Gift

This has already left my studio, and I miss it, but I forgot to post it to the blog a few weeks ago, so as I'm working on a few things I thought I would post it now. It was a gift, so I made it kind. I'm interested in the formal play of these deer, as if the echo of the shape is important somehow. My friend Arthur did a great post on visual rhymes on his blog, check it out here. It just got me thinking about my reasons for doubling and copying. Anyway, this drawing is tamer than some of the things I'm working on now! In the works: pin ups topping cornucopias, new moral messaging as campaign slogan, chopped up figures, all the presidents heads, more political cartoon as still life fruit salad. See you soon.

Lone Gunman and Other Stories

I wish I could say something graceful about this drawing. I cannot write coherently about my practice just now. I'm just churning, making multiples. These imply narrative but remain abject and still. I hope for wish for sweetness in them, a kind of loving touch to come through. Something about acts and multiples, the act of making multiples, my mirroring other acts of multiples, but in a cloistered and quiet way is deeply satisfying to me, even as it is critical and self-indicting.

One More Detail

The Flagpile Update

Radio Silence

I've been gone for a while, car trouble, the vomits, etc. I missed you blog. And all my mysterious readers that the hit counter tells me about! Email me, I miss you folks! You can use the email through blogger or nitsrik.com, both work real good. I've been talking to a few folks who found the blog, and it has been so lovely to talk painting again. This is one of the drawings I've been laboring over, though it is shot badly, in incandescent light. Why does my camera have a light setting for everything but incandescent light? Fluorescent it has got, tungsten of course, outdoor, etc... but no incandescent light? Am I dumb? Maybe someone can tell me, explain the digital camera mystery to me. Anyway, this post to be reposted tomorrow with a better photo and details. But I missed my blog. Missed it a ton.

So, um, the drawing. I have been so obsessed with the idea of multiple that I think I've lost my way. But I love this drawing, perhaps for losing my way. The flags are from the United Nations immediately following WWII, you will note a bunch of them are out of date or quirky. I set the project in motion and followed it out to what was its preordained conclusion, and now it feels like an exercise in lunacy. The whole operatic heaping of cliches may have overtaken self-effacement, but to what end? I can paint cliches, paint cliches into icons, heap them, multiply them, twist them into space, and then imply some sort of impossible accumulation, in order to critique excess? Does the multiple imply horror as it implies industry in capitalist economies? Is it what I consider beautiful?

Young Kennedy and Young Bucks

Marilyn Sitting on Ike with a Concealed Weapon

Details

Carnage with Rhythm

As promised a long time ago, here are the final shots of my Piano pile. In my study of the pile, I wanted to achieve an overwhelm not without absurdist nods to rhythmic abstraction, jewel box miniature and egg tempera, and also the carnage and elegance of some of my heros including Goya and baroque still life master Jan Davidsz. de Heem. The cut up bodies at the left of the drawing are a kind of homage to Goya's Disasters of War series. Goya manages pathos and the grotesque in such a way as to will one to action, denunciation, or maybe even a brooding pacificsm. I am also captivated by Goya's Still Life with Three Salmon Steaks. These gut wrenching delicacies were emblems of decadence in destruction that only a master portraitist could bring to the inanimate, in my work they recur as a totemic restatement multiplied. I am interested in using such appropriations as building blocks for my conceptual and political piling exercise. Goya painted these bleeding fleshy fish cuts while working on the Disasters of War, which I believe were made during Napoleon's bloody trek through Spain. Something about the prints with their severity of line, paucity of rich color, and extreme subject matter (beheadings, cut bodies on trees) next to the fleshy lamentation of bleeding glaze in the Salmon still life triggered something in me that started this body of work. I want to paint body, animal, object, movement as inanimate, stilted, and repetitive and yet oddly convivial in its color and touch. There is a lack of bleeding and fleshy beauty to these works because I work in flat acrylic and gouache, mostly. This flatness may signal my remove, my glancing appropriations, or my academic perspective in encountering this kind of horror. I want a kind of damning but devotional touch to reinforce that. I find it an interesting endeavor to nest such loaded and loosely appropriated imagery (read: my torsos and body parts are weak echos of Goya's observations of war laid into print) within a ham-fisted and off-scale baroque still life that relies as much on the repetitive touch of a performance or wall drawing as it does seduction in paint. I choose to channel the weak echo, the dilettantish or mawkish painting hand, the privilege of this sort of cracked labor within the wonky procedure of sublime still life.

Alas Poor Baby Skull

Another 3" long x 2" wide miniature, this time of my plastic skull. I was gonna give her a tiara, but maybe that's tomorrow's baby. I'm working away on some larger drawings, so just little driblets right now. But it is nice to be playing with oil paint. Its been so long since I touched oil and didn't get sick. I've been careful with what I use and how long, and it seems that the smaller the paintings and the shorter the sessions, the more likely I am to not feel ill, get headaches etc. Oh and macabe or depressive subject matter doesn't hurt! To fully ivestigate cliche in all its forms, to go where all men have gone before, that is my charge. And maybe perhaps to vomit in the process, to expell cliche and to question it. But some of this study stuff looks pretty tame, I dunno. I just get involved in the lushness and luxuriating of it all. The brash luxury of making tiny tame little paintings.

Deer Miniatures

I had been teaching my first painting classes about portrait miniatures but I hadn't yet been engrossed by the idea of a portrait miniature, even though I had been engrossed by the idea of detail. Here's to a comedic portrait miniature, where line and mark are ham-fisted but delicate! I mean to do a large grid of these, is that silly? I thought it was kind of funny to have trophies that are usually so large sized down to around 3" tall by 2" long (yes these are really small - note the dust and cat hair).

A Poem for Dropped Things

A reference to the unswept floor? Maybe. I would hope this is not what I would wish for my ancestors, or what I think of them. Evidently the Romans believed leaving food on the floor, or tromp l'oeil versions of it would be nourishing for the dear departed. Yikes. And yet there is something wonderful about having a use for those dropped table scraps beyond feeding the cat or dog. I like to think of this one as a harmless cornucopia. Mostly harmless.

A Little More Glossary

Food Glossary

Pile of Viewfinder Cameras

While sipping tea I decided to make a new post to keep the blahs away. This is a favorite of mine from grad school. Sorry for the dark detail, but it is necessary to see the way the flags reference the object oriented drawing. I think I lost track of why I included the flags in the first place, as signals or labels or maybe mislabels.