Thoughts

I think it has finally stopped raining. I’m afraid to carve that in stone however. We have had record-breaking rain here lately. yesterday, I thought my roof was going to cave in, but it didn’t. I still haven’t check my studio. I’m a little scared to go in there honestly. I am mostly in fear for my friends that live in the hills, particularly my friend Lisa Teasley. Her house is situated so that it scares me the most, so I’ve been thinking about her a lot. I must give her a call.

This rainfall reminds me of a time when I was a kid and it rained so hard that the coffins buried at Beth Olam, (now called Hollywood Forever) were resurrected out of the ground and began floating out of the park and onto Santa Monica Blvd. You think I’m kidding? It’s a true story! It was appalling. Luckily my great grandmother is buried there in a wall tomb near Valentino, so there wasn’t any fear of my family floating down the street, but can you imagine what that was like for the loves ones of the people who were??? Sheesh! What a sight that was.

I got so lucky yesterday, as I drove out to the West side from Pasadena and back before noon and not a drop of water hit my car. In fact, when I got to Bergamot Station, I had to break out my sunglasses. It was blue skies and sunny. I warned a few galleries I visited that they needed to batten down the hatches by 1pm because the Wrath of God was coming, and it did. I pulled up in my driveway at 1:05 and the skies opened up.

While I was at Bergamo, I saw a great show at Luis de Jesus. Very worth checking out. Exciting, funny, interesting, thought-provoking, colorful, and in some ways intense. The artist is Seth Augustine and he went to Asia without knowing the language at all and has come back with quite a wonderful Mash-up, as the exhibition is called.

Today is the last day you can see my solo show on the gallery’s regular hours, otherwise, you’ll need an appointment until the 30th. I must warn you however, not all of the work is displayed, as they have hung a lot of gallery artists for a salon-style holiday show where some of my key pieces were. I am going to post the pieces you’ll miss here if you have not yet seen the show. If you want to see them in real life, just ask the gallery staff and they will gladly pull them out for you…

All the dolls:

And these paintings:

In other news, I just finished all my illustrations for my new book of poetry, Monsters on Jasmine St. and the book is now being produced! There will be 50 soft covers and 26 hardcovers. I don’t know what the price will be, but they will be available soon from Bottle of Smoke Press. I can’t wait. I have seen the prototype and they are bitchen as all hell!

I finally finished up all the pieces for the Finegood Gallery show. I took crappy pictures of them and posted them here. The light was all fucked up, but at least they’re documented. I drop those off and install them on the 21st and the show opens on the 27th of December.

I just sent out a Newsletter with all my little shows and holidays special goings on, so if you are interested in receiving that, get signed up! The only thing I’ll mention here is the new little 16 Dans print. The rest of it will have to stay a mystery sandwich, unless you sign up to get the emails. I don’t send them out but 4 times a year, so don’t think I’m a heavy spammer or anything.

Now I’m working on those illustrations for my book of poems for Bottle of Smoke Press. I am nearly done and I’m happy with how they are turning out. I won’t be showing them until after the book release in early 2011, and not all of them either, just a peak.

Last night I went to the Soft opening and it’s a great little show. Lots of really cool work. I almost bight something from Charlene Roth that I absolutely loved, but I can’t spend anything right now. I am so bummed. The curator, Edith Abeyta has a lot of pictures of the work on her Flickr page. The show is up until December 30th at Future Studio in Highland Park.

Some good news is that my solo show got recommended in the December issue of ArtScene by Jody Zellen. I am hoping that will bring some new lookers in. If you haven’t seen my show yet, it’s up until the end of the year, but the gallery is only open by appointment only after December 23rd.

My sleep times are all off these days. I don’t blame the recent daylight savings thing though. Honestly, I’ve been sick on and off since right before my show, or rather, under the weather. The worse it gets is a slight fever and crazy exhaustion, and some days it’s a stuffy head, runny nose and nausea. It’s a bug that won’t really hit full force, but won’t really dissipate either, so it’s really getting on my nerves!

I haven’t been getting all that much accomplished. I am jotting down ideas and prepping some pieces for a couple group shows for December, while I get my head on straight for the book drawings for Bottle of Smoke Press.

I should mention that I got a GREAT review by A. Moret in WhiteHot Magazine, so I am very thankful for that.

The drawings I’m doing for the Finegood Gallery show are like brothers and sisters for this piece I did a few years back. It’s titled Forgiveness on my Sleeve. It’s on a sleeve pattern and the smaller clothing patterns are arranged to spell sloch in Hebrew, which means “forgive.” So I am going to do a few other pieces like this one on different garment pieces that read in Hebrew.

For the Soft show, I am going to show piece(s) from my Ethereal Research Labs project.

Luckily, some of the work from my current show at George Billis will be in Miami during the weekend of fairs at the Red Dot Fair at his booth. I hope there is a good response, since he is bringing some very good pieces (I think). He will have both the Calvin Doll and the Mom doll, and a couple of Dan paintings too.

Today I woke up at 7:30 and took a nap around 5 after I watched Some Like it Hot (1959). I woke up again at 9:30 and now I am wondering when I will go back to sleep. I am just happy I can breathe out of both nostrils right now.

Now that I’m kinda done with this particular post — oh I was going to talk a little bit about some of my ideas for a drawing I have in mind for my book of poems. I had this idea to do some little watercolor and ink drawings of small items from my childhood: just random “things.” As I was falling asleep the other night I had a good 20 items that seemed perfect, but when I woke up I could only remember 2 of them. Before my nap today, I remembered about 6 more and scribbled them down. I’m still on the quest to remember them all. So far I have:

a cigarette burning in an ashtray
a tricycle
Wheel-o
a fire engine pedal car
a fish with a knife in it
slinky
a swingset
cereal