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.