16” x 20” acrylic on canvas. Canvas is 100% cotton duck with an acrylic titanium triple primer.

What’s the story behind this painting?

In between cartoons and game shows, my eyes were bombarded with toy commercials. Of course, every year the hottest toys changed. But the “Tamagotchi” pet stood out as one of the coolest hand held gadgets of the 90s, aside from the Game Boy pocket. I remember how disruptive they were in school. My classmates got distracted by each other’s “pets” and became preoccupied with feeding and maintaining their pets. The longer one neglected the pet the more likely it was to “die.” The pets were so primitive in their pixielated forms, compared to the advanced graphics that we have today.

Not long afterwards all the knockoff versions of the Tamagotchi became accessible to the kids who couldn’t afford the “real thing” but still wanted to have a pet. Naturally the kids could tell the difference (the colors of the plastic case usually gave it away) and they often used it as ammunition on one another to reinforce the differences in their socioeconomic standing. I never owned a Tamagotchi, but there were other toys that I played with such as the Game Boy pocket, or pogs. The latter were coin sized milk caps that one stacked into towers. One takes a slammer pog (a heavyweight pog) and slams it at the tower so that the pogs would fly in the air. It was one of those activities that kids could engage in with an opponent or by themselves. I remember owning a limited edition glow in the dark slammer pog. It glowed in a bright green hue, almost like the color of Nickelodeon slime. I often played pogs by myself because I was left alone on many occasions.