Thursday, June 28, 2007

mongolian wrestlers: stage 3

eh. it got smooved out. i tried to avoid it (see pt1 and pt2), but then i started using my only sable hair which i inadvertently inherited from albert when he moved (thanks!)... with a little bit of white and stand oil i was in cross-eyed, blending bliss. it's a bit murky but with a few more sessions and a pair of nipples i think he will be good to go. i also seem to have lost his right eyeball. the shawl and hat are part of the traditional garb the mongolian wrestlers don for their matches in either red or blue. the sport is very simple kind of sumo-like, but their outfits... hot damn! soooo gaultier circa 1997.

crap... he looks like an oversized baby with man-tits, doesn't he.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

i love i love i love lori nix

i just randomly discovered this photographer on the world wide web, and i RUBS it. I have always been a fan of dioramas... something about the false environments and the unnatural lighting. in each of her photographs, the models are meticulously hand-crafted and documented to create extraordinary pictures depicting an abandoned scene and/or evidence of deterioration, not to mention her fantastical photo skeelz. check out her website for all the deets. total awesomeness to the max. speaking of max, he's in ny for the summer!

click click click!

Friday, June 22, 2007

dinner wih friends...

there are very few things better in life than a long sloshy dinner on the patio of your friend's delicious restaurant on a warm summer night where the waitstaff tells you your group has precedence and the chefs are your homies who sit and eat and drink with you while being as concerned about the satisfaction of your meal as if you were frank bruni himself.

silent h

homies

Thursday, June 21, 2007

so good. i hate him.

alex kanevsky. so ridiculous. i love his treatment of negative spaces. the entire image for that matter looks like an abstraction up close, but photorealistic from afar. gawwwd. it's a painting of a damn plant and i can't stop drooling over it. who does that!? what a douchebag. if i ever see him i'm gonna punch him in the back of the neck.

new drawring

i'm creating some new friends...

jorge, pen on vellum, 12x18

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

what i'm attempting to read...

so, i have this problem with books. i can't seem to ever just read one and move onto the next. i buy books all the time, never read them, then decide all of a sudden that i need to read all of them at once. i honeslty haven't been reading books cover to cover for very long. i know there are people who claim Oscar Wilde and James Joyce as their bathroom reads from when they were sitting on the plastic throne of their potty-training days, but i somehow managed to fly through english classes with the perfectly crafted tool of "skimming" hooked onto my belt. i have definitely encountered some wonderfully engrossing reads, the kind that kept me up at nights and had my head in cloud 9 for days, the ones that are so ingenius they make you feel as creative and witty as a pidgeon turd... nope this problem is more of a testament to the severity of my short attention span, my penchant for losing things for periods of time, and the constant fluxes in my multiple personality disorder.
i'm reading 4 books at the same time right now, (a couple of which i started around mid-2006, but lost them to the dark crevices and underbelly of my bed until they were valiently rescued one night upon accidental discovery) and they are all amazing and you should read them. maybe not all at the same time. maybe two would be ok.

1. Valis, Philip K. Dick - too. much. acid. this book is insane. gnosticism, suicide, alter ego, a dead cat, god, jesus, rays of pink light that beam info about humanity and salvation into your brain. i attempted to read it a few years back and decided i didn't have enough of the cragees in me to even begin to decipher this book, but now... oh, but now...

2. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez - i know. i'm late on this one. i'm sure you've all read it and felt your hearts swell and your nads shrivel. beautiful. makes you want a canopy bed, a victorian tea set and a tragic young latin love.

3. Blood Curdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, H.P. Lovecraft - a collection of short stories. i mean really. how can you go wrong with titles like The Rats in the Wall and The Whisperer of Darkness? Lovecraft's ouevre is complicated to explain without references of d&d-esque culture, but aside from all the pimply-faced demons of underworld lords he might have spawned around the world it's his strange personal life and his morbid outlook on humanity that make his stories that much more delectable.

4. The Conspiracy of Art, Jean Baudrillard - i can see the eyes rolling, but this is one i had actually wanted to finish in school but never got around to it. a bit more enthused than his perfunctory counterparts, his cultural critiques and theoretical writings on semiotics and "hyperreality" (like totally awesome and like relevent to like postmodern times) were standard reads for the budding art student, but with the "conspiracy of art" he had perceptively fucked himself of his revered status as the reluctant art critic when he announced that the art world had been reduced to a load of crap that fueled consumerism, that art had "lost the desire for illusion, and instead raises everything to aesthetic banalty" and post warhol contemporary art was "striving for nullity when already null and void"... but at some point his declarations of conspiracy became a vehicle for counterreaction and therefore it was ok to call art art again, but in reality this self-defacation was another spoke in the art-as-revolutionary bandwagon which beaudrillard was criticizing in the first place, no? huh?? yeah, i dunno. i'm only on page 25 and trying to see how many times i can necessarily say "art" in one paragraph. so far it's pretty fascinating. like watching a dog incessantly chase its tail.

Friday, June 15, 2007

west coast vs east coast

so different, but oh how i love them both...

long beach airport. east river bar. dumaine st. domino sugar factory

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

bicycle film festival

this is a piece i did for the bicycle film festival.


Oh, I'm Sorry You Feel That Way, pen on vellum and acetate, 10"x13"

Monday, June 11, 2007

chelsea girls


i went to see a screening of warhol's "chelsea girls" on saturday at moma's "to save and protect" film preservation festival. knowing quite well that i would've lost most volunteers with "oh, by the way, it's 3.5 hours long", i went and trudged through it by myself. i had seen some of his films in school, mostly of the more fartsy kind like "sleep" and a handful of his screen tests. having read the warhol bible "popism" a number of times as a teen in the 90s when i was a tad bit too young to be gen-x but glamorized tales of drug use and the underground were prevelantly displayed before me, most of these characters had become shrouded over the years by the mysticisms of their notoriety, and i was generally disappointed to find that they were mostly portrayed as indiscernable pawns and annoying as fuck. undoubtedly there's also the re-hollywoodization of these warhol products to blame, which makes it all become more and more convoluted as generations pass without necessarily building on the mystique of that movement but rather exploiting it's most insignificant elements and capitalizing off the regurgitated trends of that era. of course anyone's proper response would be to say that the venerable king of camp had planted the seeds for that very purpose and would have revelled in the cheapness of its outcome.
the film was mostly unbearable yet fascintaing as expected. i wish i had refreshed my memory a bit beforehand cause my own superficilly charged excitement was subdued while straining to remember who everyone was. bridget "polk" berlin and ondine were the most engaging. buried in their drug/alcohol fueled psycho babble, hints of intellect and witty estimations of their surroundings were poignant. mary waranov (i didn't know it was her until after the movie. thanks pastor!) was outstanding, overdramatic, beautiful and embarassingly cheesy while the rest of the girls (ingrid superstar and international velvet) played their parts as twiggy, spaced-out accessories to the scenes. the film was also bookended by nico, opening with a 20 minute b/w shot of her cutting her bangs in the kitchen and ends three and a half hours later with her weeping as bold swirls of light and projected patterns flash across her chiseled face while drony music a la velvet underground plays in the background (more cheese!). there are of course days worth of conversations to be had about the content, it's cultural significance, or maybe none at all... but all i could really remember feeling in the end was the burning sensation of my poor bladder holding in an entire bottle of vitamin water that i had chugged right before the film... hungover from the previous night's drinking binge and idiotic revelry in new york of course... who am i to judge.

Friday, June 8, 2007

"Nothing Gold Can Stay"

This was a piece done for Stay Gold Gallery's "Outsiders" show back in February. The theme was to make a piece in relation to either the movie of the same name or Robert Frost's poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay." I chose the latter. This is a terrible picture, btw. i'll replace it later...

**sold to peter weisman

doodles...

a tricycle (my mom loves drawings of bikes), office doodle, my little brother at the height of his mischievousness. these look like three different people drew them... hmmm. cybil.



mongolian wrestlers: stage 2

ok they don't look that much different. highlights and shadows were detailed and a face appeared, but after about an hour these guys started looking like jessica simpson's overly tanned boobs. i couldn't take it anymore. stay tuned... more next week.

click for detail!

Monday, June 4, 2007

works in progress

i wanted to post this up for observation. it's layer one and in a HORRIBLE state. thought it'd be interesting to show a before and after since i haven't painted figures in this kind of looser style in a while. kinda like on tyra when they do a jc penny/bobbi brown makeover on a charlotte russe/wet n wild victim, but with a painting. and with two bulky dudes chillin in their skivvies. more to come...



not sure if i'm done with this one yet... it's been a year in the making. and yes, they are bleeding. they are made from flesh. it's an exercise in visual signs and perceptions. balloons have a constant singular quality: they are generally filled with helium which is lighter than air, yet the fact that they are made of flesh and filled with blood would make them perceivably impossible to float. maybe the blood wouldn't be necessary if these were not painted on such a textured background that could've passed as an, albeit bad, abstract painting in and of itself, but rather a much slicker, cleaner surface where the skin colored/textured balloons would be the only subject and enough to throw off the viewer's perception. But... i am a known fan of the dramatic so...

Severed Ties, oil on canvas, 12x18