Wavelengths Just Ended

Monday:
What a tough crowd. If it wasn't for the swimming part of the experiment, I would have scrapped the whole project. Actually, the free swim came after the experiment. Tish is who saved the experiment. Tish is one of those people who is totally at home in front of a group of women. Me? I've been freaking out all week. They had me surrounded, ages 4 to 40. All ages and all skill levels. What was I thinking?

Well. . . now that you asked:

I was thinking that the first day's storyboard would be based on this skeleton:

Supplies: #2 pencils and pads of newsprint from the Dollar Tree

Song: Take a stick of bamboo

After the song, ask students to do five experiments. They are to figure out how sounds get from Tish's guitar to our ears?

Split into five groups and visit :

1: Drum with paper clips on the top. Students should tap on the drum and observe what happens to the paper clips. What do you see? What do you hear?

2: Touch side of your throat and say ahh. What do you feel as you say ahh? What do you hear?

3: Tuning fork in water. Gently strike the tuning fork on the pad and then place it in the water. Describe what you observe. What do you see? What do you hear?

4: Pluck a guitar string What do you see? What do you hear?

5: Yardstick or ruler on edge of a table. Hold one end of the ruler firmly against the top of the table. Snap the other end. What do you see? What do you hear? What happens when the endpoint is moved?

What are waves? Discuss. Rope example (send a wave shape) rope doesn't move or travel, its shape does. What happens when a stick of bamboo is dropped in the water? The wave travels through the medium, but only displaces it in an up-and-down or back-and-forth motion. Sound waves are longitudinal waves, which means that the medium moves back-and-forth in the same direction the sound wave is moving.

Talk:
Did you know that every time you feel the sun's rays, hear your favorite song, get an x-ray at the dentist, or make popcorn in the microwave, you're using a different form of electromagnetic energy? There are many different types of electromagnetic energy that exists in our universe. These energies bombard our bodies all day long, but we are only aware of a very small portion of them like visible light (or colors) and infrared energy (heat) Ultraviolet or UV light causes sunburn. Sunscreen should be applied now! (or maybe after we touch Tish's house)

Electromagnetic energy is created by vibration. This vibration produces waves that carry energy. Each wave emits a different level of energy. These energies travel silently at the speed of light or sound and produce a signature wave - a wave with a unique range of length.

Sound is a form of energy that travels in/on invisible waves. Discuss what a vibration and a medium are. Vibrations travel through the air and into the ear canal and vibrates the eardrum.

1. Transverse waves carry light energy, do not require a medium through which to travel, and can travel through space or in a vacuum. Transverse waves on Earth can move through any medium. When transverse waves do travel through a medium, that medium will move at right angles to the direction the wave is traveling. Transverse waves carry different types of light energy, found in the electromagnetic spectrum, and they travel faster than the speed of sound.
2. Compressional waves carry sound energy and require a medium through which to travel. Matter vibrates in the same direction as the wave is traveling, and waves travel slower than light or transverse waves.

Do the rope sample for everyone to watch the wavelength.
Have them try and draw the wavelength
Then, increase the frequency.

What if Tish plays a note, students draw, then she adds a note, then another.
What makes harmony?
Can Tish talk about tuning? And matching wavelengths up?
What makes discord?
Can the students draw harmony and discord
Ask students if they can draw different sounds from the synthesizer.

At this point we are moving away from the technical idea of a wave and using the pencil to illustrate symbolic sounds and rhythms like a waltz, ragtime, jazz and rock.

Lets take a moment to loosen up and scribble.

Now try and make really slow lines. Fast lines. Lines that describe a shape. Lines that are symbolic. Lines that are decorative.

Now an even bigger leap.

Can the students draw emotions? Anger, fear, joy, calm, laughter, depression, irritation, confusion.

Introduce the picture plane, portrait and landscape orientation.

Finally try and draw a stick of bamboo floating on the water

That is what I imagined day one to be like.
But man, I was outnumbered.
I reassessed the week and soon we were cheek to jowl in finger paint.
Emotions were flying around the room (and it was fun) until I tried to give the ole "perspective" pitch. You know: We make a point, a point makes a line, a line makes a cube, and a cube moving through Time is what we are having fun with.

BOOOORING
(How many more minutes until we go swimming?)

"(You'll go swimming) as soon as I tell you what I imagine will happen on Thursday:

We will open with Tish and a Song
Something mellow that catches our attention but ends on a fade out. . .

I begin the first "chapter":

Lines are our symbol for wave lengths.

Remember? How did we describe wavelengths at the beginning?
We draw wave lengths and talk about frequency and speed.
Lines are like slug trails (Have you ever seen the trail that a slug leaves?). Try to draw like a slug.
Lines are like rockets or explosions. Let us make some.
Lines can be thin, like the tool you are using now (dollar store markers)
Lines can be thick, like the finger paints we did yesterday.
What song do you remember from yesterday?
Tish plays suggested song. It might be a good time to stand.

Chapter Two:

We all sit down.
The wavy line is a symbol!
It doesn't really exist.
What do I mean by symbol?
Anybody?
Can you give me an example of a symbol?
A stop sign, a heart shape, an apple, a smiley face, parallel lines, a cube
These wavelengths that we are talking about, these wavy lines are symbols.
Put another way:
Let us start with a dot (a coin, too big, smaller, a pocket full of hole punch dots as confetti, smaller, a grain of sand. Hand out a grain of sand and it becomes absurd and goofy. That is the point (pardon the pun) dots are absurd and goofy!)
You can never point to a point, it just keeps getting smaller.
Every one stand up and form a line (point by point)
I want everyone to come half way towards my side of the room. . .
And then, halfway again
Etc. until Zeno's paradox becomes funny, and yet, possibly enlightening

Tish brings in a song, as we all marvel at the paradox.
The song also sits us all back down.

Chapter Three:

Do you get the point?
Everyone places their pen point on the paper. Static not moving. Possibly oozing into the paper.
On the count of three I want everyone to move their pen across the paper (but not leave the paper) for four beats. . . .
Wait! Tish? Why do we count 1, 2, 3, and then start?
Tish does her thing with how to start a song.
On four, we all draw a line.

See?
Lines are a measure of time.
Make a slow mark
Make a fast mark
Ok
Now make a slow mark with as much energy as you can.
Now make a fast mark with as much grace as you can.
Now make a perfectly straight line.

Lines are a measure of time.
What if I took one of your lines and moved it through space and time?
It would be like a piece of string. Let me move a piece of string, what do I create?
A string is too thick. A true line is really made of points right? Paper thin.
Like this edge here (pointing to a piece of paper and its edge.)
Laying the string down next to the edge, grabbing the corners (or endpoints) of the paper, slowly pull the paper up in the air.
What is created?

A plane.
A sheet of paper is "a plane".
It is two dimensional.
(one could go on and on about this)

What happens when we move a plane (sheet of paper) through space time?
What sort of shape does time make of a plane?
Move a sheet of paper parallel to a box.

A cube.
A three dimensional cube.

Lets all make a symbol of a square.
Four lines.
1234
Where did we end up?
4 ends up at 1!
What do we call something whose end is the beginning?
A circle is something to think about.
Where your pen started and stopped are called corners or end points.
How many endpoints on your square?
How would you move your square through space and time with symbols?
Take each point, like we did before, and travel in the same 123 direction of choice.
Making the legs of a cube. Not parallel to the sides of the paper, or our first square.

When four corners move through time, we get space.
Remember Tish's song about Earth, Air, Fire, Water?
What about that Turn, Turn, Turn song?
We all stand and make our pulse (passed on handshake) circle.
We are a line, made of points, sending a signal, having our hand squeezed, squeezing the next persons, in a circle. A pulsing wave.
Lets do "the wave"
Lets go swimming.

And We Did
And It Was Way More Fun

Who Watches the Watchmen?

I know this guy Christopher Saunders who is in a group show that opens tomorrow. . . or, for most of you, tonight, Saturday June 30th. It is at some place called The Silas Marder Gallery. I have no idea where Bridgehampton NY is, but from the link to the gallery and the images of their gallery/barn. . . I wish I was there.

Wait a minute.

I don't even know this guy. Well. . . I do know that he is a smart and righteous blogger. He is an anonymous blogger who blogs with a cowl. Secret Identities can be used for good. Christopher is an aesthetic vigilante. I don't even know this guy. I know that he can be a sensitive and thoughtful blogger and emailer (sp?).

And he can paint!
You should go to his show. I really can't. Google Maps says it will take me 3,075 mi – about 1 day 22 hours, if I leave now. I've already missed it.
Isn't it cool that when we move from West Coast to East Coast, the options for vehicular movement get tighter and tighter so that the wavelength of travel approaches a strait line in Chicago?

Who would have thought?

Who would have thought that it was going to be so hard to start blogging again after a weekend off? Its easy to to quit blogging. . . I've done it hundreds of times. But, really, it was easy to quit, just for a weekend, because here we are on Thursday! Out of sight, out of mind.

Who would have thought that buying some new drinking glasses would compel me to look at what I was drinking with (judgmentally) improved taste?

Studio Freeze Frame

Day job

Here is my assignment:
Forge and mutate this loosey goosey David Hockney (do I even need to make a link to his name?) to fit on two doors that will hide the client's monster plasma screen television.

I thought that was the dumbest painting I'd ever seen.
I normally wouldn't have given it the time of day, but, since I now have to give it my price per hour, I have a new found respect for Hockney's landscape watercolors.

Of course, I'm not "done" with the doors in the deep space above. I've had to tweak my chops. Watercolors are vapid and empty when blown up. When you increase the scale of a watercolor painting, it does not get better or more powerful. The washes become voids etc.

I was just forced to learn a lot of insights that will inform my "own" painting.
What else could one ask for from a day job?
Except for maybe $1000 an hour.

I'm putting my nose to the grindstone this weekend so I'm dumping five bookmarked links and asking Stacy to hide the laptop. See yah Monday.

Gapingvoid's how to be creative list.

A few of the 58824 anagrams found for my name
Steven Grant LaRose
generated at the Internet Anagram Server:
Gravestone Rentals
Average Lent Snorts
Arrange Loves Tents
Savage Lens Torrent
Larvae Resent Tongs
Stagnant Ever Loser

Fan Mail to God from AntiSniveler

ausgang.com
a quarterly arts journal out of Chicago

The Etsy time machine
psychedelic capitalism

I'm stoopin low

Update:
Video removed.
Stacy (my wife) said, "That was the worst post you've ever done.
When I go to your blog, I don't want to encounter that stuff".

Sorry.

How messed up is it that that was (and this is) my 666th post and the only post that I've ever deleted?!

(second update: obviously this hasn't been deleted but mutated)

Leonard Cohen performs his classic song with a mind-blowing assist from saxophone giant Sonny Rollins.

Who By Fire

thanks for the tip from Franklin at his infrequent blog Nervous Unto Thirst.

gloss=tongue=transparent=word of god=

There was a time when I wore rings made by Victoria Haven.
(I've recently taken them off because when I brush my hand across something, say for example a faux masterpiece, rings can make a nasty scratch. My hand, you see, is one of my finest brushes.)
This is why Victoria's rings have been sitting on the window sill.
><

This week Victoria has a show opening at Howard House.

Are those tiny lines dashed?
Doesn't the paper's texture seem contrary to reproducibility?

Is that ink on paper?
Is Victoria a robot quilter from the future?

Since I'm asking so many questions. . .
What are these shims for that always come with pre-made canvases?

I suspect they are to be glued into the datoed joints on the back, and yet, in all my years I've never known how.

Now that you mention ignorance, I recently tried out the limits of glazing on two of my paintings. I figure I have to call them "paintings" at this point. A glaze is what defines a painting. Drawings have no glazes.

How To Draw A Bunny, 66

I simply can't post every postcard I get in the mail. In fact, I had a personal rule that I was limiting myself to only postcards from Whiting Tennis. But then last week, I received the following three items on the same day: 1) A postcard from Whiting (listen to Jen Graves interview Whiting for the Stranger, ooh and read the sarcastic comments by doubting readers/listeners). 2) A postcard from Carla (aka blogger Rocktown, IN) which is no big deal, two postcards in one day, but when both artists used a computer to draw, I took notice.
Coincidence? A Sign of the Times? A sign from alien life forms from the future, which turn out to be us? Hm. The future. . . .?

3) The new Artforum arrived as well. It is huge! An inch thick!

I flipped through the entire magazine, like I always do, and I tried to give every page the same amount of attention. Only two pages caught my eye however: a) Hiroshi Sugimoto at Kunstsammlung, that guy always amazes me.b) Cy Twombly at Collection Lambert en Avignon. I blow hot and cold with Cy. But these new paintings stood out as page stoppers in the inch thick sea of Artforum.
Hey wait. . . didn't I just read the following about Whiting at the Slog link above? "the work is superficial and the thought behind it possibly thinner. observation has value when insight results, not when you walk past something, think its cool, and repeat. him and twombley? come on. give us more credit than that."? Yep. I sure did. It sure must be hard to be an art critic.

Well. Not much there for such a humongous magazine. Luckily Bookforum came bundled with Artforum. In it, James Surowiecki reviews The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. You can read the whole article here. Coincidence? A Sign of the Times? The same day, Robin Ann Walker gave me the heads-up to the ABC News report The Lucky Ones: Is It Serendipity or Smarts? It seems everyone is trying to figure it out. How do two events make a line? Or why do three events make a shape? Painters know why. They should ask the painters. Anyway, people seem to want to be able to explain events as well as predict them. Investigative Blogger Jacques de Beaufort has been on one tendrilling (my new word) branch of the case. He has recently linked us to three YouTube hits of Doom making a shape from Terence McKenna, the Mayan calender, and a future date in December of 2012.







According the the Black Swan theory, pundits, policy wonks, Wall Street analysts, hedge-fund managers (and maybe even Enlightened humans?) are "overconfident, narrowminded, overly committed to a particular picture of the world. But the fundamental reason for their failure is that they are playing an impossible game. The future—or at least those parts of it that really matter— is, by its nature, genuinely unpredictable. We can’t read the tea leaves because they don’t exist."

"Taleb is a former options trader who, in 2001, published Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life, a powerful critique of our underappreciation of the reality of chance and our tendency to see pattern and causality where neither exists. In his new book, he extends that critique into a broader theory of history and society and an attack on our faith in induction. Because we believe that the future will be much like the past, Taleb argues, we believe that we can extrapolate from historical patterns and evidence in order to understand what will happen. The problem, he argues, is that history is not, fundamentally, the story of predictable, incremental change, in which the past is a reliable guide to the future. Instead, what really matters in history is what he calls “the black swan”—the radical outlier that takes place “outside the realm of regular expectations” and that has an extreme impact." (link to source)

I guess I'm hoping, connecting, and extending.

How can you argue with. . .

. . . works in progress?

Can You Remember When?

Do you want my advice?

It is really a "theory" actually:
Do not simply clean your brushes,
but enjoy cleaning them.

Also make sure that you have lots to do because
keeping yourself busy means establishing goals.
Establishing goals means
monitoring production.
Production causes accidents.

We must fuck up in the most proper of ways you see.

I thought I should bump the needle
hiccup
back to my roots
force the groove into self awareness
what if. . .
instead of going bigger
I stepped back
or even dove back
into small. . .
and inky?

What have I learned since I left?

Four ink drawings on the beginnings of my David Hockney forgery that will cloak two doors that hide a client's monster television (even the flat screens are being hidden).

Stream Drop

I broke a fundamental guideline in each of the two Supersaturated Rosco paintings below (22" x 30" on canvas). I had established the guidelines last year with the works on paper. The first self-imposed rule I broke is obvious in the first one.
I have been trying so hard to draw within the lines. When I say "lines", I mean edges. It is hard not to suspect that I made a background above. If you even touch the edge of a painting, the painting's similarities to a window increase. I may have made a foreground. Are we talkin' object or hole above?

I am reluctant to discuss the rule that I broke above. What use was the rule if I can't even tell I broke it?


I finally finished Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger I, Final Secret Of The Illuminati.
Cop-out wiki-synopsis:

Cosmic Trigger I deals with Wilson's experiences during a time in which he put himself through a process of "self-induced brain change" as well as vignettes of his earlier life. The main discovery of this process -- which, he tells us, is known in certain traditions as Chapel Perilous-- is that "reality" (although a noun in our language system, and therefore commonly conceptualized as being a definite, unchanging "'thing") is mutable and subjective to the observer.

Me:
Both Jacques de Beaufort and Chris Rywalt brought up RAW's name (on the same day? synchronicity or plot?) in different contexts so I felt compelled to read one of Wilson's books. I finished the book with some skimming. When Wilson launches into correlation-equals-causation threads, I began to glaze over. Don't get me wrong, I have a profound respect for this book that was first published in 1977. This book represents what being a Hope Fiend is all about. The bummer was that not one of Wilson's predictions for the future has come true. As I read, the wind seemed to die and the momentum fizzled. The last exciting thing seemed to be Terence McKenna's Novelty Theory (again from wiki-crib):

One of McKenna's most widely-promulgated ideas is known as Novelty theory. It predicts the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time. McKenna developed the theory in the mid-1970s after his experiences in the Amazon at La Chorrera led him to closely study the King Wen Sequence of the I-Ching. Novelty theory involves ontology, extropy, and eschatology.

The theory proposes that the universe is an engine designed for the production and conservation of novelty. Novelty, in this context, can be thought of as newness, or extropy (a term coined by Max More meaning the opposite of entropy). According to McKenna, when novelty is graphed over time, a fractal waveform known as "timewave zero" or simply the "timewave" results. The graph shows at what time periods, but never at what locations, novelty increases or decreases.

Considered by some to represent a model of history's most important events, the universal algorithm has also been extrapolated to be a model for future events. McKenna admitted to the expectation of a "singularity of novelty", and that he and his colleagues projected many hundreds of years into the future to find when this singularity (runaway "newness" or extropy) could occur. The graph of extropy had many enormous fluctuations over the last 25,000 years, but amazingly, it hit an asymptote at exactly December 21, 2012.^{[citation needed]}

In other words, entropy (or habituation) no longer exists after that date. It is impossible to define that state. The technological singularity concept parallels this, only at a date roughly three decades later. According to leading expert Ray Kurzweil), another concept called cultural singularity (essentially cultural dissolution, or language dissolution), parallels this as well.

Terrence claimed to have no knowledge of the Mayan calendar, which ends exactly the same day that the Timewave graph does: December 21, 2012.

Me:
What really stuck with me about Cosmic Trigger were a few quotes and observations (and an overarching moral). In order to test the stickiness of his ideas, I will not go grab the book and totally misquote at this point.

"Convictions make convicts" was something that I remember. This idea makes me think of Bill Gusky's crusade for those who are willing to "risk making real crap". With no disrespect, Bill points to ". . . Richard Serra doing something else with slabs of iron. And there's Chuck Close making yet another giant head painting. And there's Joan Mitchell hashing out yet another Ab-Ex painting. And there's Bowser from Sha-Na-Na one more time laying the bass-line to "Blue Moon." Passion is a fashion fer sure. The golden-handcuffs of a profitable groove must be tough to break.

"Positive energy is as real as gravity" which is Tim Leary's advice to transcend suffering. It is what the "Love" of the 60's has promised. The book Cosmic Trigger oozes with the notion that we can make connections of coincidences and turn them into serendipitous power, or paranoia, its your choice. Sir Arthur Eddington wrote an essay for The World of Mathematics which sums it all up: "We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own."

Serendipitous power and Luck:
In the comments of my last post, Karen points us to Seth's Blog of June 11th. He writes simply about The Moment,

When you are sitting right on the edge of something daring and scary and creative and powerful and perhaps wonderful... and you blink and take a step back.

That's the moment. The moment between you and remarkable. Most people blink. Most people get stuck.

All the hard work and preparation and daring and luck is nothing compared with the ability to not blink.

and Helquin adds:
"Perhaps more serendipity... For some reason, I thought of you & your recent paintings when I came across this thread (and especially this comment), ultimately leading down the garden path to this out-of-print book. "

Luck and choice and fate and meaning all slurring together.

Geoffrey left the next gracious comment that I don't need to piece apart. But regarding my question about whether the audience shouldn't be offered some clues (as to how to "enter" my new paintings) Geoffrey says,

"No. And this is totally my opinion. Clues are for narratives. Clues are for the Sopranos. If you are telling the truth, you don't need clues to show where the truth is. If you are being fully open and vulnerable in the work, where would you need "clues"? Clues only serve to help someone find something that is hiding. What would you be hiding that you need to give someone clues to help them find it? Why hide it then? (emphasis mine) This is exactly my inability to understand the notion of a grand conspiracy that is cloaking the Philosopher's Stone from us. Why is the Final Secret of the Illuminati a puzzle that needs to be discovered? Especially if it is something like "Love" or "positive energy?"

Geoffrey riffs on it all but concludes with this observation that (unknowingly?) ties into "convictions makes convicts":

"The chinese, Van Gogh, Renior, Velasquez... had. no. chops. Van Gogh was not painting in the style of Van Gogh. Impressionism was a MOVEMENT. Plein Air is that tired old cougar at the end of the bar with a raspy voice and the too tan skin that you might just wake up with if you aren't careful. Fuck Chops. They are a safe place to rest, but they will only keep you from going deeper."

Shut up and paint. I get it.

George is going to summarize all this in his up-coming graphic novel Flying Poppycock! On the Midway of Higher Consciousness, starring my favorite heroine:

Painting like nobody

18" x 24"
paint on canvas

Is there a technical term for bringing a comment on a previous post up to the surface of the blog? I'm going to have to do that with Geoffrey's recent points well taken.

Geoffrey says: "i wish you'd stop with the degrading humor toward your work. It's like listening to a guy who loves his overweight wife to death, but has to crack jokes about her in public." Touche. I'm just trying to demystify the origins of my creativity. When I walk into the studio in the morning lately, I often gasp a laughing breath in and exhale a whispered "Holy shit. . ."

"You have some really interesting things resonating in these." Thank you.

"But when you say these things about them it begins to sounds like it is all an accident." In one sense it is all an accident, but that's too much for right here. I get ya though. I must admit however, that these really do seem to come from nowhere (which I believe is the pre-linguistic and pre-editing part of me.) Its all body memory at this point. Blink and Flow. Intuition based on years of studying accidents.

"I don't believe that is true. I know enough about paint to know that you have to be in the act of loving (fully absorbed) in order to make some of these marks that you are making now." Thanks again. But what about the people, the audience, the un-converted, who don't spend as much time painting as we do? Shouldn't they be offered some clues? Don't they deserve some context in order to appreciate the craft? I guess I don't know who the audience really is who comes to the blog. What can I, or should I, assume people bring to these paintings?

"These aren't unicorns, or blobs, or comic books, or rorshacks. Something real is happening here, something you have been working hard toward and following through... Why the need to disown it now that it has come?" Here Geoffrey has me on the ropes. Do I appear to be disowning the paintings? That's not good. I can't imagine anyone else making them. They aren't any of the aforementioned things, and yet they are all of them. That is why I like them. I could make an enormous list of what each painting holds. I suppose it is merely an inversion of Reinhardt's describing everything his paintings are not.

The need to turn it something "real" ? The need to make it into some mental narrative (the difference between your two blue forms in the top image... you just had to add that small one, eh?) Zing. Right on brother. I was sooo let down when I added that smaller shape. I remember thinking that nobody would believe me if I left the painting the way I wanted it. I'm going to fix that tonight.

"Or add more to the background to feel more complete? Completed things are also dead things." I like that. When I find myself talking to people about these paintings, I find myself using words like "pure" and "radiant". The best ones are not dead but coming to life. The white field really plays a powerful part. I get the feeling however, that no one who has visited my studio lately is as excited about these as I am. I get the feeling that they are too harsh on the retina. I'm going to make some more mellowed fields, but, like you say later, "What is a background" and things are just going to get more complicated and I'm going to feel the need to drop more references like animation cells, exotic marble, parchment, etc. Well, I'll make a few samples and see if I can keep them alive, but for now, white light.

"If, as Oscar Wilde says, "each man kills the thing he loves," then i gotta think a lot of the time we torture the hell out of that thing first. We cover its mouth. We poke at it with sticks and tell it its not good enough. We ask it to do things it doesn't want to and punish it when it doesn't conform. We call it names and demean it. We roll it in the tar of our judegments, and then feather it with bullshit theories. Mostly probably because we are scared that it might love us back." I don't know where to go with this bit. It doesn't ring entirely true for me.

"We are all torturing something or someone right now. Especially as americans, we are paying our government to torture people right now. We are doing this. We are torturers. And i am tortured by this idea. "Aren't we lucky?" Simple answer: no". A long afternoon of BBC radio sent me into a funk. The world seemed just as bad as it ever was. I couldn't believe that I was planning to go to my studio and paint! What a selfish act! In my mind I ran a loop around about politics, only to come up with my attempt at sarcasm. "Aren't we lucky?"

"Luck goes askew when it becomes another way to avoid bigger picture, as in "lucky i'm not in Iraq right now!" "lucky I'm not a migrant farmworker!" "Lucky I'm white with a penis!" Can we possibly sound like bigger assholes? "Lucky I ain't you!" You better eat everything on your plate, think of all the starving people in China.

"We are a collective. And we are only as lucky as the unluckiest among us. Let us not live in make believe that torture, war, homelessness, and the destruction of the environment (to name a few) are not on our hands just becasue they are happening out of sight." What do we do then? Is it enough to strive to create the opposite of those things mentioned?

"In this way, luck becomes just another way to create separation, avoid accountability, and deny love. And I'm calling you out Mr. Larose, because the title of this post reflects your attitude towards your own work at the moment." Yay! finally someone who gets it. I thought blogging would be filled with more of these sort of observations.

"Luck is a blob that just happens to look pretty. Your careful attention, diligence, and absorption in "every inch" of this new work is not fucking luck... so just grow a pair and own it." Do you really want me to lean more towards the arrogance side of the fence? I am haunted by people like William Wray. Remember his tirade? At least he can flaunt his balls because there appears to be something in his paintings. He can show off his chops because there is a long history of plein air chops to mimic. I feel the need to explain my chops at this point. Chops that I'm inventing every day. Chops that seem simultaneously part of a collective as well as unique.

(PS. what's a "background"?) Its a good place to start.

Thanks Geoffrey.

I don't live in Chicago, but I once did. Go to the Rally.

The Dodo's Reproach, 1995
Acrylic on wood, 60 x 48"

An E-mail from Paul Klein, 2007:

The rally is coming together really nicely for 5:30 PM Monday at the Picasso Sculpture in Daley Plaza. Rally for Artists’ Rights.

We are now a consortium of the following art groups: Lumpen, the Chicago Artists Coalition, Sharkforum, Around the Coyote, ArtLetter, Bridge Art Fair, Navy Pier Walk, Punk Planet, and Art Advisory, LTD. Everyone is distributing information. This is an exciting collaboration.

We have great speakers lined up for the rally: artists, aldermen, arts organizers, lawyers, men and women. The whole thing should be meaningful, significant, powerful and not much longer than 30 to 45 minutes. We expect a lot of artists and public support. Children are encouraged to attend. People are making signs. Be creative and upbeat. Face painting is okay. And we may have music.

It is really important that you attend! It’s about the numbers. We need people. Bring your neighbors. I am. This is not just for artists. It’s also for the public, the citizens, you and me – all of us.

There was an article in today’s Sun-Times spreading information about the rally.

We cannot let the attitude of the Deputy Commissioner of the Public Art Department become the law in Chicago:

“Public art is a gift to the public from the government.”

“We’re the ones who have been working day in and day out with this process. We’re the ones who are most aware of its issues and we’re in the best position to determine how to address them.”

the “public is not well served by a vote”

That doesn’t sound like Democracy at Work to me! We need you! It’s time to step up or get stepped on.

Thank you very much,

Paul Klein

PS: More information can be found here:

(My last gallery show was with Paul in 1995)
What a wonky and challenging set of paintings that was. ...even for me.
If you are the owner of any of these paintings. . . I wonder who you are. When I entered into a certain level, I lost contact with my audience. 35 pieces of me are out there in the ether. I am coat-tailing on this e-mail from Paul. He is unlike me in most ways, and yet, I trust his opinion. So I'd say, "Go to this rally Today, Monday, if you live in the Mid-West."

People are being tortured right now

Aren't we lucky?

The 48 x 32" painting above is hanging in my studio surrounded by similar works in progress. My wife Stacy recently returned from the studio (a rare but poignant visit) and she was squinting and blinking. "Are you going to leave the backgrounds white?" she asked. I bristled. She is not the first to question the white. I'm sure they would be more "beautiful" with a well thought out and sublimely executed background, but my problem is that I'm still working out the drawing. I can see a future where these paintings will have paint all over them, instead of the magnified creepy-and-goofy washes that they are. Actually, every inch of these paintings receives an equal amount of attention. I like the intense radiance that comes from them. They are too bright, until your eyes adjust. . . and they tie into the ink drawings. . . and yet they have the plasticity that only painting allows. . . and I stop as soon as I begin to see something. . .and I'm thinking "as above, so below" and "there are no accidents here", and what should I call my show in November? I'm thinking:

Steven LaRose: Portraits and Landscapes (Fish or Cut Bait)

Here's a joke for yah:

What do you get when you cross

With

You get one of my new paintings of course!

Ex-girlfren, 3

When I returned from the South Pacific, Nurse Nepotism had helped me score my third studio. It was a third floor walk-up in Pioneer Square. It had no outlets or water but it ran the length of the building and it was FREE!

I actually rode my (single-speed coaster brake) bike around in the space. Clamp lights, extension cords, and five gallon buckets to pee in. FREE! Check out (on the upstage left wall) the only earnest self-portrait I've ever painted. I wonder if that is still around. And the pews. . . I had pews!

Something happened there.
It appears that that was the first place that I made paintings in clusters.
1988 to be precise.
I thought I was making Ab-Ex Mandala's appropriated from the look of Great Master Works.
Thinking about it today, there was nothing but mimicking going on then.
I was trying to put it all together like a puzzle. A puzzle that had meaning once completed. Those were fairly dark days for me. . . it could have been the shitty lighting however.


I'm sure some of you are wondering what I did with the five gallon buckets of my bodily waste. (Remember I had just spent 3/4 of the year on a 44' sailboat with two other kooks . . .far away from anything but heaven and I was consequently in a unique mental space.) I took the buckets to the Elliot Bay Bookstore Cafe of course! There, I dumped the contents down their toilets. That is where I met Jason Finn.

Look, you can just tell he is thinking "oh shit. . . its the bucket guy again. . ." He never hassled me however and Jason even gave me loads of end-of-the-day, headin'-for-the-dumpster-anyway, morsels. Hmm. Come to think of it, as of today, only three other people have bought more paintings of mine than Jason Finn . . . and yet, I feel like I owe him so much more.

I bet you are wondering why you never see me and Henry the Helman Grade Schoool Dragon in the same room together.

An Alec Soth post that sets the stage

Let's make it clear, this is not me, it is this person of smart pants.

Tactile photography

One of my frustrations with contemporary photographic technique, mine included, is the feeling of sterility. Digital processes have become so sophisticated that nearly every picture you see is dusted and anti-scratched to a state of frozen perfection. After awhile it all feels so airless.

So it was with pleasure that I observed evidence of a return to tactile photography at the recent Photo London exhibition. One of the best examples of this was the work of Stephen Gill. In his recent project, Buried, Gill took pictures in Hackney Wick and buried them in the same area. Gill writes about the process:

When burying my first batch of photographs, a passing man spotted me and asked what I was doing. Not only did I not want to give the location away of some of my buried pictures, but It just sounded a bit weird to say that I was burying photographs so replied that I was looking for newts. As soon as I’d said that I looked down and saw a newt at my feet.

Not knowing what an image would look like once it was dug up introduced an element of chance and surprise which I found appealing. This feeling of letting go and in a way collaborating with place - allowing it also to work on putting the finishing touches to a picture - felt fair. Maybe the spirit of the place can also make its mark.

While I’m not sure I even noticed Gill’s imagery, it felt good to experience a contemporary photograph that was overwhelmingly tactile:

I’m not sure how to deal with this hunger for photography that is physical and imperfect. Certainly only one photographer is allowed to bury his photographs. Is the problem photography itself? Maybe I just envy painting and sculpture.

On my recent trip to Tennessee I encountered two other artists who might share my envy. At the Knoxville Museum of Art, I saw Tim Davis’s flawless color photographs of the flaws and textures of painting:

A Passing Shower in the Tropics, by Tim Davis

And at the Powerhouse in Memphis I saw Matt Ducklo’s large C-Prints showing blind people touching sculpture. For me, these pictures were about photographic frustration:

Seated statue of Hatshepsut, 2005 by Matt Ducklo

Yesterday I visited Musee Rodin in Paris. On view was a fantastic exhibition, The Japanese Dream. Nearly half of the show was devoted to the Japanese dancer Hanako. Rodin made more sculptures of Hanako than of any other sitter. But these sculptures weren’t exactly portraits. Hanako was best known for expressionistic plays ending with her performing hara-kiri. With his sculptures, Rodin tried to recreate her expressions of sorrow and horror.

These works left me speechless. They were everything I’d been craving. I went to the museum bookstore to buy a catalogue. But flipping through the book, I was disappointed. While technically refined, the clinical reproductions failed to communicate the spirit of the work:

The most worthwhile images in the book were those by Edward Steichen:

Steichen’s photographs were able to get at the pain and sensuality of the original sculptures. Again I’m left with the question: Can contemporary photography find its way back to something physical?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 11:42 pm and is filed under photographing sculpture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Another work in progress (but really close to done)

48 x 32"
Vinyl acrylic on laminated wood

Shit
I might as well be paint/drawing
Unicorns and Skulls

There is no "up" to this thing at the moment
I'm stickin' to my belief that these paint/drawings should
rotate with the seasons