Monday, April 20, 2009
CSUS New Works In Progress Preview!
I am just about going nuts inside my apartment. If it weren't for the new studio space at the Verge Gallery (thanks again guys), I would be completely over run with paintings. Inside my head I tell myself I will have at least 15 new works, paintings and drawings, by the end of August for the show at Sac State University. I'm about 50% of the way there and I keep telling myself I can and will do it, but self doubt always creeps in from time to time. Some are in varies stages of progress, some are finished, and some are just small studies. More to come, so feel free to leave some feedback and keep your fingers crossed for me...
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Studio Visit Magazine Volume 4
Yeehaw, I got published! If you happen to have this publication and turn to page 140-141, guess who you will see? Me that's who! After I submitted my work, two months went by I had no word. So I just figured I wasn't chosen. But there it is! Hopefully it will lead to something since over 2,000 galleries and curators as well a growing subscriber and art collector base get this magazine. Cross your fingers for me...
Midtown Mural Finally Finished!
So if you live in Sacramento or close by, get your self to midtown (23rd Street between K & L) and check out my mural. Well not my mural, but I am one of over 30 artists who have a spot in the Midtown Alley Project! There are numerous blank walls that would look so much better if there was a mural painted on it. So the people at M.A.P.S. finally did something about...Here is a brief snippet from the mural project blog: http://midtownalleyproject.typepad.com/map_midtown_alley_project/
"Midtown Alley Project.... where to begin? After about a month and a half of prep, a call to local artists and actual PAINT ON THE WALL real progress has been made! 30+ artists have donated their time and talents to what is shaping up to be the most interesting mural Sacramento has ever seen. At pretty much any hour of the day you can see someone hard at work on their piece or perhaps passers-by just standing back and staring at the scope of it all.
Making the transition from oil on canvas to acrylic on wall was quite challenging, but it is for the most part it wentwell. While I was working on the hands(both Jessica and Wes) I was very frustrated that the paint wasn't doing what I wanted it to do. I quickly learned that I would have to use multiple layers and thin the paint out heavily if I was going to get the realism I wanted. These are some hand and arm close up shots of Jessica's tattoo and of course final shots of Wes and Jessica.
Thanks for the extra pictures Dad and Russ and thanks to Wes for letting me use him as subject matter. Thanks to everyone who said hello to me when I was working outside and everyone at the Midtown Alley Projects for giving me the opportunity. Hopefully there will be more murals to come. And if you type my name into YouTube a little interview with me pops up. Watch it!
Sunday, September 14, 2008
I am going to put a gun in my mouth!
People wonder why artists sometimes seem overwhelmed with emotions or depressed or generally down. Not including the general day to day functions of being a human being, being an artist is rough emotionally. Here is just one more reason why my survival as an artist is in question and the prospect of "making it" seems more and more like a fantasy:
The Midas touch that turns the art world lethally cold
By Jackie Wullschlager
Published: September 13 2008 03:00 | Last updated: September 13 2008 03:00 From Financial Times.com
What's aught but as 'tis valued? Or, as Andy Warhol put it, "art is what you can get away with". Damien Hirst, Warhol's post-pop descendant, understands better than anyone how art and money have always needed each other. "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever", his exhibition of 223 fresh pieces to be sold at Sotheby's next week, announces a radical though insidious change in that relationship in the 21st century. A slap in the face for dealers - this is the first time an auction house has sold new work - Mr Hirst's installation-performance is a landmark not just because it shows art being sold in a new way; it also shows it being made, and seen and understood, in a new way.
One coup is the production-line size: sharks, tanks, butterflies, shelving, fag ends, diamonds have all been sourced on an industrial scale by Mr Hirst's workshops, to supply finished articles straight to clients. Artists have had assistants and workshops before, of course - Rubens' studios in Antwerp made him one of the richest men in 17th century Europe. Mr Hirst's form of disintermediation, though, is contemporary, echoing the direct way bands sell music, or companies sell stocks, online rather than through record companies or brokers.
It is populist, neat, as clinical as Mr Hirst's pharmaceutical cabinets.
Sotheby's is offering an estimated £65m ($114m, €82m) of branded must-haves, from spot paintings to a zebra in formaldehyde, for corporate headquarters and wealthy collectors - museums cannot afford them - which celebrate capitalism under the lightest guise of irony. Thus the ragged, ambivalent edges to the artist-and-patron alliance, the threat artists have traditionally posed to the hand that feeds them - satire in Velázquez's and Goya's grandiloquent portraits of Spanish monarchs; Manet's assault on bourgeois sexual hypocrisy in "Olympia" and "Déjeuner sur l'Herbe"; Manzoni's sealed cans labelled "Artist's Shit" - are here replaced by art's collusion with greed and bling.
Warhol ("making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art") and Jeff Koons (who gave consumer objects such as vacuum cleaners a high-culture aura) were prophets of this collusion, but "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" is its apogee. It does not matter what sells or flops. Along with Mr Hirst's 2007 diamond-encrusted skull, "For the Love of God", the sale of starry, gold-plated works such as "The Golden Calf" (estimate £8m-£12m) and "False Idol" (£1.8m-£2.5m) crystallises and enacts a specifically Noughties aestheticisation of money. With Mr Hirst's open-mouthed shark and glittery-banal skull and bull its emblems, art history of the past 20 years is distinguished not by a dominant movement or style - that is impossible with the new global pluralism - but by the unprecedented, unstoppable, absurd, obscene rise of the art market itself. This is how we will be remembered, this is why Mr Hirst speaks for the times.
The roots go back to the consumerist, democratising 1960s, when buying art began to be seen as an investment rather than the province of aristocratic collectors. Not until 1987, however, when Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" sold at Christie's for $39.9m, tripling the record for any work of art, did the buzz and beatification of object and sale - crowds queued for a glimpse - initiate the sort of ritual surrounding Mr Hirst's extravaganza.
Timing mattered: the fall of the Berlin Wall was two years away, Sotheby's was planning its first Moscow sale, a success in 1988. What developed next was an art market hitched symbolically to the end-of-history triumph of capitalism.
Today's most lavish buyers are Russian. Undreamt-of liquidity makes art-buying on this scope possible, but the force in the past decade has been the new global capitalism's need, in the absence of an enemy, to justify its own value. So money distils art to pure financial terms in spectacles such as London's Frieze and the Miami and Basel fairs, and spiralling prices create a screen of dollar signs through which audiences view work and, increasingly and damagingly, through which artists create it.
Half a century ago, critic Meyer Shapiro warned of the danger of collapsing differences between art's spiritual value and commercial value.
Artists themselves have always divided between the worldly, such as Rubens or Picasso, the impoverished, such as Vermeer or Van Gogh, who sold one painting in his lifetime, and a few who feared wealth as polluting and panicked when they got it, such as Rothko. None of this affected long-term reputations or saved inevitable tumbles: Burne-Jones, for example - his once celebrated "Love and the Pilgrim" fetched £5,775 in 1898, £210 in 1933, £21 in 1942.
Could the same happen to Mr Hirst, or are vested interests so tightly tied into the economics of taste that a crash is impossible? And who is the shark - Sotheby's, the art market, global greed or Mr Hirst himself, artist-entrepreneur who overwhelms the imaginations of all around him with a brilliant but devastating Midas touch, turning art-making lethally cold and calculated? Despite - because of - the extremes of money and hype in the top tier, it is harder than ever for young artists to make original, relevant, untrammelled work, and for the rest of us to discover it. Money talks, but in a language we already know. Sotheby's on Monday will entertain, but still the silent corners of the art world are more riveting, compellingly unpredictable places.
The Midas touch that turns the art world lethally cold
By Jackie Wullschlager
Published: September 13 2008 03:00 | Last updated: September 13 2008 03:00 From Financial Times.com
What's aught but as 'tis valued? Or, as Andy Warhol put it, "art is what you can get away with". Damien Hirst, Warhol's post-pop descendant, understands better than anyone how art and money have always needed each other. "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever", his exhibition of 223 fresh pieces to be sold at Sotheby's next week, announces a radical though insidious change in that relationship in the 21st century. A slap in the face for dealers - this is the first time an auction house has sold new work - Mr Hirst's installation-performance is a landmark not just because it shows art being sold in a new way; it also shows it being made, and seen and understood, in a new way.
One coup is the production-line size: sharks, tanks, butterflies, shelving, fag ends, diamonds have all been sourced on an industrial scale by Mr Hirst's workshops, to supply finished articles straight to clients. Artists have had assistants and workshops before, of course - Rubens' studios in Antwerp made him one of the richest men in 17th century Europe. Mr Hirst's form of disintermediation, though, is contemporary, echoing the direct way bands sell music, or companies sell stocks, online rather than through record companies or brokers.
It is populist, neat, as clinical as Mr Hirst's pharmaceutical cabinets.
Sotheby's is offering an estimated £65m ($114m, €82m) of branded must-haves, from spot paintings to a zebra in formaldehyde, for corporate headquarters and wealthy collectors - museums cannot afford them - which celebrate capitalism under the lightest guise of irony. Thus the ragged, ambivalent edges to the artist-and-patron alliance, the threat artists have traditionally posed to the hand that feeds them - satire in Velázquez's and Goya's grandiloquent portraits of Spanish monarchs; Manet's assault on bourgeois sexual hypocrisy in "Olympia" and "Déjeuner sur l'Herbe"; Manzoni's sealed cans labelled "Artist's Shit" - are here replaced by art's collusion with greed and bling.
Warhol ("making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art") and Jeff Koons (who gave consumer objects such as vacuum cleaners a high-culture aura) were prophets of this collusion, but "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" is its apogee. It does not matter what sells or flops. Along with Mr Hirst's 2007 diamond-encrusted skull, "For the Love of God", the sale of starry, gold-plated works such as "The Golden Calf" (estimate £8m-£12m) and "False Idol" (£1.8m-£2.5m) crystallises and enacts a specifically Noughties aestheticisation of money. With Mr Hirst's open-mouthed shark and glittery-banal skull and bull its emblems, art history of the past 20 years is distinguished not by a dominant movement or style - that is impossible with the new global pluralism - but by the unprecedented, unstoppable, absurd, obscene rise of the art market itself. This is how we will be remembered, this is why Mr Hirst speaks for the times.
The roots go back to the consumerist, democratising 1960s, when buying art began to be seen as an investment rather than the province of aristocratic collectors. Not until 1987, however, when Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" sold at Christie's for $39.9m, tripling the record for any work of art, did the buzz and beatification of object and sale - crowds queued for a glimpse - initiate the sort of ritual surrounding Mr Hirst's extravaganza.
Timing mattered: the fall of the Berlin Wall was two years away, Sotheby's was planning its first Moscow sale, a success in 1988. What developed next was an art market hitched symbolically to the end-of-history triumph of capitalism.
Today's most lavish buyers are Russian. Undreamt-of liquidity makes art-buying on this scope possible, but the force in the past decade has been the new global capitalism's need, in the absence of an enemy, to justify its own value. So money distils art to pure financial terms in spectacles such as London's Frieze and the Miami and Basel fairs, and spiralling prices create a screen of dollar signs through which audiences view work and, increasingly and damagingly, through which artists create it.
Half a century ago, critic Meyer Shapiro warned of the danger of collapsing differences between art's spiritual value and commercial value.
Artists themselves have always divided between the worldly, such as Rubens or Picasso, the impoverished, such as Vermeer or Van Gogh, who sold one painting in his lifetime, and a few who feared wealth as polluting and panicked when they got it, such as Rothko. None of this affected long-term reputations or saved inevitable tumbles: Burne-Jones, for example - his once celebrated "Love and the Pilgrim" fetched £5,775 in 1898, £210 in 1933, £21 in 1942.
Could the same happen to Mr Hirst, or are vested interests so tightly tied into the economics of taste that a crash is impossible? And who is the shark - Sotheby's, the art market, global greed or Mr Hirst himself, artist-entrepreneur who overwhelms the imaginations of all around him with a brilliant but devastating Midas touch, turning art-making lethally cold and calculated? Despite - because of - the extremes of money and hype in the top tier, it is harder than ever for young artists to make original, relevant, untrammelled work, and for the rest of us to discover it. Money talks, but in a language we already know. Sotheby's on Monday will entertain, but still the silent corners of the art world are more riveting, compellingly unpredictable places.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Myspace Hate Mail
For those of you that are fans of Miami Ink or La Ink or have ever been to the shooting gallery in san fran will know the work of Shawn Barber. If you don't, google his name and you will be witness to amazing work, both tattoo related and non tattoo related. And those who know me and my latest direction will know I too am exploring the world of tattoo through painting. As I reported here (read below) my most recent self portrait incorporates tattoos of my own design that reflect how angry and uncertain I have been about my life recently. Other tattoo related paintings are in the works as part of a learning process. But Mr. Barber doesn't see it that way...
In a recent email he referred to me as a "biter" and a "lazy, lazy monkey" and asked "what the fuck is wrong with you?"
And just in case Senor Barber ever denies he wrote me, here is a screen capture of the email:
To which my reply was:
Lazy Monkey? Biter? What the fuck is wrong with me? Nice to meet you too.
Number one: Your work is amazing and I give you huge props for your skill level and dedication to the struggle that is painting. Number two: I have been a tattoo/Caravaggio/Velasquez/Lucian Freud enthusiast, work-a-holic painter long before I knew who you were. And my recent development was brewing long BEFORE I knew who you were. So we do work that has a similar theme? So fucking what? You mean to tell me that in the entire history of painting in western civilization, no two or three or four artists ever worked with the same subject matter? No one ever painted portraits before you? No one ever incorporated movement, gesture, abstraction, thick paint, primary color palette, realism, and high contrast into their work before you? So no two people EVER in the entire history of humanity ever had the same inspiration at the exact same time? Really? Although some of our work may look the same, I assure you I am not biting your style. My work does not incorporate movement like yours does and (not including ones by Horiyoshi III I did as practice) is done in real time from straight observation. On top of that, a few of the tattoo works don't really exist in real time. The tattoos reflect issues that a friend or myself (see main profile pic) might be dealing with at the present time. So when I finish the paintings I am currently working on where I explore my personal issues and the fact that my grandmother is slowly slipping away due to Alzheimer's, and how I present those issues in tattoo form, I will be sure to entitle it "Made by a biting lazy monkey who owes everything to the great Shawn Barber."
And here is a screen shot of my response:
In a recent email he referred to me as a "biter" and a "lazy, lazy monkey" and asked "what the fuck is wrong with you?"
And just in case Senor Barber ever denies he wrote me, here is a screen capture of the email:
To which my reply was:
Lazy Monkey? Biter? What the fuck is wrong with me? Nice to meet you too.
Number one: Your work is amazing and I give you huge props for your skill level and dedication to the struggle that is painting. Number two: I have been a tattoo/Caravaggio/Velasquez/Lucian Freud enthusiast, work-a-holic painter long before I knew who you were. And my recent development was brewing long BEFORE I knew who you were. So we do work that has a similar theme? So fucking what? You mean to tell me that in the entire history of painting in western civilization, no two or three or four artists ever worked with the same subject matter? No one ever painted portraits before you? No one ever incorporated movement, gesture, abstraction, thick paint, primary color palette, realism, and high contrast into their work before you? So no two people EVER in the entire history of humanity ever had the same inspiration at the exact same time? Really? Although some of our work may look the same, I assure you I am not biting your style. My work does not incorporate movement like yours does and (not including ones by Horiyoshi III I did as practice) is done in real time from straight observation. On top of that, a few of the tattoo works don't really exist in real time. The tattoos reflect issues that a friend or myself (see main profile pic) might be dealing with at the present time. So when I finish the paintings I am currently working on where I explore my personal issues and the fact that my grandmother is slowly slipping away due to Alzheimer's, and how I present those issues in tattoo form, I will be sure to entitle it "Made by a biting lazy monkey who owes everything to the great Shawn Barber."
And here is a screen shot of my response:
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
2 New Big Ass Paintings!
Well not big ass really, about medium size for me. The first one listed is a commissioned portrait from the Kearny family. For a view of their other piece, just scroll down to the large family portrait (Blog Entry: Start to Finish). Special thanks to Tricia, Tom and Kera once again for having faith in me when I often listen to the outside world when it tells me that what I do is a waste of time and that I should get a real job. The painting is oil on canvas like always and 36 x 48 (3 feet x 4 feet) and thank you Sharon for say it is very "Sargent, Madame X like." Google Madame X to get the reference. I tried to make the strands of pearls as simple as I could by just reducing them to quick blobs of wet on wet color. I had never painted pearls before so it was a challenge. Also getting leather to look like leather was a pain, but it came out all right.
She is obviously not this pale in person, but the way I had the light made it look as such.
For those of you that have seen the 3 tattoo paintings, this new one will not look that out of place, but it reflects a shift in the direction of my work. Yes there will still be portraits and illustration work so I can eat and keep the student loan people happy. But now I am so convinced that I am going to die poor and alone, that I might as well go out fighting. The tattoos reflect issues the normal issue all artists, well not all artists, but the good ones anyway, deal with on a daily basis. I’m not going to reveal it all in written form, after all that’s why I paint, but the full title is “ Maybe Now My Art Will Be Weird Enough For You Pseudo Art Intellectual Assholes” and is 40 inches x 60 inches.
The composition itself is based off one of my favorite Caravaggio’s entitled “Ecce Homo.”
The Latin title 'Ecce Homo' is taken from the Bible, and means 'Behold the man!' Pontius Pilate said these words during the trial of Jesus, as it is told in the Gospel of Saint John (19: 5). Pilate presents Christ to the people, who, urged on by their priests, demand his execution, insisting that they have no king but Caesar. My version is not a reflection upon my views of Big JC or Pilate or how I see myself compared to Jesus. I just loved the composition, it fit for what I was trying to say, and in future portraits of myself or other people, the tattoos will convey the message, be it negative or positive. Yeah I spend waayyy too much time in my apartment and isolated, so expect my future work to reflect that fact.
She is obviously not this pale in person, but the way I had the light made it look as such.
For those of you that have seen the 3 tattoo paintings, this new one will not look that out of place, but it reflects a shift in the direction of my work. Yes there will still be portraits and illustration work so I can eat and keep the student loan people happy. But now I am so convinced that I am going to die poor and alone, that I might as well go out fighting. The tattoos reflect issues the normal issue all artists, well not all artists, but the good ones anyway, deal with on a daily basis. I’m not going to reveal it all in written form, after all that’s why I paint, but the full title is “ Maybe Now My Art Will Be Weird Enough For You Pseudo Art Intellectual Assholes” and is 40 inches x 60 inches.
The composition itself is based off one of my favorite Caravaggio’s entitled “Ecce Homo.”
The Latin title 'Ecce Homo' is taken from the Bible, and means 'Behold the man!' Pontius Pilate said these words during the trial of Jesus, as it is told in the Gospel of Saint John (19: 5). Pilate presents Christ to the people, who, urged on by their priests, demand his execution, insisting that they have no king but Caesar. My version is not a reflection upon my views of Big JC or Pilate or how I see myself compared to Jesus. I just loved the composition, it fit for what I was trying to say, and in future portraits of myself or other people, the tattoos will convey the message, be it negative or positive. Yeah I spend waayyy too much time in my apartment and isolated, so expect my future work to reflect that fact.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Japanese People Love My Art!
While browsing google I came upon a Japanese Database(click on image below to view larger) where my name appears under painting. My friend Felipe did a rough translation and told me that someone linked my website to their blog and now it appears all over this site. Not sure how they found me, but who cares!
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