Art & Process

This

Ayin EsLeave a comment

I was working in my EyeBook yesterday, the one where I write in on one side and draw on the other side. I talked about this in a previous blog entry here. I haven’t been able to get a good/usable sketch out of it for a while now, but the writing has been very therapeutic.

So yesterday I was writing about how I felt that the series I have been working on is pretty complete – in terms of it being a basic body of satisfying imagery, palette, shapes and forms where I can now continue to communicate from – for a little while at least – even though I’m just at 12 in the series.

A lot of artists like to name their series. I suppose I have too; “Dan,” “Pattern Paintings,” etc. but those are kinda obvious. I think I will just call this new series, This.

The only one painting I may want to spring board from is the pink one. There are still complexities in that one that I still can’t manage to let go of. Whether it’s the narrative, the painterly-ness, or the autobiographical/narcissism, I’m not sure which, but I know that I would miss nixing that sort of painting all together, which is why it is going to stay in the series. It has to be there to mix and mold, and evolve with the rest of these fuckers.

I suppose I should feature the last two pieces that I finished in this series in this blog post, since I don’t remember if I did or not. Let me check first….

Okay, I already featured Survivor, but I never showed Rabbi Says. The one that happened to take the longest for whatever reason. It must have been painting around all those letters.  So here it is:

rabbisaysdetail

Rabbi Says, 2013. 24 x 24 inches. Oil on birch panel.

Shit, did I talk about this before? The quote is taken from the late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (Reb Moshe). And it’s just part of a whole quote. The painting says:

There are many times when a person feels that he cannot move forward because a dark cloud hangs over him. One should know, however, that nothing can stop him! Sometimes one can make a path through the cloud…

The whole quote is actually a comment on a section of the Torah. It’s hard to explain, but it’s about a troubled rabbi not being able to enter a holy place because of a dark cloud, and this seems to keep happening to him, while his solutions had been: waiting for others to pull him through, waiting for the black cloud to go away, etc. And Reb Moshe’s comments were:

There are many times when a person feels that he cannot move forward because a dark cloud hangs over him. One should know, however, that nothing can stop him! Sometimes one can make a path through the cloud, i.e., he can navigate through his troubles without becoming embroiled in them. This is the preferable course, for who knows how he will emerge if he gets caught up in a struggle?

If one cannot go through the cloud, he should look for a path that has no obstacles (just as Moshe waited for the cloud to depart). However, if he can neither go through the cloud nor find another path, he should push forward anyway with a firm conviction that Hashem will take him by the hand and lead him through.

So, I wanted to honor at least part of this view of Reb Moshe’s comment. I thought it had many important elements that confirmed what it was (for me) in being Jewish – ambition, faith in self as equal as faith in God or the universe, yet it not mattering which, and tenacity to survive (not leaving your life to fate).

And okay, so I wasn’t going to go into this, but I figured if two people already asked me this, two more people might ask me, and so on. And maybe I will stir up shit, I don’t know. It’s only how I feel and I can’t help that!

I was asked why I made the rabbi so silly looking. We all know that I make silly cartoon characters anyway, but twice I received the comment that it looked as if I was making fun of him, and this is correct. But it is not I that is making fun of the Rabbi, or the strange Jews in the black hats, or the Jews in general. It is not me who sees the Jew with the big nose and a scary face, or the orthodox with shards of bad, archaic teeth, or Jews throughout time with their hands out for your money while entertaining you, while balancing on a stick, or making you laugh. Nope. Not me. Maybe it’s me who is tired of that though.

I see those “funny Jews” that study day in and day out coming back to the community that wants to listen to them, give the kind of insight you just can’t get anywhere else.

Anyway, back to the studio.

Oh, speaking of the studio, I added new pics in the studio section of my site. Take a look!

How Thouse Thou Blog?

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I keep telling myself that I will start writing a new blog post at least twice a week. How do people do that, I wonder? Especially working artists. Especially working artists that are also writing a book, with friends and a life, that go to art shows, that have partners, that like to garden and watch a bit of TV, go to a couple of movies a month and have a dog?

If you have the answer to these questions, please reply, or email me. I’d like to know.

Since I have blogged, or rather, wrote the little review about the Avenue 50 show, Seven Beauties, on the Huffington Post, I have finished a couple of new paintings. Perhaps one of them I finished before that, called In Training. I mentioned it in a previous blog post. I was nearly finished with it then, but I had to allow that yellow to dry before I went back and cleaned up those black outlines. So here it is finished:

intraining

This is like the rest of the series: 24 x 24 inches, Oil on birch panel.

Yellow takes forever to dry, as I am learning – so does orange! I am still working on Rabbi Says. So in the meantime, I finished up another piece that I now know is my most favorite in the whole series! It only took two days, but I thought about it for a month. I even want it to be the cover for my book, if that’s possible. It’s called, Survivor: 24 x 24 inches, oil on birch panel:

survivor

Still wet, I took these and about 4 others with me to Shulamit Gallery yesterday down at Venice Beach. We  had been trying to set up a meeting for a few weeks, actually for a studio visit, but that’s not going to happen until July. So, they asked me if I could come there with a few originals and paper works along with a few of my artists’ books. I would up staying there for nearly three hours. It went very well and we all know each other a little better. What will become of it, I do not know because I’m not absolutely sure I want to be in a gallery again just yet.

But maybe by the time they offer me something, IF they offer me something, I will be.

In the meantime, I just feel so good about painting right now, I’m just going to keep on going on my merry way. I am loving this path.

Speaking of the book, I finally got back to working on it just a bit. I even interviewed a couple people from my past and I think that is going to help me a little in writing this because we don’t always remember things exactly the way they happened. I probably will only use a fraction of these interviews, but I think it’s good to reconnect, let people know they might appear in the manuscript, and in what context – especially if I am going to be making fun of them.

No one gets made fun of more than me, and that I can guarantee all of them!

One of them was an ex-boyfriend. He is significant for a few of reasons. First of all, he pretty much turned me on to oil painting. The relationship was a whirlwind: very unlike me to move in with someone so fast, and then it ended as fast as it flew together, yet I learned a lot about art: the application of it, a little bit about the sales of it, the dichotomy of it, and some of the hard lessons. I think he was the first person I dated outside of my own circles and I learned a lot about sharing, compromise, tolerance, acceptance, all in such a short amount of time. At the time, I am not sure I even knew I was learning this. Ha!

I also am importing in a shit load of data from, get this, on-line forum dialog!  I have typed more about my viewpoints on art than I have even talked about to any one person. So now I have to weed through all of that stuff and use it where it’s usable.

I was also lucky enough to make a couple of sales in the past couple weeks so I could get more panels – small ones – so in the next couple months I will have more affordable works on hand, which I think is smart.

That’s all for now.

Spring Newsletter Addendum

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Yesterday, late afternoon, I sent out my Spring Newsletter. It was the first time I ever used Mail Chimp, which is an email marketing/list manager. There were some good things and not so good things about it, but even worse, I was so impatient to send out the letter in the new template, I neither proofread it or edited it!

Now I am mortified.

First of all, in my Google account, my contacts are beautifully organized. I have my Newsletter List: People I know want to receive my seasonal newsletters because they specifically signed up for them, or I personally asked them if they wanted to be on the list – and they agreed. Then I have my SoCal List: Local People I promote to when I am having a significant exhibition in the Los Angeles Area; my Promote List: Galleries and news media that might like to know about a press release that relates to art, particularly mine; No Spam: People that do not want any mail from me unless it is personal; Family: A group of top priority people that are, or might as well be, family; Book Promote: BookArts people that I can promote to when I have a new handmade book to pedal.

But, when I tried to import my Newsletter List into the Monkey Mail, it pulled in every contact I ever had. So, I have annoyed every contact on all my other lists. Shame, shame, SHAME on me!

Now, for the actual writing in the newsletter, WHAT AN EMBARRASSMENT! I probably started three different chains of thought that I never even finished. I just left them floating out in space like some kind of airhead. THEN, there was reference to spin art that I DID edit out, yet I referred to it later in the paragraph, giving the reader no sign or signal as to why I would mention LSD or “spinning,” which only made me look like a complete ding dong!

What I meant to say there was: what if there was an artist that created circular spin splatter paintings, and that was all he did for 20 years? Every day,  he went into his studio and created these paintings that all looked extremely similar to one another and he sold every single one of them for a large amount of money. Enough money to pay for his house, his car, his wife’s, and put his three kids through college. A LOT of money. Do you think he is doing these paintings for himself, the money, the process, his audience, the father that never loved him, some or all of the above?

That was really the question I was posing.

What I didn’t share then afterwards, was my own personal strife, outcome, realization, etc. regarding the same question: Who am I trying to please? And all this time before I recently pondered this question, who was I trying to please?

Wow, so many people other than me. Mostly, the made-up God in my head. Do you have one of those? In psychology it is called the Super Ego. That was usually my problem, and not just with art.

Now, it must be me. Id, id, id, id, id! I want to paint what I want to see. Period. Life is too short to try for anything else. That million dollar idea…what if I didn’t like how it looked? It would probably look stupid. Look at all the other million dollar ideas out there. Would you want that over your fireplace? There are very few I would want to own. I know what I like and I know I can make it, so there it is.

Now, I know there were some other points in that newsletter I forgot to tie up, but I’m starting to get spaced out again. So, until I can just trade my brain in for something better, see you on the flip-flop.

Art and Madness, Jews and Sadness

Ayin Es4 Comments

Let’s see, what the hell have I been doin’ that I can’t write a measly blog post for the last several days? And how can I be tired?

I know I have been painting. I am nearly done with number 6, which is now called, In Training.

 intrainingip

Took a while. Now I have to let that yellow oil paint dry before I can go back in there with the black and tighten up my mistakes. There were plenty.

You saw the black one already (King of This, AKA Number 4), so I can’t use that one as an excuse.  Number 5, Rabbi Says, will take the longest time of all because I am painting around words, but I do not think I have even shown the preliminary drawing for that one – or anything about that one yet. Okay, so here it is so far. It doesn’t look like much yet:

rabbisayaip1

So far I have done the black, the white and the purple. It really doesn’t look very spectacular does it? I have a kind of half sketch/half Photoshop deal. I’ll pull that in…

rabbisays4

That gives a better idea, I mean, without the painterly feel, because I lay the paint on pretty thick. You should see my art in person sometime.

I went through a lot of hemming and hawing with this fucking thing too. The cartoony rabbi, should he be there or not? Should he be there like that or not? I tried numerous alternatives. The rabbi was represented differently: as a black hat on a stick, as a hei, a hei with a hat, with and without peyos (the little curly hairs on the sides of, usually, an Orthodox Jewish man’s head), a more “proper” cartoon – that one would consider more “respectful” of the rabbi, yet it’s not about The Rabbi in particular exactly, and it’s not about Judaism either!

However, I am referring to Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. THE Reb Moshe (1895-1986). Descendant of writers of the Talmud, Father of North American Jewish Law and blah blah blah…

Now, I have a big problem with authority on anything. That’s just how I am. But part of being Jewish is to question, to study, to learn, and to be a scholar as much as possible. Reb Moshe would have told us that. Even the meaning of Israel, which Jacob was renamed for, is “one who wrestles with God.” It is supposed to be a struggle. So I chose to leave the funny looking rabbi the way he was! And still, I struggle with it.

He is spouting out part of an actual quote of Rabbi Feinstein’s, which says, “There are many times when a person feels that he cannot move forward because a dark cloud hangs over him. One should know, however, that nothing can stop him! Sometimes one can make a path through the cloud…”

Pretty nice, eh? Ya, I liked it.

Now, likewise, I had pause with the wheels on In Training –

still on the cartoony thing, stay with me…

I thought to my self, self, should I put wheels on this composition? Should I leave it be? Without them, it’s more of a “grown up” work of art. Or is it design? Shit, I sure as hell don’t want it to be that! I do think putting wheels on it would be pretty funny. But then, does that make my work a joke? Maybe all my work is a fucking joke! Uh oh. It will make it “cute.” There’s that “cute” thing again. Run away-run away! …but you can’t run away from your self…

Okay, so. I can’t control it if someone else thinks my work is “cute.” Let em. I’m quite serious – well, I mean, about my art. I am very serious about my art actually. Can’t you people see that? As far as making it a bit funny, well, I can’t help it. If I could be a comedian, I’d do it. But alas, I don’t think even I am that depressed.

Ohhhh, bad stab and my comic pals. I apologize. But they get paid about as much as I do, and they are far more talented.

Anyhow, Funny-looking rabbi with one leg and sharp teeth, kooky wheels on my figure 8 design, little feet on most everything else, and I wonder why I can’t afford gas.

 

 

however, that nothing

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Here is a new painting! Number 4:

kingofthis

It is called, “King of This.” It’s 24 x 24 inches, oil and pencil on birch panel.

I betcha wouldn’t think that would take a long time, but it did. Oy vhey did it ever. I can’t say why. I hardly know why myself, but here it is now, finished.

The one that is taking the most time, and believe me, I have been working on it between all these other ones, is Number 5, “Rabbi Says.” It has a partial quote on it from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein going around in a sort of spiral and I previously had to paint the outlines, then the lettering, and now I am painting the colors around the letters. Today I painted around the words, “however, that nothing” and it’s not that it took all day, it just took a long fucking time!

Before that I spent a longer time messing about with the photograph above in Photoshop, and before that I was at the post office, if you must know.

Here is Number 6 on my easel:

number6