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A picture may be worth a thousand words, but which words depends on who's looking. Every month, Evan Solomon sends an unidentified image to someone in the public eye along with a challenge: Give it a title and share the ideas and experiences it evokes. Today, the artist and novelist behind Generation X and the new TV series jPod goes even further — using the mystery photo to create his own piece of art

The original unidentified images sent to Douglas Coupland

Photo illustration by Doug Coupland

Evan Solomon: So Doug, what is your caption?

Doug Coupland: I've gone a step further and worked with the image you sent me. My title for it is, "Wow What a Great Way to Start the Day" You know my long-standing love of pop art. This photo seemed like the perfect base for a painting that might be done by Jeff Koons or James Rosenquist.

ES: First, tell me more about your caption — and then about your desire to screw with the whole concept of this column.

DC: Okay. The American pop art painter James Rosenquist did a painting in the early 1960s that was called, "Hey, Let's Go For a Ride." I always thought that it was really great that you could have a painting with a title that had an exclamation mark at the end of it. And I've been following James Rosenquist my entire life.

And then you have another artist, Jeff Koons — who is basically just copying James Rosenquist and sometimes doing a much better job of it — with these paintings with all these overlapping symbols and images.

Oh, I make it sound so dry. I guess for me it's a very nice way of gaining some semblance of control over the infinite abundance of information and images on the Web.

ES: By the way, how did you make this Koons-like collage?

DC: Oh, just Photoshop.

ES: But what prompted you to start using Photoshop on the image I sent you?

DC: The over-the-top happiness of the clown. In the picture you sent, he is almost like clip art, so stylized, like a generic clown as opposed to a specific clown. And the background was a generic Virgin Mary as opposed to one rooted in an artist's gestural strokes or anything like that. And I almost got the impression it was kind of like a Koons or Rosenquist ready-made. But then I thought the red on the clown was a bit dark and a bit under-saturated — so I had to go and mess with that and change it, and then fiddle with the hues. To sum it up, it just seemed so darned cheerful.

ES: So your instinct was not just to caption the image, but to engage with it. Tell me what you've done in your altered version.

DC: What you do is you take an image which has two potent signifiers there: Christianity and clowns and all the baggage they bring. And then you add a bit more to it. And it's almost like it's playing symbol overload.

So, for example, you take the image of the Virgin Mary and then you mask out a rectangle, and on top of that you put Jessica Simpson's head, minus the face. And then you get into all sorts of sacred and profane issues. And then you take a car, I guess a Camaro, and you put it on top of the clown's head and then you erase part of it. Is that gesture or graphic? What's the car got to do with the plywood down in the other corner? And then, what kind of molecules are these? Are they propane or ethane?

And suddenly you end up with … well, it's almost like beachcombing. Your brain becomes completely engaged with trying to figure out a code and a relationship between objects in the frame. And I find that comforting. It's a way of cooling down the brain.

ES: Creating what appears to be a more chaotic series of unrelated things calms you down — while for most people the simplicity of a more coherent image is how they prefer to see things. What does that tell you?

DC: For 16 or 17 years now, people with perplexed expressions have been saying, "Doug, your writing is very visual." Well yeah, of course it is. I'm writing about things.

But what I've learned is that most people don't think visually. Only 20 per cent of the world thinks visually. And it's a binary thing: You either do or you don't. So I'm always wondering, what are the other 80 per cent seeing if they're not seeing pictures or not thinking visually? Are they just hearing the words? To me, that's like an experience I can't imagine.

ES: So what I am seeing here is visual thinking for you?

DC: I would say so, yeah.

ES: It's like when we see those science books that say, "This is how an insect sees the world." You know, the ultraviolet light spectrum. And so, "This is how Doug Coupland sees this picture."

DC: Evan, that's just perfect. Sorry, that's the best thing I've heard in weeks. It's like, yeah, here's the real world and here's how Doug sees it. If you come to Vancouver and come to my house, you'll feel that the house is just a much larger architectural version of what I did with the photo there.

ES: So you've surrounded yourself with your visual thinking, how you see the world.

DC: Oh yeah. I began doing visual work back in the 1980s when I went to art school.

But when I started writing fiction, I thought, oh boy, you have to devote your entire human existence to fiction. I did that for about 10 years — until I got confident enough in what I was doing, and then I realized that one doesn't detract from the other. The brain is happier when all the lobes are engaged. Or my brain is happier. But I think that's probably a universal thing too.

ES: Let me just tell you what the picture actually represents. Every year, thousands of people in Mexico City make an annual pilgrimage to the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is Mexico's patron saint. The clowns join in to thank the Virgin for their good fortune.

DC: Hooooeeughhhhhh

ES: "Hooooeeughhhhhh"?

DC: Clowns. Ick.

ES: Oh, right. In your book jPod you have a thing about clowns. And of course you've written a TV series based on that novel that airs on CBC this month. What's your problem with clowns?

DC: Imagine you're a clown: You wake up in the morning, put this makeup all over your face and you get in a car. Then you drive to where I suppose children are. And then you frighten them.

Afterwards, you get a bottle of vodka and pass out. And then you wake up in the morning and repeat the whole process. I mean, what a weird lifestyle that is. That's the clown lifestyle.

ES: But they make kids laugh.

DC: Have you ever seen any child genuinely amused by a clown? No. They're universally terrifying.

ES: So when you see a clown…

DC: It's through the tears. [Laughs.]

ES: But in Mexico that clowns' annual pilgrimage is huge. Hundreds of clowns come.

DC: It's probably a big scam — like one of the clowns distracts people while the other picks everyone's pockets.

ES: Despite your theory, clowns are hugely popular. Why do you think they play such a significant role in our culture?

DC: It is sort of the way that emotions are simplified and globalized and trademarked and copyrighted and disseminated in a global culture. Look at, say, Ronald McDonald. There are something like 20 active Ronalds at any given time in North America. And part of the job of being Ronald is you can never ever tell anyone — even your wife — that you're Ronald. So what a situation to be in. I mean you could be a Ronald and I wouldn't know it. You couldn't tell me. It's like CSIS or something.

ES: But what about Cirque du Soleil, where clowning is a real art?

DC: Oh, I've never seen Cirque.

ES: No wonder you had the urge to deface the clown. This picture also interested me because of the tension between the sacred and the profane, the saint and the clown. What role does spirituality play for you?

DC: I think everyone on Earth is given a certain amount of spirituality. And then, wherever you are, like working in a Staples, you have a way of dolloping it out, and reconfiguring that spirituality in your way. If I had to think of what it is I do for a living, it would be locating something sort of eternal inside something that seems very transient and ephemeral.

ES: So let's apply that to your caption. What would be a great way to start your day?

DC: Well see, when I wake up in the morning, I just can't and won't get out of bed. It's not like I dread the day. Once I'm out of bed, it's like, "Yay, the day's on. Let's go." The actual getting out part — you know, today, yesterday, last week, 10 years ago — it's just so freaky for me to have to get vertical. It would be really nice to wake up and have this burst of energy like everyone else on Earth seems to have.

ES: But you've written 13 books, and you do sculpture and design furniture. Something must be driving you to get out of bed?

DC: I've got this time on Earth and I have free will so what am I going to do with it? Well, I think I'll try and make these things or write these things that express how strange it is to be alive. I mean, imagine this entire universe, and the only place in this entire universe you have this thing called life, which is kind of shocking actually. So that's what makes me do things.

ES: Have you ever had a religious experience that has connected you to this feeling?

DC: I've had several moments in my life and they're very personal. I actually wouldn't want to talk about them. But sometimes it's things like births and deaths and passages that obviously connect you to the profound. And what I try to do with the writing or art is create some small bridge or a peephole, or you know, insert metaphor here, into that other world. But sometimes it's also nice just to have a laugh too. In jPOD, it's just this flat-out exercise in laugh warfare.

ES: So I never really got an answer. What is your perfect day?

DC: Oh, the perfect day was February 13th, two years ago.

ES: Are you kidding me?

DC: No, no. I woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head, et cetera. And then the paper was especially interesting that day. The For Better or For Worse cartoon was funny. The mail arrived. I got two cheques. It's always nice to get cheques in the mail.

ES: Sounds good.

DC: And then someone showed up unexpectedly and we went out for lunch. And then I did my stuff, bumped into friends. It was just one day, you don't get them very often, where nothing went wrong.

ES: You actually marked that day down?

DC: February 13, 2005.

ES: It seems so normal.

DC: Whatever drama there was, was interesting. It was great. It was a really great day.

Evan Solomon is the host of CBC News: Sunday and Sunday Night.