Recent Object of the Week Picks

Ah Costco- big stretches of polished concrete, huge white walls withe pools of light on them and reach-ins stocked with refrigerated goods- all just waiting to be set down in oil paint.
The sample table on the left has some waffle samples sprayed with a crown of whipped cream.

Here is a new piece that will soon hang at the L.A. Art Show with Arcadia Gallery of NY. Though somewhat modest in scope and subject matter I am trying here the beginnings how I hope to expand in my execution of various elements. Huh? What? Sorry about the fancy sentence there – sounded “artistic.” What I mean is this – look at that bat in the foreground, bottom/ right. I am trying to find excuses for a more dismissive accounting of things that are further down the ladder – relying more on context. There are so many historical examples of this being done so well that it’s about time I step up to the plate and take some swings. I also had a great deal of time with this piece in order to figure things out. I think that bat down there was done 5 or 6 times over a couple months, on and off, and I soon hope to attempt things like this with more ambitious content. There are other examples of this all over the painting but you get the idea.

An aside – when are folks going to get over the idea of art with deadlines? The idea is insane but no one brings it up because “everyone does it.”

Sheesh.

Anyway, have been wanting to work with bats for some time too. And they might show up again but this was fun.

And the little girl is my niece, Lina. She’s a crack up. About 7 years old. We just watched Star Wars for the first time. She asked me if I liked the movie and, when I said, “yes,” she informed me that there is a ride at Disneyland that I would enjoy.

Several years ago the euphemistic term “Job Creators” began to pop up with alarming frequency, particularly in the conservative media. Suddenly evil millionaire CEO’s, all the creepy bosses you ever had and even Mitt Romney were reconfigured as saviors of western capitalism, the only folks standing between a truly exceptional America and the smoking ravages of European style socialism. What to do? Well, I figured I’d make me a landscape featuring some of the actual job creators themselves. First off, I needed some job creators. I found a slew of candidates on a humorous Canadian website called “Sexy Executives.” After auditioning hundreds of prospects, I settled on five finalists (all male, maxi-male actually) who got to appear in the drawing as the behemoth, golem like anti-Rushmore heads. Next, I needed a narrative angle and title. I got to thinking of the films I enjoyed as a child such as LOST WORLD and the original JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, as well as the terrific DC comic series STAR SPANGLED WAR STORIES, which always featured brave American bomber, tank or PT boat crews who found themselves, inexplicably, waging war against deadly prehistoric creatures from some lost world. Really cool. So I called my picture IN THE VALLEY OF THE JOB CREATORS. I then began to fill it will countless, toiling little people waging a variety of sisyphean tasks, including fighting off large creatures, to little or no avail. Finally, I added a lot of text, most of it absurd motivational aphorisms culled from self help and business publications, as well as a smattering of terms lifted from election ads, talk radio and the work of Ayn Rand. I worked on the drawing off and on throughout 2012 and finished it just before election day. I don’t really think of this drawing as political, but rather a rousing adventure filled journey into a landscape of the absurd.

A re-build of a re-build. This painting, in this final incarnation, started in the late summer, was completed at the end of October. My task to myself was to create a smaller but even more successful version of Northern Landscape from last year. I wanted to create a wet and rugged place which would contain elements embodying much of the landscape in this corner of northern England. Northern Landscape went off to its new owner so soon after I had painted it and I was never allowed to live with it. I dare say that the same will happen to this. (First) Fall, the title,is a play on the three obvious elements in the painting: Autumn (Fall), (water)fall(s) and the first fall of snow, which, co-incidentally, happened on the day this was hung in the gallery, just four days after it was completed. Less obvious perhaps are the quarry waste heaps and hints at ruinous buildings, also a feature of our National Park. As always, it is all COMPLETELY invented.

StarbucksMcDonald’s- they just redid this place- a McDonald’s in Sherman Oaks, the renovation made it seem less like a McDonald’s to me so I thought it would be okay to paint. I’d avoided McDonald’s as subject matter because it’s so pervasive that I thought it might be too obviously the type of place that interests me.
I like this angle of it, although the hallway that goes all the way to the back is fiction- there’s a coffee section there that blocks off the view of the deep fryer- something I couldn’t bear to leave out.

This self-portrait was something I thought about every morning for a year. I painted it in the bathroom. As I was brushing my teeth I observed the way the cold outdoor light came down on my head from the little window above the mirror, and at various times of the day it shifted in very subtle ways that attracted the painter in me. This light contrasted with the warm interior light coming down the hallway and illuminating my form from the back. That light struck me as carrying a metaphor of time passing, of some sort of ancestral passageway. And the shirt? Hell, I’m a snappy dresser.