huh. . .

I just spent 10 dollars and 2 hours and I put together something like a web site using Google Apps. Amazing.

Tendril Foreshadow

Bill's Blog Begins Beautiful Borders

Bookmark it.

Long lost brother

Anthony Castro, BLACK_DRAWINGS_3, 2007

acrylic / LP cover sleeve, 12" x 12"

Anthony says that this "drawing was created by grooving out layers of acrylic paint with an x-acto blade to reveal details of sleeve art. The process is sort of a metaphor for excavating."

Anthony Castro, PERMUTATION_SERIES_#1, 2008

acrylic / canvas, 10" X 10"

I've been looking for Anthony for some time. I knew he was in New York. With some help from Kristi, Anthony called yesterday. His web site is called castroesque.com. Undoubtedly, this is a reference to Kafkaesque. Over the years, I've posted a couple of Anthony related posts. Click here to peruse.

Chesnutt for President

Vic has a blogger account too!

Last night's dog walk. . .

Miso and I got a late start and it began to get dark halfway through our loop. Strangely, I was torn between sitting on a mossy rock or picking up the pace. The opportunity for self regulated attention, in the service of self-inquiry, in the here and now, while next to a babbling brook, made me want to sit down. Last week, Stacy spotted a Mama bear and her cub while out with Miso. Last week, I watched the movie I am Legend. Bears and light-sensitive-mutant-vampires made me want to pick up the pace. I've been struggling over the relationship between awe and effort. I think I am confusing my time in the studio with the things that I share with other people. I have some paintings in my house that are still sanctuaries for my eyes. I never stop to consider how much time it took to make these retinal oases. I think I am confusing awe and "a rush." The creek by my house is not the Nile, and yet. . . I am working a couple of hours a night on the painting above. That is about a 9 x 12" detail. Each night I am apprehensive about starting a session that seems to be a monotonous slog. Each night I leave the session wishing I had more time because the painting seems full of promise. The painting might not even be successful. The white bursts may read as too obsessive, rather then an ambient field. All that work for nothing? The painting above, from 1999 is called Blake Hole. It is 40 x 30" and is made out of acrylic and polyurethane on wood. I am referring to this earlier suite of mine in order to rekindle "The Balance". Presently, I feel as if I am sitting on the mossy rock. I feel a tad guilty. I promised myself I would never return to this sort of painting. I had been making copies of myself. My paintings were drinking the blood of their brothers. I needed to pick up the pace.

Vladimir. Well? Shall we go?
Estragon. Yes. Let's go.
CURTAIN
(Waiting for Godot)

"Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there."
"Where we going, man?"
"I don't know, but we gotta go."
(On the Road)

The first excerpt is full of passivity and the sombre cerebralism of existentialism which did not influence me as much as the second messages' impetus to action and movement which carries a more essential optimism. Although the beat generation's optimism was often confused and naive, it's mood of urgency, determination, and hope, is the prime motivation for my painting. Otherwise, Beckett could easily convince me that anything I do, painting I paint, or action I take, can not alter or mitigate the terrible circumstances of human existence. But, out of necessity, all that moving creates a light satchel.

Fish or Cut Bait.

Pardon the momentary funk

Chaos and hoodwink

Zaida practices her pre-egg-hunt-launch-stance.

Afterwards, she shows Ethan some details.

Irrational ennui

I'll be damned but "painting" sucks.

Seriously. How many of you are living with a painting that you lived with ten years ago?

I am willing to bet that most of us have decoration, and not something we meditate upon.

This is nothing to be ashamed of.

We all get tired of paying attention to the past.



The rub floats not in the money. . .

but in our ability to share.

Personally, I am beginning to play with the animation for the improv-demi-gods "El Grande Conquistador"

and the song goes LIKE THIS. If you click on that musical link you have got to keep in mind that it is TOTAL IMPROVISATION.

Free Style.

Much in the vein of Shin Yu Pai's response to my ink drawings;archaeological relics
from Mayan ritual:
Pachychilus
uncoiling
gleaming mucus
trails miniature
spiral jetties
the jute snail's
capacity for
associative learning



Poetry above, and motion pictures below.

I've got two screenplays by Lance Norris pulsing through my life. I should try to draw his scripts. .. but they are soooo movie-like. . . I am daunted.

and yet

the collaboration is inspiring.

In order to rest my case, I would like to expose four drawing that I am sending to Timothy Buckwalter, and publicly announce that he can mess them up all he wants.

Steam Drop

Crystalpunk is one of those blogs that I suspect I would like, if I had the time to delve into it. The author is only present through their observations or posts. I learn nothing immediately about them as humans. . . except for their posts. . . and yet, maybe a bad blog is one that vanishes too quickly into meaning. . .
There is a new painter/blogger in my village. Sarah F Burns has got the balance:
Dean Aldrich's blog has loads of fine eye candy that reveals a personal taste, or goal. I want to encourage his own painting by requesting more of it:
I'm on my fourth or fifth visit to Casey Klahn's blog The Colorist mostly for his sketches:
Shouldn't galleries operate like small music industry labels?

At this point, I shouldn't have to introduce Neil Gaiman, we simply have to wait for the most recent adaptation of his writing:

One could spend an entire spring break at the oops list:
I expect big things from Fiji Island Mermaid Press:

Steven LaRose, Abscissa and Ordinate, 2008
Oil on acrylic on canvas, 12 x 9 inches

experience

I did not freak out when Zaida's eye looked like this yesterday. I had seen subconjunctival hemorrhages before.

Come to think of it,
I had read Allen Ginsburg's Howl before too:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Sky Porn With Breached Branch

An awareness test that my wife sent me

Serendipity Tangent

Check it out. a_christian recently commented: "Vonnegut had a painting on the cover of Dan's papers (a local paper) a few years ago. I don't know how much he actually painted though, anyone?"

This comment compelled me to Google-search the words Vonnegut painting

and

Fucking Lo and Behold, the twelfth Google entry is Dennis Hollingsworth's three year old post:

As far as I can tell, at 72 dpi, that is some fine art.

I felt it was my responsibility to post Dennis' most recent painting;Duh

Dennis has left the canvas.

My second search took me to:

Again. . . this is another example of something I wish I could paint like. . .

The Bassholes

It has now come to this: I can't shake a thread, unless I post it.

The acrylic on paper collage (above) is by Whiting Tennis. For some reason, I sense a connection with the paintings of Christopher Saunders who has recently been outed. It is likely superficial. Their palette has been similar over the years.And there is the wonderfully wet collage sensibility that is present in both. I suppose that that edge I am sensing is what rookies often mistake for a line. Both of these painters straddle the line where two planes meet more like photographers then draftsmen. Christopher operates in that threshold or " boundary between the iconic and the personal" much in the same way that Whiting does. Above is a work on paper by Christopher, and below is a postcard that Whiting sent me. Maybe it is a shared sense of nostalgia that is revealed through a color scheme that is reminiscent of old photographs. Maybe it is because they were both born in Virginia. We may never know why I make a connection between the two, the point is, because I started looking at Christopher's paintings, I began to think about how I hadn't posted any of Whiting's postcards in awhile.
I usually post these cards under the How To Draw A Bunny label. This would make entries 73, 74, and 75.

Whiting, as many of you know, is also an accomplished musician. He even has an uncluttered MySpace page so that you can listen to some of his songs. These sorts of people astound me. How can he be represented by Greg Kucera and play beautiful music? It makes me think of Tobin Sprout, of Guided by Voices fame. Although the painting above doesn't betray it, Tobin was a hyper-realist painter before he was in one of the most awesome bands of all time. He also has a MySpace page. And then, there are successful authors who paint. For example, look at this painting by James Howard Kunstler.
Even author of 29 books, cyperpunk Rudy Rucker paints now and then: Who else does the synaesthetically charged paradigm crossover shuffle?

Kim Abeles

Although I almost exclusively post items that, in my mind, are related to painting and drawing, I seldom bring up the word "Art". I want to break that pattern and mention Kim Abeles' recent visit to Southern Oregon University for a talk that she did which coincided with the opening of Idea, Text, and Image, an exhibition running through April 12th at the Schneider Museum of Art.

Back in 1991 or '92, I was exposed to the shenanigans of Kim Abeles when I was in graduate school at CGS (which is now CGU). I was so impressed with Kim's work that I had transmogrified her visit so that I believed that she was a student that was a year ahead of me. For over fifteen years I have told people about Kim's Mountain Wedge System in which "The San Gabriel Mountains could be seen at the top of Broadway in this photograph if the air was clean. After seeing this wedge of mountain once, I decided to photograph every day until I could see it again. The resulting sculpture includes 14 months of this desire."

. . .

This patient piece was conceptually, socially, and aesthetically appealing to me. Although I only lived for a couple of years on the out-skirts of Los Angeles, I have always related a version of this piece of Kim's as a metaphor for my experience there. If I felt I had hooked an audience, I would then proceed to explain Kim's smog plates. "I place stencil images on transparent or opaque materials, then leave these on the roof of my studio and let the particulate matter in the heavy air fall upon them. When the stencil is removed, the images reveal themselves." My picture above is from Kim's "Portraits of U.S. Presidents from McKinley to Bush, created from smog with their historical quotes about the environment and business."

. . .

This is all old hat to me. It seems that I had created my own mythology around Kim. It turns out that she was actually a semester-long visiting artist and was likely roaming the studios and lecturing during my first couple of months at graduate school.

Claremont was so great for me. It allowed me to do time with Karl Benjamin:John Millei:
and David Amico:
Claremont also introduced me to M.A. Greenstein who is the pilot of Spacesuit Yoga. M.A. has recently returned from TED 2008 and let-me-tell-you her observations are certainly not going to be paint blobs loaded with signifiers.

. . .

Signs?
Kim Abeles has the ability to make theory beautiful. For example, below is her "map" of every living tree in an area of downtown Los Angeles. And, so poignant to me, is her Double D - Disney Color Guide to Good and Evil, Rich and Poor.


Kim Abeles helps me define "Art".

Are ya wearin' green?

The Jig is Up

Christopher Saunders, Arise 2005
Oil on Linen, 16 x 20 in.

Ever since I started blogging (two and a half years ago), I've been visiting High Low & in Between. HiLow was (quoting myself) part of "a puddle of artists that blogged about art, life, politics, religion, and occasionally caprice. They seemed to be united by a shared experience. I often wondered if it wasn't a teacher or a workshop that had galvanized these visual artists to blog out, and in so doing, try and change things. Lately there has been a suspicious silence from their corner of the blogosphere.

Here are their blogs and their last known activity:
eye-drops, 6/13/2007
Mindsprinter, 5/15/2007
Art Powerlines, 5/18/2007
Nonprophet Art, 6/21/2007
Speaking of Ashes, 5/5/2007
Springs and Wells, 4/13/2007"

I'm happy to announce that not only has HighLow continued to post, he has finally decided that it would be OK if he dropped his cowl.

Everyone, this is Chris Saunders. . . Chris, this is everyone.

The Cedars, 2007
Oil on linen, 40 x 36"