Goya's Black Bean-tings in a Nutshell is a series of digital images. The work combines the food product Goya Beans (produced by Goya Food, Inc.) with the individual who inspired the company's name, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. I chose to consider this brand and artist because they share the same name—"Goya," which can create a sense of incongruent humour—and because Goya’s tragic life intersects thematically with my research on tragicomedy, specifically illness and humour.

Goya's Black Bean-tings in a Nutshell offers a unique interpretation of Goya’s troubled life and does so through the premise of rebranding Goya Beans. The images of Goya on the bean cans are rendered in the style of brushy oil paintings, thus expanding on the association of these two unpredictably related entities. I recontextualize both the beans and Goya's paintings by situating the artist's self-portrait as a rebranding of the food product that bears his name.

In the final image of the series, I provide an unexpected plot twist linking the multiple self-portraits of Goya with newly-named variations of beans; the new options suggest the artist's tragic life and the various mental and physical struggles he had to endure. Thus, I address illness with both compassion and levity and employ a strategy of incongruence—a disjunction between the expected and the actual.

This project visualizes aspects of what I learned while studying the performances of comedian Tig Notaro, who is the subject of my larger research project. Notaro translated her struggles with breast cancer into a stand-up routine activating humour as a technique for dealing with illness. Here, I apply a similar, tragicomic approach to consider Goya's struggles with depression, deafness, loss of eyesight, and more. Illness is not generally considered funny; neither cancer nor depression and the loss of one's senses is something to make fun of. Yet, tragicomedy offers a nuanced way of addressing a difficult subject (such as illness) and doing so with a combination of compassion and nuance.