Woman

This is but a tiny detail from a major work I will be painting this year. The works has as it's subject the femmine, both literally in terms of the female body/anatomy, but also in terms of the generative field that the feminine represents..and incidentally I expect it to be finished in around 9-10 months time. It's impossible for a man to experience the subjective reality that is the femminine, but I would say that perhaps as an artists that gives birth to paintings I do know something about the act of creating. That is of course the type of analogy that would send shudders of rage through a pregnant woman heavy with child. My commitment is slightly less demanding.

Kali Yuga..."The Age of Darkness"

Kali Yuga

Kurt Andersen on the Apocalypse

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Did you know that.....

In the United States at the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth, and the top 1% controlled 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth.

As a community college teacher and an artist involved in the "art world"..I've seen all levels of this demographic.

^ "Why it is hard to share the wealth"

^ "Wealth Inequality Charts"

And yet strangely no one in America seems to be concerned in the least bit that this may lead to social instability.
All Empires and Grand Societies are destined for destruction inevitably, we can thank Shiva for that. When the end comes I'll be toasting marshmellows in the warm glow. Perhaps this age might end up being "biblical" afterall...

Strange

It was a strange week..feels like something shifted in timbre with the universe, well mine anyways. I've been hibernating..one of those periods of silence between sound. We wouldn't hear music without the rest in between notes. Re-group, start again. Repetition..difference. Cabin fever results in posting meandering notes at 4:00am. I'm not sure if anyone reads this crap (I kind of hope not)..guess I should've caved and joined myspace..but to all friends..happy holidays. Jesus was a great man..but the Gnostics say that we are all sons of God..so I'm still not that impressed with the dude. His shit probably stank like anyone elses. All the rest..I wasn't there for the walking on water and such..so again..not impressed. No man is God.. but all men are god. And it all works out. Even when it's awful. In fact that's why it's good. Amen.

Kinetosis

Jacques de Beaufort
Jacques de Beaufort

been "curating" over at wyncko..

I've been grouping by color pallette and such..click the image for a really cool(i think so anywyays) larger view.

wyncko

And just because I'm doing this whole "wyncko" thing doesn't mean I still don't love my other two pet projects (see 2006/2007 in jacquesdebeaufort.net)..what can I say..I'm a complicated guy. Dig? By the way..these are all "sketches" in photoshop the actual paintings will differ substantially and be quite painterly..

Los Angeles

...from the top of N. Beaudry Ave.

Professor Jacques

my bookish side.......

Professor Jacques

Driving on the Freeway as a Transcendental Metaphor

The above title may indeed appear at first a fatuous attempt at finding some sort of silver lining in what most Angelinos likely consider a brutally mindless and de-humanizing chore..and I actually do agree..but spending as much time as I have punching the clock on The Great Asphault Snake..eventually I have come to realize the poetics embedded within this common experience. Mostly it has to do with the ritual participation in what appears to be an infinite mass of anonymous humanity flowing endlessly from nowhere to nowhere at a great speed and ferocity that would lead most to the impression that there actually was anywhere that needed to be gotten to at such a velocity. The individual must shed all pretense of difference and engage in a spontaneously choreographed river of movement which is simultaneously authored by everyone..and therefore no one. Although the vehicle is a shell of sorts..you realize that in the end, the only thing more impressive about an SUV or other fancy car is really just that your dead and mangled body would be draped and crushed within a more expensive and shiny coffin. This is why I find this particular method of transportation so compelling as a spiritual metaphor: because as a liminal process..being neither here nor there..not only are all markers of identity and illusions of self effectively erased..we can see a deeper question of existence cast into sharp relief. The road is time..and one day we will come to the end of this linear path. Those who were driving so fast will wish they had slowed down a bit. But inevitably even the slowpokes will pull into that last driveway and pull the keys from the ignition that one last time. There is no good reason why our lives have ended up this way..why we must endure the specific hardships of contemporary life instead of more ancient woes such as Bubonic Plague or ritual flagellations..but then again there's no good reason for anything. Better to watch the endless play and movement of this formidable beast with a reverent wonder and realize that like all else..one day the freeways will run dry and pull into their own Last Stop.

Dead Meadow at the Troubadour, 12/9/06

I was thinking about writing a few words about the show but then I realized how pointless that would be. Words are clumsy. The medium is the message. So sorry,..I guess you had to be there. Anyways..here's a snapshot.

Dead Meadow

...Dead Meadow is my New Favorite Band.
This is what I like about these cute rocker kids...I get older...they stay the same age.
Plus they're from Washington DC, which is where I grew up if you didn't know. Our Mayor smoked crack..
Dead Meadow is kind of like what my paintings would sound like if they could be songs...take that as you will.

Dead Meadow

Mick Jagger recites "Adonais" by Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Adonais" (selected verses)

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep -
He hath awakened from the dream of life -
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. -We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments. - Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled! - Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

LINK

Sebastian Gogel

Sebastian Gogel

I recently met this artist in Chinatown working on his installation with another artist at ChungKing Project. Amazing work, I'm not really ready to write any commentary as I'm still digesting these images. But I will say the stuff is good...very good. This guy is pretty amazing....I'm definately a fan.

Sebastian Gogel

look under "kunstler"

Studio

Fiver

Fiver was that ultra-nervous bunny in "Watership Down", that had a sixth sense and the uncanny ability to predict catastrophe. I used to be very skeptical of ESP, but for about 2 months after 9-11, I developed the strange ability to know precisely what people were going to say or do about 2 -3 seconds before they actually did it. It wasn't a constant thing, but it was a marked ability that I became somewhat startled by. It's a fairly useless sixth-sense, however, as it was only a few seconds of leeway before I sensed something and then it actually occurred. Furthermore it only lasted a short while, and once the transcendental plane had achieved some semblance of harmony..my strange ability vanished.

Here's my prediction for the future: same as the past but with more people.

Fiver

Apophatic Divinity

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

"A way a lone a last a loved a long the."

(the first and last sentence of "Finnegans Wake")

Arcimboldo

Arcimboldo

When will you die for the last time in my dreams?

Cathexis

Black Taj

....is my new favorite band

Black Taj

Celebrate the New Dark Age...

...was an album by the Chapel Hill indie rock band Polvo released in 1994. If you're familiar with the band, that's great. If not, I'm hardly surprised. The reason I'm dropping a mention here, however, is that I think there's a lesson we can learn from this 90's rock masterpiece...one spelled out explicitly in the album title. Sadly, I feel that it may in fact be true that we live in a Dark Age of sorts, for all the obvious reasons that hardly need any explication,...but this should not eclipse the sublime beauty and poetic grace that constantly emerge from this gloom. "Light shines in darkness, because what else could it shine in?" I've been observing a lot of handwringing and frustration,...people seem bewildered that there are no obvious systemic guidelines to couch the production of contemporary art. A litany of complaints echo through the air. Mostly there is a dissatisfaction with the machinery- the powerful engines of commerce that seem to be so soulless and so successful, and seem to have annihilated any "discourse" that could provide clarity amidst the surging excess of options. At first blush, there may in fact appear to be a problem with all of this...but upon closer examination, I feel that the actual problem, if there is one, does not concern the "system", or any other vulgar and material measurement of production. This is a war that will never be won, so why try? The problem is that people have begun to value the wrong things, and more specifically that they are looking in the wrong direction for answers. Nothing real can be accomplished by replacing one Authoritative Ideology with another. There is a futility in this approach that is more than obvious. I like to think that certain monsters will vanish if they are simply ignored. But if one makes their bread by saving the world from monsters, then I suppose they like to create and then nurture them for that specific purpose.

I propose that we belong to a Poetic Age. This is the age of the individual, tribal boundaries have begun to vaporize within the charmed perimeter of the information network. Ideas and inspiration surround us. There are more reasons to be optimistic and hopeful in the transcendent and liberating power of art than ever. But I realize now that this is something that can only be done in private...in small intimate groups and conversations..or even in the solitude of one's own thoughts...We shouldn't look to the world to be our mirror, especially if what we seek is immaterial. And rather then building monolithic immutable momuments of accomplishment that will inevitably crumble into dust, I think it's better to travel like a nomad across the steppes. As we pitch our tents, we can set fires and share stories. In the morning after we haved moved on, our presence will be a whisper in the reeds, the faint heat from the dying embers of our fire... and then finally a dot on the horizon that slowly disappears from sight.

Polvo

Absurd

I fully recognize the problematic nature of posting this, and any other image for that matter, on this here internet. But I have to say, this is my blog, and I'll do what I wan't. If you don't like it, don't read it. Nonetheless, It does feel kind of Myspace to be broadcasting the contents of one's own mirror. And maybe there is a part of me that lingers still in adolescence, a desultory and petulant teenager...trying to find my way in this world of diminished expectations. When you think about it, adults aren't really that much different from teenagers, and, as a point of fact I believe that they are less honest..mostly because they are better at playing power games and doing things that need to be done versus things that should be done. Sometimes I wan't to harness that inner teenager and let him run rampant among the ruins. He could read the tombstones and then piss on them...writing his name in the fresh snow. But then I remember I don't live in that world anymore...and could never go back. This would be tantamount to suicide.

It's been unseasonably warm here in LA, the Santa Ana winds have been blowing a hot dry air across the basin. At night I drive home down Washington Blvd. and then through the Alameda corridor- a twisted and endless landscape of looming industrial infrastructure, a flowing artery of commerce feeding into the hungry veins of America. In the past 6 years I've done this route thousands of times, and never once is it the same. I try to remember the past, but the tragic truth is that it comes only in bits and pieces. The majority of experience is lost like water flowing through a sieve. What remains are misshapen and odd nuggets of memory. It makes me think of the beautiful absurdity that seems to define existence. There is an infinite ritual we all participate in...a daily routine if you will. Wake up and repeat. Lately I've been thinking it might be nice to shake things up and be a little reckless..in the end all it really amounts to is a bizarre and colorful absurdist theatre. So why not? What is there really to lose anyhow?

Surrender for Fashion

I made this painting in 1999 at CalArts..posting the below image of Jenny Agutter from "Walkabaout" refreshed my memory.

Part 40 of A.E. Housman's 'A Shropshire Lad'

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

This verse is recited at the end of Nicolas Roeg's stunning 1971 masterpiece "Walkabout".

"lifestyle arbitrator"

Sorry Bart, couldn't resisist...its was just calling me.
I hope people realize this as being in the spirit of an homage..and an expression of sincere admiration. I wish people would do humorous send ups of my art.....

antonhenning.com

I love this painting by Anton Henning...it's a quotation of a famous work by Courbet called "Patron Greets Genius". Courbet was famously narcissistic....Anyways, Anton Henning is a fun painter. Looking at his work doesn't make you think much, but it makes you feel good. It makes me wan't to paint in bright, cheery sun-drenched hues. He's probably a really happy guy, and that comes across. But who knows...it all could be a performance...maybe he's an irritating asshole. Does it matter?...Not really. I wan't to do some paintings based on populating his luxurious modern interiors with wierd noirish sci-fi characters...now that would be cool.

antonhenning.com

Thursday

I am the Cardinal of Geneva

Turns out that I'm also the Cardinal of Geneva....but don't be too impressed, it's just some fictional character in an online fantasy game that internet nerds play. I'm going to take control of my character and will soon be doing things very unbecoming of a Cardinal...alot of drunken swearing and staring leerily at lusty wenches. Getting loaded before mass and proclamations of the greatness of Scientology....click on the link below and then read to the bottom for the new and improved Cardinal..hehe.

His Eminence, Jacques de Beaufort

Tuesday

sci-fi

Yeah, so what's with all the sci-fi ? When I was growing up my mother was (still is) a librarian, and as a method of daycare, I would spend long solitary hours wandering the stacks and poking my nose into the battered collection of each library she worked at. I think something about science-fiction is very male and pre/adolescent..and it's also usually the province of nerds and outcasts. So it's coded heavily with a language of signs and symbols that a very specific audience is fluent with. There is, of course, a repressed type of voyeuristic sexuality that often forms the strange backdrop to a procession of variously imagined Dystopian nightmares. Science fiction is the most existential and mythopoeic of all of the pulp-genres. The idealism of youth is expressed as a precocious deconstruction of the present-as projected into either an idealized and hopeful future, or nightmarish and hellish descent into the Abyss. As a vital movement, it all ended sometime in the early nineties when reality and fiction merged completely and perfectly. Unfortunately the drab and horrific commonplace of the real future did not end up to be so brilliantly cinematic and vivid as the genre's greatest illustrators had proposed on the covers of magazines like Analog or Urania. But it could still be said to be bewildering and surreal in it's own way. Nevertheless, these paintings represent a seminal moment in cultural history. In a stunning fashion, they express a remarkable intersection between the inner and outer worlds of the individual. Looking back to this time of my life, I remember feelings of anxiety and hope, not only for my own future, and my own passage through life to come..but also for the civilization that surrounded me...which I also perceived as being young and in flux. In a way, not much has changed...

Why Write ?

I began writing this blog by accident...stumbling across Blogger one night in the empty hours between midnight and morning. As the month has passed, I've come to realize that this could actually be a good thing to continue. I remember reading recently in ArtForum's "Scene and Herd" a bit about how nobody ever talks about art in Los Angeles. I think the reason for this is both obvious and unfortunate. I believe that artists should write..we shouldn't be fearful of our beliefs and convictions...we shouldn't hedge our bets by hiding in mute safety. That being said, it is not my intention to judge, critique or complain. This is a project that allows me to organize my own thoughts and clarify the avenues of connectivity that inform my process. I'm not interested in writing a history or enforcing some sort of Procrustean worldview of my own design. Nor is this blog an attempt to demonstrate my own status within a picture gallery of the social scene. I'm not interested in creating "alliances" based on the specious notion that there is some sort of Manichean ideological struggle now brewing in the art world. On the contrary, embedded in this project is an abnegation of the shallow spectacle of narrative. There are only subjective values and interests..it is up to the individual to navigate their own inquiry and mount their own interpretive struggles. I'm motivated by the desire to explore these interests and create meaning by connecting them to the tiny plot of land that my own artistic identity now occupies.

"Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?" Deleuze

Vintage Sci-Fi painting is better than 95% of the crap out there.

That's just my stupid opinion though...everyone has their own tastes and interests. And that's ultimately what this all has been boiled down to, a sprawling landscape of highly specialized knowledge with no visible dialectical landmarks sweeping us away into a thrilling and unfurling grand narrative. Nope. Not anymore. People that try to make vast summarizing arguments for the purpose of weaving their own projects into a place of eminent relevance are hopelessly misguided and should probably stop. Art should act as its own argument...theory is not a life raft for a bland and mediocre practice. Furthermore, it becomes increasingly apparent that everything is somehow equally relevant...just as the measure of relevance becomes more and more the property of the individual. At the end of the day I think it turns out to be a lot better and more democratic...and really takes a lot of the ego and self-important posturing out of the act of being an artist. Hooray for the 21st century!

Mario Correa

A class of mine from LA Valley college took a trip to Chinatown this past weekend to pop in on some old friends. Our first stop was Mario's studio, where we were greeted by this show-stopping image. Mario has been working on a really interesting series of portraits of figures from strange, esoteric subcultures..like drag racers, hang-gliders...and people who hold odd records in the Guiness Book of World Records. Each portrait is accompanied by an abstract background meant to recall early 20th century abstraction, and to create a linkage between the odd communities that abstraction grew out of while examining the nature of "community" in general. Besides being beautiful works..they do get one thinking about the strange sub-culture that we call "the art-world". The art openings later in the evening kept my mind wandering in this direction..although in the dizzying and chaotic spectacle..there were few answers.But I did feel at the end of the night that despite the arena of competing ambitions and the shared desire to rise from the faceless swarm into glorious notoriety that perhaps we were all authors of this scene..and that ironically, the artist who was being celebrated in each show was not a lone figure on an elevated stage,but perhaps more like a "host" who had merely invited us into his little corner of the world.

Mario 2

Mario gave a great talk to my class, and was quite charming and articulate despite being obviously fatigued from the characteristicly Bohemian long evening before. I think some of the ladies in our group were quite taken with this handsome young artist, and I also know of others who have admired his charms from afar. What's more is that Mario seems completely humble and unaware of his effect on the fairer sex..and is quite down to earth..and yes, sorry girls..he is spoken for.

Bart Exposito

Bart Exposito

After Mario's studio, my class hopped over to Bart Exposito's..
I liked this image because it reminded me of a shot of a Barnett Newman painting that also had a spectator observing from close range. Except here the spectator is mirrored by the figurative element rather than dwarfed by a sublime field of color. I was reading some writing in the Saatchi catalog about Bart's work enforcing ",the impersonal and anonymous as a comforting numbness." I disagree..I don't think there's anything impersonal or numb here..it has nothing to do with "lifestyle arbitration" but more to do with a thrilling objectness. The painting is experienced initially as 2 dimensional plane, but it forces it's way past that limitation and becomes fully realized as a material object...one in which color and form are personality traits contributing to the charismatic aura that it projects. These are beautiful and serene objects..and despite the obvious and easy reference to the 60's..I feel they are timeless and cannot be held within such a narrow interpretive field. They are contemporary exemplums of a long and esteemed tradition that stretches not only into a rich and fertile past, but into a hopeful and robust future where, yes, perhaps painting does "Triumph" after all.