Freaking out.

How the heckarini are ya!?

Good I hope.

This typeface is bad, doncha think?

You know I'm going through life minding my own business trying to think up stuff to do some art with, and for the most part doing okay with that. At least I think I am. I really do think that the art I come up is either original or I've just forgotten that I've seen something similar (I worry.)

But then I see something published that is a lot the same as something I've done, and it's a little unsettling.

I think maybe I'm a little better at dealing with it than before but not much.

Just the other day this guy I know Owen, sends me a pic of guy who has done crowds, and it showing them at the SAM sculpture park.

I freak out! Well, no, but it does make me think that:

1) this artist (Mcfetridge) has realized something I've been unable to realize. That is, he has had somebody ask to put up this artwork that looks similar to mine in a public place. I may have my own similar artwork but people haven't asked to put it in public place and so I'm one step behind.

2) or a bunch of steps behind.

3) you can see where I'm headed with this.

4) I suck.

5)McFetridge and I may have similar ideas but McFetridge has done the idea better than I have.

6) I hate McFetridge.

7) Actually, one reason I didn't freak out so much with this is I didn't really like parts of McFetridges' approach.

8) He is good getting different hair styles, and putting on glasses on some people, also good with the spacing of a crowd, all things I don't think I do so good. I have to sort of think to myself that because of the good things I'm doing with crowds, I can't be bothered with everything, every detail of a person in the crowd in order to think that maybe I should be doing more as far as the items listed above (hair styles, etc.)

9) But his crowds are flat, and colorless, the whole idea of my crowds is a little different, they are more alive I think while his crowd isn't. We have different approaches.

10) I get the feeling though that once something is public like in the case of McFetridge's crowds that anything else after it will seem derivative. That possibly even people will think that I copied McFetridge.

11) Actually the first thing I thought when I saw his crowd was that he had copied me.

12) I think that's significant somehow, shows an attitude by me that might go a long ways to explaining me.

13) But maybe not, I wouldn't bank on it.

So there you go, 13 reasons (13 good reasons) to freak out.

Big Man on Stool (and it's not me)

More Drawings

Leener (sort of) before she went to Laska

Self Portraits

some drawings

Vancouver dumpster

Faces Painted Over

This here painting is the epitome of a painting where it started out as one thing and ended up as another. See, those stripes there were originally on a guy's back as he sat in a kitchen, the whole canvas turned 90 degrees.

I've found that if you leave part of the painting that you were doing before you got completely fed up, that you wind up with images you never would have come up with on your own.

I'm doing a painting now where I worked it and I worked it, involving a lot of a small faces and just couldn't get it to work finally. So instead I painted over the painting using yellow paint.

I might add here that I've done this before fairly recently, almost (as it turns out) in an identical manner. I had a bunch of small people with one large person, got fed up and painted over it in yellow. And then sold it.

It wasn't until this very moment that I realized that situation was almost identical. Perhaps there's a part of me, however, that isn't too surprised and it (this part of me) felt that if I sold one like that before I could sell another like it now.

This part of me that I'm describing appears to be in art solely for the money.

Well, the part of me that's in it for the art likes it when I paint over all these faces, and in this particular current case, you really can't tell there are faces under the paint. But I know they're there and it sorta makes the painting better (at least for me) knowing that. It also seems to me that there's a presence in this painting that wouldn't be there if those people weren't there.

All I can say is, if they ever xray this particular painting, they (and I like them whoever they are for xraying my painting) will be ever so surprised! I mean you see some of these xrays they've taken of old master paintings and you'll see that Titian, for instance, moved an arm a few inches to the left or sompin like that. You xray this painting and you're gonna see a whole bunkload of faces!!! They'd sorta be a blast from the past.

You know there's that robert rauschenburg piece of artwork where he takes a drawing by De Kooning and he erases it and calls it Erased De Kooning. I might start my own series called "Painted over faces"...or something like that.

It's not a bad idea, really, I think I'm gonna start working on it today. You will see the results (or you won't) shortly.

back burner

The screen of my computer showing all of my junk emails for one day, otherwise known as spam.

I get a lot of junk email otherwise known as spam, mostly for products that I would never buy.

What better way to feel superior to junk email than to draw it?

Once you draw it, you feel empowered, you say let the spam do it's worst, I now have control.

Believe me, it helps.

Sometimes, if I see somebody I don't like, like a guy once on the bus who would read the paper and then throw it on the floor, I draw him.

That will teach him.

I was thinking that I would do a whole series of drawings of spam, but I don't know, I think people might lose interest pretty quickly. Then I thought I would put in fake drawings of the people who sent the spam, like Consuelo Hernandez, interspersed with the spam drawings, but I've nixed this idea.

This idea is on the back burner for the nonce.

beauty

I've been reading a book lately called the Abuse of Beauty by Arthur Danto.

Now Arthur is a philosopher and as such, is very hard to understand. I guess philosophy is aimed at people smarter than me, becuz every time I read a book on philosophy I just don't undertand it. And every time I do pick up a book on philosophy I think THIS TIME I will understand it.

But I don't.

It's sentences such as this (chosen at random) that really have me seeing red: "Beautification as a modality of moral self-consciousness presupposes a fairly complex epistemology and a metaphysics of the self, which may be made explicit by referring to the role the mirror image plays in its transactions."

Well, it might be explicit to you, but it ain't to me. You can't tell me there isn't an easier way of saying what he just said there, whatever it was. And it's too bad because it is an interesting topic.

Actually, I'm sure there ARE people who understand this book and that's great, the author Arthur Danto also seems to be an upstanding individual, he quotes other philosophers and always says something nice about them which I like. He talks about Hegel quite a bit, Hegel had a lot to say about beauty and art, while some other philosophers, especially in the case of beauty, left well enough alone.

What's interesting to me is that philosophers are subject to many of the same limitations that other people are subject to. Hegel, for instance, had the notion that Chinese civilizations were primitive, perhaps not knowing or not wanting to know that they were in existence many thousands of years before European civilization. Hegel disses their art in a very provincial way which to me is refreshing -- you think, I guess, that these philosophers are always right about everything, I mean they sure think about it enough and you wouldn't think that they'd come out with a philosophy unless they were very sure about it.

I had never thought about it, but beauty has gone out of fashion since around World War I when artists of that generation were so disgusted and upset about that war that they rebelled against anything that was associated with the government and society in general that could have gotten the world into such an abomination. So because beauty was associated with goodness and artistic quality, they started making their artwork deliberately ugly as sort of a protest. This is when Dadaism and Marcel Duchamp were big, and beauty has been kept out of art ever since.

Gerhard Richter, the famous German painter, was told when he first started out in the 50's, that his art was too beautiful. And then came Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art, both movements not too concerned with beauty.

As a person who has had some people say to me that my work is beautiful (some of it, anyway) the whole topic is interesting to me. I am surprised usually when somebody says that to me and will look at what they thought was beautiful with new interest. I guess I don't see it that way myself, and I don't try to make a beautiful painting.

But what I do try to do, though, is to unify a painting, to make everything click together using composition and color and sometimes subject matter and/or words in the painting. I'm not always successful with this, and it makes for frustrating times.

What I might be doing with that kind of approach, although I wouldn't label it that way, is I am trying to make the painting beautiful. But according to Danto, there's beauty and then there's beauty. There's beauty that just is naturally beautiful, and there is beauty that you have to think about before it's beautiful. This is where I stop understanding things.

I guess as a creator of a piece of artwork, you're sort of in a different position than you are as a viewer of artwork -- I think that art comes from a place that isn't intellectual, it's more a connection. Maybe a beautiful piece of artwork connects to a vital life source, maybe that's it.

I tell ya, I might have been a little more coherent about this BEFORE I read the book, but like I said I don't blame the author who I find to be amiable and sincere, as I mentioned.