at the beach but it didn’t feel right. There’s something inherently creepy about the ocean beneath the piers, docks, and jetties of the waterfront. You know there’s a ton of life down there on the bottom, the water is murky, at low tide you can see the bottom, and at high you know just how far over your head the water would be.

I was about to clean my fish tank when it dawned on me that it had just the right murkiness to hit that sweet spot for me. It’s a combination of creepy and silly. Like the fish tank in Pee-Wee’s playhouse plus the tale of Davy Jones’ locker.

So here it is. It was more challenging than I expected, but overall I’m satisfied. I hope you like it.

Notes: My 9 year old son Will came up with the perfect title. And the lobster is a fridge magnet souvenir that I stuck to the side of the tank. I’ve had that aquarium skull since I was fifteen, but didn’t get a fish tank until I was 30.

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One Year!

A year of painting.
Some of a year’s worth of painting.

It’s been a couple of weeks past the one year anniversary of when I picked up a paintbrush again and started painting after a decade. What an incredible year it has been. I’ve learned so much, and met so many people all because I started painting again.

This spring I participated in the Belchertown Art Week and displayed work publicly for the first time since 2007. This summer “Smashed Cars” was in a group show at Gallery A3 in Amherst, MA. As of a couple of days ago my prints have gone on sale at Made It! Plymouth’s coolest waterfront art shop. I’ve sold some originals (I tend not to because I miss them when they’re gone) and a bunch of prints to a variety of interesting and really cool people who appreciate my paintings.

The most important thing I’ve learned through all of this, and it sounds obvious but it took me my whole life to really understand, is to do the thing you know you were meant to do. Don’t dress it up into something you’re not to try and appeal to more people (painting countless Fenway Park murals), or achieve a level of respect from some imagined elite class of critics (painting countless large abstract paintings), or force yourself into a mold that works for somebody else (graphic design, which led to web-design, which somehow led to CRM database management, and a whole host of other creative adjacent work) .

When you see happy people, that is success. It’s not the other way around. And when you see a happy successful person, it’s because they are doing what works for them. The reason it works for them, is that it’s true to them. What will work for you, is being true to your nature.

I’m finally able to see how truly listening to my own instincts about what I want to do moves me into the place I want to be, instead of listening to all of the people who’ve got other opinions about what I should be doing. That only gets you places they want to go. I get it now. I’ll do me, you do you, and I’ll be the first to celebrate and encourage you when you do!

Thanks for sticking around this long. I can’t wait to see what happens this year!

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The Shop is Open!

August 8, 2019

Today I am soft-launching the online store for my prints. There is a limited number of prints available for sale right now, with more to come soon. Eventually I’ll be making original paintings available for sale as well, but feel free to contact me if you are interested in an original now.

www.chrisbordenca.com

Smashed Cars - 12"x16" acrylic on canvas 2019 Truck w/ Insulation 11"x14" acrylic on canvas 11/18

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Creature with Sea Monkeys

Creature with Sea Monkeys

The Creature From The Black Lagoon has always been one of my favorite monster designs. I’ve had a translucent creature figure that I’ve saved for twenty years (from a 90’s Burger King promotion) hoping to do something with it one day besides display in our bathroom. I put it in the fish tank and shot about two hundred photos one day, but because of the translucency it was hard to read in the water so I never used it. 


Last month I found an old Sea Monkey habitat in a cabinet (who doesn’t have one lying around?) and thought it would be fun to paint Sea Monkeys in some way. About a week later a Super7 started selling a smaller opaque creature figure online.


When the day came to start working out an idea for the next painting I realized what had to happen. In the background on the top right is a poster from this years Pintastic pinball expo, a mason jar with glow in the dark grow-in-water zombies on the left, another mason jar on the right with the original translucent creature figure inside, and an octopus on the lower left.