The Lounge - Part II

6/24/18

See The Lounge-Part I (12/9/17)  Still a Work in Progress!

Having cobbled together fantasy, expectation, and memory, this piece is a meditation on a wonderful time had by beautiful young people in a lushly baby blue lounge located on the top floor of a high rise in a city somewhere...featuring baby blue shag carpet verging on the vegetative...instead of a bar, a shoot of water, a girl playfully splashing the bartender, a bacchanalian gathering in the fore.  This emerged as a piece about drinking, and a dangerous flirtation.

AA Self-Storage/ Shmevils

6/8/18

      This week, I have been working on replacing the below with the belower.  Please excuse the disturbing Photoshop on that first one.   I painted  this while living in AA Self-Storage, my first New York City "apartment".  Living there marked a strange and heady time, but mostly, just strange.  Someday, I will spend the time to recount the events from this time, but in the meantime, they are very much sealed in my memory.  That deranged man who called himself my "landlord".  The shoe polish in the hair, all those cats, the pots and pans in the shower.  The hipsters that would show up living there every once and a while.  The stuffed animals.  The way my room was where he always kept his latest "girlfriend".  The darkness and the filth.  The painting studio I had in that gigantic room, where I would paint at night when I should have been working on lesson plans and sleeping. The way he attacked my character because he wasn't getting what he wanted from me.  The juxtaposition of this strange home life with my early morning teaching stint that turned out to be an abject failure...

      I have no idea what became of the original, but after reviewing Saul Steinberg's work, I felt compelled to revisit this composition as an examination of broad flat junctions. Quasi-parallelograms located approxamtely in the same plane, but shifted just a bit...  Swimming in reds and oranges is exhilarating.  

     I started using devils, which I call Shmevils, as human subject matter as a way of avoiding gender, historical placement, and was attracted to the imagery for whichever reason it has attracted artists through the millennia. These are not usually a contemplation of evil.  In the case of AA Self Storage, it is just two beings staring at each other from either end of a hallway--trapped in their loathsome vulnerable humanity, for a window of time oddly subject to one another's scrutiny. 

AA Self Storage --Lost Original

AA Self Storage --Redux (In Progress)

   Its mind boggling to think of how much work I have sent into the world ,and how much of it disappeared without my knowing it. This is far from the first time I felt compelled to recreate a piece that was sold or stolen. 

Bonus track:  

The Class

Drawing the Figure

5/14/18

    Spring is here and the new weather heralds in feelings of freedom and relief! The block is gorgeous with its explosion of flowers and all my neighbors talk laudly and laugh in the middle of the street.

     I had a caricaturing gig in Rockville cntr this weekend.  Its been too long!  I was so nervous when i entered their private residence, but the family was delightful, and we all had fun, and I am still find the LIRR to be slightly romantic, a feeling of going somewhere much further away.

    I spent a fair amount of time this weekend getting acquainted with Instagram.  There is a lot to this, and I already crave and despise it.  I am trying to make it so that this is about art, and about "me as art", like Rosanna said so colorfully.  Trying to maintain a zero-baby pics policy.

     I believe social media is a scourge.  Too much change too fast. I am a Luddite to begin with, and the ubiquitious discussion about cold hard technology is deafeningly boring.  Its not going to lead to anything good.  This rapid fire exchange of information, and no one is even addressing the truth about our planet?

Figure drawing group on Sunday:

    The model's name was Sheila, and when she twisted this way in front of me, I felt a jolt of seratonin course through my system.  She is a wonderful model.  Tiny and composed. Another great model is John, below.   Everything about him says, "soft" - his flesh, his voice, his hair which wisps about like feathers.  I have come to know him after a few sessions.  John started out as a bureaucrat working for the city, decided he wanted to travel, received a Fulbright Scholarship (Russian), and traveled to Kyrgyzstan where he lived for two years, teaching people how to cultivate their land.  Fascinating.  His pale skin is splotched with pink and his hair follicles look inflamed-a testament to his fragility.

    From attending these sessions, I met Anjl, who
 taught me how to grafitti today!!

    All these years of trying to do it with paints and pencils!!!  I have no interest, oddly, in creating legit graffiti, only in appropriating its formal aspects.  Anjl and her peers are into creating completed murals.  However, it is the unfinished-looking hastily and secretly executed "throwies" that compel.  This is for the same reason reggae devotees enjoy the echo effect...somehow, it suggests something otherworldly.

Waves for Johnny P.

April 11, 2018

I finished this drawing for Johnny P. finally.  He is my gang mate at work.

The way that I found out that I was to do this drawing was this: Before I left for Tanzania, he had stuffed, unbeknownst to me, an envelope of money with a strange document into my backpack.  It was written with some kind of imagined officialdom, with flowery archaic phrases, and seals and signs of notoriety.  The long and the short of it, he ordered me to be paid to make this drawing.

This is the picture I worked from.  Each time I approached him about details, he just shooed me off saying, "Just do your art thing."

 I enjoyed getting lost in the waves, and attempting to catch the whisper of the rainbows.

....and here is a picture of Johnny, who is the most wonderful man I have ever met.  I will always have a place in my heart for him.  His kindness and good humor has been a fucking blessing to me these days..

A Shrine to My Beloved

March 26, 2018


Dorothy and I were reading about Melissa Zink the other day.  Melissa Zink is an artist who attracted me years ago with her lushly patinated and highly textured relief bronzes.  She says in the article that artists are either "miners or explorers".

"Which one are you?" Dorothy asked me.  I am a miner, I have decided after giving it thought.  The reason I revisit this question is because my work has become process-driven, the result of a process itself.

Mining. This piece I started this weekend is pivotal for these reasons.  First, It started with a fusion of a title (A Shrine to My Beloved) and the optics (in the style of the inestimable Saul Steinberg).  The compulsion to memorialize is somehow embedded in us, but why?  Does it serve any rational purpose?  Does the deceased (God rest their soul) know the difference?  Does it make us think they are still with us?

Saul Steinberg's name was casually dropped to me by an erstwhile teacher. This was ten years ago; about 8 years ago, I bought a book of his work. I knew when I glanced at it then, that it was going to be important.  So I saved it. I finally took a closer look, and there is something he does with his compositions that is wonderful.  First of all, he can draw, and he is not afraid of showing off, but its understated. He collages at different points in with his fragile drawing, a substantial well rendered element, that draws your eye to it, and the rest becomes very interesting noise that is forgiving of the sloppy mistakes I love to leave in the finished product.  Ralph Steadman has a similar shtick, but with spatters.   So I have been mining my old work, and reappropriating it the way that hip hop producers do with old rock songs.

This piece is small.  Why have I been working so big? Why overlook the poignancy of small works?  Thank you Ms. Smith for putting this in my head at Rubulad, where real art lives.

The other thing I wanted to mention about this piece is its on a chunk of hardwood I found on the street.  Its dense and heavy, and i am excited about the prospect of chipping away at it, and making it a relief.   The drawings are moving into the wall and the wall is reaching out to grab them.  Its an interesting fun project that I am giving to myself.

 Bonus track...."Assylum"

A Pox Upon This Week!

  I wish this blog was easier to format, but undoubtedly there is something obvious that I am missing.

I did this the other day.

More snippets of mediocrity that were inspired by stuff on walls. 

I worked today in the cold rain.  It was overcast, lonely, depressing, and I yelled at the hoist drivers.  It felt great, even though they are really cool guys. 

The Winter has been punishing.  I am exhausted from being cold, frustrated, exasperated, and ...did I mention cold?   Get my ass to work, get it home, get it washed and get it to bed.  Repeat.  Its all I can do to keep myself alive.  

I told my friend walking away from the job today that I am just going to sit and smoke cigarettes and drink beer on the 61st floor until a safety guy kicks me off the job.  Dropped a laser off the side of the building the other day. My partner looked down from the scissorlift and when he noticed it missing, he looked at me, and I shrugged my shoulders and went on with my day like nothing happened.  I was not a gift to the Ironworker world this week.

Didn't get into Hunter.  Completely unfazed by this. Was astonished by how little time I spent thinking about it.  But today, I felt the sting.  I will apply again next year, maybe in not-NY.  Haven't heard from Brooklyn College yet, but I don't really want to go there.  

I have spent countless irretrievable minutes on the phone with Epson trying to get my new piece of garbage printer to work, just to have it be in the end, no better.  Its Windows 10 fault, they said. 

I have an in grown toenail.  

I lost my favorite pen. 

Damn this week.  Glad its over.  

Art that is Personal

January 21.

I think all the work i make is personal in some way, but it is indirectly personal, in that there was a moment of inspiration which, like a game of telephone, ultimately transforms into something quite different--in many cases, bearing little to no connection to its inspiration.
      Last week, I was having a conversation with a friend about how it can seem like we are conduits-like the work is making itself through our actions.  I think this is partially what happens, but the numerous decisions that go into a work are our own, and nothing would ever get completed if we questioned the "why" behind each of those decisions.  So it becomes intuitive.  Acting on an idea without overthinking it. 
   Lately, i have been very immersed in technique. Playing with materials.  Experimenting. I felt the time had come to work on a piece that was truly personal, without the disconnect. 
   Several years ago, I had a relationship end. It ended because it needed to, but the love I shared with my ex was profound and unwavering. About two years went by, and I happen to get an old "mystery" roll of film developed, and here was this picture.

The image moved me...so much.  So i hung on to it.  Fast forward several years.  Events cause me to revisit this time in my lift, and it is uncomfortable.  So I decide to process it by making a piece out of this picture. 

Working in the collage technique, I started it this way.  Then, knowing that i want texture in the faces, but there is very little to be had in the pic, I decide to render the sun's rays in cigarette butts for a myriad of reasons I need not get into here. 

I spent a few hours today wandering aroung picking up butts. I felt like a weirdo, but I am inspired by the bold performance art of Pope L. called The Great White Way where he crawls in a superhero costume all along Manhattan's Broadway over a period of nine months.  Just him.  No one there to ease the harshness of his own spectacle.  As I  picked up cigarette butts, I thought about what each person may have been thinking about while they smoked it.  Some had lipstick on them.  Some were smoked all the way, and some looked as if just a few puffs had been taken before casting the butt to the ground.  I found myself constructing narratives and feeling like a little bit of the person's essence  (as well as their DNA) will be incorporated.  To keep the piece personal, I walked a route that is relevant to the subject.  Lots more work to do here, and yes, my apartment stinks.