Phase II, Operation Wasp Nest

Sand and pavers arrive on Tuesday, then the mini garage construction begins.

On display: My "friends" status updates on Facebook bracketed by some other opinions

So and so:

• is thrilled McCain chose Palin. Go Obama!
• thinks Sarah Palin just might be our cutest VP since Henry Wallace, if you go for that ‘Tina Fey/Elaine from Seinfeld: I’m so hot I can wear ugly glasses’.
• thinks McCain better hope Palin has an undocumented domestic worker.
• McCain met his VP choice only once before yesterday.
• is grateful for the gloriously clueless choice McCain has made for VP.
• really really hopes that jon stewart will have the chance to poke fun at obama for the next eight years.

Roots of Breakdance (Run DMC - It's Like That)

Blow at Life

I'm not sure what to make of Lawrence Yang. Should I be depressed or excited? Initially I'm thinking "Another member of the secret society of openness." Ultimately I appreciate the design and narrative level he has taken things to. Now I don't have to.

BIG CASH PRIZES AND FREE BEER

To the first person to identify these two painters and make a convincing connection between them.

Timothy Buckwalter and Steven LaRose,
He'll blame her for everything he's done wrong in his life, 2008

Various watery sauces on paper, 30 x 22" (roughly)
The background is metallic and impossible to reproduce on a monitor.

The first painting in this collaborative suite is titled: Reminding Him Somehow of What Everything Between Them Was All About

B.C.

Where were we? Oh yeah. . . cave paintings, or the power an effigy has over its subject. I don't go to any church, but from what I've read, symbols are still used to aid concentration in prayer. I am uncomfortable with this notion but, weren't painters the forerunners of prophets and priests? I think a thought and then I draw around it?image source

image source

Aren't most of us searching for unchanging fundamental laws in an ever-changing world? It is amazing how quickly we got from Prehistoric to Platonic solids.

If you are not familiar with Platonic solids you should watch one of these two videos, but not both:

Carl Sagan: Platonic Solids


Platonic Solid Rock

Finsk Disco

I gotta hand it to Mona once again.

1001 words are worth more than a picture

From Stacy's iPhone.
(That kitten may look cute now, but if it continues to apparate around the house at five in the morning, he will be hearing some snipping sounds near his testicles sooner than later.)

One day job has me making new planks look like old beams.

I have been channeling worms.

Another day job has me distressing brand new cabinets in order to match a slick Chinese faux antique. I don't have the heart to point out to the client that what they bought is not old. More worm channeling. At least mine isn't done by a stamp.

The driveway is ready for the next step.
I am ready for deep tissue massage.

Tonight was the first time I used our grill tosser thingy.
I forgot to rotate the picture. 999 words is enough, right?

Finally I made it into the dungeon/studio and was obsessed with the Timothy Buckwalter collaboration I almost have done (on the right).

Curiouser and Curiouser

Is it true that we could draw before we could write?
I was clicking through Google images looking for an appropriate classroom environment when I came upon the Thomas Rowlandson colored aquatint above. It is called Drawing from Life at the Royal Academy, Somerset House. I find it dated either 1808 or 1811. Still, it was a long time ago. Maybe not for tectonic plates, but for us, it was a whole nuther world. And yet, some things never change (click here for what Thomas is apparently most famous for).

We learn to read and write at an early age these days. It takes some effort. Repetition and exposure. So, what has happened to our "grown-up" language of vision? Why are there "layman" who complain that artist, critics, and scholars are no longer in touch with everyday life?I found myself on a Google tangent not wanting to post the Bison from the Lascaux Caves (12000 BC) like I did in the last post and fortuitously learned about Rico Lebrun.
Am I making a mistake in imagining the history of people-kind as rather like the history of an individual? Cave drawings were made for a purpose. Art for Art's sake took another 13,990 years.

I have never seen an original cave painting in my life, but from what I've read, the creators often responded to bumps and stains on the cave wall in order to pull-out, or conjure their images. Duh.

Steven LaRose, Arrangement 2 2003
Oil on stone, 6 x 6"
(click here for more)

In 2003, I was painting with oil on squares of polished marble, granite, and exotic stones that I gathered from the sink cut-outs of various job site dumpsters. I painted and painted and really thought I was on to something until I read the Janet Lloyd translation of Hubert Damisch's A Theory of /Cloud/ TOWARD A HISTORY OF PAINTING find it here
In it, Hubert bursts my bubble and locks me in!

Of course, these aren't Hubert's words but he is quoting someone else's translation of Leonardo da Vinci's:
How to expand the mind and conduct various inventions:

"I shall not fail to include among these precepts a new discovery, an aid to reflection, which, although it seems a small thing and almost laughable, nevertheless is very useful in stimulating the mind to various discoveries. This is: look at walls splashed with a number of stains or stones of various mixed colours. If you have to invent some scene, you can see there resemblances to a number of landscapes adorned in various ways with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains, valleys, and hills. Moreover, you can see various battles, and rapid actions of figures, strange expressions on faces, costumes, and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good, integrated form. This happens thus on walls and varicoloured stones, as in the sound of bells, in whose pealing you can find every name and word you can imagine.
Do not despise my opinion when I remind you that it should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains on the walls, or the ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud, or like things, in which, if you consider them well, you will find really marvellous ideas. The mind of the painter is stimulated to new discoveries, the composition of battles of animals and men, various compositions of landscapes and monstrous things and similar creations, which may bring you honour, because the mind is stimulated to new invetions by obscure things."

And before Leo da "V" there was Song Di, a Chinese painter from the eleventh century:

"Choose an old, ruined wall, spread over it a piece of white silk. Then, every morning and evening, look at it until at last you can see the ruin through the silk, its bumps, levels, zig-zags, and cracks, fixing them in your mind and your eyes. Make the bumps into your mountains, the deepest parts your rivers, the hollows your ravines, the cracks your streams, the lightest parts your closest points, the darkest parts your most distant points. Fix all that deeply within you and soon you will see men, birds, plants and trees, and figures flying or moving between them. Then you can use your brush as you will. And the result will be a heavenly, not a man-made thing."

Art is found in Death, Underwear, and Rainbows. What is an artist? Everywhere.

Everywhere that humans make shit.

The science of theory and the art of synchronised platform diving.

Engineers can be artisans. Artifacts were manufactured goods.

I've been in a slump this week. I've been wallowing in everyday life. The notion of "awe" seems so . . . unreal, elite, pretentious, crazy, irresponsible.

Because my paintings are soundly constructed out of wood, you could easily form a shelter out of a few of them. All of my paintings contain a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm. Paintings are not food.

All we are left with is communication.

My slump manifests itself as the fulcrum between luxury and necessity.


Is it ok that a good painting is merely a temporary release? Fuck. Why is joie de vivre so dangerous (other than its disregard for future generations)?

I may be totally unemployable

I often check in on Facebook.

Sometimes I visit Goodreads

I haven't effectively utilized my LinkedIn network.

I always forget I have a Plaxo Plus account.

Random Weekly Overview

This week poet/blogger Stephen Vincent was in Ashland visiting some friends and I was fortunate enough to view his "haptic" drawings in-real-life. Living out here in-between, it is refreshing to be able to hold another person's project. Stephen's drawings border on compulsive, and yet are clearly visceral and exclusive memories for him.
He makes these while listening to sounds of particular environments. Like repeated sessions of his mother's breathing : I met Stephen through the blogosphere when I Googled the word "haptic" in a previous post. (I learned the word from Helquin. . . where has he been lately?)

I learned the word stochastic from Jacques this week. I was thinking of using it as the title of my up-coming show, but the process involves a bit more randomness between observations than I apply when I paint. I am thinking my paintings are more like choreographed probability distributions. Regardless, thanks to Jacques, I am currently changing the title of the show from My Everyday Mind Space to Life Science. The former was temporary and too cute of a reference to Zen archery and social networks.

In a related or serendipitous coincidence, my friend Jason turned me on to the beauty of randomly walking.

Before I forget, Jacques left seven links in the previous post. All of them down the Life Science path. Gorgeous stuff. Influential? Maybe I should make my choices more evident? Maybe each painting should come with a performance video of its creation. Lord knows I don't mind hammin' it up for the camera.

Busy weekend of camera hammin' as Zaida hosted six other girls to a sleep-over birthday party. First a role playing mystery game, then pizza, presents, pie (no cake per Zaida's request), episodes of the 70's television Nancy Drew Mystery series, pillow fights, sleep, and finally a blueberry pancake breakfast.

Notice the energy difference between pizza a pancakes. Also, we ended up with only four all-nighters as one young lady got the jitters while the other barfed. Total party.

Zaida's birthday would not be complete without a personal visit from The Ice Cream Man.
"Ice Cream Man's mission is to travel the country, eventually the world, giving away FREE ice cream." His "growing team combines the minds, hearts, skills and resources of adventurous individuals who refuse to adhere to the old business paradigm. We fund this venture through advertising, sponsors, promotions and merchandising, building win-win-win relationships between everyone involved." We know Matt from when he was just getting started and driving a boss 69 Chevy step van. He is the sweetest guy (pardon the pun) and maybe you will see him in your town soon. He will be at the Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco next weekend.

Back to work.

Zoiks

Georges Mathieu, Tempêtes inconnues
Going up for auction.

Georges Mathieu or the Fury of being - Trailer

I'm not sure what to think here. The whole Art Star posture is ridiculous. I've never talked about selling my paintings in all my years of blogging. Tracy bought one of my paintings the other day (Zaum) and she talks about sales all the time. It just makes me uncomfortable, I guess. I suppose there might be some interesting soul searching about how sales influence studio time. More to come as I prepare for a solo show in October.

Max Ernst

Cap went through a lot of trouble to make some links in the preceding post's comment section that were not firing off to their proper places. The links were of paintings by Max Ernst, and here they are:

The Antipope (1943)

Painting For Young People (1943)

Vox Angelica (1943)

Cap made this connection in relation to the image in my preceding post that I didn't properly footnote or attribute. The image below is from page 98 of Creative Color by Faber Birren. "Through a careful application of principles already described, the eye sees luminosity, volume color (three dimensional), transparency, luster, iridescence, a metallic form and various surface textures. The composition, though realistic in treatment, is also surrealistic and imaginative." (page 100)

I've never actually read this book. I was simply tickled by the images and the quality of their reproduction. It made me smile when the author goes on to write, "Some purists, however, have decried attempts to create three-dimensional surfaces. They argue that such attempts are presumptuous, artificial and even dishonest. If an artist works on a flat plane, why should his art strive to "lie" about this fact?. . . .In any event, I am not concerned with the philosophy of art, but simply with the magic of human vision." (101)

Final Exam (chops and skilz)

Faber Birren

Steven LaRose, Portmanteau 2008

Paint on wood laminate, 48 x 32"

Pencilove, 6

Pencilove, 5

Start at the beginning

I've been pondering the question "How do you see the drawings relating to the paintings?"
For some interesting footnotes read:
Jacques de Beufort and "Jodie Mohr, "Painting of Paintings""
Eva Lake and "What is Talent"
Dennis Hollingsworth and "Some Drawing"

Collaboration Update

I finally finished the painting above that was started by Timothy Buckwalter. It is acrylic paint and ink on paper and is roughly 22 x 30 inches.

Today I mailed four hot-potatoes to Anthony and in true Newtonian karma, I received two fertile grounds to riff upon from Tracy .

Every weekday I exchange 10,000 pixels with Marc.