#403

#403 002

22×13″ Acrylic on canvas (sold)

Colors & Pigments: What is your base pallet?

What is your favorite color, someone asked–having in mind fabrics we were about to wrap ourselves in for a dress up show off and dance on the roof of the Ox…

An impossible question, I said. Every color is what it is only by the colors around it. Ask me, what combinations I’d like.

They didn’t believe me. Thought I was… I don’t know. But it’s true. We don’t know color as pure gradations on the spectrum of light, but in consort, in harmony with their surroundings. Place a tile of a particular chroma, change the surrounding colors, and–it’s as though transformed. Another color.

Add to that, that we don’t deal with color as primary light, but through the medium of pigments. I remember someone–probly on Facebook–showing his whatever… claimed that no one needs more than 5 tubes of pigment: blue yellow red black and white.

Sure. All other colors are variants of the primary colors. But pigments don’t give us color as pure light, but colors as rejections of parts of the spectrum. What appears as blue, is because the pigment absorbs reds and yellows and reflects, that is, casts off what we see–which is blue. And mixing pigments involves so many more variables.

Cut to the chase. When I want blue… there is no such thing as pure blue–but only the variants from chemical compounds–and they will all have different properties when we mix them with other pigments. Blue and yellow make green, so we know… but Ultramarine (PB-29… the standard way pigments are classified.. so you know what you’re really getting), makes a very different green than PB-28. Add to that, different pigments vary in opacity/transparency, in tinting strength.)

So what each artist chooses for their pallet will vary. Here is mine. What is yours?

Blue
PB – 15 Phthalo (or 15-2)
PB-28 Cobalt
PB-29 Ultramarine
PB-35 Cerulean
Yellow
PY-35 Cadmium
PY-38 Quinacridone
RED
PR-83 Alizarin Crimson
PR-101 Burnt Siena
PR-108 Cadmium Red
Orange
PO-20 Cadmium
Violet
PV-15 Ultra Marine
PV-19 Quinacridone
Green
PG-7 Thalo/Hookers Green
G-17 Chromium Oxide
Earth
PBr-6 Iron Oxide
PBr-7 Burnt Umber

…and I’m only dealing with acrylics. With oils, you have to factor in the varying expansion/contraction rates on drying unless what you put on is all one layer. Else your paint might crack and flake and fall off your canvas.

View GALLERY HERE.

#401 finished

Here it is. What do you think? Hope I didn’t do too much. 35×22″ Acrylic on canvas

#401 WIP 003

Laying the ground. Critical decisions to make. Leave ‘unfinished’, with minimal reworking, or continue to something closer to my original impulse? I don’t follow through on initial ideas, in painting any more than in my writing. The first brush stroke, the first word, and a dialog begins. I never know where the conversation will lead.
View GALLERY HERE.

Staring at the Face of Our Collective Death Wish

When the level of fear, zenophobia and thinly disguised blood lust exceeds all reasonable accounts of the perceived threats, it’s not about those threats, it’s about something else.
It’s time we paid close attention to that ‘something else,’ cause it’s already broken ground, it’s head and tentacles dripping with poison. What’s been let loose by the funders of the tea party, of climate denial–by those who have used racial hatred to gain political office and war for profit–it’s all come together. What was set loose by the bloodbath of the First WW, the collective madness that grew between the wars has been raised up in a new and more terrifying form and all signs indicate that it won’t end until the collective madness has exhausted itself over mountains of bodies, human and other, and a planet no longer able to support life above the molecular level.
I grieve for those with children… and for those children. We have broken the seal. What we buried has risen to devour us.

Think Your Conscious Brain Directs Your Actions? Think Again

By Shelly Fan. READ HERE

I was thinking as I read this rather unremarkable piece, not of individuals, but of our collective actions. How whatever is governing national (and international) actions, it’s not those whose role it is to govern. What populist demagoguery and endless wars of exploitation have uncorked are forces that once again seem to have taken control. One may reasonably fear that we’ve reached a point where nothing will end this outbreak of the monsters of repression till it drowns in chaos and blood.

#392

5×7″ crow quill pen and ink

View GALLERY HERE.

Drawing the thread, stitching the world together, a line at a time.

Drawing calms me. It’s very physical; I don’t need the muscular strength of throwing pottery on a wheel (something I did full time for almost 10 years)–but requires every bit the control and coordination. There’s always an element of drawing in my painting–even in the most abstract pieces, and when I get away from that, something is lost in the finished work.
Even the trash assemblages are a form of drawing, not with marks on a flat surface–but in three dimensions, creating lines, geometric or chaotic forms, tonal variations.
My need for this–to return to drawing, day after day without breaks, has progressed–gradually at first, when I returned to making art in July of 2012, to the point now that if I go two or three days without drawing my level of physical anxiety increases and my thoughts spiral toward patterns of depression.
At the end of a day of shopping, cooking, preparing a canvas, taking care of this business or that–I may be exhausted, but I have to take the time–even if only a half an hour sketching figures from an anatomy book.
I didn’t realize until recently–how important this was for my emotional and physical health. It’s that integration of interior and exterior perception… stitching together the fabric of reality.
The metaphor calls to mind, my mother, who was deeply skilled at both drawing–and a seamstress/tailor. I stitch together those ancient bonds, as well, memories and the present. As with poetry. Word by word. Line by line.

Revolution: organizing for the long haul

An interesting question: when all our ideas about how to maintain long term stability are modeled on capitalist institutions (the symbiotic relationship between non-profit and profit being the most obvious), how do we organize for the long term in ways that will break that mold? Put another way: how does a revolutionary movement remain revolutionary when the struggle is going to be multi-generational?

Do we assume they will be temporary but reoccurring, splintering off into more conventional affinity groups (like Occupy),

or can we create forms of self-renewing continuity that are not dependent on existing institutions, but exist in the interstitial spaces abandoned or not yet occupied by the machinery of capitalism–and having the power to resist assimilation and occupation?

————

Gabriel Josipovici Interview

I have great respect for Josipoici. I thought Whatever Happened to Modernism was brilliant… how commercial demand for retro-realist fiction derailed the unfinished Modernist experiment. His treatment by establishment critics in the British press tells you much of what you need to know about what’s wrong with so-called, literary fiction and it’s gatekeepers.

Thanks to Victoria Best (Litlove, of the venerable blog, Tales from the Reading Room), for this long interview–which serves as wonderful introduction to Josipovici’s writing.

Source: Gabriel Josipovici Interview

#400

#400 25×33″ Acrylic, canvas strips, paper on Masonite. Photo misses the 3 dimensional–curving delineation is from pieces that were left stuck on the surface when I ripped off stuffed rolls of paper and fabric from an earlier piece (#134 “Late Capitalism”)–like fat bloody infected intestines. The ‘face’ is from those fragments.The “Chagalesque” character was not intentional, and definitely not something I’ll pursue in the future. But what the fuck, I like the colors.

View GALLERY HERE.

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