Sunday, September 25, 2011

Painting Live @ Fallout Festival. Come.

I will be painting live at Art Attack Entertainment's Fallout Festival this coming Saturday, October 1st.

You should come and see.  There's a $20 cover to enter the festival but you'll get to see graffiti artists, bands, DJ's, trick bikers, and b-boy dance competitions.  And me.

So come on down and see it.

S.A.C Club Shrewsbury 
438 Lake Street, Shrewsbury, MA
 
As a side note: because of my involvement in this show, I will be taking down the Brookline Lunch show a day early, on Friday, September 30th, so if you were planning to go see it on the 1st, you'll be too late.
  






Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Art Fuel

Coffee, rye, cigarettes and sorrow. Yup.

Colour and composition- these are things I understand.  But I suspect I'll never fathom people.  At least if I can never find any lasting connection (or fleeting ones) I'll find plenty of fuel for the soul.

It seems it's always based in disconnection, my inspiration.

I've loved often and deeply, but never well.  And every disconnection makes me more distrustful and paranoid.  Makes me overly cautious.  Makes me me doubt my every thought and feeling.  Fills me with this darkness or perhaps more aptly bleeds the light from me.

Nobody loves you when you're down.  You're like a panhandler asking for kisses.

In the center of a turgid flood of heat and dark, I extinguished my cigarette.  This is the flower's ashen stigma.

I'm jealous of sociopaths.  It must be so easy for them.  Me though, I'm always trying so hard to connect and in failure being drawn further from the possibility.

 Blue and white are home and peace collectively.  In this second piece they are evaporated by rage and embarrassment.  Like tears on a hot sidewalk where flowers want to grow.

I never did paint that flower last night.  I wanted to.

I'm nearly out of paint again, but there's no shortage of material.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

The Show is Hung

I now have a dozen paintings hanging at Brookline Lunch and there they shall remain until Saturday, October 1st.

They're open from 8:30am to 4pm everyday except Tuesdays, when they're closed, so if you're primarily nocturnal, come in for breakfast (served all day).

They're located at 9 Brookline Street in Cambridge, MA, half a block off of Mass Ave., so they're pretty easy to find. 

All in all, I think the show looks good.  Come check it out!

You know what's weird though?  Now I have all these empty walls at home and it's unsettling.  It makes me wonder if perhaps a primary reason I paint is simply that I have a fear of empty spaces and need to fill them.  How's that for Freudian?


Strike while the iron is hot, stupid.


I had my favourite model at the studio on Wednesday and for perhaps the first time since she and I started working together, I was entirely unable to make the painting work.  We decided, since we'd already booked another session in a couple of weeks, to finish the piece then.

However since then I've been thinking that perhaps I should just abandon figurative work altogether.  Maybe even abandon any kind of representational work too. 

I think I've been telling myself that I need to prove something by creating paintings that are easily recognizable as nouns in order to validate myself.  Like somehow the work I really love- the abstracts that make me fall in love with paint each time I make one- require some sort of counterpoint based in the stark reality of life in order to be taken seriously.  The more I think about it, the angrier I become with myself.  I haven't sorted this out yet, but I intend to do so soon. 

Perhaps it's not the right time.  Or perhaps it's not the right thing.

Last night I went to the ICA with a beautiful woman.  She and I have met in passing, obliquely, for years now but never spent any real time together and she always seemed so smart and engaging. I asked her to go with me hoping to find some connection.  I think I may have.  I can't tell.  Maybe I'm stupid.

There's a common thread of indecisiveness lately in the troubles I've found for myself.  I seem to require more time to think about, digest and consider the ramifications of a thing than the world wants to allow me.   The world moves so fast and I'm so damned slow.

My mind is as disorganized as my workspace.
At one time, I was much more impulsive.  I made snap decisions and stuck to them.  And I was often wrong, having created uncomfortable, untenable situations.  This works well in my art, because I can always edit or paint over what I've done.  But I can't paint over my life, try as I might (and have).  So I've become perhaps overly cautious. 

I'm hanging my show this afternoon at Brookline Lunch in Cambridge.  I'll post again, separately, with all the details this evening once it's up, but for now, I have to ask myself- do I really want to show anyone the nudes I've painted?  More and more every day lately I find the whole endeavor to have been entirely childish both in the ideation and the execution.  What the fuck!?  I'm hanging a show in 6 hours and can't even decide what to hang.

I want so desperately to grab the bull by the horns, but I can't decide which bull and I'm spending far too much time analyzing the horns.