Patterns and Pigments

2009-07-13T18:48:00.001-04:00

drift into the fog

2009-06-05T01:50:00.002-04:00

In the last few months I've been working on my own Annunciation scene. For anyone unfamiliar, the Annunciation is the scene in the Bible in which the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear the son of God. I've a book filled with nothing but Annunciation scenes, from my mother.

The tone and symbols of the various paintings are fairly consistent, considering that they range 16 centuries. Mary is usually praying or studying scripture in her home or garden when she is surprised by an angel of God bearing news of her pregnancy, and usually various sexual symbols are scattered around the painting. Behind Mary, a bed, a male angel entering the door of her home or the gate of her garden, a lily in hand or in a vase, and sometimes a ray of light pouring through a window toward her womb. Meanwhile, as Gabe drops the bomb, Mary is sometimes mildly shocked looking, but more often, morosely calm, her fingers still marking her page as she glances momentarily at the interruption.

In nearly all, the painting depicts a setting contemporary to the artist; an attractive European woman dressed in the humblest of European fashion surrounded by rich draperies in a lavish room, despite the subject matter of a young Jewish peasant girl. The most notable exceptions to the indulgent anachronisms are the versions by both James Tissot and Henry Ossawa Tanner.

As an attempt of my own, contemporary Annunciation, I'm working with spray paint on birch plywood. Irony is not the intent, of course, as a non-Christian. I think that the subject matter of religion is important, no matter how much one abstains from it in ones personal life.

Healthy, wealthy, white American male.

2009-05-15T15:00:00.004-04:00

No one thinks they are evil. Doubt in yourself is the only thing that is going to encourage you to continue questioning your ethics and lifestyle. The first step toward evil is to believe you are doing good. To believe you are a patriot, a hero, a martyr, a fighter, a leader is to cock a gun. Every flaw in me has some sort of perceptible moral attribute. The only human aspect I think I can argue is truly evil isn't even ignorance, but apathy.

And I am hell.

From my living room I can see people die in movies and shows, and I can feel nothing. I've played countless video games about killing, in scenarios of vague moral justification, and I can have fun.

Nestled comfortably on the couch, I can see on the news thousands of humans suffering on the other side of the world because of my nation, for my comfort. I know about laborers working and dying in terrible conditions and for wages that only bind them into debt. I know of billions of animals that have never seen natural light from birth to slaughter. I know of refugees displaced from their homes by child slave armies. I know of humans like me thrown into secret prisons and tortured indefinitely for maybe opposing foreign domination, maybe not.

But instead of thinking about it, screaming about it, really doing anything about it, I'd rather stick my nose in a book, watch a comedy, and go to bed after brownies and ice cream.

The tree of my prosperity is rooted in dark blood.

And I eat from its fruit everyday.

2009-05-13T23:38:00.000-04:00

Nobody believes he or she is evil.

2009-04-23T23:50:00.002-04:00

Been thinking today about self, and how you can't really partition that idea off to itself.

I'm familiar with the saying "You are what you eat." Very accurate, though I feel incomplete. You are where you are. We are our context. Not just what we eat, but what we drink, breathe, touch, see and hear.

Our bodies only carry the same cells for a limited time. Cells have life cycles, and without any scientific citations, I think the oldest cells in your body die after approximately seven years.

So what are you?

Immortality is boring.

2009-04-19T11:50:00.000-04:00

Gods have entitlement issues. My soul is mine, and I'm taking it with me, even if I have to line my coffin with it. Nestle into nothingness.

Posts from sketchbook.

2009-03-05T23:52:00.003-05:00

I managed to scan some of my pages from my sketchbook before I left for London. A lot of these pieces are older, with the major exception of the soldier, which was an experiment with a new gouache.

Mariology

2009-01-27T13:16:00.000-05:00

Blasphemy comes easily. I keep thinking about the Virgin Mary, since I'm finally nearing that part of my larger painting to start painting her. I've been sketching out some icons and a few cursory annunciation scenes. I'd rather like to do some studies in oil of some of the forms she's taken. Perhaps if this painting is successful I'll manage to do a separate approach to an annunciation.

The concept of the Annunciation intrigues me. There's such brief but important mention of it in the scriptures, and there are many unanswered questions. This is good, though, because there's then a wide range to explore; her age, her setting, her service, her fear. Did she resent the lack of choice? Did she rejoice? Really? What if a girl today was announced by an angel that she was impregnated by a deity?

Non-Linear History of the World

2008-05-16T23:25:00.000-04:00

There was no beginning. See, reality is not like a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, so I can't start the history with something like "In the beginning". If I did, I'd start it with something like, in the beginning, there was everything. Most of the stories you hear have some presupposition similiar to that anyway: what created the Creator, or where did the mass from the big bang come from, and all that shit, but the storytellers always give some lame answer like "God was as God is" or that all matter was leftover from a previous cyclical universe. I'm not pulling that punch.

There was no beginning. In several places at all times in the universe, there has been stars, brightly pulsating and fading and dying in a relatively slow, rhthmic grace tugged by the tides of the eternal creator Gravity.

These stars are creators, too, in a way, using sheer heat to fuse simple hydrogen into more complex and pretentious elements, before dying and scattering their remains across the universe like so much intergalactic spunk. More stars pick up the beat and spread the love and some at some point are orbited by debris and tiny cute planets that manage to catch a tiny fraction of the incredible amount of energy constantly pouring our of these stars on their spinning surfaces.

The planet I'm on now particularly interests me. Not really because I think it's so special, but because the entanglement of mass and energy it forms results in a intricate infrastructure upon which my consciousness rests. Oh, and you know how important consciousness is. Man, if there is one thing that motherfuckers rave about, it is the ability to reason. Humans (or at least those I'm exposed to in Western society) just think its the best thing since sliced bread, and many would argue, better! They're also absolutely convinced that we're exclusively rational, and that it grants superiority and free reign to do what we please. "Look at the food chain, bro. If it's on my plate, it ain't eating me."

I'll grant that reason and language are pretty nifty. I like talking my ass off constantly. Makes me feel important to rattle on for a while before someone interrupts me with something relevant. Thing is, reason is just another survival mechanism. It allows beings to blast through so much time of genetic trial and error. Now, one may pass on learned information so much longer before it would become programmed in at an instinctual level. It allows for the development of culture -- the system of practices and rules that pattern behavior. Hell, culture is almost an organism of itself. But I'll come back to that.

However, a lot of people don't regard reason as a survival mechanism, but as a crown. Some believe, though they may not say it, that it makes us king over all other life forms, because while some of these other lifeforms may be able to see the world, we see it, and we know it, and we understand it. Unfortunately, that is simply egotistical banter. It feels good as hell to say stuff about yourself that makes your feel good, but just because it can't be proved wrong doesn't make it true. Nobody believes you shit potpourri because you spray freshener before your leave the bathroom. Reason doesn't automatically grant understanding of reality. That's bullshit. Yeah, maybe you can figure that with some serious meditation, but I can't back that up with personal experience. All reason gives us is speculation and science; speculation gave us religion and science gave us a rapidly-growing list of stuff we've proved doesn't work. We don't really get it. It's disgusting how prepared we are to worship ourselves.

The food-chain argument falls apart from a gradeschool observation: we don't live forever, and try as you might, you can't stop other life from eating our dead for long. Goddamn, we try so hard to build walls and distinctions between us and the rest of nature, but it really doesn't work. Pump 'em full of preservatives, seal 'em in a box and bury them, burn them, sink them, whatever, but we try so hard to forget the flora and fauna that eats us. My culture cannot seem to stand interdependence. We are more like a small organ, or the tissue of an organ, of a much larger organism, the entire ecosystem. Our role? We collect and bring nutrients to the trees that let us live. We may forgive ourselves for forgetting this, because they speak not our language.

Flora is a perfect queen, piously worshiping the sun, collecting its love without a thought, breathing calmly and uncommandingly feeding fruit to the animals that serve her.

Like I'm whispering into the rain.

2008-04-08T21:37:00.000-04:00

My sister Erin convinced me to start this blog and an accompanying Flickr account. She says she's been encouraged by the feedback for her own work and has allowed her to network with other artists.

Frankly, I don't really like being on the computer anymore. I'd rather be reading, or outside, or with my girlfriend Hannah, or in the studio, or playing games with my brother-in-law. Until I manage to start scanning and photographing my own work I must simply write about myself to at least form the habit of posting.

I've worked in the only art supply store in Gainesville (unless you count Michael's) since August 2006, with a brief occupational infidelity at a bakery several months ago. The job certainly has its perks: I meet a lot of local artists and art students, am exposed to various old and new media, and have a pretty wicked discount on art supplies.

Until high school I almost exclusively only used graphite and pen, usually starkly contrasted black an white abstract and representational work (rarely any sketches from life) and then started finally experimenting with color with gouache and watercolors. Eventually my mother taught me to cut linoleum, a medium that worked well with my style, if labor-intensive. Since I'd moved to Gainesville and started working at the store, I've been overwhelmed with different media, and have only recently been able to get outside of my closed-sketchbook world, and working on canvas.

I seem to alternate between visual art and writing every few years, usually one form of expression eclipsing the other for the time being. I haven't been writing much this past year; I've been doing a lot more work in my sketchbooks. I've tried to dedicate a couple of moleskines for writing poetry but . . . it's been difficult to write about anything but one thing. In January my best friend Derek killed himself. Whenever I sit down to write something, anything meaningful, full of feeling and truth, all I can write about is him, and the last day I spent with him. That entire event was terrible and perplexing. It was heartwrenching for me and my friends, and I don't think we're done dealing with it. I am however, tired of feeling it. Every so often, I will deliberately try to write to remind myself how to feel it, out of duty, or love, or spite, but currently I've made it only an option. There's nothing like a pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face to see us through.

Instead, I've been painting.

There is a Pattern.

2008-04-08T21:20:00.000-04:00

Life is the organization of matter into a self-sustaining pattern with the single purpose of using energy to counteract entropy.

Sol is our sleeping God, trees are its noble worshipers, and we animals worship ourselves.

Humans follow a pattern. We fear and admire an animal (an eagle, a lion, a tiger, a leopard, an elephant), and we turn it into a sacred symbol of majesty. Then we promptly conquer it, cage it, and kill it. And now we say God is Man. There is a pattern.