Candle-lit (happy little shadow)

Candle-lit (happy little shadow)
digital image

This image was created on Photoshop in 1996. Actually it was probably 1995. Ok, let’s move on before the mouse clicking gets so loud!

It’s never been turned into a brix’n mortar artwork, except that the candle and rainbow flame culminating in the ha;;y li’l fire-head elf structure was used in my huge Heliodor wall sculpture. So that’s certainly like Pinocchio becoming a real boy of some sort.

For some reason I painted the fire-bridge in Heliodor purple. Not sure why. I did paint Heliodor THREE TIMES. That zig-zaggy fire-bridge was yellow the second time, for sure. I’ve forgotten what color I painted it the first.

And why three times? Oh, I’m just restless that way sometimes. It looked very good the first time. I invited an art school painting grad over to see it. He said it was a “handsome painting.” I think that made me want to repaint it. Can’t even deal with compliments!! Ha! Handsome sounded like pretty, to me. And I don’t like that word too much.

Little did I know that my little digital artwork, which I also worked for for quite a while, would work my a** off so much!! Heliodor is so big!! And heavy. It got transported to Houston for a show, and now moved about 4 times in my house. But no more. It’s a beautiful monster… that one is 🙂

Heliodor (gift of the sun) – 1996

GALACTIC SNACK 3.006 (fiddle-faddle nebula)

Bas-relief painting – synthetic polymer paint on wood
15″ x 30″ – 2001

The Milky Way is hungry again. The super black hole in the middle of our galaxy is gobbling up … everything!!

 

The Four Seasons As Seen Through the Eyes of Jessica’s Sock Monkey

The Four Seasons As Seen Through the Eyes of Jessica’s Sock Monkey
Oil/Canvas
50 × 72 in – 127 × 182.9 cm
1997

No I certainly didn’t paint this fantastic painting. It’s a Robert Williams. I’ve been admiring it for years  🙂 Since it doesn’t belong to me, I could run afoul of copyright issues and be forced to remove it from my blog. I hope I won’t have to because my only intention is to get more people interested in Robert William’s paintings, show one of my art influences, and get to enjoy viewing this wonderful sock monkey painting (of course).

Yes he’s an infuence of mine, but a later career influence. I really began to study the lowbrow artists about 10 years after I graduated from art school, so that would be 1987. he painted this in 1997. So, that’s enough math. We’re not in high school here on my blog, so take a deep cleansing breath and… you know the routine. This is supposed to be a happy & fun blog. No pop quizzes. No punchin’ time clox.

No bosses ragin’ ‘n raggin’ on ya 🙂

Robert Williams began his career in Southern California – a Hot Rod artist, and enthusiast. His art definitely still reflects that interest. It’s still Hot Rod with an emphasis on HOT but not so much in this wonderful painting. He does intellectual, or pseudo-intellectual, depending upon your take. I’ll take it as it comes, myself.

And often his art comes a WHOLE lot edgier, weirder and more confrontational than this piece. Here’s another interesting Robert Williams painting to peruse and ponder:

The Waterhead that was Raised in a Box
144 Color Hand-pulled serigraph
26 x 30 in ~ 66 × 76.2 cm
1992

 

(the) Cave of Forgotten Snowmen

Charcoal & pastel painting on wood
2015 – 24″x60″

This is the Snowman charcoal drawing one. Yes, I blog-bloviated about it in my “Panoply” post. It’s my ode to the demise of snowmen 😦 Will they disappear forever? I’m not sure, but I hope not. Of course I don’t have to live way.. way up above the Arctic Circle. After I move there for a few decades I’ll repost. THEN we can see how nostalgic I remain about the Great White North with its ten feet of snow for months at a time. Or its soggy tundra and southern invaders fleeing fires, drought, floods, heat . . .

Maybe it’ll be a gentle warming, like chestnuts roasting on a open fire. This is Christmas Day <:>}

But I have a feeling I’d still feel the same, even if I didn’t, somehow. The earth’s climate seems to be a very flexible entity. It is wind after all. Wind and the windy people who get windy about it. Like I’m doing right now!! HA!

Oh, I make light of something that’s important to me. And worse, it’s important to my inner self, that eternally youthful self in me. Now that’s a sad thing to be doing. But it’s a protection from the coming waves of warm and warmer that I fear. More than cold.

More than cold.

I console myself by remembering one important fact about this charcoal-pastel drawing:

(the) Cave of Forgotten Snowmen is a visual experience

It’s reason #1 when I’m asked why I create them. I never set out to try to change, or save the world with my artwork,

 

 

Panoply (drop your guard)

wall sculpture-painting – synthetic polymer paint on wood
1998 – 20″x24x6″(deep)

Ah! Panoply! We hardly knew ye 😦 But you have a nice home with my friend an ex-coworker at TTUSOA. I guess that’s not the name of that art school now. Somebody, quick! Hand me an Acronymosaurus!! Ha! Well, don’t care to go there. I love this wall sculpture and I want to dream nostalgic about it.

Panoply has a lot going on, face to face. But it has as much or more going on around the corner(s). Unfortunately I let those photos get lost in the e-zone. My bad, really, e-bad on me!

I may not be able to repair that loss. Anyway, Panoply was the first appearance of “The Snowmen.” I am not sure I quite appreciated what they were all about at that time – almost ten years before I drew & painted “The Cave of Lost Snowmen.”

Did I know I was beginning to paint environmental “global warming” art? I don’t quite think so. But my deep soul did. And now it’s quite important with Generalissimo Bozo having hijacked the Oval Office and being all busy as a busted brain bumble bee trying to deny the reality of the death of “The Snowmen.”

I cannot sit back and do nothing at all. I know I can do little. So I must retrieve the edge photos of this artwork – they show the first appearance of King Snowman I …

The Snowmen help keep the earth on track and in its orbit!!

Cave of Forgotten Snowmen

Mondo Abstracto

wall sculpture – synthetic polymer paint on wood
6.5″x12″.5″(deep) 1985

I’ve always loved this diminutive wall sculpture 🙂 which is NOT diminutive in my artist eyes & mind!! It never did sell down in Houston. The little creature traveled with me a couple of times to different states, and finally I sold it to a friend of mine – doctor’s wife, for her husband’s birthday. That sort of sale is always a scary thing for me.

A lot of times I’ve experienced an enthusiastic spouse but the other spouse wasn’t enthusiastic at all. And if the enthusiastic spouse be female, “occasionally” it has appeared (like a big truck) that hubbo was a bit more than unenthusiastic, if you be getting my drift.

Well I don’t want to drift along like an iceberg – ready to ram the Titanic of marriage voyages . . . yikes. Still, being an artist trying to sell his or her art follows a simple formula that was succinctly explained to me by my most excellent artist friend (both artist & friend) Ron K Smith many long years ago down in Houston, TX.

Believe them (public art buyers) when the check is in your hand!

This simple statement runs counter to many folks romantic idea of what it’s like to be an artist. I’ve heard both ends of the spectrum actually. There isn’t a lot of middle ground and Ron’s handy art measuring guide is very useful, as it does lie firmly in the middle ground of artist reality (a place that seems to be getting harder ‘n harder to locate for everybody).

But before I break out into song (which sometimes happens when I begin to ‘n so watch out people!! You saw that ‘n in the previous paragraph. I did, too, and went all mental uh oh. Song-bloggin’ is a scary place to be with me…. I’ll move on with my bloggy bloviatin’ blather. See, the ‘ns are multiplyin’ haha My wordy word words are the lesser of two or three e-evils when you’re surfin’ the interwebs 🙂

SO, the glamour of being an artist is (partial fun list): full of a lot of alone time – painting, sculpting, printing, priming, sanding, crating, uncrating, etc. Also, calling dis-interested gallery owners & entering shows (well I’ve been sho nuff lazy ’bout that – got me a good violin soundtrack goin’ now!! Yes, there’s plenty o’ rejection from galleries for most of us (but as Dean Andrew Martin says, “It’s a numbers game – Just keep entering.” That doesn’t seem to bother some artists. They just move on down the gallery row list. But some of us are sensitive artists like yours, too-ly! haha I don’t like no rejectins. Still, do it enought and it gets easier. Not sure it gets quite as glamorous as a job at the art supply store, though 🙂 Meet lots of artists there, male & female. Move to the big city, like Houston – Texas Art Supply has tons of folks buying their art supplies there. I worked there for 4 years. I met lots of art people. Not glamorous but could be fun for an isolato artist like me. Still . . .

For me, the most glamorous parts are those times (and not every day, when the pieces of the art jig-saw puzzle fall into place and I see something new &amp; amazing on my easel or wall! WOW! Often this is 3AM, 4AM, or 5AM. Almost always it’s when I’m totally alone! Just me, my brushes, and my cats!! That’s when I’ll often have my music turned way up and my ancient dancin’ feet going a mile a minute… Or, I’ll be sitting in my special art chair just gazing at what I just finished painting – wondering how that got painted exactly… and… wondering if I will be able to make such magic happen again. Because often I’m not too sure how it did happen anyway. But the wondering doesn’t drown out the feelings of awe at these times!

Yes, art IS GLAMOROUS!! But the general public misses most of it 😦 

Queen’s Interpretations (Near Death Suite)

Non-objective painting on canvas – synthetic polymer paint
30″x40″ 2017

This painting is only three months old. Just a little baby 🙂 It might still change as I continue to work on it, I think I’m done for the foreseeable future. I’m settled in my creative mind with it. And some of my outside critics seem to be relatively calm about it, too.

That can often be a good stopping place. A creative “declared” truce. Even if it’s all in my head, which is usually the case.

Do you see what I have to put up with here? ME!! HAHA The creative battle is so much about dealing with keeping my mind calmed down so I cal really SEE what I’ve painted. It’s tricky sometimes. I don’t want to paint out the brand new creative parts. They can fool my old thinking brain with their novelty-like or weird-ass oddly different appearance. I’m making this sound like a crazy sort of pursuit. It’s not quite that, but you’d be surprised sometimes what the mind will put itself through and drag me along with it.

Truly creative newness is not so easy to make, to recognize, to keep, to live with, etc. It can be uncomfortable – it can look like a mistake. AND…

MY REALLY CREATIVE HITS OFTEN LOOK TOTALLY AWESOME AND I DON’T WANT TO DO ANYTHING ELSE BUT STARE AT THE PAINTING FOR LONG PERIODS OF TIME.

Glow (of recognition)

Glow (of recognition)
abstract painting – synthetic polymer paint on canvas – 1976 – 86″x60″

 

This wee painting 🙂 (all of 8 feet long and five feet tall) was my second large-ish painting to produce, in art school, way back when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Or if not dinosaurs, then flying-saucer men or something. It’s getting fuzzy in those parts of the old head-kicker.

I painted this huge a monster with a different palette first, mostly an arrangement of blues. That didn’t suit me, as so often happens, so I fixed it. I remember very late nights alone, just me and my brushes, in the big painting lab working away. This is the result and it was rather popular with some of the students as I recall.

We hung it in the big stairwell by the main art office (where large paintings were hung all the time). The stairwell was enclosed in an interior space about 30 feet high with skylights at the top and the one big wall just ideal for large paintings!! 🙂

This painting (which is now suffering from my art school lack of photographic technical abilities) was a natural for that space. My apologies for the lack of a good slide of the painting and no slide of the stairwell. Oh well. But I was able to save my one photos quite a bit  with my digital painting program abilities. How some things have changed in all these years since 70s art school especially the digital revolution.

So, I remember one small event after we got it hung. I was looking up from the stairs below, and a classmate and I were shooting the breeze about how it looked and art in general.

About that time, a faculty member came down the hallway. I didn’t really know this teacher but my classmate, John, did, and he went over to visit with this faculty. John came back in a couple of minutes, clearly in a bad mood. He told me that the Fack had a criticism (well it is their job, I guess). Apparently he didn’t like how I’d dealt with the “corners” of my painting.

Being way way too sensitive to criticism, I let this get under my skin so deeply that I became hyper-duper aware of corners in my artwork for the next… FOREVER YEARS!!!

WT HECK?? And you know, another student in the class, my very good friend, Donita Myatt loved this painting, and bought it from me. True, she only paid me $50. That just covered the cost of materials. But my wife Cindy &amp; I went over to her house to see it installed.

Donita and her husband had a very nice home, with one of those “sunken pit” living room spaces. My painting was the showcase of that room!! She had big Philodendron plants on either side of it and her cathedral ceiling  had skylights and track style lighting shining on it, too. WOW! I could hardly be upset about the home my “corner-challenged” painting had – it was living much larger than Cindy &amp; I were! ha!

Finally, just earlier this year, I seem to have overcome my “painting corner” PTSD. . . I’ve been working on a lot of new abstract paintings on canvas and with a little effort on my part it seems to have faded into the background din. Oh yay!

Rectangular art is once again safe for me to tread…