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.

Revision

I gave this one a title. I changed the man in the chair picture a little. Here it is again.

So, my sister called me last night while she was walking to her car and asked me to be one of her "followers" (I still think that term makes me sound like a minion). So I did, and then I remembered that I had a blog.

Here is a picture I did probably 9 months ago, just after I came back from Israel. It is of Pope Shenouda, the leader of the Coptic church. I think I like writing about my religious pictures because they are more true to my spirit. I do not believe that art has any special spiritual power, simply because it is so subjective. But it does have something, and I like trying to channel my spiritual narrative close to my art one. I think it makes both of them feel more real. That being said, I am not sure that this picture has any religious ideology behind it other than the sort of musty, reverential emotional experience that I had visiting the churches in the Middle East. It made me excited about my artistic heritage as a Christian.

This is Thomas.

Here is a new picture.

The first one

Hello anyone. This is my first, and somewhat tenuous, venture into the blogosphere. I enter here with trepidation because it seems like everyone has a blog or blogs, so it is not very novel or noticeable to have one. In addition, by having a blog, I am supporting something that (I think) legitimizes poorly conceived ideas and bad writing (including mine) by allowing them to be posted. On top of all this, I don't read other peoples' blogs (even the good ones) very often at all, so I feel pretty hypocritical creating one and expecting people to read it. But, I read on a website somewhere that artists who want to get attention should have a blog. So here I am. I don't get to paint too often, so I probably won't post too often. But I will when I can.

Here is one picture I did a few weeks ago after I went to listen to N.T. Wright (Bishop of Durham and New Testament scholar) in Pasadena. He spoke on virtue. I was struck by his steadfast opposition to "subjectivism" and I imagined him fighting a big, subjective dragon. I tried to portray what I imagined. Kierkegaard is the dark, obscure figure in the foreground, although you can't really tell by looking at him. As the philosophical father of existentialism and a Christian, I thought he deserved a place in the scene. The writing on the lower right is from T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral." Wright's dogged opposition to a popular, and (if you agree with him) dangerous, viewpoint reminded me of Thomas's opposition to the King in a strange sort of way.