Wednesday, July 30, 2008

El Chipi Chipi



El Chipi Chipi is up for auction on ebay

This extremely popular painting exhibits my classic style of calligraphic line and rich bold colors. Its energy and movement is like a dance - like the El Chipi Chipi dance which gives this painting its name.

The painting is a signed original and no copies or Limited Editions have been issued for this painting.

It was inspired by a Venezulan dance and it's featured best in this clip from the Motorcycle Diaries. It is interrupted only briefly by Che's dialog with someone else's girl.

On ebay it says that I will only ship to the US, however, I am willing to arrange shipping to Canada and Europe.

email me with questions...

Good luck bidding!

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Bone Painting



As I continue to diverge in my work I find such pleasure in the unexpected. This particular piece was one such unexpected pleasure. For the lovers of my colorful vibrant swirling work - fear not - these are parallel concurrent divergences. The bone painting marks the beginning of a new path much like the black and whites did. This is certainly a very different aesthetic!

So much is conveyed in this piece - it is like a shroud or swaddling or bedsheets or something. It is as if something has been un-tombed. The bones lie in stark contrast to the softness of the "sheets." They seem somehow cradled and held in a careful, yet carefree manner. The sheets seem to move and flutter as if moving through the air. It is life and death and sleep and care - the hardness and longevity of bone against the softness and fleetingness of textiles carried by wind or tossed off a bed. The imagery is both haunting and beautiful. For me, it is the simultaneous horror of finding bones in one's sheets and the sacredness of beholding some holy relic.

The bones are from a goose I found while teaching outdoor science to a group of school children in Upstate New York. "You never know what we'll find!" I would say, "when you think you've come and seen it all - there is always one more thing." That is how I hope this piece and many of my pieces are viewed. That when one has been satiated with an image - I hope there is always one more idea spurned, or one more detail illuminated. With that we'll never suffer boredom.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Medium

Today I went to a spirit medium and received messages from; yes, you guessed it, my mother. Now, I had to go do something as a few of my spiritually connected friends were getting messages and I figured I would try to go straight to the source. When I arrived for my reading I was told that it would proceed like I was listening to one side of a telephone conversation and that I should not expect anything in particular since I could not dial directly, and we merely had to accept whatever call came in!

It was a mesmerizing hour of one way conversation as my mother came through very similarly as she did while she was living - extremely talkative, vivacious, insistent, and a little impatient. She spoke of things that only a mother would know and it assuaged any skepticism I might have held about the work of people that communicate with the spirit world. By the end of the reading I was in kind of a heightened state of awareness and awe. Everything seemed different. Of course as I walked out I thought of all the things I could have asked when I was given the chance to ask questions. However, none of it seemed to matter. It doesn't matter if I ever get a clear answer about why I was sent to a Catholic School for six years!

One of the things I can share of the reading was that my "spirit guides" came through and spoke about my working as an artist. Apparently the creative force within burns so hot and the path is so clear that there is no danger that "you might go be an accountant. Furthermore there is an unraveling or unleashing going on now and in the future that is leading to greater and greater freedom and creativity. I was glad to hear that a creative recession is not likely in the spiritual forecast. They also said that I need not get all crazy and go to Tibet on a spiritual journey - "just keep painting," they said. I could have told them that, and it is fun to have congruency.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Black and White Paintings

Here is the full series of the black and white paintings so far. They explore what is hidden and what is unsaid; what is covered, and what is revealed. Rather than swirling lines these explore the use of characters in a language of mark making that I explore. The black and white characters are layered over each other with varying opacity to create a visual effect where the viewer can feel as if it is possible to step into the text.

This painting was the first ever of its kind and gave birth to the exploration of emotion without the extra information that color provides


Hidden #1, 120"x72"



Hidden #2, 84"x72"


Hidden #3, 120"x72"


Hidden #4, 96"x72"


Hidden #5, 120"x72"


Hidden #6, 120"x72"


Hidden #7, 120"x72"


Hidden #8, 120"x72"

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Ballet Perfomance

To celebrate the birthday of my late mother on July's First Thursday my friend Sally Rousse performed a short ballet of my mother's life and death. It was an amazing impromptu dance that was arranged only days earlier and commenced without announcement. It was a touching and deeply moving piece to say the least. Many in the room were moved to tears within the first few minutes and were obviously affect by the sheer beauty and magic of Sally's trained and improvised movements. The unexpected unfolded as we watched her pour salt across the room, kick at props, twirl herself into bolts of fabric, and finally lay down and stare into the audience with the abject vacuous eyes of a woman without recourse. Applause was slow to follow as we sat stunned by the sheer power of the six minute piece choreographed to Leonard Cohen's Dance me to the End of Love.


"Dance Me To The End Of Love"

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love


Tuesday, July 1, 2008

First thursday, July 2008

Thursday, July 3rd
5:00pm - 9:00pm

This First Thursday includes complimentary Barbecue!

Please join me at the gallery/studio to talk, eat, drink, and view two new paintings.







July 3rd is also the birthday of my late mother. I invite you to join me to quietly celebrate that with me as well in whatever way we see fit...

On March 19th, 1996 she committed suicide one month after a heartbreaking episode with her current husband. What can I tell you that would be worth reading? The experience gives me first-hand experience with the depths of human existence. I understand rage, loss, confusion, depression, sadness, abandonment. All of these are so close to happiness, passion, forgiveness, love, and bliss that the understanding of one extreme informs the other.

The most incongruous part of her untimely death and seemingly sudden spiral into depression is that I knew her as such a vivacious spirit and feisty maverick. She was the black sheep of her family - the youngest of three daughters. When she came from Quebec at 19 years old she spoke very little English and faked her way through the interview process when she wanted to get a job as a stewardess. She would tell me that she worked so that she could take time off and all my life I knew her this way. As a stewardess she learned English, traveled the world, and eventually met my father in Tahiti.

As a child she played in the woods a lot - caught bullfrogs, kept them as pets and dressed them up in doll clothes for tea parties. She climbed trees, slept outside, and didn't notice boys until she was in her twenties. Her family thought her strange, and she would eventually pass on the weird genes to me. My sister got her good looks and similar vibrant personality - I just got the weirdness and the inclination to eat a lot of salt. She would eat raw rhubarb with salt and passed on this habit to me. She had a taste for oysters, fish, scallops, and wine. Well, maybe not a very distinguishing palate for wine as her penchant for Franzia White Zinfandel could attest. While I hate the White Zin now I actually enjoyed her permissive nature as a child and drank it with her.

Seriously, she was strangely permissive - she would leave the house so that I could have raging parties, and actually booked a hotel room and packed a cooler for my prom date and I in high-school. Anyways, about the weirdness: she just enjoyed things that were so foreign to most of her suburban contemporaries. Aside from having a nice little house and mini-van we were anything but similar to the other suburban larvae living in Metro-Detroit wasteland.
She had this inclination towards dead things, old things, and odd esoterica. A nice list of some of her oddities ought to be interesting:
  • She joined a rock and fossil hunting club and took her two children to quarries to mine for crystals
  • She was a garage sale antique fiend and would bring home taxidermy specimens
  • She collected artifacts, furs, teeth, bones, and elephant hair bracelets
  • She collected giraffes and snow babies later in life which is so heinous and was seriously scarring to me
  • She couldn't properly pronounce H's or contractions like can't or won't
  • She couldn't say "worm" without it sounding like "warm"
  • She allowed me to have a pet raccoon when I was six, and a checking account at 14 years old
  • She virtually denounced the Catholic church but thought I should endure six years of a private school run by nuns
  • She had a huge and very heavy fur comforter-like-thing that was made from the thick dark fur of Chinese dogs.
  • She brought a six foot African giraffe carving onto the plane as carry-on
  • She dealt out no punishment when the neighbor caught me making and detonating bombs in the backyard - when I was in middle school!
  • She let me play with electricity as a child
  • She encouraged my desire to create a museum in my bedroom when I was six and helped me build my collection by buying me a horse's skull from a garage sale
  • She liked tent camping and long road trips with two young children
  • Before my father she dated mountain men
  • She ate raw egg yolks with salt and put the egg-whites on her face as a mask
More later...

some pressing errand

Beyond fame and fortune lies an integrity of spirit necessary to carry one toward the highest expression of self and the highest expression of humanity. That highest expression can no more be that of nobleness, grandeur, or righteousness than it can be of squalor, laziness, and evil. It is all of these things. The highest expression of humanity and self is that of honesty. The fullest honest expression of the human experience as it has been told and retold for thousands of years is the artists quest. This quest is the highest errand and its rewards lie beyond any earthly promise and perhaps even beyond any heavenly rewards believed or true for we know not what they are.

What rewards are there then - the admiration of peers - the adulation of critics? From where do the boons come? From within? The feeling of a job well done? If there were a reward would it ever be enough if it came from without rather than within? Where then? What then? It could only come from within; that internal pleasure and knowing that one's work is being done and one's being is working towards some goal that can never be reached.

The work of the artist carries no reward worth working toward. To play on myth: the quest has no reward - the scrolls are blank - the hoard of gold is worthless, and no amount of heavenly virgins can satisfy the ache and wonder of the human mind.

It is only the answering of a call that has the artist create. It is without reward to create. What of beauty? What of evil and good? Even these lack honesty - to judge and deem beautiful, ugly, evil, grotesque is base. It is superficial and trite. One can look beyond these judgments and see further toward the truth - the asymptotic truth that can never be reached. At this truth there is no good and evil though the human experience may seem to be full of such categorization. Truth lies beyond these in some universal constant that is expressed in us as emotion and instinct.

Somewhere between emotion and instinct lies for us the beauty of humanity where we act and react wondering if we act and react of our own free will. Is it all written? Is there destiny or fate? Even these become parochial views when considered in the universal context. What plan can exist inside of our expanding universe - our breathing universe that we have the pleasure of knowing now as being on the out-breath. Was there a Big Contraction before the Big Bang? That is a question that guides this artist.

With this question, no reward, and a commitment to create with honesty one can be left lost unless guided by some higher knowing.