Author: wjacobr

Visual artist, poet, novelist, activist & Street Medic, living in North. Penn Name: Jacob Russell My blog is a confluence of art, writing, politics. my Art portfolio: Art-by-Willard.com

#482 matted

I matted 36 pieces the last couple days. I’d like to get away from ‘framing,’ but so many of my pieces, especially the smaller ones, none more than the metalpoints, look so much better when they have that focus.

Here’s a crow quill ink piece… the one that started as a drawing of a crumpled paper bag. I think it’s pretty striking in tonal contrast, and in the detail… which doesn’t show so much here.

#482 matted...

Patterns/texture–revolutionary chaos

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“Bio Filters,” posted on DeviantArt,  speaks to my fascination with organic textures, which I’m coming to understand as a fascination with pattern: after all, texture in nature is but the sensuous expression of pattern, and discovering patterns–and combining them, combining them in antithetical (or should I say, incommensurate) combinations, plays an increasingly important role in my art. I think this is visible in 3 of my recent works:

#480

#481

and #482

…as well as my Pavement Series of last year, and all of my trash assemblages (we too, are ‘Nature,’ and all things we do and make, we do and make by Nature’s rules). I’ve only begun to see how this works with my acrylic paintings and larger larger pieces.

Pattern & structure are present in deterioration & decay. Entropy simplifies, but doesn’t destroy, structure. Political, social and economic structures become rigid, resisting change, stifling freedom. Visualizing decaying patterns becomes a psychological extension of a search for fissures in the borders, locations of breakdowns where new, generative patterns may begin to form. I think of my most abstract work as no less political than pieces with explicit “messages,” … and more truly subversive.

 

 

Artists! Wake up!

For how long have I been saying this? The author sees the symptom but refuses to name the disease. Of course he does: he’s a part of the system! “But of course galleries need to make a profit….la la la ” The very structure of capitalism turns art into commodity and erases all other values. The whole damn system is rotten! Artists have to be creative in more than making art; we need turn our creative energy to imagining another reality, another world!

Artists who seek commercial success, without thinking about how this system works, are complicit in their own exploitation.
Artists–become activists, become a revolutionary force!

 From ART NEWS, Go Pro: The Hyper-professionalism of the Emerging Artist, by BY

In today’s art market, objects are created and judged like stocks. Illustration by Victor Juhasz, 2016. ©VICTOR JUHASZ

The End of Democracy: The Reign of Ignorance and Stupidity?

“… Technology is not some alien thing, it is what we are: our creation, an extension of the inhuman core of our own being. We’ve externalized memory, intelligence, and our physical and bodily lives to the extent that the human is being dispersed and fragmented among its own inhuman components. We live in a moment of mutation.”

S.C. Hickman's avatarThe Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

Long ago Socrates’ analysis of the hatred he incurred at the hands of Athenian citizenry is one part of a larger theme that he dwells on throughout his Apology. Athens is a democracy, a city in which the many are the dominant power in politics, and it can therefore be expected to have all the vices of the many. Because most people hate to be tested in argument, they will always take action of some sort against those who provoke them with questions. But that is not the only accusation Socrates brings forward against his city and its politics. He tells his democratic audience that he was right to have withdrawn from political life, because a good person who fights for justice in a democracy will be killed. In his cross-examination of Meletus, he insists that only a few people can acquire the knowledge necessary for improving the young of any…

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