#525 Cityscape series

32″ x 28″ Acrylic on canvas. Was working from one of my street sketches. The drawing and underpainting stayed true to the perspective. Then I was stuck. The natural direction was to develop it as a representational image. But that wasn’t at all what I wanted. I fussed with it for two weeks. This morning, the art show opening behind me, I went down to the basement and before I looked at it, I knew what was wrong: perspective. I had to flatten it, destroy the geometric depth. Extend the lines to vanishing points, extend them, let them define the space around the building, erasing the distinction between solid object and empty space. Take the graffiti from the wall of the building, and write it over the surface of the painting.

#525 CityscapePin it

View GALLERY HERE.

My (brief) experience with Artfinder.

Artfinder
We all need to make a living
It’s not my problem
I was only following orders.
I thought I could stay under the radar. After getting kicked off  Wetcanvas for using the word ‘Queer’ (to describe myself!), I thought… just play it cool. Chill. Fuck, I need the money.
I answered questions on the application, sent photos of my art, was accepted. It was going ok, until I had a problem with a required field in setting up my “shop.” They wanted a phone number. But only a cell would do… Skype wasn’t going to work. The help FAQ suggested I look in the forums. Big mistake.
I came across a thread where several artists were complaining about ArtFinder’s exclusionary promotions. Of the 6000 some members, only a handful have their work selected to be foregrounded, to be posted on FB, etc.
“What do you expect, it’s a business. It’s not about equality,” someone wrote.
I replied to one of those–that, this was to be expected. AF is a virtual gallery, so it follows the rules of the system. It’s how the gallery-to-investor system works. One of its primary purposes is to exclude–to secure the value of a very few “brands” for investors. That’s where the money is. It’s capitalism. Capitalism corrupts the whole process of distribution of art as a “product.”
I’m called an idiot. That AF is for “real artists,” and this is how “real artists” make a living. What kind of person am I, biting the hand … etc.
Bye bye ArtFinder.
Why are artists so often, so compliant, so unthinking, so docile and willing to be used by their Masters?
After this most recent difficult encounter with the establishment art world–I’m most grateful for A-Space and the radical community for providing a place for our work to be seen–I mean, for artists who don’t want/can’t make themselves, be part of the capitalist artist branding, gallery-to-investor system.
It’s a form of political censorship. And don’t tell me, “it’s my choice,” cause if it’s a choice for me, it’s so only because I chose to look the other way and not see the many for whom there is no choice, how for those who are suckered into the con game, it’s overwhelmingly white men who make up that 5 to 10% whose ‘brands’ are trending, and so appalingly few blacks and marginalized people even get let in the door.
It’s an utterly corrupt system–the same system that sends drones across the world to bomb hospitals and wedding parties, and call it “collateral” damage
… interesting, inn’it … the other meaning for that word, “collateral.” If you don’t have the collateral, you become the damage.
Capitalism has colonized art. That’s the reality. Suck up to the bloodsuckers, or you got no future in the system.

The Extinction of the Future — Larval Subjects .

Perhaps everything changes in the nature of our philosophical questions, in the nature of the aims and ends that might animate us, when the future dies. We need not think this extinction of the future in terms of Brassier’s crushing thought of the extinction of the universe due to heat death as the outcome of […]

via The Extinction of the Future — Larval Subjects .

 

I must have half a dozen posts on this. I was wondering if anyone else felt this way. Here are links to three of them.

Posterity: Art and the Artist in a post-capitalist world

Imagining Posterity

The Malevolent Desire for Recognition

 

Thematic Arragnements

A-Space organize

View GALLERY HERE.

Preparing for the A-Space show–giving a lot of thought to how I want to organize it. My work tends to migrate toward these broad, thematic areas–I hope to make this clear in my arrangements. I want to help people see what I’m doing, without overcoded interpretations.

 CHROMATICS & INVERSIONS:
Color exercises: watercolor or acrylic in inverted pairs– tone and colors (dark to light, light to dark): hue to complimentary hue (opposites on color wheel). Playing with color, like musical variations on a canon.
CITYSCAPES:
A new series in progress: from Plein Air street sketches to finished work, acrylics, assemblages & other media. Only 3, maybe 4 finished so far, but will tape the sketches to the wall around them to show the relationships.
BROKEN PAVEMENT
Series in several mediums, drawing on patterns and textures of pavement and streets.
RHIZOMATICS! Cells, Maps, Words
The first art I got paid for was in a class on comparative embryology; Professor paid me for crow quill pen and inks–microscopic slides of chick embryos. This is a Series in several mediums, inspired by photos in an histology text book. Free renditions, patterns and lines of communication— in no way meant to be biologically accurate illustrations! There’s a visual affinity for me between these and MAPS, and WORDS.

ASSEMBLAGES

Arrangements of Found Things, street trash, dirt, broken glass—the detritus of Late Capitalism—discarded identities in search of new relationships.

FAERIE TREES

Human Arboreal Intercourse

 

I don’t work from an abstract concept of the theme… more something that develops from a primarily visual interest.
There may be crossovers for any of these.

Father’s Day

 My father in Or pacific.jpg
My father was a good man, as the world of his day would see him. He wasn’t an abuser. He learned to let me go my own way, and when he couldn’t be supportive, like when I was a draft refuser (he was Navy, WWII), he kept his silence. I think he was proud of me when became active in the civil rights struggle–but we never spoke of it. Silence–was his means for communicating both approval and anger. Which made him terrifying when I was a child.
I think, from the time I was 4 years old, I was resolved that whatever I would do or be in my life, I did not want to be like my father.
In his last years–with a failing heart and facing the approaching death of my mother–who had been for him the emotional outlet he couldn’t permit himself–I no longer feared him… but neither did I have any way to comfort him, to let him know that I saw and felt what he was going through.
He died alone, a year and a day after the burial of my mother. This photo is from a few years before her death, visiting my sister in Oregon.
I remember him with neither love nor anger… but with an infinite sadness. As though the one most lasting part of himself he gave to me… was whatever it was that was missing.
A hole at the center that can never be filled. I think he doubted if anyone in the world really loved him, but my mother–and he was never quite sure he deserved that.
When I think about my father, I’m never sure that I’m talking about him… or myself.

Five pieces from 2015

I must have deleted photos of these. I painted them on weathered plywood salvaged from repairs on the neighbor’s porch roof. #376, 377, 378, 379, 380

#376 #376 66″ x 25″ Acrylic on plywood

#377 #377 64″ x 26″ Acrylic on Plywood

#378 #378 29″ x 48″ Acrylic on Plywood

#379 #379 66″ x 22″ Acrylic on plywood, with canvas strips and leaves

5444444444444444444444444444444444#380 72″ x 28″ Acrylic, Oil crayon on Plywood and cardboard.  “No gods No leaders No bosses!”

The Neoliberal/fascist War Machine

war
When we think of the war machine, the focus tends to be on the horrors of war itself, on the cost to social programs when so much of the national budget goes to military and arms makers, of our treatment of veterans… but these are only parts of the machine, and not the machine itself

When you see the figures for contributions to candidates and political representatives, the larger structure begins to emerge. Isn’t this the very heart of 21st C. neoliberal/fascism–that the war machine has become the real owner of the State, that the oligarchs we want to see as our owners and rulers, have themselves lost power over the War Machine–that to maintain their wealth and the illusion of influence, they are free only to act as operatives of and for the War Machine?

… a machine that has no goal but increasing destruction–of everything subordinate to it, until there is nothing left to destroy but itself… and all human life with it?

In the long run, all the Presidential candidates, are servants of the War Machine. There is no hope for survival, or significant change, within the orders of established power. We need to find the fissures in the walls, the cracks in the foundation, to build in spaces still invisible to The Machine–alternative lives, organizations and relationships in what, from within the orders of power, are but figments of the Unreal. Microspaces of imagination, resistance and love.