I went to NYC a couple of months ago and spent a lot of time just checking out the street art. Other than music it's probably the biggest influence on my work. I haven't been able to paint much this year, since Mark (my husband) was killed. It'll be a year this Christmas.
I feel lately though like I'm coming through it and in the last couple of weeks I've really come out with some work that I'm happy with for the first time in nearly a year.
These new paintings are very urban and street art inspired. I've always been fascinated with urban graffiti art and it's been a strong influence in my work.
There's something I find compelling about street art, when it's good. Some kind of vital rawness that shuns the provincial, mainstream aesthetic.
Like a dandelion forcing it's way through the concrete mentality of the art world, street art is rebellion. Arguably a necessary component to art itself.
So now, several decades after Pollock pissed in Guggenheim's fireplace and it's just a contest every year to see which art school enfant can be more terrible. It's all gotten so boring and predictable. And it doesn't have a thing to do with art. Or it shouldn't anyway.
Sometimes I wonder if it's the only audible heartbeat of an art world choking to death on it's own poshlost is the art coming from the so-called criminals like Banksy that would rather remain anonymous and give it away for free than risk being labelled a sell-out hack. It makes you think, don't it? :)
:: About this Series ::
The SAV-MOR Series really only has one common link which is that after I lay down the initial textures I do an image transfer of the weekly Sav-Mor circular (think of it as recycling if you want) that these people insist on leaving wedged in my door every Tuesday.
I guess there's probably some common corporate drone imagery in many of them and also some kind of ironic thread that they share as well.
Okay, so sav(e) mor(e) of what, exactly? Money? Not so's you'd notice. Trees? Apparently not that either.
But in their defense: They do seem to like to use the letter 'e' sparingly... so there's that.
A customer just reminded me of Secret Squirrel... I'd totally forgotten about this little dude. The squirrel of many faces... I'm dyin' ova hea... this is hilarious. Thanks Kat! made my day...
Watching this makes me realize how groundbreaking the animation for this cartoon really was. If you watch one of the episodes you can really see how much influence it had on modern cartoons from Ren & Stimpy to Courage The Dog.
I just found out that David Foster Wallace died a couple of months ago. Arguably, the best writer of our generation, I can't even imagine that there won't be another book by him. Ever.
I walked around stunned for hours. I haven't really painted anything at all for days and just today I got back into the studio. That's not like me. I paint every day. Especially when I'm upset.
I've read Infinite Jest 3 times - I think that's sort of the idea with it, I mean the way the end goes back to the beginning and the beginning is the end - like 'the entertainment' in the book (James Incandenza's film was so deadly that people couldn't stop watching it and they just died sitting there in front of it - obviously a metaphor, sure but a good one). The book was like that for me. I just kept reading the damn thing for like a year or more. it's just the most incredible thing I've ever read.
I will argue to the death that the first dozen or so pages of Infinite Jest are the best dozen or so pages in all of modern literature. love, love, love this guy.
If you think that something like oh, say... One Hundred Years of Solitude was a very easy, enjoyable read... you should check out this book. True, it's dense but if you have patience and trust him - he will not let you down. Even during the endless Eschaton match... trust in the D... just do it.
He was a great, great writer. And he didn't need to write another thing. He's said all he needed to say.
Here's DF Dub's version of Journalism - just hilarious - could you call it Gonzo-esque? He would have liked that I think. They give him credit for coining the phrase 'Lynchian'. He was a huge David Lynch fan.
I especially love this clip because I was a baton twirler in high school and I've been to events like the one he's describing... he's not kidding, it's really THAT bad!
and, no... don't bother asking... I'll only pick up a baton when i'm really, really drunk. It's not a pretty sight...
I believe it was Jakob, son of The Great Profit that once
said, “There’s got to be something better than in the middle.”
And p.s. if anyone writes me and tells me I’ve gone and
misspelled prophet I will lose my faith in humanity... and trust me, it’s hanging
on by a thread right now. So just don’t.
Now, don’t go and email me all you dyl-sciples out there, I
love Dylan The Elder as much as the next guy, both of them, seriously. Listen
to both nearly every day. I’m just saying...Kapitalism is King, man. It’s all
about the profit in the modern world and the prophets are bought and sold (and
made). Sorry, just the messenger here, put your gun down.
I for one don’t agree with the folkies that say Dylan sold
out when he plugged in his guitar (That’s like saying Bono sold out when
he...never mind) but let’s talk about that Victoria’s Secret commercial for a
minute. Is it just me or does he look, ever so slightly, like an angry
Alzheimer’s patient that wandered onto a porn set? A stylish one granted, but
still. Just me? No? Probably should fire the PR guys that told him “yeah bob,
this’ll be cool.”
Check it out:
All right... enough dogging poor, helpless Bob. My point here is this: Am I the only one that
prefers Jakob’s lyrics to Bob’s? I can make a case for this POV - Here it is:
Check out Jakob’s new CD, the lyrics seem more honest to me. He doesn’t hide
behind them with (sometimes, maybe just a bit) forced obscurity. He puts the
thoughts out there cold and kind of fearless and they succeed or fail with no
apology, no side-step shuffle like his pop does (if only occasionally). I for one respect
that.
But then, as my friend Robert pointed out the other day (maybe a bit sarcastically?) as he winced through a Dylan song that was playing in Starbucks, (he tends to wince a lot in Starbucks whether Dylan is playing or not) "whatever the man may lack in lyric writing he certainly makes up for in harp playing." So... there's that.
Now, anyone who knows me knows I'm all about the lyric. To me, Elton John was little more than the star-spangled vessel that delivered to us Bernie Taupin's lyrics. Some people stubbornly insist on calling them Elton John songs... don't get me started on that one.
This is one of my favorite songs from Jakob Dylan’s new CD. At the end of this clip he actually talks about his writing process a bit:
I'm having a Soul Coughing moment and I don't want to be alone. They broke up in 2000 and even though I'm pretty much through the grieving period I still have bad days.
Here's Mike Doughty on Letterman playing 'Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well'.
M's got a brand new CD out [Golden Delicious] and of course it's amazing. But then, I have a thing for uncompromising geniuses.
Make ART not WHINE or How to tell a successful artist from an unsuccessful one:
Associated Press September 18, 2008
Correct me if I'm wrong here but I have found this to be invariably true: Whenever I hear people hatefully ranting on about any successful artist or author - it is always - and I mean always - an unsuccessful artist or writer doing the ranting. Ever notice that?
Case in point: Check out Damien Hirst's latest conquest. HUGE. He sells a gazillion dollars worth of art at a Sotheby's auction - no middle man there - just like me with eBay? See, great minds think alike ; ) okay so I get a dollar for every million he gets but at the rate he's selling - I'm okay with that!!
And all this right on the heels of the Lehman Bros collapse. oops. So, would that make it: Art - 1, Global Markets - 0? maybe not.
Now, here I am going on about DH again but I love the guy! He's the best and please correct me if I'm wrong... I could be... but the only people I've ever heard ripping on him are basically just unsuccessful artists.
All over the web people are bitching about "I guess I didn't need to go to art school to learn anything... all I needed was an empty room and some dead animal carcasses." Yes, keep whining sad sack, obviously that's working well for you.
All you really needed was a fresh, non-provincial perspective and a much more open mind - and of course a little raw talent won't hurt a bit. I know a little artist that needs a nap.
I've noticed that successful artists handle other artist's success with much more grace. So I figure I'd rather look like a successful artist than an unsuccessful one. All the whining in the world isn't going to make you good. So shut up and paint.
The last few days I've been working on a series of paintings obviously inspired by the graffiti I see all around me.
I've always been fascinated with urban graffiti art and it's been a strong influence in my work. And now with these paintings I've begun to push it even further.
There's something I find compelling about our repulsion at the sight of graffiti. It's not the graffiti itself obviously because we look at uglier things every day and we're okay with that, so what is it? Is it just what it represents that scares us?
As a simple aesthetic element, graffiti can be gorgeous, some of it. Look at it without an emotional response...which is practically impossible, but try. Of course it's a sign of rebellion but without rebellion, well...Marley, Mandela,Ghandi,King, HST not to mention our founding fathers!...do I need to go on, think about where we'd be!
We think graffiti is ugly because we're told to think it's ugly. What if we choose to say 'wait a minute, um...that smoke belching factory, that crumbling cement wall, that dilapidated warehouse over there is what's ugly and it’s not like the graffiti is making it look any worse!' Like nature reclaims abandoned buildings maybe this is the same kind of thing. Our inner nature striking out at urban decay.
Like when a dandelion pushes up through concrete searching for the sun. They're saying something important. Something about our culture and our modern times. And that is what art is supposed to do. It's supposed to be honest and of course that always makes us uncomfortable. So if this is true, it seems logical to conclude that there must be some value in graffiti.
What we call 'gallery art' or 'high art' has become largely absurd, redundant and irrelevant. It's all but completely disregarded by even the upper classes these days. Even the most educated people today would be hard pressed to name three well known living artists. When art is controversial we know it’s being honest, we may not like it but like parking cops, it’s necessary.
And when art is being honest – and not just controversial for controversy’s sake – everyone hears about it, everyone knows the artist’s name. Maybe no one knows any modern day artists names because they’re not being honest...enough. Maybe they’re not being honest enough because art has become a billionaires game and they want a big slice of that pie so they’re reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them.
Or maybe, like John Currin (one of my favorite living artists) they make a career out of biting the hand that feeds them to the point that the biting becomes part of the art. Or maybe there’s just nothing more to say.
I can’t help but believe that graffiti holds some kind of answer as to why art has no real relevance in our modern culture. Being blind to truth is like leaving the door wide open for god knows what to walk right in!
I should be clear here that I don’t think everyone running around out there no-style-tagging all over the place is an artist or even remotely interesting for that matter. I’m talking about street artists like Barry McGee and Rich Jacobs and David Choe and Sam Flores and of course, Shepard Fairey (of Obey Giant fame - fyi 'obey giant' is now one of the hottest search terms in the art category on eBay - right behind 'abstract' and ahead of 'Picasso'. yeah, buddy!)
And if you aren’t familiar with what Mark Jenkins or Ron English are doing you simply have to check it out right this minute!
[ Jonathan LeVine - um, yes, that Jonathan LeVine - interview with Shepard Fairey. If you think these are just a bunch of dumb kids that don't know what they're doing, you might want to watch this one. ]
Another one of Mark Jenkins insanely cool street sculptures, this one was in Washington D.C. in June of 06. for more pics like this one you've got to check out his site. Love this guy! Love all these guys!
Yes, this is graffiti at it’s highest, granted, and your local 13 year old vandals probably can’t hold a candle to it...yet. But, just so you know, this is what is what they’re aspiring to.
These artists, even though many of them are now showing in galleries, are still considered ‘street’ artists and for the most part outsiders from the so-called art world. If the most interesting thing in art is going on outside the art world um...well...that speaks volumes about the inbred nest of self-congratulatory silliness that is what they call the art world today.
If you want integrity, these guys and others like them, in my opinion is where you’ve got to look for it. Most serious street artists hold it as a point of pride that they're not only never going to get paid for their ‘street’ work but it’s also a necessary component of the whole process that it will be destroyed in a matter of hours or days.
[ Oh yeah, let's jail the dude that defiled this gorgeous wall!! Notice where it's been painted over before! I just don't get it.
]
This, I suppose is seen as fighting ‘the good fight’, the inherent corruption of art and humanity in a bourgeois, capitalist society, among other things, I don’t want to put words in their mouths. They don't need my words or anyone else's.
But as citizens of this society we’ve been more than happy to martyr these artists and call them vandals. Not unlike what the populous did to van Gogh. Perfect, just add a few decades and you've got the perfect cocktail for what the future will undoubtedly regard as some of the best art of the times.
I mean, why wouldn’t they? It won’t be threatening anymore and by that time (it’s already happening to obey giant) it will have been assimilated into the establishment as a symbol of pasteurized rebellion and regurgitated back onto us in the form of high contrast images on tee shirts. Odds are, we’ll still be missing the point. I mean who even really knows what Che Guevara was all about? 99% of the people wearing the tee shirts would probably say he was Mexican.
Soon some product, some snack cake executive - to borrow a bit from David Foster Wallace, who’s right on the money with this...as usual! ‘Felonies’ was the name of a snack cake brand in one of his short stories, ‘Mister Squishy’ - but anyway, some ad exec will want to make his snack cake appeal to an urban, hip, young audience so maybe he’ll incorporate a little bit of graffiti looking type and bam...begin assimilation. Graffiti will begin the pasteurization process and soon be well on it’s way to total consumer acceptance. oh and p.s. Companies are already doing it...mostly just selling shoes and gear to skateboarders. But last year Ron English designed a car for Scion. The process has begun.
We try to teach our children that money can't buy happiness but what do we show them? Right...money buying them happiness, exactly. In the form of fast food, toys, trips, x boxes, blah, blah, blah. These guys don’t want any money at all for their street work - some are doing some commercial work and they take a lot of slack for it but some hard cores never will work for money.
These guys, like modern day Diogeneses spend their time in the streets, offer us art and want nothing in return, in fact sometimes I think if they were embraced by the art world it would be the last thing they’d want. Like Diogenes when Alexander the Great, who liked the philosopher, once told him that he would grant any wish Diogenes might ask of him. Diogenes asked Alexander to move because he was blocking the sun. ‘So don’t take from me the thing that is not yours to give in the first place.’
Alexander and Diogenes by Nicolas Andre Monsiau 1818
Apropos of Obama recently asking Shepard Fairey to contribute some iconography (along the lines of the obey stuff no doubt) to his campaign...if he wanted to. Apparently Shepard didn't tell Obama to get out of his sunlight...
The existence of graffiti is simply nature, our own better instincts, our own fearlessness coming out and saying something's wrong with all this. It's just too much. Stop the inanity!
It's all just man and his endless war against nature - his own and Mother Nature as well. Gee, I wonder who’s going to win this one?
And the moneylender said unto Jesus, “Yo messiah, climb down off that cross and go on over there and get me one of them dollar menu burgers. Get yourself one, too. Here.”
And he laid onto Jesus two Georges.
To this I bore witness and if I were tasked with scripture writing, that’s how I’d lay it down but seeing as I’m not...I’ll say that if you’ve never seen the rolling messiah of Quartzsite, AZ, you have not yet but lived.
He walks down the side of the road some but not all days, slumped under his burden, an enormous cross, I don’t know maybe like, 8 feet high if it was standing but it’s not, it’s leaning on his shoulder, assuming the position you could say, rolling behind him as he walks...it’s on old roller skate wheels, did I mention that? He of course in prophet-toga white and worn Birkenstocks...what else?
I once spent a winter, basically Halloween through April Fool’s Day in Quartzsite, AZ living in an old 70’s RV that a friend had given me to get me out of the van I’d been literally living in and painting in and traveling around doing art shows in for the better part of two years.
For me, this was the lap of luxury because I didn’t have to tear the booth down every day and set it up again the next. Or pile all the boxes of supplies on the roof of the van so I could sleep in the Walmart parking lot or where ever I stopped that day.
In Quartzsite, I painted in the tent and sold in the tent, which was attached to the RV. The RV had heat, sort of, a fridge that made a very worthy cupboard, a fully functional bathroom and shower and I had full hookups at the parking lot cum shopping mall slash flea market that is Quartzsite in the wintertime.
I remember Thanksgiving evening, eating my turkey Lean Cuisine, purchased in a grocery markdown tent, and looking through the front windshield, where I could see in the distance for miles East up Hwy. 10, a stream of RV headlights headed straight for us.
Retirees and snowbirds, living the dream, rolling in for the winter, most of whom will pile onto a patch of barren BLM land and pay a couple hundred dollars for the entire season just to enjoy no electricity, no sewer or water, no more than a stones throw of distance between neighbors (at best) but plenty of dust storms, ATV racing, micromanaging camp rangers, rattlesnakes and rainbow people.
They love telling you that the population of Quartzsite goes from something like 800 to a quarter million every winter. I think the attraction here is obvious.
But at night, if you wait until after about 9pm, when all the old people turn off their RV television sets and the subsequent generators, you can see more stars than you’ve ever seen before and hear something resembling silence even.
In all honesty, the one thing that is not to be missed is the ‘naked guy’. Seriously, I love this guy. He does wear some type of little sock thing so it’s only mildly freaky to stand there talking with him. Here I just found this video through the magic of U Tube:
As you can see Paul’s bookstore, Reader’s Oasis is truly worth the stop if you ever find yourself passing by. I didn’t expect much when I walked in but I’d been looking for a volume of Ovid’s Metamorphosis (needing to get some mythological facts straight or more probably needed it for 'Ovid dipping' which I occasionally do to help name paintings) so I asked Paul if he had it and he said, “Sure, I believe I’ve got two here do you want hard cover?” Okay, you honestly can not get a decent cup of coffee in this outpost but Ovid...you’re covered. Love this guy!
I will never, ever regret giving up the buck and a quarter salary and the yuppie lifestyle and going it homeless for what was probably something over 3 years all together. I've never learned more about life, myself and humanity in general and while I'm glad it's over and I'm living a semi-normal life again, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. You’re never going to meet people like Paul in a cubicle and they’re the people that really make life worth living! Rock on dude!
So what does all this have to do with my paintings today? Well isn’t it obvious? Condor feathers. Where else are you going to meet a Navaho Supermodel that makes and sells found object, nature sculptures but in Quartzsite?
My friend Rainbow Redfeather, one of the kindest and most generous people I had the opportunity to meet on the road made me a dream catcher out of a pod, some feathers, an ermine tail and a couple of quartz crystals that she found on one of her many walks in the desert.
She just sat there quietly (well not really quietly, Rainbow talks as much as I do but...) and wove all this together and now it’s hanging in my studio and as the spring breeze blows through it today I can’t help think about Rainbow and her art. How gorgeous is this thing? I love it! I have her contact info if you want to see her work - it is truly amazing!
When she was younger she was often a model for artist R.C. Gorman and she has one of his original paintings that he did of her framed and hanging in her trailer/tent home that she picks up every year and moves around with like a very interesting and talented little turtle.
In fact here, I was able to find one of his paintings titled “Rainbow”. Since there’s also literally a rainbow in this painting I’m not sure if this is one that she modeled for or not but you can get an idea of his work:
So today I’m thinking about these feathers that Rainbow had in a box, hidden away somewhere with all her found treasures waiting to be made into art.
These were condor feathers that she had found on a walk near the Grand Canyon probably, an abandoned nest, they were scattered but she’d found quite a few of them. They were very special and sacred and she told us about how they’re often used in native rituals of death and mourning.
Probably associated with death because of their carrion nature, I thought but didn't say anything because earlier they'd all been laughing at me because I knew that haratige was in fact more commonly spelled h-e-r-i-t-a-g-e so I didn't want to risk anymore 'intellectual' jokes. But anyway...
She held out the box and offered a feather to me and another friend who was there. I chose the smallest one in the box and our other friend reached in and pulled out the largest one in the box. Our choices were indicative of our personalities which I guess is an obvious statement but I didn't really think about it at the time.
I really treasure this feather and my dream catcher and I often think about all the cool people we met on the road and how much they've all influenced my life and my art. Now feathers will always make me think of Rainbows.
I suppose it's no surprise to anyone if I say that Roy Lichtenstein has had quite an influence on my work. I mean with the benday dot effect I go for with the bubble wrap printing, the off-register, dox matrix style that I utilize in about 75% of my work lately, Lichtenstein's influence isn't a far stretch. (Especially in today's painting)
A lot of his imagery was probably born of our consumer culture and in some ways I guess
the all around strangeness of human behavior. I am always very interested
in art that takes this point of view and in my own way I'm getting at
it as well. I think what I'm saying is that I think I share with him
not just an aesthetic sensibility but something even deeper.
And it's true, I've had the pleasure of hearing him speak in the 80's and I've always felt a connection to him through his work.
This is really my favorite thing about art, the way two human beings can connect over a piece of work when they've never met or never spoken. And the really amazing thing is that one person, say the creator of the work, may be thinking the work says one thing...and the viewer may be thinking the work is saying something completely different - but it doesn't matter!
It's saying it all or maybe it's saying none of it but somehow they still connect and communicate back and forth without words or ever even laying eyes on each other.
When someone buys a work of art the artist knows - even if he never meets the patron - that they get it. Someone understands and really to most artists I know, that's at least as important as the money. Maybe more so.
Love Kerouac, he's a big influence of mine and I was thinking about him today while I was painting - how the way I'm painting right now is kind of like how he wrote.
Stream of consciousness-like. His writing was arguably great and I'm
not talking about the quality of my work here, not my job, but more about the style of
how I work.
This picture that I transfered onto the canvas along with a french jack of spades...get it, is the photo of JK with the Brakeman's manual taken by Alan Ginsberg, circa 50 something.
I mean for example, I work from a seemingly endless roll of white canvas and he once typed like, an entire manuscript on a roll of paper towel (or was it toilet paper)? I think that was the first scroll, manuscript for On The Road if I'm not mistaken, but I could be. That's why God made Google...look it up if it keeps you up tonight.
What was it Capote said, "That's not writing, it's typing." ouch! And I’m sure Truman Capote would have nothing good to say about my work either.
I have been known to drink a fair amount of whiskey while I’m painting, it helps a lot actually...and he...well...
I paint in long, you could say neurotic bursts then fall flat on my face for days at a time...he wrote constantly, long, rambling unedited sentences...kind of like...
I paint without editing myself or even thinking about what I’m doing (I mean in an analytical sense), that was like, his whole point, was it not?
So, who cares? Alls I'm sayin is...you try to paint 3 paintings a day and write about it. It'll put hair on your chest...the whiskey part explains most of this.
