My new art fair

Because SOMEHOW I was not including in the what I guess is VERY FABULOUS Art Basel Miami art fair where 35,000 of the world's best artists congregate (it turns out I was ranked 35, 132 which is much better than last year (42,351)) I'm thinking about starting my own art fair in Seattle called Moisture Sure Gray Sure but Fabulous Yes Art Fair.

I might have to work on the title.

Anyhoo, I plan on holding it in the parking lot of the Safeway on Madison, hiring a tent or two and just see what fabulous things happen!

Probably a lot will (if I do it, but I won't.)

I'm also going to publish a magazine article (based on Art Review's Power 100) called Ed Nelson's Power 35,200 where I write about, well, the top 35,200 most powerful artists in the country, of which I know next to nothing except for artist number 35, 132 of whom I know quite a bit.

"Ed Nelson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a humble beginning for someone who has risen to be a valuable member of the Power 35, 200!"

So anyway, another year, another year excluded from the fabulousness that exists elsewhere other than in the near vicinity of me and my so-called art.

Do I sound bitter? Well, no I'm really not.

Last year I felt like I was missing out on something, but this year I don't so much. I think I've come to grips with making art and what I want to with it and I don't see why there should be any reason that painting a painting that someone LOVES in Seattle is any worse than painting a painting that is coveted by New York collectors.

I mean what's so great about NY anyway?

In some ways, I think painting a painting that connects with a person (the man on the street) who didn't expect to be connected with by art is far better than painting a painting that connects with a gallery owner who doesn't know a man on the street from a hole in the ground.

It does seems sometimes that there's an artificial standard that's been created to establish the value of art and any new piece of art is evaluated against this artificial measure, instead of being evaluated in a different more genuine manner.

Now I could be eggs-actly wrong about this and more than likely I am. I do not discount the fact that probably a big new york art gallery curator is in fact very much in touch with what art means to any generation of our age, is sensitive to change and to trendy movements that aren't worth investing in, and in short, are all the things that I would hope them to be.

From what I've heard, however, this art fair in Miami involves a frenzy of art buying, it's more like a sale at a department store than anything else, with people lining up outside the doors and rushing in when the doors open to get the best deals.

I guess I would like to think that it's somehow not worthy of art to have this thing go on, but in reality, I think there are plenty of good reasons and good things to be gained by being a part of such a spectacle.

So I'm going to have to work on my rationalization a little bit to prepare for NEXT YEAR when again, more than likely, I will again be excluded.

Maybe I should try a more positive approach?

faces

Some people really like paintings and drawings done from life and some people really like paintings and drawings that are totally made up. It's fun for me to do both and so I do do both, even though I used to worry a little that I should just be doing the one or the other.

At the last open house people were asking me where I got the people from, which is something when I’m painting I don’t really think about too much so I looked at all of them on the wall and pointed to each and said “that one from a drawing, that one totally made up, that one from a drawing, that one totally made up” I think it was divided between half totally made up and half from drawings.

I said to a couple of people that I’ve drawn so many faces that even when I totally make them up they look like they weren't made up but I’m not sure that’s necessarily so.

I think more to the point is that when I do make up faces what I usually work on is making them have some life, to make them more than just a cariacature and when I work from sketches I do the same thing, so maybe they end up looking the same.

What I always think about is how much life Rembrandt’s paintings have in them, and I try to add that kind of thing to mine although of course mine are NOT REMBRANDTS…one of the best compliments I ever got was on this painting where a guy said something like the person looks real and not real at the same time.

That was exactly what I was trying to do, and to have somebody see it was absolutely amazing.

I don’t want to the faces to paint to look realistic in the normal sort of way, but I do want people to be able to relate to them somehow. I go to great lengths to make them not look realistic yet retain something and it’s a fine line that I don’t always manage to walk.

Whenever a face gets too specific, I don’t like it.

I don’t know, this is just one person’s opinion and you got to find your own way, that’s for sure. I think working figuratively is WAY HARD, partly because so many people have ideas about it (after all they all look at figures every day) and aren't afraid to voice them.

I have trouble in that I get influenced one way or the other depending on what painting is making a hit and what isn’t.

What’s happened to me a few times is I’ve had a great success with a painting and I’ll think, well I should do more like that and I try it and the new painting is nothing like the old one, and it suffers in comparison. Or at least it seems to.

What I think I’ve learned about that is during the course of an artist’s career there will be certain successes and they are hard to duplicate because you can’t duplicate the time you did the first one, your state of mind, the way you used the materials and all the things that CLICKED to make the first one so good.

I think the best thing to do is continue to work like you worked in the first place, working in a way that allowed you to do what you did and if you do that, you’ll end up doing something great again but probably it will look entirely different.

I think the time to do more of what you were doing is at the time you are doing them, and the thing is, I DO that and maybe not all of them are good, too. So when people like something I did back then, there really isn’t any going back to it, I just gotta smile and say “thanks.”

The thing is, there are so many people who like different things, it's not like everybody likes everything so that even if I go back and try to duplicate a success and fail, there's probably going to be SOMEBODY gumming up the works by really liking the failure. Not the people who liked the original success mind you, but different people!

It's really a freeforall out there I'm telling ya!

Toronto trip

Back from Toronto, here are a couple of things that I thought were remarkable.

1) you hear a lot of golden oldies in Canada, they pipe it in everywhere.

2) lots of diversity including white males in green army coats who have a beard and who stare at you. They all look like they used to play hockey at some point or another and they all look like their highest achievement was scoring a goal in high school, that in some way they are still reliving the experience somehow.

3) it's flat flat flat there, no sign of a hill anywhere which made Julie and I think it would be PERFECT for riding bikes. I don't know why we came to that conclusion, it just came to us spontaneous like.

4) The Grand Hotel in Toronto was something just short of fabulous! And I say that cuz it had great breakfasts and great beds. You can see why Shaq likes the place so much! That reminds me (celebrity sighting) I visited the bathroom in the lobby one day and by the smell of things, I think Shaq had just been in there.

The breakfast consists of:

a) scrambled eggs (yum)

b) sausages (yum, but only have one!)

c) bacon (you can have more of these cuz they are good for ya!)

d) French toast (skip this, it looks soggy)

e) diced potaters...could have been better but what the heck, huh?

f) go over to the pastry section and have yourself an apple something or other.

g) toast available but sucks. Lots of jam in little jars, good to steal and eat later.

h) coffee

i) juice, Julie didn't like it but drank it.

j) that's about it.

Now THAT is a good breakfast and you could probably go back for more if you wanted, but I didn't.

If that wasn't enough, the elevators in the place were the BEST I have ever been on. The second you would hit the button (and it didn't matter which floor you were on) the little bell would go "ding" and the yawning opening door of an elevator would be at your service.

5) Toronto looks like a bunch of different cities all rolled up into one. The following are the cities it looks like and the person who said it: Tacoma (EunJean), Rochester NY (Julie, Eugenie), Barcelona (EunJean), Boston (Ed), Cleveland Ohio (Ed) New York (Ed and Julie) and Vancouver.

6) We usually make it a rule not to laugh at anyone, but sitting outside of a store that sells vibrating chairs and watching an older asian woman calmly take off her shoes and insert herself into the vibrating chair and then proceed to writhe in ectasy for about twenty minutes (that we know of, we left before she was done) was too much for us.

When she went from Sleeping Lion to Dying Swan, Hopeful Crane, Julie just lost it, big time.

7) Whatever you do, DO NOT ask EunJean what she encountered when she went to the bathroom in Chinatown.

8) I still have the reoccurring nightmare of turning and seeing the waiter holding two bowls of STEAMING hot soon tofu at the Buk Chang Don Soon Tofu restaurant right over my shoulder as he waited for a big table to leave the premises in a very crowded restaurant.

As a Korean food aside, the taste for hot water added to leftover rice in a soon tofu bowl is apparently an acquired one, one I HAVE NOT ACQUIRED.

9) When going to the Beaches while Eugenie shops, it's best to allow for more time to get back to pick her up than we allowed for. However, in the Beaches section, (celebrity sighting) we saw the general area where John Candy used to live.

10) Although I do enjoy a good walk, I was glad I suggested that we use the high quality transportation provided us by the city of Toronto. They have street cars that start out at the beginning of the route with nobody in them and by the time you're done, you've got everybody in Toronto (literally) riding on them. I think there's like a hole in the back of the street car cuz people kept getting on and getting on and NOBODY WAS GETTING OFF! If you've recently lost somebody who has visited Toronto you might want to check out the holes.

11) There were the coolest graphics in the movie Stranger Than Fiction that we saw in Toronto. That movie, by the way, although members of our party begged to differ, I thought was EGGS-cellent!!!

12) Eugenie is caught up in SOMETHING very hard to explain in her studies at Rochester Institute of Technology although she valiantly did try to explain it and I got some of it (I think).

13) We all decided that a cold weather destination for a vacation was a VERY GOOD IDEA although a warm weather destination would be EVEN A BETTER IDEA!

14) the driving in Toronto wasn't too bad and you actually noticed that they were better drivers than Seattle, plus they were more friendly letting people in and stuff.

15) Julie did EGGS-actly what you ARE NOT SUPPOSED to do at the airport as a policeman politely pointed out, by trying to help a woman with her bags. That woman (from India!) is probably still at that airport trying to explain why she had to answer "yes" to the question, "Did anyone help you with your bags while at the airport?"

16) While I do like shopping, I only like it for about a minute and then I could easily move on to something else.

17) Toronto was the BEST.

18) It's good to be home.

Being Done

I've been doing some BIG watercolors lately with a lot of stencilled words on them. I mean we're talking here pieces of paper about 4 feet wide and six feet long all filled with words, every single square inch has a letter on it.

It's so much stencilling that I thought I might call up the stencil maker and see if they'd be interested in the finished product (Acme Stencil? Well, I'm your biggest fan!)

It's sorta fun to do, all this stencilling especially in the case where I don't really have to think about what I'm stencilling. But even if I'm writing something with some meaning, it's fun...

You're in this large piece of paper, you're kind of swimming in it it's so big and there you are putting a letter on it in some particular location on this big grid, it feels funny and kind of cool that somehow you've created some meaning out of this space to the point that you are directed to put this letter there.

And gradually gradually you begin to fill up the big space and the letters kind of lend a uniformity to the whole thing, they take a space that's full of marks and watercolor splashes and erasures and they sort of march over it, cleaning it up.

The overwhelming feeling that I get when I've finished the last stencil is "I did it!!!" I raise my hands over my head and I run around the room yelling (well, not really) celebrating in a way that I don't do for anything else.

And I say to myself, "I don't care if it's any good or not, it's done!!" And there's a whole of satisfaction in that, being done.

But, of course, if I don't like how it looks finally, just being done isn't gonna be enough, so in fact it isn't done and it won't be for awhile until I get it where I want it or I throw it away. It's a lot of work to throw away but if I can't get it to work, that's what I do (I'm warning you.)

I saw an article about artists and their mistakes and a lot of them said that they really don't think of it in a way as being a mistake, if there is something they don't like they just work until they like it.

And I agree with that. You could say in this big watercolor that I made a mistake because the thing is working very well, but to me it's just not done, it's not fixed up.

Being done (finally) is a good feeling.

Recently on our trip to San Francisco, we saw a Matthew Barney show, called”Matthew Barney: It’s Me Me Me and some more ME”

Nah, just kidding…it was called something like Matthew Barney Drawing Restraint.

I’ve never really liked him much and in fact, in New York once I almost got sick at one of his shows although that may have had something to do with the Guggenheim with it’s circles and circles, ack. Garp.

Anyhoo, this time in SFO I liked him better and saw a little of what he’s trying to do which in some ways isn’t that much considering how much STUFF he puts out on the floor. It’s really amazing to see all the stuff he generates, I’d hate to see his garage, it must be packed to the gills! I mean there’s vasoline this and vasoline that and videos and movies and some more vasoline, there’s movies’ about movies about vasoline and there’s little watercolor drawings and there’s big boat rigs made of vasoline.

I’d say he’s Vasoline’s biggest customer hands down.

What gets me about it is how BIG he seems to be thinking (even tho as I said, his ideas sometimes are kinda small) and it makes me think that I too should be thinking bigger.

So I went home and I started to think bigger or at least tried to.

Which really didn’t work.

I don’t know, maybe some people are intended to think bigger and some people aren’t. I’ve always been a guy who looks at smaller things rather than the big obvious things so maybe there’s just no way I can do otherwise and it’s impossible to change.

On the other hand, maybe you don’t always know how big you can think until you finish thinking and possibly you ain’t finished thinking until you actually stop thinking. That if somebody is destined to think big he or she will start thinking and one thing will lead to another and before long BAM he (or she) is making BIG TOPIARY PUPPIES AND PUTTING THEM ON THE GROUNDS OF THE MUSEUM AT BALBOA!!!!
Maybe one thing leads to another in some people faster than it does in others.

I think it is true that one idea does lead to another and sometimes the end result is nothing like what you started with. You have a hard time even eggs-plaining to somebody how you even got to where you did, it’s so different than where you started.

And another thing to think about is, just because something is big in size doesn’t mean it’s good. I think that’s the case with Matthew Barney, he just overwhelms a person with how much stuff he has that you think well he’s GOTTA be good, just look at all this vasoline!

I bet if you asked one of these people who do things on a grand scale how they did it, I bet they all would say something to the effect that in order to do this BIG old project over here, they had to first do that small little project over there, that the big thing didn’t spring from nothing.

And the key to it all is to do something. You can think and think all you want, you can come up with MAGNIFICO ideas, but it aint’ gonna amount to a hill of beans unless you actually produce something, even if it’s a small thing.

I bet people who work on a grand scale are people who aren’t afraid to try something, aren’t afraid to fail and who (most importantly) produce things, probably very rapidly. The one thing leads to another leads to another and bingo you’ve got great big slabs of steel in your backyard and you got your neighbor complaining to the police!

So forgedda bout this thinking stuff, you get an idea you do it. And that gives you another idea you do that too and you don’t think AT ALL about it, not one bit.

Thinking (uh oh)

Just got back from a camping trip to Oregon and California with a stay of four days in Berkeley.

Little or no thinking involved.

Stayed away from the news, from music, from the papers (although would read the box scores occasionally) and didn't listen to the radio. No computers either.

It was nice.

Went through the hinterlands of which there are still plenty in this good ol' USA and discovered that the vehicle of choice is the Dodge Ram Charger.

That's good to know.

Also good to know that people who drive selfsame also like to tailgate. I felt like the freakin' Pied Piper for most of our trip, always leading a pack of rats (I mean Dodge Ram Chargers) into the sunset.

And I'm not that slow a driver either. I think some people don't really know how to drive unless they're tailgating somebody -- I saw one guy slow down after he passed me cuz there was nobody else in front of him, poor slob.

So the thinking was absent on our big trip, let the mind go idle (which isn't very hard for me to do, either).

But now, am back, and am loaded for beer. I mean bear. In a thinking kind of way. I'm gonna think and think until I can't think no more. Think this and think that I'm gonna think every which way but loose and then when I'm done thinking I'm just going to think some more in a thoughtful manner.

This is what I think: I think that people have two brains, the right and left. The left brain speaks and is verbal, the right brain is spatial, etc.

But what I think also is that sometimes people can be really smart in one or the other brain, and not all that smart in their other brain.

So maybe you’re really smart in school (left brain) but you leave a lot to be desired when it comes to making common sense decisions (right brain).

You see this all the time. People who I used to think were so smart cuz I was only evaluating one of their brains. People who are so smart in one way and go to Harvard or sompin like that but who are kind of morons really.

But say you’re really smart in your right brain, how do you communicate that to people cuz you always have to filter it through the left brain and the speaking thing. The left brain will always edit the right brain and you look like a complete idiot.

That’s a person who is not smart in either brain, a complete idiot!

So I think it’s a good idea to find out which brain you’re better in and then go with the flow baby!

Anyhoo, I think I'm a right brainer, that's for sure. That's why it took a LONG TIME before anybody thought I was anything other than a complete idiot. I'm a right brainer with a very critical left brain, my left brain always thinks it's right so it has been very difficult for my right brain to really shine, always being intimidated, etc. by the left brain as i said.

I have these things that happen to me at the studio where I sit down with all these good ideas that I have thought up (that my left brain has thought up), I've got a million of them, ones that will be the next masterpiece of the world or close anyway, plus I got a couple in reserve in case the good ones don't work out, and instead, I sit down and something else entirely comes out!

Out of the BLUE!

See, I think when I sit down and start working my RIGHT BRAIN takes that opportunity because if I'm drawing or sompin I most likely am in my right brain to supercede whatever my left brain has thought up (something very stiff more than likely cuz my left brain is STIFF) and go for the glory on an idea the Right Brain has been percolating around for awhile.

And so all these other ideas go OUT THE WINDER! And it's kind of a surprise to me and my left brain.

Whenever I get back into my left brain, like the next day when I arrive at the studio, look at what was done the day before my left brain goes HMMMM very interesting but you can tell the left brain doesn't like it very much but the left brain has learned to keep quiet cuz when it comes to art, the right brain wears the pants in the family.

It's been determined (I'm not sure how) that my left brain is not very smart and leaves a LOT to be desired and to our credit (me and my brains) we've all realized this and have made accommodations.

So after thinking and thinking and thinking like I've never thought before I've come to the conclusion that I think that I ain't gonna think no more bout nothin' and by that I mean thinking in this faulty poorly synapsed way that I think my left brain is known to think in.

Instead I'm gonna go into my right brain and stay there! With occasional sorties over to the left brain when I need to do my taxes, etc.

Wonder

Now this is a wacky painting as seen to your left, I call it "Peaceful Assembly"...

It's a crowd scene, you probably could guess that.

I had this big canvas that I got from jamey down the hall when he quit art which I wrote about a coupler months ago.

First I painted this big painting called "Big Man Dancing" which had this guy on it dancing to some music. I liked it but it was really really difficult to paint for some reason, I think because I was painting over something that Jamey had on the canvas that somehow did not facilitate the fluidity of my paint.

I should mention that this canvas is LARGE! It's five feet wide by six feet tall.

At some point whilst painting Big Man Dancing, I got fed up with the paint facilitation, as I mentioned, and took out some acrylic paint and boldly painted over the oil paint.

I'll get some paint facilitation I thought to myself.

And I did. That acrylic paint went on slicker than a cat's whiskers and I had myself a brave new painting.

Butt (and it's a big BUTT) back in the recesses of my sorry synapsed brain, I remembered something about not mixing acrylic and oil, but I'm thinking to myself, what? it will only last 100 years instead of 500? What do I care about that?

I did broach the subject carefully though with a few people and from what they said (Reilly Jensen) I was a little more worried. So finally, I just took off that old canvas, restretched on a new one, put a little gesso on it and started over.

And as I took the old canvas off the frame, the acrylic paint flaked off, so I don't think this thang was going to even last 1 year. Bunk!

Anyhoo, I started painting this big old painting with all the faces and things and it got to be kind of an obsession with me, I just worked and worked and worked on it until it was done. I've never really worked like that on a painting before.

And I got it done and this is what I've got. Fifty faces, all of them made up completely. I think what's weird about it is, they are all made up faces. I mean if you make up one or two faces people think it's kind of cute. But 50 faces?

I think they start to wonder about you.

Top Ten Best Museums (and Ham Restaurants) in the World

Ok, here is a list of the best museums (and Ham restaurants) in the world.

1. Prado - great.

2. Seattle Art Museum - sucks, shouldn't be on the list.

3. Tacoma Art Museum - a beauty. Just saw an exhibit by the guy to the right there, Akio Takamora. His stuff is a little repetitive, kind of ho-hum, once you've seen one, you've see them all, it's almost if he doesn't have any rhyme or reason to his work and I say this with absolutely positive objectivity. This drawing I call "portrait of a self-portrait."

4. Doll Museum in Bellevue - one of a kind for a reason. Never been there. Chris has, many times and it's just one of many reasons we all wonder a little about him.

5. Museum of Ham - not really a museum, it's a restaurant in Madrid. It's a chain of Museums of Ham. You can't get ham like this at most museums, lemmetellya. All kinds, your black forest ham, etc. of course the menu is all written in Spanish, like Julie and I are supposed to understand THAT!

6. Louvre - this is the one in Pocatella, Idaho not Paris, France. No, Ha Ha, kidding about that, it's the one in Paris France. I went there once, stood in line in front of the IM Pei addition, the pyramid in the center of it, and listened as people ragged on it. I liked the pyramid but didn't like the museum, I raced (I was fast back then and easily outpaced tourists) to see the Mona Lisa before they could see it (Ha! I won!) and saw some Michelangelo something or other. But I felt at the time that the other paintings left a lot to be desired, I mean how many HUMUNGOUS paintings of horses can you look at? I mean one HUMOUNGOUS horse is one thing, but a whole bunch of them? You got to be a big horse lover, maybe a big horse lover will love it there, I don't know.

Since then, however, I've come to have an appreciation of some painters who more than likely have some stuff hanging there such as Titian, for instance. And probably some others too, so I think I should go back and check it out, avoid the horses altogether except of course when they're in a Titian painting ("Portrait of a Horse").

7. Outboard Motor Museum, south of Tacoma - never been there, but Chris has. I think they wanted him to be the resident artist there, but he declined.

8. Chicago art institute - CRAMMED with art, lots of impressionists (who are in my dog house lately, just how many paintings did they paint, the rascals?). And how cold do you think it can get officially and still support human life? I'd say about 20 freaking below, about the temp that it was when we visited. Luckily, I have eggs-perience at the cold stuff, or Julie and I would have been frozen stiff in the middle of a big field that Julie wanted to cross and to which I said No Way, do you want to be frozen stiff? Midwesterners know to avoid a field during a cold snap. And why there's a field in downtown Chicago is a question that we asked ourselves. In the warmth of a nice bar.

9. New York Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum - Yawn, take me someplace great, will ya? Ha Ha, another joke. These two museums probably should be rated higher than the Outboard Motor museum, but only because the book store at the Outboard Museum didn't carry any copies of "Outboard Motors: Do you love them or do you not, finding them stinky and noisy?"

10. Unofficial Norman Rockwell Museum somewhere in Vermont where I was at Tamily's wedding - this is not the "official" Norman Rockwell museum even though it's run by one of the people who actually was in a Norman Rockwell painting way back when. It's got a lot of Norman Rockwell stuff, which I guess shouldn't be a surprise.

I don't pretend this is a definitive list of the top ten best museums in the world, but I would be willing to argue my point on any one of them with gusto. And believe me, you haven't seen gusto like I got gusto when it comes to the best museums in the world. (I might not have quite the gusto on the ones I haven't been to (but are on the list).)

I just have to say that I know two of the best going to museum people in the world too, Julie and Chris. They really are the best and all their bestness comes out the most in museums (except that Julie's back gets a little sore if she's on her feet in a museum all day.)

Best going to Museum People

(Tie) 1. Julie and Chris.

Anatomy of a Painting Idea

My friend Sid asked me the other day why I changed a painting that she had seen. And for some reason I had it on the brain and I think I was thinking about why I had changed it myself so I had a lot to say about it.

The old painting consisted of this face at the bottom of the large rectangular canvas with a trail winding up to the top of the canvas where there was a housing complex. The canvas was sityated on the easel in a vertical manner. (I'm setting the scene here, it's very dramatic, doncha think?)

Well, I didn't really like the painting for some reason (can't really say why) but I think it had to do with this face at the bottom which I found was less than satisfying. I think maybe he looked too specific or something, I like people to look a little more general. Also, I think I didn't like him because he wasn't a whole person. He was just a head.

And I didn't really like the housing complex either. I've found (because I've done a few housing complexes lately) that you really have to find the right note when doing a housing complex and that's difficult to do. People all the time think they can do an abstract painting (and they can) but it's still difficult to do a GOOD abstract painting, it has to have that ooomf which comes from who knows where if you find out please let me know. (Probably it comes from Canada or somplace, right under my nose.)

Anyway, I thought about doing some more people on the piece and started that but thought Naw that aint any good, so I flipped the painting 90 degrees so the canvas is going horizontal now and I sat and looked at it for awhile and then, out of the blue, I decided to paint a tuba player and an accordion player.

Now, I'm not sure why that subject matter came out when it did, but I have thought about doing something along those lines at one point and maybe I was tossing it around in some inaccessible brain I have for awhile and so maybe it isn't such a big surprise to some part of me.

It really does seem like I have two brains, one that handles talking and things like that, and one that handles writing. When it comes to painting, I think that I use the part that handles writing more than the talking side. I guess we're talking left brain and right brain, but somehow it seems different than that.

If I'm in the studio during a long day, the right brain starts to take over and I do all sorts of things that the next day, the left brain looks at in wonderment and says (because it can talk) THAT sucks!

I had thought enough about the tuba and the accordion that I had drawn a little sketch of something a few months ago and I knew eggs-actly where it was in an old sketchbook. I hunted through the studio and found the sketchbook and turned right to where the drawing was in the front of the book.

So, armed with the little sketch, I painted in a tuba player and an accordion player by mostly painting in the background around the shapes, which I've started to do more often, especially when I'm painting over something.

This is called painting the negative shapes (I think).

I have to say that I kind of recommend that kind of painting. For instance, instead of drawing and painting somebody's actual hand, you paint the space around the hand, and for some reason a lot of times you get something that looks way more like a hand than if you struggled to draw it. (Hands are tuff).

Continuing to paint negatively, I debated (Do it! No, Don't do it!) for awhile once I got the two people on the canvas if I should maybe just flip the canvas back vertical and just have the tuba player. The tuba player's image I really like, it shows the bell of the tuba but you can't see the person's head.

But I decided to go with the two people because I thought maybe a tuba player with no head would be a little too impersonal and I did like the image of the accordion player(female) who is looking off camera to the right, kind of checking out to see if the audience is enjoying the music.

There's something appealing to me about people in that situation where they really want you to like what they're doing. It shows, I think, a very good side of people.

The music aspect of it is there too, because I'm not sure if a tuba and an accordion combo is very common and I think it adds a little something to the whole thing. Some humor possibly but for all I know, tubas and accordions are very common duet mates. I mean, we saw trumpets and accordions all the time in Spain when we went, and cafe owners who would come out and shoo them away before they could really work a sweat up.

To finish it off, I added in a music stand for the tuba player (for compositional purposes) and filled in the background with a curtain (also for compositional purposes), as if they were on a stage for an audition or a recital.

It's funny, but a lot of the time I'll have ideas during the day or night that I come to the studio with planning on implementing them. But when I sit down in front of a blank canvas with say about four ideas to choose from, I suddenly start in on something completely different, like a tuba and an accordian.

Probably it IS something like my left brain has thought up all these things and is communicating to me while the right brain has ideas too that just aren't communicated until I sit down and pick up the brush...for some reason, I tend to go with the idea that comes out of the blue (or so it seems)...

Anyway, I left some of the old painting in the new painting, so the tuba has some red lines in it (from the remains of the houses of the old painting) and the accordion is green.

That may change and in fact the whole thing may change again, but that is....ANATOMY OF A PAINTING IDEA.

Bunnies

Went to First Thursday last night, saw some art and talked to a few of the dudes who had some shows.

They all have this look in their eye when you talk to them like wow Im really doing this and they also are trying to figure out if you're important or not.

I'm not.

So they talk to you and generally they're nice but when they do figure out you're just some schmuck from East Brickhouse, a few miles outside of Hicks From the Sticks, they tend to start looking over your shoulder at everybody else at their show.

I think I do the same thing whenever I have a show. It's tuff and on occasion you find yourself not listening to a word a person is saying to you. You get distracted.

Anyhoo, some some good stuff here and there but wondered why can’t people just make good art? If they’re going to do it, why not make it good?

That's a good question, one I think people could ask me too. It's funny, but everybody who makes art and shows it thinks in their heart that it's good, even people whose art is turrible (which I say non-judgementally).

I don't think they think their art is a masterpiece or anything I think they think that their art is adequate for the venue. If somebody came up to them and said "hey there, you want to show that pic of yours there, that one with the bunnies, do you want to show it in the Louvre? We have some space available"I think they might think, well it ain't no masterpiece and say to the Paris representative of the Louvre who is in town and has seen their art unexpectedly, "why no, I don't think I better. Are there other bunnies in the Louvre? Are you curating a bunny show? well, maybe...would I have to pay to have it shipped there? Just where in the Louvre would it be, like in the basement or something? Do you label the paintings in French, would I have to put my artist's statement in French?"

Once the initial shock of "an Homme" from the Louvre asking for your bunny painting subsides, you'd have a million questions. (How do you say Bunny in French? Jambon? (that means Ham)).

Anyhoo, we saw some paintings of bunnies last night that elicited the comment from Chris that he liked "the wax stuff with the bunnies or whatever."

The bunny guy had a lot of paintings there probably around 30 or 40, most of which (if they contained a bunny) I didn't like all that much, but some of them (bunny free) that I really liked.

I think it just goes to show you, if you make enough paintings, some of them are going to be good.

Do you think if you laid out all of Vincent Van Gogh’s work end to end that every one of them would be a masterpiece? I think not. I know if you laid out every one of MY pieces end to end there would definitely be some of them that are better than others.

You know you DO get your masterpieces every once in awhile (I say this objectively and think as I write it of my masterpiece "Man Eating Burger" that reminded some people of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" it was such a masterpiece) and I think as you continue to work, the quality of your work becomes higher and higher (until it drops off completely which we don't want to think about) and so after a while, EVERYTHING is a masterpiece or maybe EVERYTHING is CLOSE to being a masterpiece with the occasional REAL masterpiece every so often.

F'instance, you know you can look at Van Gogh's "Starry Night" and think it's a masterpiece compared to his "Postman at Arles" but both paintings are kinda up there.

Maybe I better stop using Van Gogh for my greatest artist of all time segments since I saw a list recently of the top artists ever as voted by British art students...it's a long list (I'm tied for 33rd) but here is the top five. 1 Marcel Duchamp2 Pablo Picasso3 Francis Bacon4 Henri Matisse5 Lucian Freud6 Philip Guston.

Kind of a weird list, huh? Marcel DuChamp number one? Van Gogh was actually tied for 17th on the list so I guess his period in the sun is over.

C'est domage.

I mean if you paint a bunny picture do you ever think it will be a masterpiece? Best masterpieces of all time 1 Mona Lisa 2 The Pieta 3 TheBunny picture 4 Campbell's Soup Cans 5 The Last Supper.

I don't think you shouldn't paint bunny paintings, it just I think there are certain uses for certain paintings and not all paintings (while they still are good) are not destined to be masterpieces and that fact is acknowledged by all, including the artist.

Maybe as a whole genre, like say you painted hundreds of bunny paintings you could then collectively say you've painted a masterpiece.

Maybe then but probably not. I think you'd have a better chance of painting a masterpiece if you painted a madonna and stayed clear of the bunnies.

ideas

It's a funny thing about ideas, I mean how important are they to the success of a painting?

Yikes, that's a question.

I was thinking the other day (uh oh) that I used to have more ideas than I do now, partly because when you're young you're trying out new possibilities and as you get older I think you start to realize that a lot of the possibilities you think about just won't work.

You have gained eggs-perience.

But I remember having a million of ideas. It makes me wonder what I would have painted if I was painting then.

But that's water under the bridge, doesn't pay to think about that too much.

I was reading an article in Modern Painters magazine recently about the big show in Amsterdam, the Caravaggio-Rembrandt To-Do. The author said that after looking at the paintings she felt that really the most unimportant part of the whole thing was the subject matter, that these paintings were GOOD no matter what the people in the paintings were all about. I think that's what she was saying and I think she's right about that.

And you can imagine that Rembrandt probably spent hours thinking of a particular subject matter to paint, that he went through many different options before settling on Samson and Delilah say.

And that the subject matter is in many ways the "idea" of a painting. You can hear Leonardo Da Vinci now saying to himself, hmmm, I'll take this Madonna and I'll paint her half-length and I'll put her in an insipid landscape. Maybe I'll have her smiling enigimatically.

Or you can hear Picasso saying to himself, "Pablo, you're the best! And that idea you had about putting some prostitutes in a painting with masks on them and I'll put them in a circle, with grapes on a table in front, that is something to pursue!"

I mean, that's how a painter gets started, thinking about his subject matter coming up with ideas.

But maybe there are ideas and there are ideas. Ideas that are more important to the success of the painting and ideas that are less important.

Perhaps the most important idea when it comes to producing a great painting is to have an idea as to the way the painter connects to the world, has compassion for the world and loves the world, and in particular the idea of how the painter uses that connected self to portray the world.

That's a pretty good idea.

And perhaps this "idea" is not really in the form of a traditional subject matter idea, one that is thought about, reasoned about and then acted upon.

But maybe it is. Maybe that's what makes great painters great.

You just wonder if a painter's greatness is something he/she thinks about or is it something that is just there. I can understand that Rembrandt could've painted ANYTHING and it would have been great, but did he know that?

I think that the great painters do know that, that they come to understand that what they paint isn't as important as how they paint and make an effort (have an idea) to do art in a particular way.

You look at a guy like Andy Warhol where the idea of the painting seems so important to the painting, the Campbell's Soup Cans for instance. The idea of the soup cans is brilliant, the BEST, but more importantly he had the idea to think about the world in a different compassionate loving way, a way that would connect with his audience in his era.

As I mentioned, Rembrandt probably DID stay up nights thinking of ideas to paint, and you can't disassociate that from the process that led from A to Masterpiece. But I think that the great painters had an idea about what they were doing and how they did it that they knew was more important than what they painted.

So the next time you (or me) starts to worry about that, about WHAT you're going to paint, just remember that your process can be just as good as Rembrandt's if you can manage to live in the world, and love the world and have an idea to show that love and compassion in whatever subject matter you choose.

What to concentrate on

First let me say that I think this feeling you get when you try to do art, this feeling of frustration if things aren't going well, the sorta riled up-ness you get as you try to work things out, the disgust you feel with certain things you do, is all part of my process.

I have to work this way, this process is who I am.

Other people have other processes, and maybe some of their processes are better, less stressful. I hope so anyway.

Mine is not a very nice process, you kind of wish it was easier. And sometimes it does seem to be, sometimes it feels like you ARE getting it, you ARE able to keep the art coming at a high level, that you ARE becoming more consistent.

But more often than not, you fall back again into the frustration, and in particular with the feeling that you're not heading down the right pathway, that you aren't seeing what needs to be seen, and that you're a pathetic hack.

You get a strong feeling that you're working in the wrong medium, that if you were to find the right one everything would work out slick.

It doesn't help that people are constantly telling you what they like, and you tend to get influenced by that. If you sell something, it's very easy to think you should do more of that, if somebody says Your BIG OIL PAINTINGS are GREAT (implying that everything else you do isn't great) you tend to think they're right, that you've been wasting your time doing anything that isn't a BIG OIL PAINTING.

This is what is called in the business An Obstacle.

There a plentitude of obstacles in life, and in anything that you want to accomplish and there a billion zillion obstacles in ART. Art is full of 'em and as people proceed in ART they start falling by the wayside as they can't manage to overcome various obstacles.

I know that I've mentioned this before but I bring it up now because I really think the MOSTEST of the BESTEST obstacle that I've run across is this one mentioned above, where you feel (at certain times) that you aren't good enough.

To overcome this obstacle means to NOT CARE what other people think about what you're doing, it means NOT CARING if you sell something or not, it means NOT JUDGING what you do and just let it be.

And in particular it means NOT BEING SWAYED by other people's opinions.

This is a very tuff one and I think a lot of people do pretty well for a while in ART but hit this brick wall pretty SMACK dead on.

Hopefully, part of my process as I proceed and not let this obstacle bother me (much) is that as you get further and further into the whole thang, that you start to free up a little, you start to really hit the place that you want to hit, partly because you've stuck to your guns and HAVEN'T been influenced by people around you.

That's what I'm hoping anyways.

I sort of see it a little, I sorta see things that I've been doing lately that I could never have done before, could never have thought of seemingly.

But you're so close to what you're doing it's very difficult to see how things have changed, to see improvement. If anything you are rewarded in reverse more often than not, by people liking what you did previously opposed to what you're doing now. They're not seeing improvement in what you're doing, they see a falling off. (oh boy, what an obstacle!).

So anyhoo, lately I've been feeling a little bit more confused about things, about direction and I think it's probably no coinkydink that it's happened when I've been about as successful as I've been at selling pieces for higher prices and it's happened when I've gotten more and more varying opinions about what people think is good about my art. Also, add into this mix rejections from places that I've applied to, rejections that are everywhere sometimes.

It's tuff but I think it's good and, as I say, part of a process that gets you through an obstacle (let's hope) and spits you out on the other side, free and clear.

I think for me in these times I have to concentrate on what I think is good, and what I think continues to be worth pursuing which would be:

1) Being a conduit, not being a reasoner or a thinker or trying to look at things logically.
2) Including people in the paintings with the idea of trying to get beyond their appearance and in particular explore how that character relates to every other person in the whole world.
3) Including a dark side.
4) including a humorous side
5) including writing (but not always)
6) concentrating on making the color as good as I can.

so that's it....Easy, huh?

Leonardo da Vinci, hack?

A couple of weekends ago, went to Portland and whilst there went to Powell's Book store which has got to be one of the best stores anywhere.

It's good with lots of art books.

Got a book by Niki de Saint Phalle which is pretty cool... I remember once seeing one of her paintings before I painted myself and I think it was an impetus (one of many) that got me going. I had no idea that she had done as much as she has, really lived the life of an artist that's for dang sure.

Did some stuff like shooting her paintings and letting them bleed oil out but mostly I think she's famous for her sculptures, here's a link:http://www.csupomona.edu/~plin/women2/images/stphalle_big.jpg

Also got a book about all the Last Suppers that have ever been painted although I'm not sure the book contains ALL the last suppers ever painted. Maybe just the highlights of the Last Supper paintings.

By far (at least I think) the BEST one is the one by Leonardo Da Vinci and it makes me re-evaluate him because I used to think he was severely overrated.

Maybe that's bound to happen when a guy paints the most popular painting of all time, The Mona Lisa, that he's going to get a little backlash.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41123000/jpg/_41123916_monalisa_203.jpg

http://www.mystudios.com/treasure/davinci/davinci-ermine.jpg

See what I mean, they kind of suck (but in a good way)....

but this Last Supper, boy it's pretty good....
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/l/leonardo/lastsupp.jpg

DaVinci painted at the same time as Michelangelo and Raphael which was news to me and they all knew about each other. I think DaVinci was the oldest and Raphael the youngest with Michelangelo being the genius.

The time in which they lived was a raucous chaotic time, with crusades and wars and people trying to take over other people and Popes (Julius II) leading armies himself despite his afflictions which included syphillis. There were prostitutes everywhere, and mistresses and affairs and who KNOWS what else. The woman who is the subject of the Mona Lisa was probably a mistress of a wealthy man who wanted her portrait.

At one point, Michelangelo proposed that Da Vinci's plan to build a bridge from the tip of Italy to Sicily or somepin like that be actually put into operation but nothing ever happened along those lines.

So all these guys were sorta loping all over Italy, doing stuff here and there, going to Rome for the big projects (The Pope's Tomb, etc.) being inspired by the others. Raphael and Da Vinci were not afraid to partake in all that there was to offer a famous artist, but it seems like Michelangelo did not live the high life (except when on top of the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel, ha ha) probably because apparently he was one ugly dude. Here's his self-portrait:
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/sistine/0-Michel.jpg

He was one of these guys who are perpetually put upon, with problems in his family and problems with money constantly on his mind. He didn't want to be in Rome because he thought it was unhealthy and longed for the comfort of his home town, Florence. At a moment's notice, or if a war threatened, he would hightail it back to Florence and the pope would get pissed off and drag his ass back, with Michelangelo complaining the whole way.

I recommend a book I recently read about the whole time called Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel by Ross King. I hadn't really ever had put Michelangelo in an historical period in my mind other than I had a vague idea that he was kind of ancient, so he came alive to me when I read this book.

The Sistine Chapel ceiling sound really amazing and some dude, Dante or somebody, said something like it just goes to show you what one man is capable of (the power of the quote lost in my paraphrase) and it sure would be something to see.

http://history.hanover.edu/courses/art/micsis5.jpg

Before they tear it down and put in a Wal-mart I mean.

Baseball

Well, baseball has started and the Mighty Mariners have lost their first one, 5-4 to the defending AL West champeens, the Anaheim Angels or whoever.

Things seemed an awful lot the same as last year, the Mariners falling behind early when Vladimir Guerarro deposited a pitch from Jamie Moyer into the stands which prompted Ron Fairly to wax philosophic on how you don't pitch to Vladimir. Period.

Speaking of Ron, he was in fine form saying the MOST OBVIOUS things..."If you want to win, you've got to score a few runs!"...well, he didn't say that but he coudda. I don't really mind Ron, but a lot of people certainly do.

Komo 1000, the voice of the Mariners, has continued to put as many ads on the air as they possibly can to the point that the game actually seems secondary. I mean, really, the Torve Roofing status of the dome roof? (Closed).

It's too bad that they didn't have the Kellogg's Pop Tart Pop Up of the Game With the Bases Loaded back in Dan Wilson's day, he would have won it every time. Last night, Yuniesky Betancourt got the Lenscrafters Seeing Eye Single that scored a coupla runs and followed that up with the Pooper Scooper Blooper in the sixth.

Komo 1000 (with the news on the fours...or the traffic maybe) has put so many ads in between innings that the broadcasters always miss the first pitch or two of the next inning. This is very irritating mostly because every other media that has ever covered a baseball game has managed to fit their commercials in successfully but KOMO 1000 seems to have a little problem in that regard.

Somebody last season wrote into the Mariner Answer guy and asked why KOMO does their ads that way and the answer guy got somebody at KOMO to talk on the matter. The spokesman had the balls to say that it was all major league baseball's fault.

It's kind of funny to hear the broadcasters at the end of an inning wrap up a play fast because if they don't get to the commercials there will be hell to pay the next inning. Yesterday, missing that first pitch meant that we also missed Kenji Johjima's first at-bat in a Mariner's uniform, a fact not lost on Rick Rizzs I think who would've LOVED to talk about that. You could tell Rick was kind of aching inside as he reported the ground out after the fact.

I'm not sure why KOMO hasn't marketed that first pitch miss, like something like The Seattle Rugby Club First Pitch Miss. Turn that pesky ol' negative into a positive, like those GENIUSES in the marketing department at the airlines who instead of worrying about the physical discomfort of any passenger over 5 foot 10 has instead started charging people for increased leg room.

Commercial endorsements aside, the Mariners seemed a little better than last year, they came back from a 3-0 deficit and tied it up. They even had a chance to blow it open before the Angels relief pitching shut them down.

It really looks like the key to the Mariner's success this year will be the Rolaids Relief Pitching which yesterday was a little Shakey's Pizza Shakey with the winning runs being scored from two Discovery Park Walks given up in the Late Night with David Letterman Late Innings.

If the Mariners can manage to Visit the Maryland Shore that up, they might be pretty goldarned good.

Art and audiences

Recently I saw some paintings by this guy I know Aaron Coberly, who had a show at the Fountainhead Gallery on the top of Queen Anne. My old stomping grounds.

Here's a link:

http://www.fountainheadgallery.com/

They're really really good, really technically well done, very painterly.

And they bug me for some reason.

I think what gets me most of all is that he sold about 6 or 7 of them so he obviously has tapped in to a very lucrative market. He's getting $1000 dollars for each one of them (actually more like half of that after the gallery commission) and they're selling like hot cakes.

Deep down, I think what gets me the most is that it's a kind of art that I really don't like to do myself and I don't do myself, yet people love it. It's like he's connecting with the people around him better than I am.

A BIG part of the whole art biz I think is how well you connect with your audience, how well you understand the world around you and how well you interpret the world to the people all around you.

When I see art that isn't my art doing so well, it makes me wonder if I've gone down the right track, done the right things.

That's probably good, that kind of self-assessment, a way of constantly evaluating your efforts but it can be hard to carry off sometimes. It's very difficult to check out new art and be positive about it especially if you think it's better than yours. So a lot of artists don't check out new art and if they do, they always will criticize it. I have to watch that.

What's really difficult to take is seeing an artist going down the same path as you but unlike you, they have a show in a gallery (that you're attending), they're using your ideas (so you can't use them anymore without looking like a copy cat), and they're selling the art, they're a BIG HIT. That can be tuff. But that can't stop you from looking at the art and you gotta strive to look at it uncritically. Nonjudgementally (even though it hurts).

I think one thing to remember though is that there is a BUNCH of different audiences out there, I mean you can't throw a stick without hitting an audience that's different from the audience just down the street.

The problem is, some audiences spend more money than others.

Another thing to remember is, some audiences aren't audiences I necessarily want to connect with. There's a definite tendency with some people as they get older is to become more conservative, they pine for the days when art was art and you didn't have these namby pamby ABSTRACT artists who do things ANYBODY could do if they had the time or the inclination and what's the deal with that BLUE FACE on that perfectly attractive woman over there across the way there, against the wall, that painting with the videcassettes in the background?

People love the good old days and I think that makes certain art more attractive to them and certain other art unattractive.

But I guess I WOULD want to connect with one of these kind of people if I could. I think that if people could just open their eyes to old ideas (the basics) in new paintings (or any other art form) their appreciation of life all around them would improve, they would be more vital in their day to day existence.

But that's just my opinion.

I have to be happy for Aaron and his work and I yam I really yam.

Art and Control

This pic on the right here, probably that's the most people I've ever drawn. Probably close to 5000 people represented there in a little sketch.

Maybe it's the most people drawn per square inch, you never know.

Should contact the Guiness Book of World Records and let them know that probably that's the most people per square inch (PSI).

In other Art News

My friend Chris and I saw a modern dance performance the other night called The Invisibles and it was really good! It seemed to me that the choreographer (Jessica Jobaris) did an amazing job of keeping the thing intact, 90 minutes of dancing and runnning and falling and acting and all SORTS of things were going on and it still held up.

We didn’t really read up on it beforehand and so it wasn’t until afterwards that I realized (or remembered) that the characters were linked to real people. I don’t think that detracted from my enjoyment and in fact I think it sorta made it better for me, not to have the characters historical.

And to have it all work out like it did anyway is a real testimony to the fact that the dance connected to the audience big time, I really felt that everybody thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

My feeling is that the connection with the audience was on a deeper, subconscious level like an an archetypal level or somepin, causing certain reactions in people that sometimes weren’t understandable consciously. Jessica Jobaris mentioned in an article that people were laughing at parts that she thought were sad and I noticed things like that myself throughout the performance, and both Chris and I remarked after the show that we thought we were understanding a lot of it on a deeper level than our conscious mind, that certain things weren’t explainable if we had to talk about them, but that we understood them somehow.

It sort of seemed that at some point that the whole thing took on a life of it's own , something that the choreographer didn’t plan on necessarily but which was a good good thing.

I think if you’re an artist and this happens you gotta let it go and not get too worried about it, even though it sometimes can be tuff. A correlation in a way is when somebody paints a painting and people see all sorts of things in it that the artist didn’t intend. It’s easy to be miffed at that, to try to control the piece of art and their reaction, but it’s a smart artist (and a good one) who can overcome that feeling of wrongness and let the piece of art just be.

I've heard the comment many times from authors that their characters seemed to take over while they were writing a book, that they did things in the story that the author never intended them to do.

In the face of a piece of art taking on a life of it's own, if you can just let it go, let it be what it wants to be, I think that it means that you are operating correctly as an artist. You’re a conduit between the world and your audience, you open the pipes and whoosh it all comes flowing out, full of life. And not everybody can do that I think, but Jessica Jobaris surely did.

Anyway, it was great, and she definitely should keep on doing what she's doing.

Art and all aroundness

So I'm doing these big watercolors with words on them, with people's faces and then words coming off the top of their heads that somehow are a summation of their lives.

At least that's what I'm TRYING to do.

Anyhoo, as I sit there and think of things to say I worry that I'm not including everybody in the world, that somehow big sections of life and people are being ignored.

But on the other hand, how the h-e-double hockey sticks would I be able to include the entire world, it just isn't possible, is it?

When Julie and I were in Madrid a couple of years ago and we went to the Prado (which is the BEST museum, I really liked it), we saw the Diego Velaquez masterpiece, "Las Meninas"...here's a link http://silencio.weblog.com.pt/images/eyes/DiegoVelazquez-LasMeninas.GIF

It's a fantastic painting, really one of the best ever and the first thing I thought when I saw it was, "he did it, he painted the whole world."

That was weird and that thought quickly left me as I moved on to more important topics like where can a guy and a gal get a cerveza around here? (My spanish begins and ends with asking for a beer and then asking for another one, please).

But how eggs-actly did he paint the whole world and was that just some frazzled misfiring of my sorry synapses? I mean, if you look at the painting all you see are a painter and his subject matter, who seem to be a motley crew of kids, midgets and animals. I don't even usually like a painting or a novel (don't get me started) where the main character is a painter or an author.

Maybe it's the big space above the people that does it, with the one man halfway up the stairs. I don't know.

But I'm thinking that Deigo Velaquez didn't start out to paint the world, it just happened. In the same lesser way, I should not worry about it either and just do what seems right.

By the way, there's a big exhibit of Goya's work in New York going on now at the Frick that's gotten rave reviews. Here's the web site: http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/goya/index.htm

I checked quickly and didn't see the Black Paintings of Goya which if you do ever go to the Prado you should see. They would be hard to miss, but you never know.

I think the Frick show are paintings that Goya did late in life, and I think the Black Paintings are too so I would think they would be there. They are unbelievable, really something completely different than a lot of his early work.

Goya's very early work is turrible (I say that non-judgmentally) and relegated to an out of the way floor of the Prado -- if you wanted to like have a foot race in a museum or sompin like that, it would be a good place to do it. There ain't nobody there.

But then he hits his stride and does the Maya paintings which are great, that one about the Third of May and that one family portrait that's got to be one of the wackiest portraits ever done, it's AWESOME:
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/g/goya/goya_family.jpg

Then came the Black Paintings and hoo boy, he let's it all hang out:
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/g/goya/great_he-goat_dtl.jpg

I guess he painted the black paintings on the walls of his house, and later they removed them and gave them to the Prado.

Anyway, he's one of the best, I put him in the upper pantheon of painters:

1) Rembrandt
2) Goya
3) Arne Westerman
4) Michaelangelo
5)Velaquez
6)Rubens

Baseball. Hope springs eternal and it springs up in the spring as well, as every year me and everybody of my ilk think that their baseball team will be better than last year.

And it's no different for fans of the Mariners, even though last year's team was pretty pathetic really. It's like they all went out and had a big kegger before the year or something and then were all hungover all year.

They had guys like Boonie and Scott Spezio and really they were just terrible, I don't even want to think about it.

So let's just see how good we think they'll be this year.

Pitching: well, they got rid of Ryan Franklin so they are IMPROVED from the get go, he was a drag on the whole staff, doing his steroids and saying things like "No, I don't think I should miss my next start, I don't CARE if I gave up 7 runs in the first inning. I felt good after that!" That whole thing about not getting enuf run support was a Krop of Krap too, some pitcher just ain't deserving of runs, probably their bad Krap Karma.

They got rid of the pitching coach, whatshisname, which was a very good move too. That guy was turrible and he was a drag on the whole staff, what with his "psychology" and his need for the spotlight. What could you be possibly discussing with Felix Hernandez in the middle of one hitter? That he needs to work on his mechanics? Arg.

This year they got Rafael Chavez who was the pitching coach in the minors that everybody went to to fix what old whatshisname had messed up for them. So let's just hope Raffy can do it again and get guys like Pineiro and Meche back on track.

Catching: They got this guy from Japan who is destined to be called "Joe" because his last name is Johjima. The batting watch is out this spring as we are all watching how he's going to hit major league pitching. So far, it's 1 for 6 which HAS GOT TO GET BETTER!!! Just kidding, it's spring training. And so far in spring training, despite the best effforts of Raffy and Joe, the pitching has been AWFUL, so hopefully they can round up the cows from that stampede and put them in the ol' corral before the games start to count.

Broadcasting: Still got Rick Rizzs, he's still turrible. I think we have to be resigned to the fact that he's here for the duration and just live with it (if we can). It's not so much his play by play, it's his highly irritating discussions with "Val" and "Hendu" and his propensity to talk about the Bowling Extravaganza for Cancer that "Bone" put together last night and how much fun they all had. Also, he tends to drive everybody KER-AZY with his rosy outlook, his running up the flagpole of the talent of anybody who shows a smidgen of success, talking and talking and talking about their last game meanwhile they're giving up home run after home run until Rick is finally silent for an out or two before he gets some steam up again and watch out Clint Nageotte, because you can't do ANYTHING without Rick telling people how GREAT you are even if you and I and everybody else knows that there's going to be some ups and downs during a year and it's not all going to be a bed of daffodils.

I just hope Felix can rise above Rick who IS getting a little old, maybe thinking about retiring? ("Oh, no, I just love this game too much, they're going to have to pry the microphone out of my hands.") Sigh.

Let's see: First Base? Richie Sexson. Hope he does better this year, batting average wise. Second base? Jose Lopez. This guy is going to be great, probably the year after the Mariners trade him. Shortstop? Yuniesky Betancourt, who showed he was a good fielder and an improving hitter, he seemed to get a lot of hits with men on base. Third Base? Adrian Beltre, who I think will have a better year than last, and who has reported to camp 20 pounds lighter than last year, just like Boonie did at the start of spring training 2005. Uh oh. Left field? Uh, Raul Ibanez, the quiet guy who is just hoping that nobody finds out that he's not all that good either. Center field? Jeremy Reed who everybody is thinking is a lot better because the Red Sox wanted him in a trade, so we'll all be looking at him a leetle closer. Right field will be Ichiro, and I tell ya, he better have a better year than last year or people are gonna start talking. DH? The Bucky Jacobsen era is over, and now we're in the Carl Everett era. Not much change, probably.

All and all, I'd have to say that the getting rid of Ryan Franklin and Bryan Price will add 10 games on to their record last year. The addition of Raffy will add some more games and the pitching I think will be much better.

So I'm predicting that the Mariner's record this coming year will be 85-77.

That's a real stretch, but I do think that the Mariners have some good young talent and if a guy like Felix is really as good as everybody hopes, it could make a BIG difference. They need somebody like Jeremy Reed or Betancourt or Lopez to break out and they need Johjima or Rene Rivera to be really good.

All are GOOD possibilities of actually happening because hope does spring eternal in the springy spring, so I'm sticking by that prediction, 84 and 78.

I'm getting to the point where I don't want to continue to do the kinds of paintings that have gotten me as far as I have gotten, not that I've got very far.

So I've been branching out a little bit, trying some different things that are kind of abstract.

I do want to keep some connection with reality, however, so the pictures I've tried to this point have been houses, kind of these abstract houses that stand in landscapes, sometimes with stars.

I've got one going called "Large Generator on Earth" or maybe I'll call it "Large Love Generator on Earth" just for the fun of it. Another called "Housing Complex in the Hills", and a couple of others with red and pink houses.

There must be something about this going on in the collective unconscious (of which I yam a part), too, because suddenly others are going off on similar tangents. For instance, Reilly Jensen in the studio next to me could totally relate when I mentioned that I suddenly got the hankering to draw and paint some straight lines. She said she felt the same way.

And then I saw in New American Paintings, which is this book that you'll see in the magazine racks a whole bunch of people doing similar kinds of paintings. I've looked up a few but can't find too many good samples although here is one:
http://www.davidlinneweh.com/portfolio3.html

Believe me, there are more and all along the same lines, with house like objects set in rolling hills, landscapes with houses hills and sky.

A manifestation of a general theme that originates in the collective unconscious is a very strange phenomenon and it happens like that all the time. For awhile, a couple of years ago, you couldn't look at any painting and not see a painting of a bird in it.

The collective unconscious phenomenon especially in regard to the housing theme, reminds me of the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" where all across the world, people begun making sculptures of the mountain that the aliens were going to land on (and did land on) in Wyoming.

But what exactly does this particular collective unconscious theme mean? I guess you could look at the bird thing a few years ago and see maybe a premonition of the bird flu epidemic that has hit the bird population.

I'm not exactly sure but it does seem to have to do with straight lines juxtaposed against the curves of the natural world, it also seems to have to do with a sense of disorder and chaos juxtaposed against the relative calm of the universe, the quiet, the space of it. There also seems to be part of it a sense of cells, individual units with barricades against outside penetration...just cells in general, the basic building block of all life seem to be omnipresent at this time.

I'm not sure if it is something that you can figure out, or if I should even try to figure it out. I think it's something that just is and someday will be explained by somebody a whole lot smarter than we are.

A phenomenon such as this gives us a glimmer that there is way more to life than we know, and it can be kind of tantalizing, like a fuller explanation is just out of reach just waiting to be grabbed by somebody who rises above it all and really goes for it!

On Curating

I'm telling you it really sucks sometimes in the art business, when you apply for certain shows and then get rejected.

I had a flurry of being accepted there for awhile and it was nice while it lasted but now it's back to rejection.

This last one though was tuff, because it really seemed unfair. One of the curators (out of three)was this professor at the University of Washington....aw the heck with it gosh dang it I guess I just have to get over it. I really thought that certain artistic endeavors would be free from politics, but I guess not. At least I know it now.

The trouble is, people spend a lot of time and money to get things ready for a particular application and to have it already decided in advance is hard to take. There were 147 applicants, of which 135 had no chance because they weren't 1) graduates of the UW 2) personal friends of the curators.

Oops, ignore that last part, it seems like it's sour grapes.

I continue to stuggle on mightily at the studio, hoping to get a break sooner or later. Probably the best way though would be to go out and meet EVERYBODY in the Seattle art scene and be nice to all of them. Forget the actual painting part, that's for hacks.

There's this magazine that I read from time to time called Modern Painters. It really isn't that good of a magazine but I don't think there's any art magazine that's any good. They all have a good article about once a year, otherwise you could probably just put out the same version each month that went out the last month and nobody would ever notice.

Modern Painters for some reason doesn't have that many articles about painting, they tend to get lost in photography and stuff like that which to me is B-o-r-i-n-g. And talk about bad articles, the ones about videos...I mean these shots from videos make no sense, have no real meaning yet they pepper their pages with them.

Anyway, there's this dweeb in Modern Painters, I think his name is Matthew Collins, who thinks he's hard wired to what's good in the world of art. Him. Nobody else.

That must be nice to feel so certain about things, I know I don't.

But Matthew tends to get behind things that go down my street so to speak. He doesn't like paintings that were done from photographs which even the big guys seem to be doing a lot of these days. Like Damien Hurst and Eric Fischl and that german guy, can't think of his name. Elizabeth Peyton who is as hot as hot hot can be right now apparently works from photographs. Mr Collins thinks that sucks and has called for an international boycott (or somepin) about making paintings from pics.

He also says that a lot of painting in a generation such as the generation we're in right now are going to stay in this generation, they don't have a link to the past. They have no history, they're spontaneously generated.

I sorta agree with these two points even though I still think he's a dweeb.

When some artists submit slides to apply for a show, it's hard for them to convey the general feeling you would get if you saw a painting in situ, in the studio amongst all their friends, all the other paintings that helped the painting become what it is. A general feeling of connectedness.

It's also hard to convey the feeling you'd get if you were to spend a little time with a painting, and some paintings you really need to spend some time with before you get to the real heart of them.

I think that the stuff that stands out in an application for a show is the stuff like Collins was talking about, the art that is spontaneously generated in a generation and which won't last past that generation. It appeals to the curators, because it's different and because it's witty. There's this guy in Seattle, Todd Karam, who I think falls into this category. http://www.toddkaram.com/
It's pretty dang good stuff...you can see why he's successful. You DON'T have to spend a lot of time with any of these paintings to like them. You DON'T need to see the paintings together with his other paintings to like them. It's art that captures the youthful spark of a generation and it's a beautiful thing. But will the next generation like them? And the next?

Sometimes you see art that's different AND it connects to the past, it's built from those that went before. I think the artwork of Katy Stone, a Seattle artist, is in that category.
http://www.gregkucera.com/stone.htm
Her artwork has that youthful spark but it seems to have a little bit more, a weight to it that some art does not have. It's funny to say the artwork has weight, because it's made of mylar, very flimsy material and airy.

Sometimes you see art that IS spontaneously generated that IS NOT going to make it partly because it has absolutely no connection to anything. This guy I used to talk to came up with an idea that really was pretty good, and he executed it fairly well. He thought he was going to go to the moon alice with this art, but I didn't think so, he didn't have enough presence somehow.

So I guess even art that's spontaneously generated needs some base somehow, it needs to grow from something.

All in all, it's probably a very difficult job curating an art show and getting the best stuff based on slides and jpeg images. I've probably gone about applying for shows the wrong way, I really should try to do it differently. And I will. Starting now.

Art and Super Bowl

Well the Super Bowl is over and so now there's no more football. Yay! Can concentrate on art and art related activities not that I wasn't before in between RANTING at the referees and feeling that it just wasn't fair.

I've been reading a diary by Eugene Delacroix who was a painter in France in the 1800's.

It's really interesting, I recommend it. Here's an example of one of his paintings, a self portrait:
http://artroots.com/art2/delacroix3.jpg

He starts out writing it when he's in his twenties and then drops it for a long time before picking it up again in his 50's.

It's funny, but all the entries during his twenties are about women, all the women he's in love with and all the women "he makes love to", which I think had a different meaning back then than it does now.


In his fifties, he's settled down quite a bit, he obviously more serious, the ol' loss of the youthful enthusiasm. He says at one point that the real geniuses are those who can manage to keep their youthful observations alive even as they grow older, which sounds about right to me.

He fills the diary with day to day things, like what the weather is and talks about people who annoy him. He travels a little bit and writes about that too. He goes to the theater and he goes to concerts and he goes to parties where they talk about large topics.

He has many complaints about modern artists and thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket which I guess everybody of every generation starts to think about sooner or later.

It's fascinating for me to read and I always have to stop and think that during his time there were no cars or trains or planes or any of the modern inventions yet his ruminations and discussions sound very close in subject matter to things that I've thought about and wondered about.

It just goes to show you that the main focus of any life during any age is about the same, that you can be a caveman or a man in 2006 and still be worried about or wondering about the same kinds of things.

The setting around you has changed of course, but not much else.

Delacroix is also very particular about how he paints, he has recipes for success that he applies to all his paintings. He'll describe eggs-actly how he's going to accomplish something, eggs-actly the paint he's going to use.

This is light years different than the way I paint, where if I had to describe it to someone would come out somepin like "well, I guess I just paint until I think it's right and that color there (pointing at canvas) could never be repeated in a million years by me because I have NO IDEA how I got there."

Delacroix LOVES Rubens to the point that I'm going to have to get a book about him and really check him out. Here's a link:
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/rubens/christ.jpg


He is constantly going to Louvre or other museums around Paris and looking at paintings (really looking at them) to get ideas and to discover how somebody else did something. There also seems to be an endless supply of prints of paintings that he can look at, they must've been more prevalent in that era as a way to show the masses the paintings of other lands.

Delacroix loves Gericault, who died while Delacroix was a young man, and his "Raft of the Medusa" (http://wilsonhellie.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/gericault_medusa.jpg) is universally (at least in Paris) considered to be a masterpiece.

What I like especially about the diary is that Delacroix will see something around him or see another painting and get an idea and he'll say something like "Be careful with the hands" or "Be aware of the foreground color", these little notes to himself that sound kind of like the notes I'll make to myself sometimes.

There's kind of a way that a person talks to himself I think that's direct, to the point, no beating around the bush, you just say it to yourself and you understand it. It's fun to see somebody else a hundred and fifty years ago doing the same thing.

I think people of Delacroix's era, if they had money enough, had a lot of time to spend thinking about things and they also had a lot of time to spend talking to others about the things they thought of. That's great, but all in all, when push comes to shove I think that the big things that count are the same across the board through every era and it really is true that there isn't anything new under the sun.

And I think that's a good thing.

Closer Look

Well, here are some things that deserve a closer look.

1) Seahawks in Super Bowl. I've written a pome about it:

Seahawks Super

The gloom and mist
of the coastal city
lift for a minute
as do our hearts
until the clouds move
back in and the gloom
gloomifies tragically and
wetly with wind
this time like a
cruel joke that
is defused
more than anything
sizzling there
in the relentless rain
pounding the
crosshatched pavement
hitting men's
bald spots bam.

The pounding of the
rain at night,
the glory (or not)
of an umbrella
that needs instructions
to open, rain falling
down the crack
at the back of
your pants as you
try (vainly)
to open it
and Curse the lack
of instructions
which as I've said
the umbrella
should have
come with.

Fishing out change
to get the three
dollars needed
to park, your head
awash with water
that seems to
circle it (your head)
and create a cold
wet band of steel
that requires somepin
like a blow torch to
warm up again
and reading on the
parking lot instructions
through a misty wall
of rainy rain,
that aren't instructions
enough on how
to get one dollar
back.

The Coursing
river of puddles
that combine one
with the other until
there's one Big Old
Puddle to drive
through uneggs-pectedly
Swoosh
leaving you
shaking your head
and saying to your
partner next time
I'll put the wipers
on HIGH! and your
partner not answering
because she can
get very moody after
37 out of 41 days
of rain.

The Glory of
the Damp Seattle
the Weathermen All
Prattling, Doppler Radar
this, Doppler Radar
That, It's
More of the Same
Rain with a high of
48 degrees that
we would watch
if we could work up
enough Energy.

We await word
from Detroit
and looking
forward to
having a beer
on Sunday.
Gloom.

Go Seahawks!

Sports Recap

Oi, the Seahawks actually did it! That was unbelievable that they won and now that they have I have to say that I thought they would all along. In fact I predicted it, I said, I think they might win big (or they might lose a close one).

And win big they did, 34-14 just as I predicted, over those hapless losers, those Washington Generals of the NFL football set, the Carolina (meow) Panthers.

Oh, it was so great, Matt Hasselbeck was the star throwing pinpoint passes to his pesky receivers who ran and jumped high to catch them and Shawn Alexander carried the load, darting and dashing all over the field, dinking and diving his way to 134 yards a playoff record of stupendous proportions at least for him it was a personal record.

The defense was AWESOME in particular Lofa Tatupu and especially Rocky Bernard who gave a few of his Suga Bear Shakes that signify the sack of the opposing quarterback and who brought the crowd to its feet in a mighty roar.

The Panthers who had riddled the best defense in the whole freakin' league last week, the Chicago Bears, had a lot of problems with the Stingy Seahawk defense and they managed only a meager amount of yardage, pathetic really.

Panther quarterback in a Seahawks induced Daze

Jake Delomme, the Panthers quarterback (who looked like either Ashton Kuchner or some guy from a sitcom that Chris had seen once) looked like he was in a DAZE, a Seahawks LETS PLAY TOO MANY MEN ON THE FIELD IT LOOKED LIKE THAT THEY WERE ALL OVER THE PLACE SO MUCH induced daze (as it turned out).

The Seahawks DARED TO DREAM and for their efforts are now going to the Big Ult Tomato, the Super Bowl.

Omigoshalmightyholycrimony

Let's just hope the 12th man is able to dream too, and not get intimidated by size of the whole thing. There's already been some people who have gulped and said to themselves, omigoshalmightyholycrimony what have we done?

A case in point is the article by Steve Kelly in the Seattle Times this morning, the headline for it reading, "Super Bowl loss can be difficult to Shake".

What? The Seahawks have just won the NFC Championship game two days ago and this joker is already talking about LOSING the Super Bowl?

That's what I mean -- Seattle is FULL of provinical people who do well in their safe secure environment who have trouble rising to the occasion, have trouble dealing with the Big Time. Oh, they might give it the ol' college (Purdue) try, but in their hearts they would just as soon lose the Big One and go back to moaning about how there has never ever been anybody nearly as good (he's like a GOD) and there never will be anybody better (you can take that to the BANK) than Dan Wilson because he's such a good guy in the clubhouse and he handles the pitchers (team era= 5.21) so well.

It'll be interesting to see what Art Thiel writes about this week, all his normal "I get it but you don't and I'll tell you why" angles seem to be non-existent although believe you me he'll find one you can bet your bottom dollar on THAT.

The twelfth man (that would be me and everybody of my ilk) need to jettison these guys who would try and DRAG US DOWN and keep our attention focussed on keeping our head on straight in Detroit and kicking some Big Time Booty.

We don't need small minds at this point. I think all you guys who can't handle it should go get your latte with Soy and peppermint and perhaps, Art, I would suggest that you can draft a nice article about what Safeco Field cost to build or those danged high prices that are paid to players that we PROMISE we'll read when we're done TAKING CARE OF SOME BIZ-NESS in MOTOWN!!!!

Puh-Leeze just let us do our work, and don't say anything (Steve Kelly I mean YOU!).