So, this is an opportunity for me to say thank you! It’s been just over a month since I’ve opened my print shop, and I have received more orders of posters than I would have expected. Its funny that of all my images, those which are my favorites are also yours! I can dig that!
After some website work, I have to evaluate if the next task will be to list my museum grade prints in my shop. The prices of these high-end prints will indicate the quality, and the prints will carry more impact. I hope to have framing as an option, creating a more collectable, more substantial, addition to your home.
As a thanks again – I give a special nod to those who want to see my work on their walls. My paintings need to have friends!
I mean, that’s how it usually works, except for the suddenly part.
Somehow, by not so odd experience these days, I find myself wondering about what I paint – The words “curiouser and curiouser,” said by a particular and notoriously hungry mushroom eater named Alice, roll around in my head.
It’s puzzling, it is, but not near conundrum for me. I’m just wondering what it is I’ve tapped. Nothing I really expected, that’s to be sure, but probably predictable, being what has led me here has been what it has.
Having left the studio for almost six months this last winter had me finally return a few weeks back, upon which things suddenly started coming alive, and it was so easy, and fun. and I had skipped right past the job/work thing that can shadow the joy inherent with painting. This blast of enthusiasm hasn’t lessened from that first day back in my own personal bizarro-land! Its a fun place!
Today,standing in front of one of those five canvasses in progress, with paint-filled brush in hand,what I would imagine being on the canvas just suddenly seems to have appeared on that canvas. I mean, that’s how it usually works, except for the suddenly part. Its usually pains-taking problem-solving with colors, values, shades and shapes, questions and answers.
This new season,these special things are just happening without any effort, and other than showing up (and that’s easy, since it’s a joy to do). Somebody popped a keg and the party has started, each day, day after day!
Those other things are still there, the technical stuff, of tints and tones, saturations, contrasts, etc, but decisions regarding those technicalities are on auto-pilot. These things want to appear, and appear they do.
“Do me, do me!” “Do me next – Do me next!” “NO! Do me – do me!” It’s like being in a roomfull of kids!
To detail this project that I’m currently working on – it’s a parallel earth kind of thing, including all kinds of pertenent references to other-worldly states and beings, concepts and metaphors, references to ourselves , loads of oddness – a mythological place. Its another world, which is much like ours in only a few ways, and maybe also in many ways.
Maybe its all just a culmination of years at the practice, a kind of reaching a new threshold kind of thing after my retreat to warmer spaces for a long winter, but its quite an experience for me to be shown parallel realities in a mirror-like way and be so comfortable with it. I opened a door and there it was: another time, another place.
I’m having more fun than I’ve had in a long time playing on canvas. So, I’ll be introducing bits and pieces as they finish, details that’ll probably get you smiling.
MEN IN BOXES – Sponsored by Coronavirus
See the selection here
There was once a photgrapher, of whom I know nothing of, including his name. What I do know is that he did a series of images of different men in boxes (though I’m pretty sure he only had one box for all these different guys) in various positions. These were black and white studio photos with different men striking poses in big boxes. He might have done a second series with women, or maybe it was rabbits, I’m not sure about that second go-round.
Then there was a guy named Crumb, Robert Crumb. I tend towards calling him Bob, and I know much more about him than the mystery photographer mentioned before. So Bob, he did a single panel of the same subject I think it was published in one of the ZAP issues. Crumb’s were 12 small images placed in a one-page comic-grid. Each one couldn’t have been more than 5 inches each in original form, and 2 1/2 inches in print form. Quite a study, really, and I’d have to say that Bob was the most likely originator of this concept.
So I had do do one of my own, a series of men in boxes, a metaphor for confinement in the Corona-age. So, doing my own was just a thing artists do. When done well, theft is not even considered, when its honest inspiration, and tribute. Its a contribution to whats larger. Picasso – Lautrec, Crumb – Fuseli, Crumb – me.
Each one of these twelve Men in Boxes paintings in the series is 50×50 cm (around 20 inches square) Twelve seemed as good number as any to exhaust a subject to full satisfaction,The only update with mine is the addition of color to this great subject.
REFORMATTING MY VISION
So then, I’ve also been redisigning my homepage which might be a couple more weeks in the making (right?). This project is really a flex for me, though I am loving it. It could be a bit of a distraction to my painting activities, though I refuse to give it too much right now – there’s so much work left to do with my current series called “Running and Returning – the Land of Eleven Suns.”
This is due to my cursed and unchangable, compulsive need to draw, illustrate in paint in similar ways to Robert Williams, Hieronymus Bosch, or Peter Breugal. I ‘m refering to the extent of detail these artists share with us in their paintings displaying each ones differences in approach and subject.
I think I expect my website express that – so, some its some vague ideas thumbnailed out right now, and certainly and loads of work when I start executing things.
BwahT POSTERLAND
Then there’s this, a poster I want to show you, to show off to all my old Santa Monica, Ocean Park and Venice peeps and family. This is a scene typical of this Ocean Park neighborhood and its quiet, sleepy boulevard, just a five minute easy downhill run to check the waves at Tees, at the old pOp Pier. A magical place – you remember, eh?
Click on trhough to read the paintings story.
DOWN by the BOARDWALK – BEACHTOWN OGs
BwahT, if you don’t know, is my line of poster prints done under the name Buried with all his Teeth (which is one of my goals in life, to be buried with all my teeth). It’s bucket list thing, maybe, and the last thing I’ll ever do, so I’ll be taking pride in that! Anyway, Buried with all his Teeth is the umbrella that covers anything and everything I do as it pertains to presenting my art to the world – it’s my story, my myth. It’s a journaling thing, an illustrated journal that includes image AND written word. A strangely assembled comic-like, illustrated novel of some sort put into website format.
OOufff – I’m done for!
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