....................

PETRONIUS ARBITER

2010-05-25T07:10:00.000-07:00

QUALIS nox fuit ilia, di dcaequc,
quam mollis torus, haesimus calentcs
et transfudimus hinc et hinc labellis
errantes animas. valete, curae
mortales.

(AH God, ah God, that night when we two clung
So close, our hungry lips
Transfused each into each our hovering souls,
Mortality's eclipse !)

In the Vienna Genesis the hand appears above the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.

The hand is found in some Western and later Armenian scenes of the Transfiguration of Jesus, where again the Synoptic Gospels have the voice of God speaking, this time from a cloud.

The hand sometimes appears in scenes of the murder of martyrs, clearly indicating neither involvement nor approval of the deed, but approval of the saint.

Dextera Dei feccit virtutem: Dextera Domini exaltavit me.

2010-03-11T06:33:00.000-08:00

Another one that ended on the last chapter of Half Blood Prince.

2010-03-07T16:24:00.000-08:00

Every couple hours I took a shot of it:

2010-03-06T15:51:00.000-08:00

They're so cute when they're babies:

And another little sprout:

"Surprise! You're Dead!", Screen Print, 15" x 20"

2010-02-27T10:28:00.000-08:00

SO MUCH SNOW . . . .

2010-02-15T18:11:00.000-08:00

Some new prints:

that background by itself:

A collaboration with Carlos for a fake metal band called Cruciphallufix:

Portfolio

2009-12-03T05:23:00.000-08:00

Here's the first drawing for the portfolio print I'm working on. The theme of the portfolio is the Misfits "Where Eagles Dare" song:

Hides

2009-11-23T14:50:00.000-08:00

22" x 30" silkscreen, handpainted

But in reality the images of the figures are a lot more obscured and visibly sit under the skins with this really beautiful orange glow:

a detail.

Busy boy.

2009-11-22T07:14:00.000-08:00

Yeah . . . Grad school. Anyone wanna write my thesis for me?

Today, Love.

2009-09-19T16:46:00.000-07:00

1:30. Sketched outside by the canal. Got some sun and did thumbnails of something kinda carnal.

2:22. Got the board up and divided it in half length-wise then width-wise with a piece of charcoal for sighting reference to get the 8 foot drawing in roughly the same proportions as the 8 inch sketch.

3:01. The drawing is changing slightly in the translation. Legs are growing and moving. The head had shifted.

3:18. Black spray paint will help me see the marks that I cut into the board, Without the paint all I get is wood color on wood color.

3:27. Pneumatic (powered by compressed air) Die Grinder. Usually used to grind or cut away small amounts of metal from a workpiece.

3:49

3:59

7:19. That's how I am.

Bigger than a bread box

2009-09-18T18:47:00.000-07:00

From my sketchbook:

Five hours later

That's an 8 foot wall it's peeking over.

Interesting to compare the two.

You'd think that throwing the notebook on the floor and standing on a chair there would be more of a discrepancy. I guess all the art school is paying off.

Anyone wanna buy a ten foot print of a generic mammal-type-thing with a smaller mammal-type thing coming out of it? I'm sure it would look swell over your couch.

I still don't really know what I'm doing.

2009-08-30T17:21:00.000-07:00

And, yeah, so what's it all turn into?

. . . Dunno either.

Drawings for the newest print.

2009-08-28T10:23:00.000-07:00

Don't really know where I'm going with this one yet.

A carousel. Care-or-sell. Yeah, it's about a bunch of smarty-smart art stuff.

this guys about 20 inches long.

six hours worth of liney pen scratching.

Mysterious face dock. Who knows what it will hold.

some new work

2009-07-24T06:20:00.000-07:00

Been printing long days lately. Just finished two for a show in August.

The original drawing:

10 screens of color later (and a couple of those runs were printed five times):

You can kinda see all the white on white drawings that cover the whole background:

And the other one in shiny bronze and green and red:

Sparkly:

White halo:

I was visited during my birthday morning tea (I'm out of coffee) by a golden turtle. That's gotta be a good sign. right?

Three Days

2009-07-12T19:54:00.000-07:00

In the last three days I've drawn, ran six miles, worked one dish shift and watched two movies.

Tomorrow I hit the print shop to start silk screening these runs together.

Wish me luck.

New D'erection

2009-07-09T16:33:00.000-07:00

Drew for six hours today. My hands hate me.

More, more, more . . .

2009-06-23T10:26:00.000-07:00

Bloom

Bigger view

Tree

Bigger view

Embryodyssey

2009-06-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

bigger version here

inverted version:

bigger version here

Cell-o-fanity

2009-06-18T15:27:00.000-07:00

and the big 'ole version here.

Kinda science-meets-porno-meets-Jerk de Soleil.

Dream Catcher

2009-06-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

This doesn't cut it small, check it bigger here

AND AN UPDATE. . .

So I moved it all around a bit and came up with this:

(The full screen HERE)

Which I like a lot more. Don't get me started on talking about these just yet, but they corcern:

The future
technology
human obsolescence
the future of reproduction
randomized geometry
scientific coding
digital vs. DNA
. . . and other light conversation topics.

Plus, I love this geometric shape that occurs in the middle:

I should tattoo it right in the middle of my forehead.

Calander

2009-06-16T06:01:00.000-07:00

I'll be working on this image all day:

Knowing Squat

2009-06-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

Another set of color separations for silk screen:

I move back to Athens for the Summer this weekend. I plan on starting to do the studio work that will eventually evolve into my thesis work.

I got my old job back for the Summer too. I'm excited about waiting tables and washing dishes and cooking and just plain-ole knowing what needs to be done.

2009-06-08T14:00:00.000-07:00

Screens and colors and making stuff look just fine

2009-06-07T12:30:00.001-07:00

Color tests and a nice close up for y'all.

Drawing blood.

2009-06-04T08:40:00.000-07:00

Drawing with colored pencils always makes me feel like I'm five years old laying on the carpeted floor of my Mom's living room in front of some huge, wooden-enclosed television set. I can feel the deep shag pressing into my elbows and taste potato chips.

Ripen

2009-05-27T13:31:00.001-07:00

Ripe

2009-05-26T14:42:00.000-07:00

Working on this drawing:

Crowd Mask

2009-05-24T15:54:00.001-07:00

New images I'm working on.

2009-05-21T14:47:00.000-07:00

Hand Study 1

Hand Study 2

Hand Study 3

Somke pictures from the last semester.

2009-05-19T07:11:00.000-07:00

Pretty much just like this.

2009-05-12T13:41:00.000-07:00

First Year Review

2009-05-09T07:58:00.000-07:00

One school year worth of prints.

My First Year of Grad School is Almost Over!

2009-05-04T11:36:00.000-07:00

All works of art are collaborations between the artist and the viewer. Both parties can invest their energies towards the goal of experiencing something greater than the sum of the individual. An evolution of thought can occur. The work can be an observance of what illustrious amalgamations we can achieve through this sharing. Like the book that is only a shell for an eternal story that has nothing to do with ink or paper, a work of art is merely a trophy representing the coming together of two minds.

Expanding

2009-04-14T19:29:00.000-07:00

This is what I'm looking at until at least Wednesday.

2009-04-12T10:25:00.000-07:00

I've been seriously contemplating the difference between education and intelligence. Anyone can "learn" how to take the Rubik's Cube apart and cobble it back together so it looks solved after someone tells them about that particular possibility, but the first person that did it was the real problem-solver.

Well, well, well . . .

2009-03-19T18:46:00.000-07:00

Hey Blog. What's shakin', blog. Sorry I haven't been around much, blog, but school and learning and books think they're pretty important these days. I don't know if I really agree, but seeing as I'm here . . .

If you haven't noticed, that playlist up top (that has had the same music for years) is all changed up now. It's nothing but cover songs. Look through it. You'll find something you like.

I wrote an article that got published. It's for an academic journal so it's not all that exciting. Here's the first part of it (including the nifty illustration I did for them):

And All You Wanted Were Flying Cars.

We were supposed to have flying cars by now. That's what I was told as a smallish* boy running around my childhood backyard making laser noises with my mouth and double fisting plastic X-wing fighters into imaginary dogfights. We were going to live in the City of Tomorrow with motorized treadmill sidewalks, robot terriers and a lot of glass domes. Instead we got the Internet.

You may not know this, but the Internet features a whole assortment of material besides porn and eBay. It's what lingo-savvy people like to call a Social Media. From the agoraphobic comfort of your own home you can socialize in complete solitude. From a historic perspective this may not qualify as "being social," but that's only because our hand-shaking forefathers had to ride a horse into the town square to read and sign their declarations in person. If George Washington had a wooden keyboard to match his teeth the first presidency would have required a lot less saddle burn.

In March 2003 Friendster went live as the first online social network and was quickly embraced by three million users within the . . . blah,blah, blah. It gets pretty dry from there (although that asterisk leads to: "*Alright. I was fat.").

Here's the original photo of the "flying car" for anyone who's interested in that sort of thing.

I was going for the whole retro-way-you-remembered-things-when-you-remembered-them-a-long-time-ago feel.

Back to my illustrious spring break of writing a research paper and not doing anything fun.

Bye Blog.

Slice of Life

2009-02-21T07:47:00.000-08:00

New print. No matter how thin you slice it, it's still a slice of life. How much can you analyze any given situation? Decisions are the currency of time. All the plotting and strategizing you can do doesn't change the fact that everyone still has their fated destination. In retrospect, all your choices seem to have moved with a life of their own and the sky is still above you.

Hive

2009-02-17T20:56:00.000-08:00

The hotel we stayed at for Missy's show opening was an old bank. It had these intense, brass carvings of bees and hives running along the old teller booths and up the ceilings.

Ever since I've been wanting to do a hive print. After a couple false starts I came up with this:

New Print for Office of International Affairs Portfolio

2009-02-14T18:25:00.000-08:00

That's right.

It's black and white.

And it's only 11.5" X 10".

I don't know why . . .

2009-02-12T19:55:00.000-08:00

I keep drawing this thing. I think maybe it's my spirit animal.

I'm afraid I'm gonna have to make a print that features it, possibly as a pair.

8AM

2009-02-10T05:28:00.000-08:00

It's bigger than a bread basket.

Almost 1AM

2009-02-05T21:38:00.000-08:00

. . . And I've been in the studio since 7AM.

New print idea?

Bedtime.

Litho

2009-02-05T17:24:00.000-08:00

Drawing on a litho stone for the last two days.

It's etching overnight. I think it involves little print elves and greasy brushes . . . but I don't know for sure (just kidding. I know it's all about the oleo manganate). Some people say it's the best drawing surface ever. Sometimes it just feels like using a crayon on a piece of reticulated cardboard.

documentation

2009-02-02T05:27:00.000-08:00

Every artist has to go through the ordeal of documentation. This is fancy art talk for getting a good photograph of your work. Now, my silkscreen prints are usually generated on the computer (do a drawing, scan it in, make a bunch of separated layers in photoshop . . . .) which means I have a good image of what they'll look like on my computer before they are even made, hence, no pain in the ass photo sessions. Point in case, that last entry (when I wrote, "here's all my new prints . . . . ") what you were looking at was a bunch of pre-conceived print ideas. After a good weekend of printing:

(The little tiny drawing on the bottom right is the original)

and this:

(fork in the wall so you can gauge size)

Print Variations

2009-01-29T15:59:00.000-08:00

The Original:

Some variations:

I could probably go on, but I won't.

Tired of taking knee-high steps.

2009-01-28T13:41:00.000-08:00

Snow Fountain

Snow Man

Winter Stigmata

New Print, big-ass muther, 30" x 40"

Worky, worky . . .

Silk Screenin'

2009-01-23T20:56:00.001-08:00

Just trying to figure out some color business. This needs it's rain drops too.

I get to sleep in tomorrow.

Like Nothing's Even Changed.

2009-01-08T10:09:00.000-08:00

Like Receiving Communion

2008-12-27T13:20:00.000-08:00

Back home from the holidays. That was the worst Winter driving I've ever experienced. Just went for a walk in the 70 degree weather and got a coffee, fed my friend Danielle's cats and coated some screens in the studio. Gonna rest up a bit and then go print those tiny little drawings.

Heading back to school on the 4th or 5th.

I've got a week to sharpen my vices and trim the fat.

Smell My Beard.

2008-12-22T07:48:00.000-08:00

One Down . . .

2008-12-21T12:16:00.000-08:00

A bunch to go.

This is the first 30" x 22" background drawing and I'd like to get three more done over break. It's pretty much unbloggable in its vast drawingness.

Sketchy Muther Fucker.

2008-12-16T12:44:00.000-08:00

These are smaller than they look.

These will be printed white-on-white for the back grounds of the new work (actually, these are all from one large 22" x 30" drawing).

You'll only be able to see them when they're white if you look real hard and move around in the light.

Maybe I'll print out the whole screen in black just to have them.

Sitting with my mouth open and drawing clouds like flies.

2008-12-16T11:21:00.000-08:00

But they won't do.

I've already moved on.

I'm still drawing clouds . . .

. . . Just not these.

Overcast, sounds like a dilemma on a stage set. "Sorry, We're overcast today. You'll have to go home."

And the Pallic Yod of Macroprosopus (before it was shaded and oiled up with the grease from a stray cat's coat and the yield of 33 packets of Mayo from the museum cafe).

R529 Final Analysis: Due Date: December 1010, 2008

2008-12-10T10:54:00.000-08:00

Write a Response to the following Questions
Your total response should be approx. 3 pages:

Analyze the advantages and disadvantages of working collaboratively in terms of your own work.

No matter how cleverly you think you can mask your most guilty and
shameful reactive social projections in the public sphere, everybody
is down when they get a bad review, get rejected from a show, miss the
prize or get bumped from the guest list. Oh sure, certain civic
responsibilities demand that you muster up some social graces and
exude a humble and sympathetic posture in the spirit of supporting
your community and being "above" countless numbers of infantile
grudges, meaningless defeats and hollow feuds, but you are not fooling
anyone.

We know.
We know it hurts.
We know it burns to be under-

-estimated-appreciated-bred-classed-cool-
-dogged-represented-played-stated-done

and under-

-dressed-emphasized-whelmed-exposed-sold
finaced-mined-payed-rated-weighted

You can smile and look understanding when you're really undesired,
undetermined and undone, but we know that smile is just another hole
that you didn't punch in the wall.

What we don't know is what you really feel beyond all the petty
role-play. We don't know who you are beyond the drill of being good,
but not too-good-to-include-me. If you can talk the talk you are
tolerated. If you can talk the talk and seem genuine, you are trusted
and maybe even somebody will remember your name or possibly help you
carry something heavy. But we still see mostly a shadow of the
turmoil that led you to this vocation of lunatics.

Normal people don't make art. Art defies the definition of normal.
That may be all it does. So when you look around the gallery or
studio or academy don't think for one second that all is well in the
bone helmets of your fellow peers. They have problems. They have
issues. Not to say that all problems are detrimentally bad or that
all issues are functionally detrimental, but they are not customarily
polished for public consumption.

Collaboration is the primal scream therapy of the art world. It tells
all your secrets. It reads your diary and then passes it on. It
unties the string that holds that mask to your ill-defined face. The
mask that constantly looks out on the world through half-mooned,
smiling eyes. The mask that reflects all your lies back into your
mouth like warm black light. That mask is a psychic levee formed by a
deluge of mental sediment in order to hold back the next flood. It's
flesh colored make-up on a clown.

Some people don't like to have that mask off. Some people like the
leash-and-collar comfort of being pawned to circumstance. Reticence
and composure are heavy tools that you can't just strap to your face
and forget about.

Collaboration is alternately defined as: The betrayal of others by
working with an enemy, especially an occupying force. I believe some
people see themselves as that enemy: The Ultimate Occupier. The
intellectual strength of force is moral not physical. Morality is the
energy that fuels collaboration. Without morality the whole process
will slowly grind itself to a stop. Collaboration, like morality,
teaches a lesson in moral behavior. It defines the pack and your
placement in or out of it.

You can't bare-knuckle-art-fight with kid gloves on. You can't lie
without your mask and feel like the lie has been sold. If you don't
wonder who you are outside your head collaboration may not work for
you. If you don't care to explore the frontier where the border
patrol of your ego sits and picnics on its lunch break then go back to
your studio, lock the door behind you and let your drama prove sincere
in the comfort of your own head.

Write out your own working defintion of a theme.

Theme:

Theme as a word should be thought of as a plural (maybe even a proper collective plural for ideas, as in, "I just had a theme of great ideas"):

Theme are the semantic notes in the visual melody of your work (keep them in tune or the
crowd will throw things at you).

Theme are never perfectly balanced, but the over-all ratio should at least be complimentary.

Theme are not mother, pick up after yourself.

Theme are like Jesus in that story about the disappearing footsteps in the sand and
actually forgetting that someone picked you up and carried you.

Theme are like plants. You can never really figure out how long they will live and sometimes, for no reason, they just die despite your loving attention.

Tar Talker

2008-12-09T18:20:00.000-08:00

Just finished this little cutie:

Four More Daze

2008-12-08T07:47:00.000-08:00

Thursday is the last day of my first semester of grad school. The grad studio is about as cluttered as our heads.

There's a funny thing that happens when you only take pictures of the spaces and things that you've been spending every minute of the day around. They look like photos of your own hands.

I'll spend the next couple days cutting out these printed and drawn elements, mounting them together and, maybe doing a little cleaning before I winter in Ohio.

1.
The hand is commonly recognized as an idiomatic symbol that indicates physical awareness. When information is obvious it is "as clear as the hand in front of your face." When you are immersed in total darkness you "cannot see your own hand in front of you."

Isn't it odd that our social atmosphere obsesses and identifies with arbitrary individual body parts yet uses the common hand, seldom an object of bodily fetishism, to signify such an essential conception as what we are consciously aware of?

2.
Words are like water. They always flow to the lowest level. People can only attend to what their understanding consents. If words could rise to their explicit intent, they would well up into the atmosphere with the energetic heat of proficient communication and form clouds like audible thought bubbles that could be seen for miles.

However, even these impossible-to-miss billows of phrase would reach a state of saturation and eventually rain words back down to the point of least competence.

Time to work, yo.

Big 'Ole Critique on Thursday.

2008-12-06T20:01:00.000-08:00

Like, they're totally gonna critique me.

Don't they know I'm bringin' it with Pee Pee Lungs?

None of this shit's done yet but I got two or three days . . .

I used to say, fuck it
Wouldn't placate the functionaries
To busy making playdates with buxom secretaries
but I hope that my homies don't laugh, my choreographed dance steps
Are a little effeminate for a sociopath
We've been airbrushed so much we look like a claymation zoo
I'm a voice over on your Playstation 2
But in my hey-day my ethical fiber would turn stages into firewood

My daily commute ends with a fender-bender
Cuz no one acknowledges my ten-year tenure
I've got the know-how the thrill your scene
But they want someone lowbrow, a philistine
With iron-on irony for Viacom's white honkies
They'll send you a girl wearing tight thongs under nylon gi's
"let's all hit!"
but I'm not for the gaudy gangbang
the thought of it turns my member to a soggy plantain
and shit, I get off on news leads
and you eat pet mouse meat,
set and poised with sex toys
in your penthouse suite believing you're Lou Reed
I spit used reeds out the wet mouthpiece
Even when sex appeal is taboo, electric bills are past due
My head is clear of engineered, election year snafu

That's right, I said "Pee Pee Lungs!"

Not that anyone reads this blog anymore anyway, but . . . .

2008-12-03T15:06:00.000-08:00

For
anyone anywhere
with a
preternatural patience
for
anal analysis
that's
done under duress,

READ NO FURTHER:

X-ra(y)ted

"Well! I've often seen
a cat without a grin,"
thought Alice;
"but a grin without a cat!
It's the most curious thing
I've ever saw in my life!"

Lewis Carrol, from
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

It is possible to consider the success of our species' survival as being instigated and sustained by a series of biological mechanisms that order non-evidential information into a pseudo-but-functioning reality. We are alive and evolutionarily sound because we are preprogrammed to manipulate and exploit delusions to our advantage - in the sense that "delusions can be called accidents of the senses" (Herbert, 236). This theory, however, is in direct conflict with the premise of the photographic truth, which operates on the implication that an objectively derived visual presence implies the actual existence and truth of a depicted phenomenon. However, this mechanical objectivity that the photographic truth functions by is not a singularly identified notion specific to one time period and one time period's technological achievements. It evolved progressively in distinct phases and eventually behaved more along the lines of our abstract perceptive mechanisms than the hard-lined reasoning we commonly associate with the photographic truth. In essence, there has been a point of symbiotic interface between human consciousness and the photographic truth that has mutually altered each other's relative modes of procedure to affect one another more profoundly.

With the invention of photography in 1839 came the original notion of the photographic truth: the idea that these mechanically conceived images depicted an irrefutable, legitimate reality. Never before had the image been endowed with such a sense of modern and scientific legitimacy. This unmediated legitimacy was perfectly in tune with the entirety of the Western intellectual climate of the period. Everything was imbued with the potential power of what man could build and how he could change his world around him to satisfy his every need. This was, after all, the Industrial Revolution when technological and economic progress swelled beyond points previously ever seen anywhere or anytime in the history of the world. This was also the year Cezanne was born, and like him the photographic processes would evolve to bridge a gap in how the culture of man perceived what it experienced as reality. A new age of manipulating the External was set in motion and with it came a need to re-envision the Internal.

The popular reaction to photography was overwhelming. Photography did to the portrait what the printing press did to the written word. The entire culture simultaneously experienced a version of Lacan's alienating mirror phase. The long exposures of the early cameras generated stiff, corpse-like images that obviously betrayed the sitter's usual pretense, but the accelerated shutter speeds of the late 1850's allowed people to voyeuristically see themselves as they actually lived for the first time. The literal image of our moving bodies as seen by others replaced any previous internalized impression of how we appeared publicly. The re-envisioning of our internal conceptions of ourselves was indeed in full effect as we realized the exact extent of the separateness between our supposed body images and the indexical signs before us. The individual consciousness of human beings had probably not been altered so dramatically since we lost our original sense of unity after disbanding from our original tribal society structure.

In 1895 Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen stumbled upon a process of using radiation to penetrate and record his wife's hand on a photographic plate depicting the entire internal bone structure (figure 1). It is the first ever photograph of a living body part that was made with x-rays. This even more scientific use of the photographic process won him the first Nobel Prize in Physics and once again photography challenged the general public's threshold for reconciling exactly how much of a spectator we can become to our own bodies.

The heightened basis of the founding photographic truth found in this new form of photography is discussed in Bernike Pasveer's Essay Representing or Mediating: A History of X-ray Images and Medicine. Pasveer cites L. Daston and P. Galison's claim that the invention of the camera beckoned a new "mechanical objectivity" (Pasveer, 42). He explains that this concept of mechanical objectivity came in stages:

The first was the invention of technologies that substituted a machine for the human sensory apparatus: "[machines] produced not only more observations, but better observations" (Daston and Gailson, 84). The second movement consisted of the invention of technologies that would render visible things that the human eye could not see; technologies, that is, that did not substitute but rather were a new sensory apparatus themselves and that so produced new objects of inquiry (Pasveer, 42).

The x-ray was not only a new form of technology, but also a different kind of technology than what we had previously experienced in the realm of photography. Artists and Scientists alike were previously altering camera and film images in time-based ways that allowed for new inquiries to be made and settled. All manner of human, animal and natural movement was examined. Muybridge even reached a conclusion to the age-old debate of whether all four of a galloping horse's hooves left the ground at the same time (they did), but this time based-experimentation was only able to manipulate what the human eye could already perceive. We had never been granted the visual access to viewing the inside of a living human body before x-rays (i.e. a new object of inquiry), let alone the leisure of carrying out this viewing in a manner that was in accord with accepted social decorum.

The thematic concept of X-ray photography functions in practice as a substitute for dissection. Dissection had been employed since the early part of the third century B.C. by the Greek physician Herophilus of Chalcedon and his younger contemporary Erasistratus of Chios but inexplicably disappeared from Greek science after their deaths (Von Staden, 225). The dissections they preformed were by no means a socially accepted mode of acquiring black-boxed knowledge of the functioning mechanisms of the human body. Dissection in general was customarily forbidden throughout history until the United Kingdom's Anatomy Act 1832. Even this Parliamentary decision was only arrived at in reaction to an alarmingly increased number of murders that occurred due to the unprecedented desire for procuring cadavers among the medical and scientific communities.

The idea of dissecting a human body has never been looked upon without an element of social reluctance. There is a relatively pervasive code in human society that traditionally prohibits any social tolerance for non-territorial desecration of a human body (whether that territory be one of ethics, morality, principles, resources, religion or actual tangible areas of land). We have a contemptuous aversion to dismantling fellows of our own species and I suspect this has to do with an instinctive repulsion to seeing the inside of our bodies. We may be coded to understand that the visible insides of our human bodies represent death and, ultimately, the end of our opportunity to contribute in the genetic propagation of our species, which may very well be the ultimate instinctual goal of any species.

Another theory could indicate that the actual witnessing of our body's supremely fragile construction divulges an awareness of how close to death we are at any given time. Either way, the viewing of viscera in some way alienates us from a coded implication that we are somehow likely to survive any given day despite the abundance of lethal situations and adversarial circumstances that our environment confronts us with on a daily, if not hourly, basis. It is entirely possible that a civil and urbane cohabitation amongst human beings as individually conscious participants can only occur if we disregard the likelihood of our mortality in order to concentrate on more optimistically ambitious purposes.

Both these theories are loaded with the word "our" and I must confess to believing that each individual empathetically relates to the horrors of bodily damage viewed in another, even if only in a self-centered manner. We understand how a body that looks like ours on the outside must looks like ours on the inside because our brains function to fill-in missing information. In James Elkins' The Object Stares Back he proposes that "our eyes are built to seek out whole figures" (Elkins, 125). He then discusses a psycho-neurological phenomenon called subjective contour completion. Elkins explains this phenomenon:

If a building is half hidden by the branches of a tree, we literally see it in fragments: subtract the tree and you have a floating collection of irregular building pieces. But the eye completes the puzzle and sees the building whole . . . it helps explain how we can routinely see a single building instead of disjunct pieces. On a deeper level, subjective contour completion answers to a desire for wholeness over dissection and form over shapelessness (Elkins, 125).

This human predisposition for cognitive invention is further proven by the effective stimulation and stimulating effectiveness of optical illusions. The Kanizsa Triangle (figure 2) works much in the same manner as subjective contour completion by using illusory contours and modal completion. A white equilateral triangle is perceived, but in fact none is drawn. We experience a perceptual "filling-in" of object borders that do not exist - our brains substitute the missing information and we see an invisible triangle. Illusions help to clarify certain latent perceptual functions of the human vision system whose proper mathematical modeling and computational simulation are essential to our sense of vision. Through the devices of modal completion, a modal completion, Illusory contours and subjective contours (and, likely, a countless other yet-to-be-discovered optical/neural utilities) we have come to trust our brains to tell us what we cannot see and I believe we prefer this trusted faith even to literal evidence.

In a historic period marked by a decreasingly invested religiosity the inclination to gravitate towards phenomenological explanations of a proven, scientific nature increase exponentially. While I may not believe in god or miracles, magic or witches, I can wrap my head around the fact that mathematical/cognitive modeling arrangements facilitate a working sense of biological vision that permits me to hurtle myself across a concrete conduit while navigating my automobile at a speed of one-hundred-miles-per-hour based on the faith that my brain allows me to "see" through objects that I know are substantially solid. Our brains render "perceptible" things that the human eye cannot see in a manner concordant with the technologies of mechanical objectivity's second phase.

Not only do we perceive invisible and non-observable objects, we tend to anthropomorphize the ones we do see. Elkins' claim that we seek and desire wholeness is further pushed to include an inherent human need to see whole bodies. He suggests that we need to see figures that are like bodies because we ultimately need bodies themselves as a means of reproductive success. When it comes to acquiring partners for genetic reproductive purposes wholeness is instinctually preferred (Elkins, 129). This applies to all objects, no matter how un-body-like they are. Even Children will draw a smiley face on a tree. Could this human instinct to anthropomorphize non-human objects and animals be an auxiliary function of the same biological mechanisms that allow us to see the unseen?

In the article Why Anthropomorphize? Folk Psychology and Other Stories authors Linnda R. Caporael and Cecilia M. Heyes suggest that humans possess a cognitive default for anthropomorphosis that is derived from a social need to coordinate behavior much like the use of pheromones in insects (Carporael and Heyes, 69). This hints at the type of sensory exotica found in the animal kingdom that practically writes the "to do" list of humanities aspirations for technological advancements. Humankind's best natural defense has always been it's ingenuity and this very ingenuity has always been in direct competition with nature's non-human elements. We started with inventing spears to rival teeth and claws, cars to rival horsepower, planes to fly like birds and on and on to magnetic and solar biological compasses like birds and insects, and sonar, electroreception and chemical communication-like systems. This defensive, survival-driven ingenuity may well be a direct result of these various methods of visual supplementation and neural metaphorism.

This ability to metaphorize neurally and anthropomorphize non-human-looking forms, along with the numerous other forms of subjective cognitive invention, have amalgamated with the second generation technologies of mechanical objectivity to alter the way humans perceive their bodies and their environment, as well as altering the way these mechanical devices portray people in a survival-driven way. The symbiotic relationship between the process of x-ray photography and the human biological methods of perception illustrate this concept. The actual image derived by the x-ray by no means looks like a human interior. A human interior is represented, but not portrayed realistically. It takes the abstract, coded sense of human interpretation to decipher these images in a manner that is advantageous to fully utilizing their medical advantages. It took decades to perfect the art of reading the x-ray in order to understand what knowledge it's image held. As Pasveer explains, " . . . it is unmistakable, even for historians, that an x-ray image is not a simple, true-to-nature representation of a bodies insides . . . but only a particular perspective on that body" (Pasveer, 43).

Without the human skills of inventive cognitive perception we would never have been able to sophisticate the reading of these particular perceptive images into a content that was beneficial to our health and survival. Humankind has finally risen above the challenge of only mimicking its peripheral natural elements in its quest for inventing new technologies. We have finally added ourselves to the list of natural objectives that must be out-witted and superseded. At the same time, we have accepted our machines as "like-minded" comrades in their ability to abstractly portray the world in ways that were formerly only comparable to our own cognitive abilities. But exactly how truthful an image of the human body or the world we could possibly capture and record when the means for describing objectivity is in a constant flux between the literal and the conceptual? "Immanuel Kant argued that because the mind begins with perceptions and not with things in themselves, we can never entirely understand either phenomena or the world" (Dunning, 157). When the mutual modeling of our "things" and "perceptions" progress and evolve we can possibly begin to obligate ourselves for the first time to attempt a new form of faith with an alliance of reason.

Works Cited

Caporael, Linnda R., and Cecilia M. Heyes. Why Anthropomorphize? Folk Psychology and Other Stories. Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals. Eds. Robert W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson and H. Lyn Miles. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977. 59-73.

Daston, L. and P. Galison. The Image of Objectivity. Representations 40. 1992; 81-128.

Dunning, William V. Advice to Young Artists in a Postmodern Era. Syracuse University Press, 1998.

Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Harcourt, 1996.

Herbert, Frank. God Emporor of Dune. Berkley Publishing Group, 1982
Pasveer, Bernike. Representing or Mediating: A History of X-ray Images and Medicine. Visual Cultures of Science: Rethinking Representational Practices in Knowledge Building and Science Communication. University Press of New England, 2006.

Von Staden, Heinrich. The Discovery of the Body: Human Dissection and its Cultural Contexts in Ancient Greece. Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine. 1992 May-Jun; 65(3):223-41.

One more week until break . . .

2008-11-29T19:30:00.000-08:00

Wallowing

Floundering

Weltering

Dithering

Right before this picture J. HIT ME with a food tray.
You can see the legs on the floor . . .
. . . SHE HIT ME!

I'll have my revenge.

My fucking car is in the shop AGAIN!
My research paper is not done.
I haven't even started printing
my three prints for my final critique.

And this:

Sharpen your stencils!

2008-11-28T12:46:00.000-08:00

Well, these may not be the best photos, but they're not to bad for using a light-table and no tripod. Just a bunch of stencil experiments that will most likely get incorporated into other work. All the imagery was cut out of newsprint with an X-acto blade. I opted not to alter any of these pictures in photoshop because, well . . . I'm busy and lazy.

Yup. Clouds and light switches.
Not bad for a day's worth of printing.

Borshoff

2008-11-21T12:35:00.000-08:00

The Borshoff communications agency is working with my department to help them celebrate their 24th anneversary. They are doing a show of prints based on the theme "Communication 24/7". I pulled an all-nighter yesterday finishing my piece and building a frame and getting it all set up. They have a video about it on their homepage (yeah, I'm in the video working on a wood cut).

This is what I put in:

Titled:
Analeptic Anagnorisis (Anabolic Antenna)
40" x 32" framed (handmade frame too. . . that's right).

My submitted text (for the $1000 purchade award for their corporate art collection):

Historic propaganda posters often featured a closed fist to signify the physical might of a single ideology as it struggled against its adversary. Today business communications labor in an inverse manner to develop relations. The historic image of the closed fist has become a tree-like antenna symbolizing determined, sociable progression. The week's days are represented by seven suspended informants who all radiate an indicator for each hour of the day.

It took from 8PM until 4AM last night just drawing those radiant pencil lines around all the bubbles (because I do it with a mechanical pencil, like an idiot . . . probably the most labor intensive tool I could choose for that particular visual device).

Shakey coffee hands.

And my favorite part:
The word bubbles are printed on separate sheets of really thin Japanese Paper and adhered to the print. They over-lapped the decal (that's the ragged edge of the art paper) and I trimmed them to the exact ripple of the original sheet.

Some of the small bubble prints before they got cut down to bubble shapes.

These are the first wood cuts I've ever done.
I think I'm in love with the process.
I'm a natural-born woodsman!

Stabbing, cutting and gashing with an exacto metal talon

2008-11-18T06:35:00.000-08:00

More pieces for the print I'm working on:

The focus on these photos was brought to you by the substance: coffee.

And whose the most metal mother fucker you know?

Calluses on his hands calluses on his soul
Hard-boiled son of a bitch
Scraping away on the down hill grind.
It's a means to an end, a mean end for most.
Death and domestication ends in shattered hopes
Can't see the hand at the other end of the leash:

. . . And More About Me.

2008-11-11T15:48:00.000-08:00

Got a solo show up at Cap City Tattoo Co. in downtown Columbus. There's some pictures in the "Shop Images" section halfway down the page.

If you're around Columbus, Check it out at 61 Parsons Avenue in Olde Town East.

I Need To Clean My Studio.

2008-11-10T21:23:00.000-08:00

Going Down, Town.

2008-08-25T09:11:00.000-07:00

India Napolis

2008-08-14T09:33:00.000-07:00

I'm mostly moved into my new place in downtown Indianapolis. 400 square feet of computer gear, art supplies, music supplies, clothes, books and workout equipment. It takes me twenty minutes on foot to walk to the center of downtown from my front door.

I'm in a coffee house that marks the half-way point. It's nice to be in a coffee house where the art on the walls is selling for $950. This is the first time I've been online since I got here. I was pleased to see my work featured as a daily deviation on the DeviantArt website: featured link

The coffee house is right across the street from the gigantic, silver public library. I got my card the first day I was here with my lease as a proof of address. I have been ransacking their huge collection of graphic novels and artist series DVDs. I've already read two different anthologies of comics from 2008.

Today I plan on heading downtown with my camera and snapping some eye candy for you all. Tomorrow is my orientation where I find out what the hell I'll be doing for the next two years. I'll also get my studio assigned and can begin moving all my supplies out of my tiny, cramped apartment.

I'll also be getting my three-legged roommate this weekend. I hope she likes the new digs.

The List

2008-08-06T11:58:00.000-07:00

I found the list. THE list. I don't remember writing it. I don't remember when it's from, just one of those memory-shaped cereal prizes.

The List intrigues me.

The List reads as follows,
in my own handwriting:

leach wife
union by gnawing
the palate
super natural mother
Menstruata
the vision of no difference
the head which is not
Retarder
formless state
said to have a monkey
prime object
the false sea
skirt of justice
the antique servant
the steak of puberty
The Supernal Beard
the covenant of his mouth
Cubitus
weasels and other terrible animals
the girdle which girt the house of fire
heads of days/the head which is the tail
the doings of the godless
everything that befalls the elephant
lips extol
the eaten son of man
grievous judgment
apostacy
husbandmen
functionalism
the deficiencies of style
lotus of the palace of the floods
petty malice
The Phallic Yod of Macroprosopus
the answer of the oracles is always "death"
the book-smart fool
the consciophy of philosophus

Artists I've been looking at.

2008-08-06T06:25:00.000-07:00

Mattias Adolfsson
Freelance Illustrator working from Sweden:

Cone

Argonauts

Baroque Deathstar

Superstar DJ

Visit him:
Gallery and Portfolio
His Blog

I Now Have In My Lab Freezer Over 8,000 Samples Of Human Urine!

2008-07-30T19:14:00.000-07:00

Lumps?

2008-07-27T11:39:00.000-07:00

E is for Edward who died on the Cape.

2008-07-21T06:16:00.000-07:00

While teaching for the week in Cape Cod, we got a chance to visit the House of Edward Gorey.

Original artwork and Edward's watercolor set.

Ready for print.

A look inside the peephole:

Edward's weather vane:

Dolls he sewed while watching the X-Files:

And my personal favorite: The gravestones of the Ghastly Crumb Tiny's.

The class went well, the trip was great. We stayed with Cyndi.

My sunglasses cheating on me (Moya sans hula hoop):

And Again (Johnny's first day off since mother's day . . . He opened a restaurant on the Cape called Sol).

And I even got a good start on a new plate:

All that AND an ass-kicking set by the Squirrel Nut Zippers at a small bar on the shore of the ocean.

Cape

2008-07-11T06:56:00.000-07:00

We leave for Cape Cod tomorrow. Melissa is teaching a lithography class and I will be "assisting" her. In order to demonstrate the technique we had to draw on some litho plates for the class. When you draw litho there is no erasing. You draw and don't make mistakes . . . right.

Oh, and you can't touch the plate either. I wore a sock from wrist to elbow and a rubber glove. I think the first plate took four hours to draw, it's 18" x 12", and three ultra fine sharpie markers:

Now that I've got the first one out of the way, I think I am getting a feel for how I need to work on these plates. I've been looking at a lot of Edward Gorey stuff for inspiration.

And a bonus digital image, in case you think I'm just sitting around the house and patting myself on the back about being unemployed for the next two years and left to my own artistic devices:

Scratch

2008-07-08T11:02:00.000-07:00

Sketch of a building on the Ganges River.

2008-06-20T17:52:00.000-07:00

Drawn on a receipt.

Printmanship

2008-06-20T05:04:00.000-07:00

Working on something a little bit different from the rest (and bigger),

Four layers (Gray-blue, light blue, fleshy-tan and a silvery-green) to make this (25 inches by 19 inches):

Prints, again . . . always.

2008-06-12T16:03:00.000-07:00

Sneaky peak of the next print I'm working on. There will be another figure floating above him, but he's not here yet. No hands either.

2008-06-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

Framed a bunch of work this morning for a group show that's going up. It's all stuff you've seen here before.

. . . and I'm still trying to figure out a way to draw really large heads that will still look good (detail-wise) when they are blown up large for printing. This one's close to what I want, but not quite there yet.

Some of the older ones I like ("older" as in "a couple weeks ago") look like this:

But they where too grim looking (and lacking in line oriented detail) for what I want to do with them.

2008-05-26T19:27:00.000-07:00

This in a waxy yellow

This in a warm, light blue

this in a mustard pink

and this in a cosmetic purple

From now on I'm gonna try to remember to bring a white shirt every time I print.

And Missy got me this shirt at the Sacred Mirrors Chapel.

Late afternoon coffee and what's on the digital hair metal station.

2008-05-22T13:22:00.000-07:00

Mother's Eyes
E'nuff Z'nuff
Not really a radio hit (video?). What can I say? In Chicago they where the big lucky winners. All the local bands looked up to them for their videos, Hit Parader articles and numerous pin-ups of deliciously beautiful drummer Vic Fox. These guys had some of the best cock rock vocal melodies ever. . . and don't forget that everybody had a story about Chip capering around with his massive dong.

Don't Cry
Guns N' Roses
I was just going through a bunch of old stuff and found a stack of concert tickets I'd saved. My favorite was Iron Maiden in '88 at the Rosemont Horizon with Guns N' Roses opening up. G n' R never did do the show. Megadeth played in their place.

Love is a Killer
Vixen
I will always resent them for not being as pretty as the guys in the metal scene. Back then it was because I was a superficial dick and wanted to watch a totally hot girl band, but now it's because they make me think I avoided gayness by one accidental blow-job.

Desert Moon
Great White
Fat guitarist! Fat guitarist that never took his sunglasses off (maybe he wasn't fat?)! What could have been under there? Lazy eye? Cross-eyed? What would make a public figure of note never-ever-never take his glasses off? Maybe he was just really stoned. For some reason, I always just assumed he had sunken-in eye sockets, but now I'm thinking bigger.

Celebration
Headpins
Never heard of them before. The singer sounds exactly like the dude from the Darkness more so than any other specific metal singer I can think of. Check 'em out

Fire and Ice
Yngwie J. Malmsteen
I always loved that he used his middle initial to cut-out any confusion as too which Yngwie Malmsteen you were hearing at any given time. His singer, Joe Lynn Turner, had Alopecia (had no hair on his body) and wore a modestly long black wig.

Love Bomb Baby
Tigertailz
Another portly guitarist. Chubby British kid with bleach blonde hair in gold lemay. It's the best kind of serious mockery going on here. I either don't remember this song or have forgotten it on purpose.

Here I Go Again
Whitesnake
They had to play the crappy keyboard version, didn't they? But check 'em out back in the day (well, back in the day of the day's day):

Angel Eyes
Steelheart
Why didn't this guy just publicly come out and call Mark Slaughter a pussy. I know the high vocals thing was a coveted commodity in the cock rock crowds, but sometimes you get too much of a good thing. I wonder if this dude hit it live. If he could really pull that shit off live it'd be pretty impressive, but I have a hunch he did a lot of shows with "shitty" monitors.

Too High To Fly
Dokken
All right, first of all that's not Dokken. It doesn't even sound like it has George Lynch in it (or Reb Beach). Mick Brown's fine and all (he has all the best lines in their home video), but no one left those show's thinking, "Fuck! That Drummer was Great!" I'll never not think of them in their half black/half pastel leather tail-suits from Under lock and Key. This tune probably came out this year.

Don't Wanna Let You Go
Quiet Riot
This song is the reason they usually played Slade tunes. Another frontman in a wig. He really did scream like an alligator. He passed away last year but I'm sure Quiet Riot will be touring with Jizzy Pearl on lead vocals in a town near you soon enough. I'd actually like to see that.

Bad Reputation
Damn Yankees
Did the Night Ranger guy play keyboards? This sounds a little Night Ranger heavy on the keyboards. Saw them play with Bad Company at Poplar Creek. Poplar Creek is now a huge Sears building.

Body Rock
Fastaway
Hey, that's the dude from Katmandu! I covered a version of the Fastaway song "Say What You Will" for years without ever hearing the original. I did that with Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" as well. I was such a douche. I thought Shout at the Devil was the first rock record ever made.

I Wanna Be Your Man
L.A.Guns
What a weird L.A.Guns song to play. It's a bonus track from something. You already know exactly what it sounds like.
I'll bet Jizzy tears the ass out of this tune.
They look like sexy Asian girls dressed-up like naughty matadors.

Raise Your Hand
Bon Jovi
It's about time, huh? You'd think whoever programmed this station would have played some Bon Jovi by now. I'll bet he was holding back on the Bon Jovi on purpose. He's probably plotting his Bon Jovi strategically throughout every hour of the day. He's always wondering if it's too soon for another B.J. tune.

Don't Treat Me Bad
Firehouse
This song makes my brain go completely blank. I can only hear it from a far way away in a dark corner of my head, I'm curled up in a mud-like substance in my mind and from somewhere this song it coming, echoing off corners and flat surfaces like the hooves of a thousand devil horses breathing glitter and exhaling aqua-net into flaming clouds of KISStechnic flame pillars. You know what I mean.

Bad To Be Good
Poison
This has to be Poison at their best. It's hooky but not faggy (there is no breach of P.C. calling them faggy unless you're ignorant). It starts off really groovy and slow and then, all of a sudden, you're like, "this is Poison?" Further proof that blow-jobs cause premature hair loss. Look at poor David Lee Roth.

Simple Man
Junkyard
I've always hated these southern rockers and now hate them even more because I know they wrote a song called Simple Man. I was thinking maybe it would be a Skynyrd cover, 'cause you know, they're a southern rock band too and probably the most famous ever. But no. Junkyard borrowed a Skynyrd title. Fuck Junkyard.

Faster Pussycat's House of Pain is my sign to stop for now.

Rock.

Skwat

2008-05-15T15:48:00.000-07:00

I'm about 78% sure I'm gonna silkscreen this next one for a portfolio exchange I have coming up soon (18" x 14"):

Odd Private Trivia:
Look at his hands, they are exactly identical, mirror-images of each other. That's 'cause once I scan the drawing into the computer, I'll sometimes choose the best hand, copy it, and paste it backwards on the other arm.

Update (Friday morning):

Here's the official color separations for the print. Four colors.

2008-05-08T16:13:00.000-07:00

Looks like I'm going back to school next Fall.

Crazy.

Just absolutely crazy.

Delicious

2008-04-30T18:17:00.000-07:00

I'm involved in this public print thing. The Delicious Design League is in town and we have visiting grad students from Bloomington Indiana working too. Today I drew a bunch of stuff in a room full of people drawing bunches of stuff. All that stuff is gonna get printed on shirts under a tent. We're just gonna frenzy on the stack and grab whatever somebody just printed and print over it. Of course, somebody's gonna print over that as well.

Heads

2008-04-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

The entire underside of my right hand is stained shimmery, silver gray from graphite.

Breakin' Out the Pencil.

2008-03-19T14:51:00.000-07:00

I was getting so sick of printing solid, black silhouette figures. This boy needs some values in my life. I missed playing with light.

Some written commentary on the show:

2008-03-12T10:12:00.000-07:00

Matt Pazzol had a show of drawings and prints at two locations in Athens simultaneously. The larger drawings which were displayed in Perks Coffee House were my favorites. His darkly whimsical figures posed in an exhaustive array of unabashed anything-goes sexual attitudes can be read as a hermetically conceived kama sutra for the new millennium. The figures are stacked in compromising relationships upon each other, their black silhouettes overlapping to create velvety black forms contrasted upon expanses of white. The ambiguously gendered androgynous or hermaphroditic beings are characterized primarily by their genitals, by mounds of paltry buttocks and thin straps for limbs. Most of the personages wear nifty, pointy booties upon their undersized feet, and virtually all the figures are bald, their heads often squared. The most recent and most successful pieces contain stylized clouds of swirling mist, a layer of patterned and subtly shifting grey tones which fetchingly complicate the field of visual information while contributing a suggestion of metaphysical content.

written by Mateo Galvano

And in my researching images for clouds, I ran across these.

Print print print print print again.

2008-02-20T14:06:00.000-08:00

So I'm scratching on the swirly smoke pattern and just doing a nice dark blend roll.

I've always been the proponent of a good Neapolitan Color Scheme.

Print print print print print

2008-02-19T12:56:00.000-08:00

And by this point it's pretty ambitious. 30 inches high, 15 inches wide.
1 black screen
1 tan(?) screen
1 pink with an orange blend roll
and
1 50% transparent grey screen

The swirly pattern reverses itself inside the top figure. I wouldn't lie about a thing like that. In the figure, the grey is a misty line pattern, but outside the figure the grey is only filling the negative space so the lines still look white.

Registration will be difficult. Lining it all up. It's gonna be a rough time to get right with art. I think it will be worth it.

Four-thousand and twenty square inches of work.

2008-02-06T12:18:00.000-08:00

I've been blowing-off the whole process of taking pictures of the shows for a couple days now. Mostly because after framing and hanging all the work I got really sick of being in it's proximity. You'd never tell from these pictures, but the work hung well.

The reception's next week. You should come. I've got an extra room. . .

I gave myself a week off from making anything new. I also started working a "real" job for the first time in three months. I covered half a dishwashing shift for someone last monday. I actually had a $34 paycheck in my box at work.

I'm trying to figure out how to add water to the newest prints. Who knows? It might work out.

Here's a copy of the statement that hangs with the show:

Matt Pazzol
Untitled Exhibition*
February 1st - 29th
Reception:
February 13th, 7pm

The Union

This series of prints originally appeared in the book Air in the Paragraph Line illustrating each of the twenty-three short stories contained within. The initial computer-derived designs were stripped of their text and hand printed for the Man-Shaped Animals portfolio that was first displayed in October 2007 at the Frontiers in Printmaking conference in Normal Illinois. The original hand-bound portfolio, complete with cutout silhouette placeholders, now resides in Hollywood California.

$50 each, framed

Perks Coffee House

These five drawings represent a series of six pieces produced in Kolkata during a two-week stay at Artspace India in November and December of 2007. These images disrupt the featureless interior of the silhouette forms used in the Man-Shaped Animals portfolio by introducing equally featureless transparent entities.

$400 each, framed

The single print represents the next evolution in the series of Man-shapes. The Missed-prints flavor the figural voids of the man-shaped animals and their translucent companions with a semi-transparent "mist". This haze subsists to further discriminate between the solid black space of the original figures and the insubstantial presence of their luciferous shadows.

$300 framed

*These pieces are untitled. Consistent with the featureless nature of their presentation, they remain linguistically uncategorized as individual objects. Like all shadows, they are known only by the place in time that their shapes fill.

And, ya know, one of these would probably look great in your bathroom.

After all, I'm a public servant.

2008-01-30T12:14:00.000-08:00

For some reason I didn't realize the 8" x 5.5" cards would be so huge. Luckily, I got them free on a promotional deal and only had to pay for shipping.

I already sold a piece and the show's not even up!

I keep trying to remind myself that art openings are all about listening to what people have to say. Every failure in art is preceded by someone who told you exactly what would happen . . . and focused listening is not my specialty. I'm more of a random babbler. I hear key words, out-of-context, and my mind reals to connote them in a ridiculous manner to something that sounds similar. Sure I'm amusing, but I need to pay more attention to the "audience".

I took the day off yesterday.

2008-01-28T07:25:00.000-08:00

Day of rest and all.

I'm waiting for my show cards to arrive in the mail. It's always so cool to get a box of professionally printed material with my stuff on it. . . mostly because I didn't have to print it. I still have to design the back sticker. It's the part with all the show info, dates, times, receptions, etc. You gotta sticker that, as opposed to having it printed, because that way you can use the same cards for different shows.

If anyone wants a card in the mail, email me your address (stupidtool@gmail.com).

In the meantime, I've been posting a lot of work here. There's a favorites section low on the page that has a bunch of great art by other people on the site.

And how 'bout some high school stoner art? This is 16 years old:

Sketching out some layer ideas on the computer for the next print.

2008-01-25T06:58:00.000-08:00

Update, Jan 26th:

So here's the finished layers.

Gonna eat something lunchy and go print these up at the shop. One black screen, and one grey at about 50% transparency.

Still got a week before the show hangs.

Almost Framous (yeah, sorry about that)

2008-01-22T12:30:00.000-08:00

8 sheets of BFK, 30" x 22"
6 cut mats, 27.5/8" X 19.5"
6 frames, 31" x 23"
2 clear, fabric rulers, 29"
1 t-square, 49"
1 ruler, 12"
1 cutting mat, 35" x 23"
1 x-acto knife
1 pair scissors
1 butter knife
1 dust-buster
1 roll paper towel
1 roll linen hinging tape
1 spray-bottle windex
and of course, a sharpie marker.

I have so much framed work laying around my house, it's ridiculous. I haven't worked a proper job in three months. I've got 28 pieces going up in two separate shows, booked a block away from each other. They will come together like Voltron to form a dual-optic, art-hole in the fabric of space.

And the Arthole says. "The Solid Black expression of the systaltic understanding we call awareness. Structured order and it's relationship to other structural relationships in order to express meaning or emotion."

But can a Blackness really ever just be a solid. Solid doesn't really happen in our universe. Even the densest matter has vast amounts of space inside of it.

I suppose you could argue that this vast space is probably black.

The new prints are a black silkscreen run (of course) with thin, almost
transparent, grey layers of mist. I really like how the white lines
move into the figures and integrate the different layers into these
weird, combined spatial planes. I love the hands and limbs that
embrace the mist layer. I guess all those carved, lattice screens in
the desert did more for me than I thought. It also kinda justifies
all the time I spend staring at my reflection in the window when I'm
outside smoking.

I love a good word-play thrown in, so all the new mist prints are titled
as "missed" actions. Stuff that has escaped your realm of
reminiscence. I guess it's more a representation of still feeling the
flavor of memories you no longer possess.

How stories felt,
how rules of forgotten games informed your youthful models for social
interaction,
the last of the small victories that added up to one large one,
forgetting to remember dreams. . .

2008-01-19T19:31:00.000-08:00

I've been busy making prints, cause someday, when I grow up, I want to be an honest-for-goodness artist.

I think I'm gonna print this one just like above, all sideways and intimate, even thought the original idea had the whole bodies:

And then there's these two:

See Ya'll later.

Alleppey

2008-01-09T06:29:00.000-08:00

Driving from the Arabian Sea to an Estate House in the tea and Cardamon fields of Vagamon.

It's hard, with the state of the roads (or lack of them), to take a picture out the car window. The whole time Muni was our driver (days and days and days . . . long trips, too) he only had two CD's in the car which we would listen to endlessly.

Joe Cocker's Greatest Hits
and
Some random Moby compilation

I think tomorrow will be a post of cats and puppies we met along the way.

Afterasuarus

2008-01-08T09:01:00.000-08:00

Started the immense job of cataloging pictures from the trip.

Hindurobics

2007-12-24T06:31:00.000-08:00

30 hours on two planes. There was a 15 minutes break from crampy, knee-hugging seating postures where we ran, full speed, through London's Heathrow International Maze of Never-ending Hallways. I didn't have my shoes on because I had to push my way through customs and the time was just that close (after two months in India, where lines for anything are non-existent, I am a premiere pusher). Running, sock-footed, on the moving escalator-style walkways. Using my arms to push forward on my back-pack straps so the load behind me wouldn't jostle and slam against my scoliosised airplane spine. I wonder how long it takes the muscles to atrophy. My legs are still throbbing and in the real world I'm a disciplined runner. Once in Jodphur I even had the inclination to strip down naked in my marble-floored hotel room and jog-in-place in the rank heat of the humid room until the cold water in the shower wouldn't matter any more.

I had also hiked through the tea and cardamom fields of Vagamon. Impossible hilled country side arranged like a blown-up microchip with Green crops of tea and spice. You can't even find that town on the gigantic map of India I brought to my mom so she could place me over the months. The ground jagged up at 80 degree hills that I visually measured to be 250 cows high (from the one I could see grazing in the distance you could fit a stack of 10 on my pinky nail). The sun in the high elevation was ruthless. It reddened my head and neck into my first and only sun-burn during the entire two months in the desert, on the beaches of the Arabian sea and along the riverbanks and rice paddies of the Southern Jungle.

Constantly, there were stairs. In the City of the Dead the red stoned steps climbed at anything but a straight line. The individual steps felt like they were devised to consent only to the stride of a crippled limper with one leg three inches shorter than the other carrying a pile of driftwood and rotted boat planks on his head towards the burning ghats to incinerate his deceased. He is not out of breath. He is chanting.

Every open sewer system is a teeter-totter of concrete slabs hovering over a million peoples worth of daily waste products. Every step feels like a dangerous gamble as each sheet of rock and mortor slides under your weight and shifts to a new position one foot above the sound of flowing septis. You can feel the inevitability that if your foot went through your shoe and sock would wet warm with the seeping matter that would cause immediate insanity, hepatitis, incontinence and infection upon contact.

Walking, climbing, running weighed down by two months worth of backpacked lifestyle in the Heat.

I think what some people mistake as a spiritual Asian vibe of mystic self-discovery is really just the palpable, throbbing energy of two billion peoples' tearing thigh muscles reveberating in waves across the landscape and ringing your pelvic bone like an ivory forked tuning key.

*

The luggage is untracked as of two minutes ago. Three days and the airline still hasn't even gotten to the step of running the computerized tracker over the coded tag to see where the bags are coming from and going to. I couldn't even imagine the mountain of unchecked luggage at the airport right now. It must be thousands of bags, maybe more. Somewhere in that pile are my belongings.

At least I'm no longer living out of a suitcase.

Clocking Out!

2007-12-06T19:55:00.000-08:00

Two straight weeks of drawing here at the Residency. Sitting in front of the tv watching the one bad English channel and cramping up my hand into a massive knot.

First it's the out line of the siloutte after figuring out where all the overlaps will be.

Then about two hours later it's filled in. It takes two hours because you have to constantly move around and change directions so that the paper doesn't get too wet in any one spot and buckle. It also gives the black a nice velvety look that the silkscreens don't have.

Then about two more hours of filling in the overlaps with the most even, light pencil layer you could imagine. It's harder than you would think to do a wide flat grey with a mechanical pencil. It's usually harder than I would think too.

Then I do this really time-consuming faded line around the clear shapes. When they are done, the inside white of the clear shapes looks like a completely different white than the white of the paper. Who likes optic tricks?

I got six done that I like and will take home with me. They are already packed and safe to go. Frames are in the mail and they go up in the gallery in Febuary or May or something like that. I'm getting pretty good at deadlines. Who's all grown up?

I probably did another six that all, somehow or another, got buffooned-up and abandoned, either right before or after they were done.

Melissa engraved 8 woodblocks.

Her inspiration was rupees and victorian table-setting charts.

hese are a bit larger.

Now it's time for the "vacation" part of our trip. We fly south after two nights in Kolkata for some good beachy relaxation. We may not have too much internet connection, so if I don't get another chance, have a good holiday.

Come to Matty

2007-12-05T03:53:00.000-08:00

Whenever I get a little homesick, this makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside:

More photos.

2007-11-29T03:42:00.000-08:00

I never know what do with my shoes.

We lived in this giant cake for a week.

This is the god of golden spray paint who watches over elephants made of porridge.

This flower was as big as my torso.

Outside the Taj.

Indian medicine cabinet.

Check out the biker with the water cans.

View of the blue city from Gala, the monkey temple.

Boats on the Ganges.

There was a monkey living in this boat.

The bookstore didn't have the second Dune novel.

Pictures of invisible gods.

Bathroom walls.

Feeding the camera.

2007-11-28T02:05:00.000-08:00

Tea Drinkers taking a work break.

The color blue keeps Djinns and mosquitos away.

For when you run out of candles.

Another dude about to ask me if I want some "golden quality" hash.

Makes you wonder why the power surges every 20 minutes.

These doors are ram-proofed from elephants.

This spot is probably more comfortable than my bed at the guesthouse.

Right after this picture was taken these kids asked me if I wanted some hash.

Indian gay bar.

You can buy hash here.

The barbed wire keeps the monkeys and pterodactyles away.

These dogs are playing dead because they're afraid of white people.

These things should come with passenger helmets.

Juicey teats.