new (old) tools

kewl tewls
i just KNEW i had a heat gun stored away in my fathers air force issue foot locker (along with a sunny day real estate and sonny rollins lps)...

i have had two bottles of wine evaporating their last drips of merlot/cabernet goodness on my desk for about a month now. then, last night after going to see phoenix bodies play in a basement (the best way, by the way), me and the wife along with good friends jenny and antonio were smoking waaaaay too many cigarettes in the office when i decided to drop some wine onto a page of a new blank book i made this week. jenny was a little amiss that the line of concentrated, fermented grape juice looked a lot like an earthworm. she had been part of a childhood turf war in Muncie, IN and let me know that she once had a can of worms dumped on her head. no dirt, just worms. awwwww. isnt that cute?!? no. its gross (but kinda cute, right?)
wine on canvas (200?) 9x9

blah x 4. ive done two "real" paintings with wine on primed, white canvases. i love them. i would love to do more, so i bought a couple bottles of crappy wine at aldi (really, not that crappy since i will drink two of them) with the intention of getting some pretty layers of the earthy color that only wine on primed surface can provide. sloppy layers of wine (possibly cooked down for concentration this time around) can be dried with the heat gun in a few minutes. i like showing the process, the layering of color, but really, waiting around to watching wine dry is boring. use the technology you want to to make the image you want.

i wish i had a monotype press. i also happened across a post-card portfolio from 2000. herron and the university of tennessee did a little print exchange. i remember being so happy to get my classmates work and well, more than a little let down with the out of state mailings. maybe if i plug in the ole scanner i can share some goods and bads? you wanna?... my piece was an ink jet color print of a tank firing a big shell with a thick burgundy colored colograph on top. it looks immediate and is named after an Unwound album. yea! undergrad! i should get back to that kind of work. steal an image, crop and re-place on black background, place a violently drawn layer of line over it. simple. effective.

match this with a few (2) started underwear pieces. not as sloppy as the previous bra pieces, but still cool, to me, at least. a little more realistic, but de-sexualized as far as connotation and color choice. i would love to reduce the shapes to just that (a shape) and forget about the anthropological weight of underwear, while still letting the viewer know thats what it is. the challenge to illustrate the triangular shape of a pair of womens underwear, complete with lace trim, and expect viewers to NOT see a fetish-istic element? whatever. really, whatever.

oh, and that IS a managector in the top pic. hello contour!

Hokusai's most famous woodcut on a PSP? yes.

im not that big into hand held gaming, but this skin for a psp makes me want to ride the bus and play call of duty, just for fun!

neats

via: destructoid!

back to it (the IT being what you want it to be)

this past weekend andrea asked me to listen to the heat vent. of course she is crazy but i thought i heard something going on too, so i got on my knees and well...

i went to our basement storage area and saw nothing going on in the main room. the back room (my studio space) was a different story; on the left wall there was a hissing sound coming from the ceiling, mist in the air, and a nice stream of hot water falling right atop my prized "Dinosaur" strat copy guitar (best $35 spent ever)... the floor was soaked and everything in sight was moist. luckily there is a drain in the floor, uncovered by carpet remnants or cigarette butts, so most of the over flow was taken care of. some of the things not taken care of were a Bose mounted speaker i used to rock out to whilst painting and drawing (i plugged it in today and it gave me a nasty hum with moments of squeal), a receiver/tape deck/record player which im pretty sure is a goner, a fender sfx II amp which still works, some awesome pencils that decided to expand in hot water (thanks frenchies, your shit breaks).... and carpet... and some other throw aways like, well, nothing much.

the maintenance guy called back within minutes of me leaving a voice mail on some emergency line. he would be over as soon as he got some pants on (thanks dude, me and the lady really appreciate the thought)... they started work at 7:30 saturday morning and were done when i got home from work at 2:30. new pipe and they re-tubed a furnace duct that was all rusted out with, you guessed it, water.

why the hell am i writing about this? because i rearranged my studio, made two blank books out of the paper i use (small series, big sales) and am hyped to get in there and basically do some cool shit. im looking at the better series of the last year - i think i made about 5-6 strong, multiple piece works, but different people (whom i all listen to and respect) like the most disparate and 'not like the other' images...

how the fuck am i supposed to meld the imagery of an eagle with that of a victoria secrets bra? thats not a challenge, thats fucking dumb.

so i have more work cut out for me, maybe too much, but thats better than being a boring sap. trust me, it is.

a depressing song to listen to while contemplating the Israel/Palestine conflict

even if you cant dig on contemporary dance,
or if you dont like Antony's voice,
or if you think Israel has the right as a sovereign nation to kill for the sake of making a point (crusades anyone?)...

let the video play and think about what so many others must come to terms with; wether it be a sad teenager that cant grow into their feelings, a woman in Gaza seeing her children killed, or yourself on one of those dark days we somehow get through....



strings by Nico Muhly, my new favorite contemporary composer.

i kinda needed this to get my mind in check. my resolution for this year (that i CAN NOT BREAK is to take bigger steps to achieve what i want to happen in my life. i found this article about sins made in taking those steps. so you should make bigger steps too,but try to not fall down.

thanks shoemoney. you have a dumb name but have inspired me, in a way.

seriously. what the fuck. seriously

BART officer shoots unarmed man.

riots last night in Oakland.
this happened 2 a.m. New Years Day.

what the fuck.

enough blabbin. look at this.

these pieces are steeped in nationalism, masculinity, phallic symboligy, and sadness. right now, for reasons i dont want to get into i will just talk a bit about the image itself and the songs that go along with it.


coxcomb)red

songs:ohia has been popping up via the shuffle tendencies of Karamozov, my ipod. i dated a red head for a while. she used to sing the star spangled banner at random.




like)a)man

as much as i would love to spend my hard earned dough on imported beers i am relegated to buying domestic most of the time. i know most imports have been skunked by the time they reach our shores, but the tastes remind me of when i was dating my now wife. the twist is in the fact that a German company now owns the USs' largest domestic brew operation. regardless, american beer makes me feel like rock and roll, but not like the spinning drunk goodness of euro-based beers do. american beer doesnt make me feel like a man.
fugazi once asked that question, of what it is to be a man.... but then ian had to go goofy on a slant six record and make me feel weird about his iconography in the post punkdom that is my enjoyment of music.




first)place

i really love it when a beer has a blurb on its can or bottle label that references some prize they won when my grandfathers (ded) were sneaking beers in between sessions of learning at the hands of Nuns. pabst has no qualms just putting a damn ribbon on the front of everything. go on girl, do it! but still to this day, even with pabst having weathered the storm a few years back .... even with major underwriting on NPR, even with the rise or both ironic hipsters drinking it and actual cool people doing the same... pabst still has that damn logo. its american as all get out.


i have started one more eagle based something or other. the shape is the same.... i should tell you now its just the Anheuser Busch eagle only retared through my hands ability to create shapes that look like the things they are referencing. the latest one is the shape and i have taken an extra step in the workability of the image. first off, in on Rives BFK. i love to beat the hell out of this stuff. so its going to be sanded and rolled and probably yelled at. 90% of what i do is on some 100# offset printing paper, so using a piece of Rives means i am investing at least $3 in the project.
second, the shapes of feathers and leg skin have been meticulously etched on the paper by yours truly. it took almost two hours for the simple shapes to fill the spaces. i could have taken longer, but this layer of work will become a discoverable gem to those that get up close and look at methods of production. i hope it turns out looking the way i want. its the only sheet of paper i am currently working horizontally, so thats one more thing to grip ahold of and shake violently until it shuts up.
theres an abuse joke in there somewhere, but i will leave it alone. its only art.....

....which brings me to warn you. some scribbled prose may make its way to your eyes via me very soon. so look out, ok?