Ricky and Voltron

The head in this picture is a portrait of my friend Ricky. We hatched the idea for this picture about a month ago. He suggested painting a robot and I suggested putting his head on the robot so the picture wouldn't be too contiguous.

Here is my newest piece. I painted it on a piece of rejected plywood from the house next door that I screwed onto the back of my desk. I painted it because I was frustrated with my apathy towards morality and justice in life. Most of the motivating moral force in my life seems to be guilt, which is helpful, but not very pure. I made the snake white because evil can be confusing.

On a completely unrelated note, I have started writing a bit of poetry, which sounds really lame. But I am doing it for an elective in the after-school program I volunteer at. I think that justifies it. Besides, I need to fill up some space on this blog. Anyway, here is a bit of free verse (even lamer) that I penned the other day:

King is such a worn out thing
Like old leather rubberized by the kneading and gnawing of time
But behind sign, thing flits through the faces on the news and comic books
Obama and Ironman,
Verifying the health of humanity's royalty fetish:
Our painful hunger for the face to follow.
The things inside of the faces we follow have power, sucking neural milk from the slippery devotion of their groupies they try to envelop more in the sticky embrace of their membrane.
But, like James Marshall's castles, they fade away
Imploding Red Giants folding into a black hole,
Poisoning the minds of their followers and sending them into spacious cynicism.

Here is a happier one:

Today I walked to the Alley for socks.
Dress socks for working
A me apparition gleamed every few blocks.
A gleaming Grey me in windows
High rises hung distantly, grimly above the street.
Steel demigods ruling the sky
And patches of sidewalk lay contorted at my feet.
Warped by trees
I was alone, observing, until I asked someone for directions.
Then I became unified in Sound.

Yes

So, after a three month hiatus, I am back. Maybe I will write more.

I live in Los Angeles now, at an intentional community called the Nehemiah House. Over winter break I visited Mendicino and ran into a lady named Sue Hoya Sellars. Her art focuses on the idea that the cosmos is present in everything. Many of her paintings are pseudo-iconographic.

Since I moved to LA, I have painted a few paintings. I don't have any canvas, so I have been painting on my desk. Here are two panels.

I think artists paint themselves because they are narcisisstic

My penultimate form: beardless.

I finished this piece last week. I am very frustrated with arrogance in myself and the rest of the world. This piece is kind of an outflow of that frustration. So many people are pompous. After drawing the men and the bull and painting the background I made the black stuff swallow his words and added the (hopefully) Ensoresque figures in the lower left foreground. I have played around with text and image a little over the past year, but I am becoming less enthralled with the mixture, which is why I blacked out the speech bubble. Maybe it is because my profundity is too prosaic or nonexistent (more likely), but images seem harder to trivialize than words, even though they are less useful for mass communication. This is the bane and blessing of art - less to hold but more to remain.

Artwalk

(Allison Schulnik, picture via www.allisonschulnik.com)

Went to the Brewery art colony this last weekend for the biannual artwalk. It was great. Got to meet some very cool people and discover some fine practitioners of the craft. Here are two notables:

C J Kang

His website is a bit difficult to navigate, but worth the effort. Check out his paintings from 98, 99, and 02 especially.

Allison Schulnik

Make sure and watch her hobo clown short film.

Mr. Holland's Opus

We were having a conversation on the porch about art. I think Trey said that a given piece needed to evidence original thought and planning to be good. I said it didn't. So he drew me this picture. Then I put it on the wall in the apartment.