Holotypes

"A holotype is one of several possible biological types. A type is what fixes a name to a taxon. A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism, known to have been used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of several such, but explicitly designated as the holotype." - Wikipedia. Each specimen was designated in the Fall of 2009 and is made of ink on watercolor paper and measure 5 x 7 inches. Click on the illustrations for a larger view.

Wrath of God type stuff

Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

Hold a Candle To

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (906-2), 2008
Oil on wood, 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 in. (source)

Red text source

Green text source

"What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?" (p. 39)

"But the academies proved that everyone with a modicum of talent can make an impeccably proportioned figure, if they are trained to do so. The tens of thousands of drawings by Baroque academy students held in museums throughout Europe and America, show that basically anyone can learn to draw a figure with reasonably correct proportions. A proportionally correct drawing is not really a matter of skill, and only marginally a question of training. Everything difficult about drawing begins after proportions are not longer an issue." (p. 20)

"That's the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards," said Mrs. Berman. "You don't write for the whole world, and you don't write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person." (p. 65)

"Later in the century Whistler said, 'I don't teach art; with that I cannot interfere; but I teach the scientific application of paint and brushes.'" (p. 30)

". . . because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions." (p. 82)

"Out of a thousand art students, maybe five will make a living off their art, and perhaps one will be known outside her city. That's not a condemnation. It's the nature of fame, real quality, and genuine influence to be rare." (p. 67)

"How can you tell a good painting from a bad one?" he said. This is the son of a Hungarian horse trainer. He has a magnificent handlebar mustache. "All you have to do my dear," he said, "is look at a million paintings, and then you can never be mistaken." (p. 165)

"Too much drive and engagement narrows the possibilities of art just as much as an excess of insouciance. Unfortunately studio art instruction nearly always privileges and rewards the deadly serious students over all the others." (p. 81)

"And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought.'" (p. 210)

"It is also said that art itself is ineffable, and people teach 'around' it or 'up to' it. Oscar Wilde says the same thing, a bit less ponderously: 'Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.'" (p. 99)

"The whole magical thing abut our painting, Mrs. Berman, and this was old stuff in music, but it was brand new in painting: it was pure essence of human wonder, and wholly apart from food, from sex, from clothes, from houses, from drugs, from cars, from news, from money, from crime, from punishment, from games, from war, from peace -- and surely apart from the universal human impulse among painters and plumbers alike toward inexplicable despair and self-destruction!" (p. 312)

Elizabeth Neel, Come and Gone, 2009
Oil on canvas, 40.6 x 48 cm (source)

I figure it is half way there

My biggest lesson lately is that when working at this scale, it is very easy to get sucked into details and completely ignore the big picture. It is easy to start making perfect ticks before there is a dog for them to latch onto. It is difficult to cram the cake under the frosting.

I think I've got the basic composition down, but now I can imagine endless fine tunings. Here are three moments that might need my attention:


I know that I started out with NeuZen ink blots on bristol but lately I've been flashing on these guys when I paint:

That dang scale shift.

Dr. Boo and Miso Too

smiley face

Holidays Again

I just dashed together Small Oil Abstractions, a place to purchase some of the small paintings from earlier this year. I will be updating it this weekend with better images. Thanks to Tracy for organizing the Fine Art Department.

Taste of the future

Matthew Landkammer sent me a link to a blog teaching cancer to cry by a guy named Ezra. It seems that Ezra had a similar condition as mine and is on the "tail end" of his treatment. He also builds beautiful bikes. I will be having a subcutaneous port implanted on Tuesday. The picture above is of Ezra after the removal of his.

Grinding out some new ink

Check out one of my three new tattoos. There, on my hip. The dot. There is another one on my other hip and one somewhere in my pubes. Zaida said I should have asked for a strawberry. After I got done laughing, I tried to explain to her how a precision CT scan (Tomotherapy) might not work as well triangulating off of pictures of strawberries. She suggested that they could have simply used red ink and it would have been a tiny strawberry.

Competition

Zaida is enjoying volleyball more than soccer it seems. She loves hanging out with the other teammates in both sports, but in volleyball, there is a clear cycle of when you get to play. Nobody gets left on the sidelines because of the coach's decisions. Physical aggression does not come naturally to Zaida, so a competitive team sport like volleyball seems to be a better fit. Although, I suspect being part of the U-10 division champs in soccer is a nice feeling too.

Sketchbook Installment Four (circa 1986)

The first 30 images can be found by clicking here.