mute

Frying Pan Jack says:

2011-01-24T14:56:00.000-08:00

“…Baby I am so faraway from home, I miss my baby so, I can’t make it by myself, I love you, so…”

Tom Waits

I am going home,

I understand monastic life a little better. "Marry the church" and keep your eye single to the glory of it, and only it.

In the last six months I have given myself to art; I have been its bride, pondered it, lived it, lived in it, slept with it, and the ideas just keep coming. Whenever I take stock the number of concepts continue to multiply.

Maybe it is best I go home, slow my brain back down, have my production catch up with the development of ideas. And I was concerned that left on my own I would find myself bereft of imagery in the midst of a great desert of nothingness, thirsty, grasping for an image to cling onto. Rather I have been awash in them.

The challenge will be to presume my life and still find the capacity to make pictures. To find the visual vocabulary to communicate my imaginative language . But how I manage this seems an open question. My fear, is the wisdom of Frying Pan Jack will be all too correct when he says:

“…I learned when I was young that the only true life was the life of my brain. So what sense does it make for me to hand that brain over to someone else for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day I would get it back in an un-mutilated condition.”

Quoted by Utah Phillips:

image List:

Top: ""Linda on Trampoline" etching

"NJ in NY" etching

"James Bay Lodge Man" oil on Linen

"Mountain study #2" etching (and last piece completed in Berlin)

Jet lag

2010-11-29T15:07:00.001-08:00

I had a dream.

"Untitled " 58"x80" oil on canvas

My dream was in two parts. I spoke with two people, the first was with a Chelsea art dealer, the second was with a young black woman and artist in New York. The dream was both affirmation and defense of my art and a devastating personal critique.

Firstly, I asserted the right of my art to be on galleries walls. I invoked its quality in comparison to the other work present. I remember clearly the conviction of my feeling from this section of the experience. The dream proclaimed the urgent need for the work to be seen and for it to have an audience. When saying audience I meant that the work needed a cultural community with which to have a dialogue. I went to a screening recently where the director Olivier Assayas stated that the precondition of a work being art was it never took the audience for granted, but established a discussion between itself and the viewer. The dream advocated for such an exchange and then in it was a premonition of how the conversation might unfold.

"End of Civilization" or "barbarians at the Gate" etching 18x24"

The second part of the dream morphed into banter with a young artist and could be imagined on the subway. It was a loud friendly funny affirmative talk about family traditions ,TV consoles, values, culture, and art. Since the young artist was a woman and African American our experiences and opinions differed. She argued that the work I sought to exhibit was "yesterday," from a time past. Today the work is about identity, she said, a rejection of white male concepts of universality. The problem, my dream was telling me, is that is exactly where my art is posited. It is born from that tradition. It invokes the spirit of the enlightenment; it revels in narrative; it challenges orthodoxy; it suggests revolutionary (class) politics; it asserts the ideas of individuality and justice; it embraces the complications of a Christian identity in a postimodern time; it celebrates universal ideas.

(Forgot title... from a Borges short story) 12x16" etching

Martin Luther King’s dream used the logic of those same “its” to renounce America’s failure to realize its own ambition. But his speech also ushered in a new age of identity politics: race, gender, age, sexuality. The dreams young phantom was embracing this new era of in her critique art. By he end of the night my sub-conscious presented me with an irresistible dialectic of my own work and its position in the contempoary public arena.

"untitled" 22x30" water-colour

As a Footnote I was re-reading Monsignor Quixote with my morning tea and my heightened sensitivity to the subject led to redacting the following from the text and doctoring it to apply to art. Sancho is talking to the Monsignor about chivalry and the church, but I have replaced “art” as the subject of discussion:

“You remind me of your ancestor (Don Quixote) who believed in all those aesthetic traditions quite out of date even in his day"

…but the voice of true art does not go out of date.

yes it does

what nonsense you talk

and you have broken away to do your art in a world that no longer believe in those old images anymore.”

navel gazing

2010-11-17T19:08:00.000-08:00

Self Portrait London Underground: B/W photo

I love the book Siddhartha and have had my students read it for several years. Their response is generally positive but they do struggle with him because his quest to “know” himself requires a selfishness they (yes even them) are unaccustomed to. He renounces his family, friend, God, lover, and even his child, but it is through these rejections that he has the clarity to understand the nature of the universe and his place within it. An important premise in the book of Hesse is his idea of the rotation of the “wheel of formations” because through its acceptance we can learn from our various incantations allowing us to arrive at a sense of completeness.

I am in New York right now and in fact leaving is around the corner. To come here I have had to be “the bad guy.” I have gone from well paid to unemployed, beautiful possessions to rummaging through the garbage, teacher of bright young talents to not having an impact on anyone, supportive father to indigent man, Victorian home to smelly dirty warehouse, pampered to never paying more than $5 for a meal … no fancy gym, no car, no bike, no TV, and most importantly leaving Linda.

My flat near the end of trip with finished work stored behind

(below:) a picture at the print studio

As I pulled into Penn Station two months ago I wrote …

“So the train is half an hour away and I am scared, filled with self doubt. What if I cannot DO anything? What if the work sucks? What if the studio is a bust? What if I am living in shitsville? What if I get lonely? What if this is just a pretentious self indulgent money, relationship, career tosser?? This is a risk, it is scary, it does require putting “it” (money, time, job, relationship) on the line and then the question sits in the back of your mind, is this just an empty gesture?”

Has this been an empty gesture?

And now at end of it all New York confirmed my existence as another cultured pretentious snob. But can the value of this experience be measured in plays, museums, performances, screenings, lectures, concerts, and readings … or has being a productive artist elevated this experience beyond tourism?

Portrait Underground: etching 9x12"

On the other extreme coming to New York while preserving my bridge back home may be evidence of a lack of courage and enterprise. By not taking the (Kierkegaard) “leap” have I doomed this experience to a dalliance? Another of my favorite books is Maugham’s “A Moon a Sixpence” that follows Strickland an artist who abandons his family, country and career for the life of a painter. He eventually makes his great masterpiece on the walls of his hut in Tahiti before being engulfed by leprosy. The scale of the renouncement, the extent of the turn of the wheel allows Strickland to become great.

"Torso" oil painting, 55x68"

Henry Chinanski

2010-09-30T06:17:00.000-07:00

He is the real deal, the “man,” the artist He is making it, true, honest, in your face, cruel but laced with a touch of insight and pathos. And then He lives it too. On the edge: women, drugs, booze, the track, and all the while, in the midst of the fucking, whoring, and drunk he makes art. And now we can add Arturo Bolano another artist cut from the same cloth. As a teenager wandering the streets of the big city, passionate for experience tethered to art, wrapped in glory of his certainty for a “visceral realism.” Reading these iconic tales I can only wonder why I cannot aspire to such heights or plumb such depths.

First, I am sitting alone … no 18 year old redhead with “ample” cleavage is giving “head,” no joint, no vodka-7, instead …. I am eating Choco-dynamos. I am making art and like Chinaski I have had the struggle of doing it while doing the day job, like Bolana, I have wondered great cities living and drawing. However, Chinanski was able to cleave to an audience until he became enough of a phenomenon to just make the art and live it, use it, for an endless source of girls and booze, and recycle those times into more art.

At least I can take the subway to the studio and read of another Henry Chinanski chapter, another written page and another sexual experience, another bottle of booze. I can look into the mirror and hope the work, in its intimacy, energy, voice, drawn line has an echo of poetry.

Then I can have another bowl of choco-dynamos and go to bed.

Top: "Hands with cigarette" etching

Next: "Nude study: Jen" oil on canvas

Then: "Party" drypoint etching

left: "Me and Katherine D" etching

right: "Couple" etching

above: "Portrait and Mirror" oil on canvas

last: "Cold Wind Blowing" etching

Drawing

2010-09-11T17:58:00.000-07:00

Today is 9/11, 2010 and I went to a drawing exhibit of Gerhard Richter. For much of the work, except the three big works on the far wall, I thought this is a preposterous idea, intellectualizing drawing … its very nature is about freedom it should defy theorizing. It’s form should be a personalized extension of the mind, the vision of the hand that makes them. Unless drawing is meant to be a final product its existence needs to simply be an extension of the direct utilitarian needs of the artist. It is the intuitive extension of the mark making of the child and we understand from kindergarten we only learn from what a child draws we do not correct them.

This is not to take away the power of drawing. Its very freedom can be the essence of an artists production, can be the form most fused with the raw energy of the artists hand. Talouse Latrec or Degas’drawings, Egon Schiele’s painterly elongated drawing and particularly Michelangelo’s last crucifixions in charcoal all testify to the power of the medium. Finally drawing, I have become increasingly aware, is like the script for theatre. No matter how good the acting, set, direction, without a proper realized script the play is compromised. Drawing is script writing for art.

My own drawing has moved away from finished work to the development of the idea. The capturing of the idea and sorting out the possibilities what it suggests.

So I offer a few examples of my drawing as my own personal exhibition

top: "9/11" stencil

next: sketch (w. watercolor) for the development of lithograph and painting of movement

next: "man" oil on paper

side by side: scene from Gravity Rainbow for as yet unmade work, and

watercolor of Mountain from Himalayas

above: Preliminary sketch for self portrait in orange

immediately above: "After Wesson" oil on paper

"We are all crucified"

2010-01-30T23:06:00.000-08:00

I have made crucifixion’s at the expense of being modern!

I just finished “My Name is Asher Lev” and was struck with its utilization of the Crucifix as the culminating conflict in the central axis of the book. I paraphrase Potok as he writes about painting a crucifixion, “For all the pain you suffered, for all the torment of your past and future, for all the anguish … For (God) whose suffering world I do not comprehend, for the love I have, for all the things I should have remembered but have forgotten, because the crucifixion is the aesthetic mould into which you can pour a paintings ultimate anguish and torment.”

It is this why I draw crucifixion's. Potok reminds me of a quote from Sherwood Anderson that has stuck with me “Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.” In this sense we can all identify with the image of Jesus nailed to the cross.

Or from another perspective Kundera refers to the idea of “Eternal return” in his “Unbearable Lightness of Being” when referring to life lived as light and heavy. Picking up on the existentialist notion that we should act as if everyone should do as we do Kundera discusses how heavy an existence this notion presupposes. Borges reiterates this idea when he says: “What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men.” He continues, “For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race, for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it.”

List of slides:

"Borges and Fumes" etching

"West coast crucifixion" etching

"Millennium #1" etching

"Jesus of London" etching

"Untitled" etching

"Crucifixion" etching

"Man and Cross" oil on canvas

"Howl'

2010-01-03T16:51:00.001-08:00

"Suicide" dry-poiny etching

Allen Ginsberg's poem " Howl" always stayed with me. As an artist I was concerned with street imagery and how on the road, in the open, social issues seemed more true, honest, and real. The knowledge that violence, sex, drugs, and art could all coexist was an exciting tonic for a childhood spent in suburbia. The opening lines seared into my skull “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix …” I recognized in Ginsberg’s literary voice themes I was only beginning to define. In time a natural affinity for the poem grew to a collection of prints that were combined to create a box set of etchings.

The images below were constructed from thoughts and scenes realized while walking on my own. Some are from photographs I took, some from people I met, some from ideas that came to me, some were illustrations based on the lyrics in the work, and others from found photo’s that resonated the spirit of “Howl.”

"Shooting methadone" dry-point etching

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn

looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat

up smoking in the supernatural darkness of

cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities

contemplating jazz, …

who were expelled from the academies for crazy &

publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

"Howl" dry-point etching

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-

ing their money in wastebaskets and listening

to the Terror through the wall, …

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in

Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their

torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-

cohol and cock and endless balls, …

"Angels" dry-point etching

who chained themselves to subways for the endless

ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine

until the noise of wheels and children brought

them down shuddering mouth-wracked and

battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance

in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's

floated out and sat through the stale beer after

noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack

of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, lost battalion of platonic

conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes

off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts

and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks

and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, …

"Reflection" dry-point etching

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting

the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union

Square weeping and undressing while the sirens

of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed

down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked

and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight

in policecars for committing no crime but their

own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were

dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, …

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose

gardens and the grass of public parks and

cemeteries scattering their semen freely to

whomever come who may,

"Three men in an Alley" dry-point etching

"Seattle" etching

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad

stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these

poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy

to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls

in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'

rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with

gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-

ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station

solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, …

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in

the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the

suffering of America's naked mind for love into

an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone

cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered

out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

Two "Untitled" drypoint etchings

inheriting Mormon...

2009-12-23T19:19:00.001-08:00

Originally written at the outset of the war of Iraq the article did not find publication at either SLC newspapers or the Sunstone magazine. I have re-visited the article updated it slightly and present it here for some kind of re-publication.

"Person of the the Year, Time" dry-point etching 12x18"

There is a lesson I have taught as a sunday school teacher the premise of which goes like this. We spend our lives living religiously and attempting to be Christlike. For the most part we easily accommodate these values into our lives, but there are moments of truth where our years of study is put to the test. I ask the group a question. Will you be able to apply religious principals in a true moment of crisis? The idea is to assess whether the years of incorporating spirituality as part of your life will be of assistance when the foundation of your values are tested. Will you be “Christian” or will you resort to solutions that reflect the modality of contemporary culture, “the world,” or as church leaders are wont to say, will you become a “natural man” an enemy of God?

Our civilization, society, and the Mormon church passed through one of these moments of truth before America invaded Iraq. We failed. In Mormon church President’s Gordan Hinckley’s War and Peace address in its semi-annual Conference he opted for War. In part his decision was based on the idea that national leaders “...have access to greater political and military intelligence than do the people generally.” It subsequently become clear that the world was lied to about the imminent threat posed by Iraq’s Weapon’s of Mass Destruction (WMD). The notion that the government fabricated the evidence against in Iraq is not startling, however. The USA was bent on war and we all sensed that propaganda was simply being applied to ensure popular support for a potentially unpopular war. As a member of the Mormon church I am ashamed with my association with an organization whose leader, given the test, chose to parrot political leaders slogans couching their epitaphs in a shroud of religious legitimacy. My hope is with a new prophet we can, in retrospect, amend our past failure and make a comprehensive statement that supports peace and apposes war on terror, assassination, imperialism, and dispels the notion of a crusade to protect our supposed “way of life.”

We must first assume a common ground of understanding about the war in Iraq in order to critique the prophet and by extension the church’s position as expressed by President Hinckley. Lets agree on the following:

1), the war was not fought to eliminate a threat to US community fabricated there existence to justify war;

2), this is not a war of liberation. You do not liberate a people by bombing them, shooting them, encouraging betrayal with ransoms, or choosing who its new leaders will be. These are all characteristics of an occupying imperial state;

3), the USA tolerated Hussein when it was politically expedient to do so. America knew of his secret weapons programs, gave him political legitimacy and CIA assistance, and hid his abuses from world public opinion;

"Globalism" etching 20x30"

4) the war and subsequent occupation has been a failure, when measured by the creation of viable state, the protection of peoples civil rights, establishing peace in the region, making the world more secure, or building international institutions that support the idea of “collective security.”

5), then if no threat existed, if Hussein had no connection to Al Qaida, if the WMD used in the war were exclusively American, if the USA regularly tolerates dictators, if arms inspectors were in place, then we must conclude this war is a war fought by an imperialistic superpower determined to enforce its will, even if it requires invading and occupying intransigent nations.

In an attempt to come to terms with my communities approach to this war I have spent a little more time reflecting on Hinckley’s conference address when he acquiesced to the war as it both guides and reflects the opinions of our Mormon community. Given the conditions described above, I have asked myself how could President Hinckley , a prophet, seer, revelator, and God’s chosen spokesman, who tells us at the outset of his address “I seek the direction of the holy spirit, I have prayed and pondered much concerning this,” give his assent to the war.? One would think a prophet’s wisdom would be able to see past the thin veneer of propaganda purported to justify armed aggression. The address has several fundamental problems. It’s historical interpretations are simplistic, it manipulated the religious texts by selecting the most provocative passages, it is ethno-centric betraying the notion of an international organization, and finally it places the Mormon church on the side of violent repression and against peace.

The prophet defines the essential conditions of conflict. The dichotomy of good versus evil inherent in the scriptural texts is the prism President Hinckley was most comfortable looking through. Using this paradigm the prophet implied that Iraq and Saddam Hussein represented evil that the United States was justified and maybe compelled to remove him from power. President Hinckley stated: "We are a freedom loving people, committed to the defense of liberty ... it may be that He will hold us responsible if we try to impede ... those who are involved in a contest with the forces of evil and repression.” This final sentence is most damning in its consent for the conflict and its tacit condemnation of those engaged in peace activism.

He went on to criticize the Empires of the past Rome, Byzantine, Britain. He states there is a darker side to empire “ of brutal conquest, of subjugation, of repression, and ... cost of life and treasure.” This statement is indicative of President’s greatest failing in the talk. His inherent ethno-centrism. He fails to see America cast in these same terms. To many in the world this war is proof of the United States attempt at self aggrandizement at the cost of brutal conquest, post-war repression, at the cost of between 100,000 to 500,000+ Iraq lives, over 4000 American lives and $3.8 Billion each month. It is surprising that the prophet is unable to see the exercise of American power and empire as an essential condition of this war.

"Watching 9/11" etching 12x18"

Of all the passages in Mormon scriptures President Hinckley chooses a passage that glorifies the aggression of battle and strikes a cord intolerant of dissent. In The Book of Mormon, an ancient prophet Moroni famously rents his coat, unfurling it as the “standard of liberty.” I have always felt uncomfortable with Moroni and his tactics. Moroni tore his coat in order to stir the people against the “cunning” leader Amalickiahtes. Once Amalickiahites were captured and defeated Moroni and gave them the choice “support the cause of freedom ...(or) be put to death.” (Alma 46: 35) This was a pattern for Moroni forcing people to choose liberty or death. Upon their defeat the Lamanites were given the same choice but Zerahemnah honorably retorted “we are not of your faith, we don’t not believe that it is God that has delivered us into your hands, but we believe it is your cunning (breastplates) that has preserved you from our swords (or because you have WMD and we do not). “(Alma 44:9-14). But defeating the enemy was not enough for Moroni he had to overwhelm them culturally as well and when the Lamanites did not submit to an oath he began a massacre until they submitted completely to the Nephites. Is the prophet suggesting the same. In quoting Moroni does he suggest we too should destroy the Iraqi’s if they are too ignorant to choose our brand of “liberty.”

The ancient scriptures it seems were written by the powerful, kings, judges, and military commanders. War is a means of defending the privileges of the elite's and it is the rich who view war as in their interests. For President Hinkley’s speech only one reference to Christ is made. Maybe this is because he is unique in the scriptures as he is one of us. As a carpenter, war and rebellion served no purpose. Whether viewing his crucifixion has the arbitrary administration of occupation justice or as a result of a collaboration compromised Sanhedrin really Jesus’ death is just another casualty of the imperial project. He taught that overthrowing the Romans would never free the soul. Only by loving God and serving ones fellow man can true “liberty” and salvation be found.

President Hinckley’s quotes Alma 43: 45-46 to justify America’s soldiers role in the war in Iraq “they were not fighting for ...power but they were fighting for their homes and their liberties, their wives and their children, and their all, for their rites of worship and their church ... And they were doing that which they felt was the duty which they owed their God.” These lines seem to apply to the people in Iraq, the Palestinians, or any other people dominated by occupying powers who seek to destroy the independence of a nation. I have not seen any American serviceman's families at risk, but I have seen scores of Iraqi woman and children dead in Markets, in their homes, killed by coalition bombs. I have seen young soldiers shooting into cars with families in them in the mistaken assumption that the vehicle contains terrorists. It is the Iraqi resistance fighters labeled Baathist’s holdouts who personify these scripture references, certainly no American marine.

President Hinckley spent this critical moment in history justifying the actions of church members who would be serving in this illegal war. The prophet uses the worst emotional contrivances to illicit sympathy for the men serving in the conflict. Trotting up lines like “Mom, I have to go so you and the family can be free, free to worship as you please” or “I am proud to be here (Middle East) serving my nation and our way of life.” An astute observer might say, “ I am proud to allow you to continue driving our family SUV to church on Sunday while we suppress Muslims right to reject materialism while taking their oil.” Given his status as prophet I would expect more original analysis at the very least. This plea to servicemen is one of the most egregious eras in his talk. It points to the narrowest cultural sentiments for a man purporting to lead an international organization. He is placating American members at the expense of feelings held by members and would be converts world wide.

"US Soldier in Iraq" etching 4x5"

President Hinckley has been applauded for “talking tolerance” and recognizing that people do have differing opinions. But those few sentences in his talk ring hollow and complacent. They are the consolation’s doled out by the victor. Of course those who are devastated to see civilization fail in it’s attempt to achieve a more civil society, and those whose homes are being bombed, are resentful of the circumstances they find themselves in. President Hinckley had a historic opportunity. He squandered it. He justified the propaganda and lies used to launch a pre-emptive war. He lent his name and the name of the Church of Jesus Christ in defense of the narrowest of cultural assumptions. The “direction of the spirit” led to a ringing endorsement for war. An excellent opportunity to firmly position the church as an institution heralding peace, honesty, tolerance, and diplomacy was squandered and he embarrassed me because my membership as a Mormon is associated even married to his interpretation of events.

President Hinckley and the Mormon community was faced with a test. Are we a people committed to peace, to international law, dialogue, tolerance? Have we learned from our years of prayer and study? Can we apply the principles Christ taught us in our personal and civic lives? When teaching little children on a Sunday I ask them, “what would Christ have done?” The most simple morality (light of christ) tells us killing is wrong. Christ teachings are filled with examples of love. Unfortunately we in the church have forgotten that the Pharisees “who reasoned together” conjured up reasons to kill Christ. We have become like those Pharisees. It is this wrong reasoning that allows a people to support cutting off a nation with sanctions for 10 years, killing thousands of innocent lives, deprive them of any weapons, then invade them in order to liberate them.

President Hinckley is just as guilty as the Catholic church was a 1000 years ago of glorifying the Empire. He knows that the Christian Church lost its way when it took advantage of its association with Rome. Persecution ended and growth took place within the context of the Empire but the Church became terribly compromised. Being in America, the 20 and 21st Centuries great Empire, will have the same impact on the Mormons. In part the prophets decision were based on the idea that national leaders “...have access to greater political and military intelligence than do the people generally.” How far does President Hinkley think we should go to honor the direction of National leaders. Continuing to draw on history, the Catholic Church was further compromised in the 30’s when the Pope made concessions with Mussolini and stayed ever so quiet about the racism inherent in fascism. Now that it is clear that the world was lied to, is the church going to condemn the Bush and Blair administrations for conducting an illegal war on false premises.

President Hinckley negated the message of peace Christ taught . He, the leader of a purportedly international movement, practiced the worst kind of cultural bias and ethnocentrism, but he was true to the large American flag flying over the Salt Lake Temple. It need not be this way. It is possible for leaders of the church to serve the role of religious leaders who prick he consciences of their parishioners. Is it really Quixotism to believe that a prophet would assert the need for peace and question the use of violence in an already to deadly world. The relevance of the Mormon faith is its claim to having a living prophet, a spokesman for God in contemporary life. This claim is a burden, it requires the spokesperson to get “it’ right which clearly President Hinckley did not do. So we are in a unique space. The Mormon church has a new prophet and America has chosen a new president. Is it naive to think President Monson will demand an accounting of political leaders honesty, and will call for the end of the illegal occupation of Iraq by American Forces? Can Mormons be a constructive voice in the world or will we remain silent. I am ashamed now to be a Mormon and I hope the leaders of this church rectify the mistakes they made over the past years and reject the entire premise that Terrorism is a war that can or should be fought.

"London Allegory" oil on canvas 9x12"

Millennium

2009-11-14T01:13:00.000-08:00

The Convergence of the Twain
Thomas Hardy (1912)
(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic" written at the start of the “last” millenium)

In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?". . .
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate
For her so gaily great A Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate.
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history.
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one August event,
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

The 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall reminds of the optimism that surrounded 1989. “The end of history” has been used be several commentators as a reference point with which to focus their thoughts at the beginning of the new millennium. So I too will use the arrogance implicit in the statements to fix my ideas. The end of history was the thesis developed by Fukuyama a member one of Washington’s consensus that asserted that the US had won the dialectical struggle with socialism and that democracy had achieved the intellectual utopia Marxists had forecast. The document justified American supremacy following the fall of communism when the unhindered goal of global capitalism seemed assured.

The following etchings however choose to unravel the threads that sought to promote the notion that history was now over. In 1912 Hardy saw the vaingloriousness of the age sunk by nature traveling through the undercurrents of the ocean. As with the Titanic our titanic historical hubris crashed against the reawakening of tribal violence. Without a grand narrative in Europe neighbors turned against each other allowing ancient grievances to re-surface.

The horror of ethnic cleansing was only surpassed by genocide of unspeakable atrocities that swept Africa. Finally, history came banging on the American front door and we found ourselves again waging a war against the most personal of violence, terrorism. History’s end and the poverty of small endless atrocities caused us to withdraw. Self absorption and fascination at our own wounds became the personal narrative that obsessed this new age.

These etchings are about the Millennium and “intimate welding history. The Titanic shook Hardy’s confidence in the power of industrialization. Two years later the globe witnessed the utter failure and naiveté of that world. But no sooner had the war been concluded than Woodrow Wilson claimed that history was over, autocracy vanquished, and the world was now safe for democracy. As he heralded unprecedented American arrogance his vision of the end of history was very pointedly refuted by the red and black apocalyptic vision of George Grosz and those brutally simple lined lithographs that showed the cruelty of man who destroyed lives to preserve a way of life.

The four etchings are 12x18" and part of a Millennium suite:

"Otherness" a book of Asia

2009-08-30T19:36:00.000-07:00

(Excerpt from hand made book)

As a traveler the awareness of being separate is acute. At once you are the “other” while being seduced by the exotic quality of life beyond your ordinary experience. “Otherness” (from an existentialist understanding) recognizes the impossibility of ever being able to fully comprehend that which is beyond oneself. As a traveler this is particularly the case.

Armed with expensive imaging technology we have the power to engage and record our time abroad. What is produced is inherently problematic. The images technology affords end up in family albums or posted on facebook. The pictures themselves depict “us” grotesquely out of place collaged in front of great monuments making victory signs with friends or as evidence of being to places on the must see list.

The following is further evidence of that urge to record and create. It sits on a continuum between travel-log and an art book. The images seek to transcend a mere capitulation of a travel slideshow. Yet, to be art, or photographs purporting to be art, pictures must advance concepts from ones own cultural and social experience. Being self conscious of the critique of what constitutes “art,” but as a traveler awed by the exotic quality of the continent what follows is a compromise between these two positions.

The pictures were organized in large part by the motive of recording how people work, because work is the essence of lived experience. However, it is watching from the perspective of fascination for processes that are alienated from “western” practices. Most of the pictures were taken in Nepal and Northern India, but images from the transit cities of Calcutta and Mumbai are also included. The organization is thematic. They begin in the north, in the Himalayas, showing porters, migrants, children walking to school, agriculture, and the incredible effort to cut roads through those mountains. In some of the pictures the environment seems to engulf the human efforts, yet also irreparably the footprint of activity is transforming the natural landscape.

The images move south and show existence in the city. Throughout the role women play in the working environment is evident. These urban images include a few frames of the slums and are juxtaposed with a form of activity hidden in the west, though wonderfully conspicuous in the east, worship.

Within a tradition of working landscape photographs of Salgado, Gursky or Burtynsky these pictures show people working enclosed within a landscape. We see people tending animals along a hillside and the rivers in India and Nepal during the dry season become a hive of enterprise as individuals set up small work sights and sift and scourer through the sand producing bags a cement that they sell. Finally an enormous effort has been made to cut roads into vast regions of the Himalayas. These roads are replacing footpaths. Soon jeeps will ply the roads carrying the goods once served by porters and pack animals. Development will make thousands of workers obsolete and yet will give these communities unheard of access to the outside world. For now, the roads are shorn from the rocks by men working with crowbars and pick axes, while the debris is thrown of the side of the mountain by children.

Nudes

2009-08-21T12:51:00.000-07:00

Painting nudes has become a prohibited artistic subject. The re-appropriation of the depiction of the female form has accused men of objectifying women by placing them under the male gaze.

As an artist I have to justify the investigation of the nude. Firstly, there are universal motifs in art, timeless forms, and the female body is one of the original art subjects. Painting a female form can be justified or explained by dealing in some generalities. The nude is sexual and when a man paints the body the intent and expression is fundamentally different from a woman’s treatment. A man’s representation is objectifying as it celebrates, remembers, hopes, and is an embodiment of desire. Women seem to generally approach the figure as a discovery of the self, of identity, and with younger artists a realization of their own sexual awareness.

The work here then is an expression of sex, a realization and affirmation of the fundamental experience of sharing a woman’s body. The work is also about drawing, about painting, and the figure is the surface whereby questions of texture, color, media, and substance can be explored. Working from the figure for me has varied over the years. From drawing Christey Brinkley from Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issues, back in grade 10, to images that re-create Edward Wesson’s photographs of Clara on a beach. These canvases are about the de-construction of the drawing. For many years I have drawn, with a brush, a thin rapid brown under-painting. These paintings have made this initial stage permanent and let the canvas stand on it’s own in that ephemeral and spontaneous form.

After working for two years as a printmaker I was interested in creating images that stood in stark contrast to prints and I longed for texture and color. Brilliant, bold color and excessive use of thick spontaneous brush strokes was a celebration of the freedom of painting in contrast to the black and white flatness of printmaking. However, that said I went back to the print form and tried to work back into printmaking some of the qualities unique to painting. By applying washes over the surface of the limestone and using color mono-printing some of the gestures of paint have been preserved.

Other variations of nude’s have included formal etching representations working from the model using traditional drawing techniques to Emile Nolde like small gestural plates combining aquatint, etching, open bite embossing, and dry-point. Interestingly, the more formal the representation have used conservative poses, and the more liberal the approach the greater provocation in the female’s gesture.

The figure offers a space for aesthetic exploration while offering the viewer an image that is evocative and relevant.

Yesterday I read a sexual passage in a tacky detective novel, “… and then they moved again “Oh,” she said, a low sound from her throat, her head back … he put his mouth on hers, kissing her as he gripped her below…” I fear in the end art fails sexuality. The discomfort reading about sexual encounters derived from the writers limited vocabulary to properly express the moment may only be duplicated visually. And then when guests come to our house, Linda my wife, will at times hide canvases. This reminds me that nudity is still viewed by many as the thin edge of the wedge leading to pornography. Who owns the right to depict the nude, who has the right to view it, why keep returning to it, or how to create a vocabulary to depict one, the subject continues to beguile me.

list of slides:

"karin in Yellow" 33x40" oil on canvas

"Jen: after Wesson #1" 40x60" oil on canvas

"Jen (as yellow torso)" 16x24" oil on canvas

"Jen: after Wesson #3: 24x36" lithograph

"untitled" 8x10" etching

"Karin" 8x10" etching

"Fast, Loose, and Lovely" 16x22" oil, plaster, varathane on canvas

The Street

2009-04-18T20:52:00.000-07:00

Kings Cross

Beneath the Malebolge lies Hastings street

The province of the pimp upon his beat

Where each in his little world of drugs or crime

Drifts hopelessly, or hopeful, begs a dime

Wherewith to purchase half-a-pint of piss

Although he will be cheated, even in this

I hope, although I doubt it, that God knows

This place where chances blossom like the rose

For each face is such a hard despair

That nothing like grief finds entrance there.

And on this scene from all excuse exempt

The mountains gaze in absolute contempt.

Yes this, yet this is Canada, my friend

Yours to absolve of ruin, or make an end

Malcolm Lowry

As a younger artist I was interested in confronting the audience with images that they chose to ignore. Using street scenes I hoped to arouse the conscience of the viewer. Fascinated by city life I travelled to Hastings Street and Kings Cross to draw images of humanity loaded with emotional sentiment rendered in raw experience. I found etching useful in this enterprise. Acid, the printing press, tar, wax, and gouging into metal all seemed appropriate ways of depicting life on "the other side of the tracks."

"Three Men in and Alley"

The idea of cramming dozens of figures amidst a decaying urban-scape created out of the apocalyptic tradition that flowed from Pirenese was a challenge for me as an artist. Implicit in the pictures is how we as figures mingle within the environment and so the stage is entwined with the players. Furthermore, the pieces, within an apocalyptic frame, were infused with a religious subtext. This was particularly evident in the print "Dream" where the tilting church symbolizes a failure on the part of orthodoxy to meet the challenges "humanity." in this sense I was particularly influenced by the words and example of Arch Bishop Romero as he reached out to the poor by announcing the fate of church (but all of us) is bound to the fate of the people (all people).

"Dream"

Today as I read these words I realize it is time to return to the street motif. We are, in Victoria, faced with the a growing homeless population as a reflection of the cumulative effect of failed policy and our own moral neglect over the past decade. Morality being the transition between the apocalypse and contemporary failure, I return to these images as a depiction of our social reality, and as a means of depicting an immediate and frank glimpse of humanity.

"Birdman and Angel"

Bankrupt

2008-11-02T00:04:00.000-07:00

"Pool #1" oil n canvas

We live in a bankrupt age. America, victor of the Cold War wallowed in self evident proof of the bankruptcy of communism. But the confidence of American hegemony was shattered with a morally corrupt war in Iraq. In the absence of universal ideas of emancipation we had at least the belief in unfettered growth, acquisition, and wealth. October has caused this belief to implode. The artifices and the morality that these ideas purported to idealize have fallen into disrepair. My paintings are derived from history on the way down when optimism is replaced by pessimism and acknowledged failure.

In the early 1970's David Hockney produced a group of paintings of swimming pools in Southern California. The pictures were some of the finest icons of the age, brimming with the confidence of a material world. The paintings have always impressed me for their polished mechanical application of paint, the bright colors, their flatness ... but particularly the symbolism inherent in the pieces. The pools spoke of enjoyment, liberalism, capitalism, and an age of leisure.

"Pool #2" etching

The landscapes I have been working on operate on the other end of the ideological continuum. In a world where ruling ideologies have proven bankrupt my paintings of abandoned, destroyed, and decaying artifices are emblematic of the beginning of this new millennium. The images mostly derived from photo's taken in Asia tell a tale of materialism overwhelmed by events. In contrast to shiny slick surfaces, paint runs and dribbles, in the place of clearly diliineated forms the images deconstruct and break apart. Yet they are not traditional landscapes as the obsession with hard lines and mechanical patterns are still very evident of an urbanite.

Is it theoretically possible to show the environment reclaiming man-made objects given that we live in an age of environmental devastation. Can our eco-system really reclaim the ruin visited on it. If these pantings have any optimism it is that nature will grow through our best attempts to force the wilderness to adapt to us. The parade grounds are vacant, the pools empty, and the condos with the name of what they covered are being re-absorbed.

"Parade Ground" oil on canvas

"Pool #3" oil on canvas

"White"

2008-10-12T23:59:00.001-07:00

"Spy Game" etching

The following page shows some examples of some new small etchings I have completed. They are characterized by drawing, bluntness, and a use of White. They have eschewed techniques that require multiple stages, different colors, embossing, or complex tonalities. This is out necessity, being away from the studio, they have been largely drawn in isolation, but the treatment is also out of respect for the subjects.

"Jehovah's witness" etching

(left)

"Portrait (Pender Street) etching

(right)

"Underground Portrait #3" etching

Remember Richard Avedon's portraits, were they called "West," I cannot remember. They are people from middle America, the dispossesed, wild, weird, captured by his camera in front of White backdrops. In contrast to Yosef Karsch's rich portraits in front of black dark curtains the work on white seemed clean and light. The white replaced the ambience, density, and drama of the work that preceded it. The White of these plates have a sense of Avedon about them, because of the strang characters and the White. But the works are also uniquely prints and that is what I will refer to next.

What has attracted me to printmaking is its directness. Yes printmakers are obsessed with mark making, always wanting to know how "that" was done in order to expand ones visual vocabulary. Painters approach a copper plate with an appreciation for the simplicity of drawing. Historically Goya's "Disasters..." combine the clarity of line and tone in small devastating indictments of war. Rembrandt fascination with knitting lines together and even his thrill of long black drypoint scratches demonstrate a love of drawing. Their painting was where reputations were won but rarely had the graphic and stark ... pure ... impact of those prints. Today Lucien Freud continues in the painters tradition as he works in print. His etchings are a simple celebration of drawing, they do not parallel his paintings, but they are escapes into the simplicity of line.

So these new prints are exotic and White like Avedon yet they celebrate the boldness of a drawn surface. They are about the "immediacy of NOW." They attempt to connect to no larger body of work but simply are derived from a premise of curiosity, image making, bluntness, a lack of complexity.

"Tea and Cigarette" etching

Springbok

2008-10-11T12:33:00.001-07:00

"Bushman woman in alley" etching

When growing up I believed that South Africa went "through me, like a thread through a needle, everything I (did was) stitched by (its) color." From the more narrow perspective of a 20 year old this seemed true, until I met South Africans first hand. I recognized too many years separated them from me and the fabric of who I was what far more complex. An imagist is always looking for an iconography that encapsulates an experience, place, or time. At this early stage of my art making stumbling onto the image of the bushman was particularly effective icon for me. The woman standing in the midst of the alleyway and electrical lines spoke of mine, and Linda's, arrival in Vancouver. We stepped into a strange urban-scape our suburban upbringing was unprepared for. The woman naked, separate, alien was a voice for my own isolation. Making a drypoint was a liberating technique that matched where and who I was. After Bob Steele threw away my fist attempt at a print I was given a piece of copper and a scribe. Turning heads in the library I tore away at the surface as I created my first print "Woman by board." But when I later turned to the Bushman the technique and the imagery were well aligned.

"Woman by board" and "Bushman woman(study)" etchings