25″ x 29″ x 3″ acrylic on board mounted on palate of a packing crate: mixed media: roofing paper, paint rags, scraps… photos still doesn’t capture the depth. The tar paper “figures” are some 3 inches in front of the backdrop.
depth shows up a little better at an angle..
So sad at the loss of John Berger. I would so love to have been able to meet, and talk and… just spend time, mull shit over with him. So few… like, almost none… of those who write about art, or even those who DO it… when it comes to thinking, and talking about it… who I feel like… get it.
Capitalism–and who got this better? –fucks up our minds–as artists. There is no model for what constitutes ‘success’ for an artist in this capitalist world, no collective model, but … like our art, that which we make for ourselves.
One less now… who did get it.
More alone than ever.
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Yesterday I went to Penn Book Center and bought a copy of Landscapes… opened it on the El on the way home… pages flipped to chapter 3. The Basis of All Painting and Sculpture is Drawing.
In March of 2015 I wrote THIS POST
I sat there the rest of the way home… and felt like John Berger was there beside me… holding my hand.
18″ x 24″ Acrylic on wood.
Layering. Interested in giving an impression of depth, without resorting to geometric perspective. Pollock, of course… but also, the illusion that one is looking at something… both real, and mysterious, like Hubble photos, or electron microscopy… in color. right click on photo for more detail.
View GALLERY HERE.
… I’m thinking of using this piece of a packing crate for a frame. Paint it black.
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Goby’s Journal: December 23, 2016
Stasi, Trump, Jesus and the Subjunctive Voice
In an age when anyone who hears us speak, in person, or through social media, students in our classrooms, our patients or customers–when anyone might feel empowered by the Trumpocracy, to report you, to troll you, to try to get you fired, blacklisted, kicked off a plane…
It would be well, were we to revive the long neglected subjunctive voice.
To polish our skills at not quite saying what we mean.
If one were to imagine oneself, say, in 1956 East Berlin, one would find ways, even in front of a class, of speaking to those who “had ears to hear,” without giving cause to those who would take you down, were they so inclined. Which brings to mind–that phrase, “those who have ears to hear” — the language used by Jesus in the Gospels: speaking in parables. Jesus, too, lived under a hostile power. How much of that language was made to pass safely through the Roman occupation?
We aren’t at that level, yet… of Stasi, say… where no one, not even our most radical friends, can be trusted, because anyone can be made to be an informant. Let them only describe what will happen to your children, your aging parents, should you refuse. But this is where we are headed.
I have heard stories. Some reported in news, some seen on social media. Would that it were true that nothing of the kind had happened to anyone I know.
Be careful. Don’t say anything in private you wouldn’t say in public, cause… nothing is private. Learn from poets how to say more and less and other than what you mean.
20″ x 16″ Acrylic on canvas
There’s no message here. Just colors. Useless… because, to pursue what is of no use, in a world where nothing is valued, and everything is used…a world where Death, with all leaders and all parties as its agents, uses us all, this, in itself, is an act of defiance and rebellion.
View GALLERY HERE./>
34″ x 26″ Acrylic & strips of canvas on Masonite.
This has been sitting in the basement for months. I’d glued strips of canvas to the Masonite, rolled on both black and white gesso, thinking this would be a B&W piece (See HERE) Last night, 2:30 AM, I went down to the basement; all I wanted to do, was cover the B&W, which wasn’t working. This is what happened.
View GALLERY HERE.
30″ x 24″ Acrylic on canvas. This wasn’t what I had in mind, went off in another direction…in the best way–leaving the imageless, generative vision that was driving me, still alive, still working. I think there may be a few more pieces happen before it’s exhausted.
This took four days… would have taken months to do in oil. So many layers, having to leave each to dry before adding the next. With acrylic, I could do 3 or 4 layers each day. Layers and detail.
View GALLERY HERE.
It’s not the flow of oil that’s at stake at Standing Rock, it’s the flow of money. I was thinking about why there’s not been a massive shift of investment to renewable energy: wind, solar, wave, when it’s been pretty clearly established that renewables could replace virtually everything we get from oil but lubrication and plastics, both of which also have alternatives; and watching the battle over the pipeline, it occurred to me that the answer is right there in front of our eyes: oil flows. As oil moves from source to refinery and production, to all the points of distribution, capital follows, multiplying at every stage. Renewables are far more than alternative sources of energy; they represent, forgive the cliché—a paradigm shift for economics, and existing structures of power.
The renewables truly do belong to a different world. Think of Israel, as just one example. The oil based money pipeline that flows from the Middle East to Houston to New York to Israel—without it, without that flow of American capital, in the form of money and weapons, Israel would not exist as the rogue colonial power that it does. There is little resemblance with wind and solar, to the complex, capital multiplying networks of supply and distribution that exists with fossil fuels. Why? Because… wind and sun are everywhere. Generation favors locality, and what follows, is nothing less than the dismantling of the pipeline-tanker-refinery-banker system, and with it, the vast military complex used to control and defend it. The very fact of universal delivery presages the failure of the present system ( SEE — Niklas Luhmann: So-Called System Failure)
In this light, what an amazing confluence of interests and circumstances is happening now in North Dakota! The emergence of native peoples, the blocking of the pipeline, which is the blocking of the flow… the Flow, the power driving the one civilization blocked by this beautiful eruption of spiritual power from another, one that is both a reassertion of what existed before European dominance of the continent, and promising yet another, a new world that is indeed, possible! This confrontation in North Dakota has become, materially, symbolically, spiritually—the focal center of the most important struggle of our age—on the outcome of which hangs nothing less than the survival of our species… and the many others we will take down with us if we fail.
(I would very much appreciate feedback on this, and if you think it worth while–please share)
In Israel, we see how the executioners always win. If they do not succeed in exterminating their victims, they know that they will be reincarnated in the survivors.
It’s the horror of this knowledge–unacknowledged by the executioners, that drives them to ever greater carnage, to ever greater acts of cruelty. To save future generations from yet another visitation of what they have become, they are driven toward the annihilation of their victims.
Genocide as an unconscious act of mercy to future generations.
When we killed the gods, they made us their heirs.
“Dear Liberal Friends, you do not have the tools to fight Trump” … because it’s not
just Trump, it’s Fascism, and it’s world wide.
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 