Back in the saddle

My latest creation. Acrylic on paper. 19"x27"

Notes from underground

Or from the undergallery if you will. Some random and unedited thoughts from my notebook I'm keeping as I make new work for my upcoming show (Shameless plug.. June 19th, Lala Gallery, 609 Main St.):

"Fit your parts into one another and build up your figure as a carpenter does a house. Everything must be constructed - built up of parts that make a unit: a tree like a human body, a human body like a cathedral."  -Matisse

What can be art

What art can be

"...one of the fundamental points about Cubism is this: not only did we try to displace reality. Reality was in the painting... We always had the idea that we were realists, but in the sense of the Chinese who said 'I don't imitate nature; I work like her'. " 

Just because you don't know where you're going, doesn't mean you won't end up somewhere.

"The painter is revealed to be the true subject of the painting, for it is on him that the psychic as well as physical pressure of space is exerted, rather than leading out in the opposite direction. As Matisse says, 'It is the tremor of the individual that counts, rather than the object which produced the emotion'." -Picasso

I've been doing work from imagination that at points and for fleeting moments becomes real and representational to me. Typically I'm amused by that acknowledgment of some thing I see, a face, an animal or something like that. But I resist pursuing a close visual representation of that thing. Think for a moment about the form of a cloud as it blows by, unbearably slow, but constant. For a few moments, a minute or so, your mind recognizes, in the masses of clouds, a face. And sometimes the friend next to you can't see it, no matter how much you point and gesture in the air, making graceful drawing marks on the sky with your hand. And by this point the clouds have moved on. The face melts and distorts and finally is gone. It only looked like that one thing to you from your exact perspective for that few moments in time that will not and cannot ever happen again.

This is how I've worked on the paintings for this show. I create forms from my mind; just colors and shapes that are floating around in my head (like clouds). Then my mind sees something it recognizes from it's visual repertoire and as I'm making the marks, I begin to make them as if I were painting that thing; rigid architectural lines, rounded arabesque muscle like forms, plant life, birds. But before the image becomes a literal representation of that object, I try to obscure it. Let the form be what it is, not project that "reality" on it. Leave the ambiguity there so that the viewer can also have those moments of discovery that I delight in so much as I work. What I "see  in the clouds" so to speak as I'm working tells me something about myself, and it's my hope that the viewer then learns something about themselves as well.

"I believe the work of art to be the product of calculation, but such calculations are often unknown to the author himself... Or one should presume, as Rimbaud said, that in us it is the other who calculates." -Picasso

A korf is a tiger.

"If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." -Albert Einstein

Sketchbook back cover

Hmm..

A totally unworthy Joan Miro impression and some sort of other worldly pumpkin patch?

Holy Hiatus Batman!

Foggy

King Friday

winner

Old(er) Me, Young Me

No matter how hard I tried I couldn't recreate that expression, not with the same excited energy, the hopefulness of 17 year old me. It was kind of bizarre. I suggest looking in a mirror and holding up an old picture of yourself. Try to recreate the same expression. Your face feels different. It's shaped over the years by repeated expressions. This is the sort of strange self-scrutiny you can't help but get into while laboring over countless self portraits in art school. This one was a simple exercise from MICA precollege almost 7 years ago. The beginning of my earnest journey into whatever this is I'm doing now. And the same way I can't make faces the same way anymore, I can't make images the same way either. The face of my work has changed too. Grown hair. Gotten messier but also (I hope) far more interesting.

So I think I'm going to tighten the canvas (sagging from years under my bed with other long forgotten paintings piled on top), document it well, and then do a new self portrait over it. Out with the old, in with the new.

Composition

B&W acrylic and collage. I'd like to do a mural quite similar to this, like 12x30 feet

Brave New World

Some words of wisdom from Aldous Huxley. The first paragraph and a half of his foreward to Brave New World. I wish I'd read this and taken it to heart a couple years ago.

"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Art also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are the same as, or at least analogous to, the rules of ordinary ethics. Remorse, for example, is as undesirable in relation to our bad art as it is in relation to our bad behavior. The badness should be hunted out, acknowledged and, if possible, avoided in the future. To pore over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed at its first execution, to spend one's middle age in trying to mend the artistic sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth -- all this is surely vain and futile. ..."

Abstractions of late

All small abstractions, none of them bigger than about 7 or 8 inches on the longest side.

?

My Wallet - A constant work in progress

Fliers and Posters

Pretty self-explanatory.. The last three were from shows by or with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. A crazed Elvis Costello fan stole two large expensive prints right off the window of a packed lobby on opening night. Flattering and frustrating at the same time.

MAC D MAC!

Perm. markers, ballpoint pen, yellow ink, and whiteout on a cardboard box.

"They call me Mac Rapalicious and when I bubble I blow trouble up in your ear."
Last Call, Outkast