Madison Avenue. Crowds swirl by. A tugging on my sleeve, I turn. A madman, gaunt, cloaked, forlorn, saying, "Tell me about your true love's hair." I impale him on my vacant stare, vacant because now I am looking inward, feeling my loss. "My true love's hair," I say, "is a silken fall of glimmering lights, a dark wood with glints of autumn, coffee and cherry and chocolate brown, and fallen leaves all around." "May God have mercy on your soul," the madman says, and vanishes in the crowd.
Allen Wheelis
11 comments:
Is this a detail of one of your older works, or are you starting to loosen up?
it's a detail from a work in progress that I started earlier in the summer but then had to neglect to make some filthy lucre.
here's another view:
http://jacquesdebeaufort.blogspot.com/2008/06/possible-signs-of-recent-activity.html
LaRose is always asking for shots where my "hand" is in evidence.
hey CAP, what do you think of this guy :
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
Firstly, I find evidence of your ‘hand’ mainly in the drawing – very precise, very elegant, sensual line. But mostly this is matched with very smooth modeling and tone (even when tone allows screaming chromatics). There’s definitely a 60s acid trip/solarized hippie album cover tip going on.
Were you frightened by Blue Cheer or Moby Grape albums as a child?
So I don’t think your ‘hand’ necessarily has to be brushy or gestural. But with this gray head – I just felt there was a nice economy to it (it made me think of Ray Pettibon, but you know like COMPETENT!). You sort of got there without clubbing everyone over the head with virtuosity. I suspect part of that might be because you have doubts about the subject, and tighten up just to really nail it for you, as much as others. This is understandable, after all, you keep getting ignored and sidelined and that affects anyone’s confidence. I think I have the same problem sometimes. I get too fussy simply out of lack of confidence in my audience. And then I realize of course! I don’t actually have one anyway! And for a while I’m sort of relieved and really go at things with a “Oh yeah? Well how about this? Or This? Still not getting me? You won’t get this either!”
Later on they talk me in off the ledge and I promise to take my medication regularly.
But the whole claustrophobic bodily thing that seems to be going on in your work is probably not one people can easily relax with anyway. I think the colors pretty much signal that. It’s edgy stuff.
Here take some of these.
Anyway, enough about me – this JMG cat is new to me. I couldn’t quite figure out the druid angle to the fuel crisis etc but what these guys seem to miss is that, DUH – it’s not just that raw materials are finite, and quickly running out – but that who gets the last of them will be decided by war – a big big war. The stakes have never been higher and the winner might not even have much of a planet left. But ‘economic’ matters always rest upon ‘political’ arrangements, and pressure in one sphere quickly affects the other. Yeah a ‘free’ ‘market’ ‘economy’ - dontcha love that one, Admiral Perry? Running away to live in the hills and grow your own might work for the privileged few. But there aren’t enough hills for everyone, the climate is not going to let you grow everything you need, and not everything can be grown anyway.
ARMAGEDDON!
It’s not so bad, really. Here have another one of these.
BTW: Your possible-signs-of-recent-activity.html didn't work for some reason.
I wasn't exposed much to psychadelia as a child or young adult.
It's amazing how marginalized the psychadelic movement became after the whole Leary fiasco. A much better exemplar of the subculture is the late Terence McKenna, who I consider a huge influence on my life and art.
I'm very into solarization..
and competence...
I like it when people render well...has competence become some sort of cardinal sin or signifier of lumpen kitsch ? I guess we should turn to Pierre Bourdieu for insight on that. Have you read his work ?
It's a dangerous subject (matter)....eros that is. Thanatos not so much. It must be lampooned like Currin or Yuskavage to pass through the gates of the current skull order. Henning seems to do it well and with impunity...anyone else you can think of ? Be much easier of I was gay or female. Whatever.
I have plenty of confidence and plenty of disgust. This gives way to buddhic serenity. And then to rage. And then to hyperspatial godhead.
I guess you could say I'm somewhat expansive in the spectra of my emotional range.
the blue pill or the red pill ?
JMG is very interesting..I love Neo-Pagans in the same way that Hillary's holdouts must love their pantsuited doyenne. Or maybe not exactly like.
Yeah, lot's of war in the future. Would suck to be born about now.
I don't think it'll be an armageddon, but as JMG point out, these things can unfold over centuries. One thing is for sure, the carbon era is finite and we will never see anything like this again.
Personally I think we'll eventually see a return of something resembling the old academic system of art education as the current regime slowly and inexorably fades away. I wonder what works and artists will be remembered amongst all of todays clamor and excess? Most of it will not stand the test of time and will burn in one fire or another or rot away in some mouldy cellar or trash heap. People save and care for things that are moving and true and beautiful (if also dark). Cultural chaos is a true test of this axoim.
Let the games begin.
One time! One time I wanted to see that the images on the blog weren't collages. I wanted to see paint.
I looked at pictures of John Michael Greer and I have definitely seen him around town, but I'll be darned if we've ever been introduced. I will approach him the next time however.
You’re all Nazis! I see that now. It took The Olympic Games in Hell to snap me out of it. Now it’s off with the kid gloves and back to the camps. Leni Riefenstahl never let it get to her – the numbers, the hype. There was a plane waiting. Later Africans did though. What a gal! Always in close-up always in slow-mo, the collective surge to sexdeath and a word from Our Sponsor, captured, recorded, rendered unto Caesar with all due competence…
We salute you with a click of our heels, Madam!
I think my weakness might be Slavs.
But you’re right about Currin, Yuskavage – currently sex is played for laughs (has to be). It’s the permissive, decadent phase, (cue Fellini’s Satyricon). Or think Rococo – Currin as the Fragonard of our times. Mr. Irreverence, the original party animal, oh they were high, high times for the ‘enlightened’. Then “Poor old Frago” they used to say once the revolution swept away his client base. He tried to adapt – he could be competent, sober, solar, well for a while. He ended his days destitute and forgotten.
But would you rather the puritanical backlash, Hester Prynne? The No-Sex-Please-We’re-(linguistically)British denial? Encoded in so many lame fetishes for school uniforms and the clergy? There is something about the attraction of the forbidden fruit. The oh so No No. Like old nudist or naturalist magazines that somehow are always hotter than pinups for being B&W (repressed!) crazy and real. Sex needs that other thing. Is it guilt or gilt?
We seesaw between not enough and too much.
Henning? Are we talking Anton or Hands-on? There’s Marlene Dumas but she’s into Dutch sex that turns you into an infant always waiting for Mommy and being oh so aloooooone. It’s a tough act, and she can make a small splash on the right paper but is that competence or complacence? Don’t ask Steve, he’s holding a sponge in rubber gloves right now.
Thing is, I can always tell when I’m being matronised. It leaves a white taste in my mouth.
It WOULD NOT be easier for you if you were female, homo or both. Will you listen to yourself? I mean it’s not like your black or latino, a retard and/or amputee, right? I mean you could come from San Diego for all anyone knows. At likeliest, I’d say you could be aligned with flaky Jim Shaw or Robt Williams (both solid, competent and WC store counter culture). You could push the retro thing – get into lettering – ‘text’ – citation! Who’s that young NY guy doing the rugged Psychedelic lettering? See Painter paparazzi blogspot.) He’s only halfway there. You can take him in the next round, Rocky. Anyway placement, positioning and location, you know the deal, join the dots, publish and push a little harder, a little more specifically.
You are out there, but there are maps.
As for Pierre Bourdieu, does that name sound a little French to you?
But no, haven’t read him, probably never will. But then I understand he says the same about me.
That is sooo weird. While I was reading this I was holding my penis while wearing a latex glove which is essentially the same as a sponge in rubber gloves. . .
I certainly think of myself as the Bizzaro-janitor. Instead of cleaning up the mess on my hands and knees, I crawl around and create vignettes of calculated spooge.
cap, dude, you don't actually visit Painter paparazzi blogspot, do you? That is like so,
so
unreal?
not our life?
petty?
Don't get me wrong, I'd be checkin' in every day if I lived in the Big Apple.
The competence bar is something I personally need to raise, or balance with soul. I keep thinking of those painter cats Wynton Marsalis and Miles Davis and their battle of polarity.
I listened to Blue Cheer after Mudhoney, still made my musk percolate.
Moby Grape is cool and all but to this day Alexander Skip Spence's "Oar" is a master trip.
Oh and "I wonder what works and artists will be remembered amongst all of todays clamor and excess?" is like visiting Painter paparazzi blogspot. "When did you stop beating your wife" is the same kind of question. Kinda. Maybe it is more like "Did you ride your bike to school or pack your lunch?"
Jacques, how many student names do you have to learn this week?
Currin as Fragonard: If I have time, I'm stealing that tonight.
Erik Parker is the dude I couldn't remember (doing the psychedelic lettering deal).
Using Painter paparazzi is just like the society pages for that little NYC circle, so it's easiest for me to find him there. No big deal (methinks).
I don't endorse it, but it's good for a laugh. Openings! They're the same everywhere. Only the names and prices change.
dude, long thread...
how to braid it ?
Steve I'll forever have an image of you masturbating with rubber gloves wearing a blue tinsel wig in my mind now. You might wan't to put out some wholesome iconography to counter that. Or not.
I haven't been to painterpaparazzi in over a year.
It is lame to ask "what art will survive ?". I guess it's just an interrogative masquerading as a statement. The statement is: I am a neo-conservative artist. Which is very different from being neo-conservative politically.
I just hate all the BS man. The posturing, affectation, cold icy elitism. I have dreams of these people burning in fires. Then I realize it already happened. And it didn't make me happy. I am no better than the most shallow hipster nihilist in the chelsea art-school backwash. No one is better than anyone else. We should try and remember this.
It's unbelievable how moody I am. I might have some sort of ultra fast cycling bipolar thing.
CAP, I'm not following you with the Nazi thing.
I wrote an essay on Fragonard and Greuze:
http://jacquesdebeaufort.blogspot.com/2007/02/false-dichotomiesthe-value-of-painting.html
(or just click on False Dichotomies in the sidebar)
If I was independently wealthy I would probably settle down somewhere and devote myself to becoming a painter of pin-up girls or something. A-la Vargas or Vallejo or Serpieri. Boys are fun to paint too. I'm going to do that as soon as I get a chance...the bodies are more challenging, though. So boxy and rectilinear.
I thought today it would be better to be just thought of as a guy who makes paintings than a "professional artist". The latter is so desperate and uninteresting. It's a type of slavery.
Erik Parker is very pop. I hate pop.
Thread over ?
mercurial sounds so much healthier than bi-polar.
cap gets the last word. . .
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