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Monday, August 25, 2008

show...

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I'm contributing seven large pieces to a show in the cavernous José Drudis-Biada Art Gallery at Mount St. Mary's College. I dropped off the work today and had a pleasant drive through the winding hills of Brentwood. There's a great view of the Getty Center from up there. Many thanks to Jody Baral. The opening reception is September 14, I'll update the specifics later.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

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Madison Avenue. Crowds swirl by. A tugging on my sleeve, I turn. A madman, gaunt, cloaked, forlorn, saying, "Tell me about your true love's hair." I impale him on my vacant stare, vacant because now I am looking inward, feeling my loss. "My true love's hair," I say, "is a silken fall of glimmering lights, a dark wood with glints of autumn, coffee and cherry and chocolate brown, and fallen leaves all around." "May God have mercy on your soul," the madman says, and vanishes in the crowd.

Allen Wheelis

Sunday, August 17, 2008

If you would strike...

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.....strike through the mask.

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She still needs a nose job- that will come next. It's good to have a brief window of art-making time before the next tidal wave of pedagological responsibility sweeps across the bow. This winter promises to be like none ever seen, I'll be lucky if I have time to even post the odd blog, let alone get into the studio. But the tea leaves look good for 2009. Cross the horn and venture forth into a brave new wold.

Friday, August 15, 2008

hiding the wires









overheard somewhere in the blogosphere:









..But I dig the managerial impulse. The elevated plain where the best people live, you know, the ones that make all the connections connect? Behind the scenes, above the scenes, they waltz around in designer jeans. Paradise, right? I’ve done jobs up there, fixing stuff up, hiding the wires, as they say. The view was great, but it didn’t elevate me seeing everyone else made small or low. I like my spirituality up-close and personal, below the belt when I can and strictly one at a time.

I’m not into mass baptism, conversion under fire and water from on high. I don’t buy the letter before the word, the word by hearsay or the real estate agent from heaven. I’m into one on one, face to face and extremely unplugged. You think the special light will illuminate? The wrong temperate will agitate? The sound of a thousand drops crystallizing for a nanosecond in free fall is any more thrilling or revealing than the slightest reverie, memory or bright idea?

That’s not spirit you’re buying. That’s spirit you’re selling, before you even know it. And you will never know what a slave that makes you.

I too have wandered in the daze and darkness of another buy-any-old thing, through the canyons of a Serra, looking for an art that’s fairer, only to wait amongst the throng and heed the curator’s broadcast song: “Are you in awe yet? Do you feel the force?” And as I formulate my reply, to the unseen way on high, I realize a tiny gesture of the hand, is all they seek or understand; that to say any more is just to signal one of us is poor.

There’s no mystique to the chic, to the clique at their peak, in the divine in-crowd at large, and condescending, by and large. So intent upon largesse, they pray for prey while they transgress. I get no kicks to complain - about the ‘ghosts’ in the machine and the works that lack my soul and the privilege of inheriting control. I do it for love!

I only give when the artist shows both hands at once on the material at once and not the followers at all. I only give in where use transcends, not transports or transacts, transfers or translates. I only give way on the wilderness, where nothing offends. I only give up on the wastage and the will to impress. I give more to the person, when we’re eye to eye and making more than amends. And I’m always in the market for angels and friends.

Georges Mathieu Is A Total Stud Who Will Kick Your $#@%$ Ass !


This is why I love Modernism. Smell the Testosterone.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Life Science

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I should begin contemplating words to go with the above images by Pacific Northwestern Artist Steven Larose. My first non-blog writing assignment....other than editing stuff for sis.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

....getting in touch with the Unconscious


My mother always is telling me not to make my paintings so "dark"-and that probably I would $ell more if they were "happier". I always tell her that it's important for culture to become fully aware of all the dimensions of being, and that the good cannot exist without the bad. Plotinus might not completely agree, but the intricacies of Neo-Platonic Metaphysics notwithstanding, I feel that it's a matter of personal and cultural responsibility to look into the Darkness and become aware of the full scope of humanness. When we lose touch with the reality of our situation, and prefer to dither in the palliative mindspace of eternal sunshine, we exercise an optimism that is reckless and immature. Apparently this is a lesson that mainstream culture is beginning to take hold of:

IN "THE WAY WE ARE," a concise, razor-sharp book of existential musings, philosopher Allen Wheelis describes the "margin of terror." Just beyond the agreed-upon scheme of things, like the raw desert and wild places at the edge of the paved city, it's the territory where pain and grief and mystery are too much to reconcile. "We look away, pretend it does not exist, is of no importance, a deviation, a neurosis perhaps."

That self-deception, Wheelis contends, is the essence of the social pact, a matter of survival. You don't gaze directly at Medusa -- and, as a rule, you certainly don't do it in summer movies, those mega-escapist mass entertainments. But as a quick scan of current big-screen protagonists attests, mainstream filmmakers are not always playing by that rule anymore; not only are they not looking away from the margin of terror, they're sometimes setting up camp there. Even cartoon characters and those based on comic books are gazing straight into the abyss.

Darkness has rarely been the central subject of large-scale fare -- it might surface as a tone or stance or an intermittent generator of shock. To temper and defuse the horror, filmmakers -- ardently independent ones as well as those working for studios -- often have adopted a twisted, winking jokiness, the punch line à la Quentin Tarantino or the Coens having become all but obligatory. But to varying degrees, 2008's summer tent-pole titles are forgoing irony as they walk quite purposefully into the darker realms of storytelling, and critics are embracing that darkness, whether it's an undercurrent (" Iron Man") or a defining principle (a certain Batman movie).

In the 38 reviews of " The Dark Knight" by Rotten Tomatoes' "top critics," 90% of which are favorable, readers will find 40 references to the film's darkness, most of them admiring. Reviewers speak of the feature's "dark vision" (Christopher Orr, the New Republic) and the way it "turns pulp into dark poetry" (Richard Corliss, Time). In this paper, Kenneth Turan praised the film for its "darker-than-usual themes that have implications for the way we live now." Manohla Dargis of the New York Times observed that "Knight" "goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind," and Newsday critic Rafer Guzman called it "a dark and highly complex drama [with] more brains than any other movie this summer."


Sheri Linden for the LA Times

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Friday, August 8, 2008

currently reading

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Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil
brilliant chapters on Blake, Baudelaire and Sade....a must read for any Bataille connoisseur...
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J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island
a man becomes "shipwrecked" on a highway off-ramp area after a car crash...very topical

Monday, August 4, 2008

Romantic Death

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Eugene Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapcilus 1827

The subject of death, which had been previously treated by the Neoclassicists as a moment of universal nobility and the enduring triumph of human spirit, became for the Romantics an artistic device for the expression of individual tragedy. The same themes that had been illustrated by David or Canova had now become tinged with a certain darkness and began to  operate not as inevitable occasions for nationalistic heroism, but as realizations of a new vision of mortality and time. Scenes of death became entropic analogies for disintegration and decay, particularly seen in the despairing figures favored by Gericault and Delacroix. The artists of the Romantic movement imagined the past as an organic and changing flux of dynamic disequilibrium rather than continue the static and crystalline monumentality of Neoclassical pictorialism. The Death of Sardanapcilus, which illustrates mythical antiquity with a characteristic lush and seductive detail, is similar in mood to that evoked by Gustave Flaubert's novel Salammbo (1862), set in ancient Carthage of the third century BC. Here Delacroix expresses the relentless certainty of man's progress towards death despite the opulence and magnitude of his material possessions; his use of sumptuous decoration is but a thin veneer that conceals the inevitable and unstoppable processes of time and tragedy. Eros will always be consumed by Thanatos. At the time the painting was sharply criticized for its rejection of French classicism in both subject matter and style, not the least in its bold and dynamic treatment of color. 

Saturday, August 2, 2008

I wonder....

...how many people who read this blog actually slogged through the four paragraphs below ?