catching up...

oops!

just revisiting my old posts. i realized that,
not only have i rudely failed to reply to your
replies, but i also left out various pics and
comments in the posts themselves!

you'd think that fifth year of college would
have made me smarter...

anyhoo, thanks to everyone for posting! i
really appreciate your comments and support.
frankly, the past year has been very unsettling
for me, especially realizing how short i've fallen
of my own expectations (both professionally
and artistically). boo, hoo.

on the one hand, these little "projects" are a
life line for me, one the other hand, not having
the time (or not being smart enough to figure
out how to MAKE the time, whichever you prefer)
to finish my visual thoughts is frustrating. each
little thing is progressing in teeny steps, and
i'll keep posting them, but the desire to throw
out my entire current art life and start from
scratch is really overwhelming.

wow. i am garrulous AND whiny.

back to the point of this post... adding to a
few incomplete earlier posts:

in january, i posted sketches for my first
"assignment", the CD cover. i was considering
different final treatments for the basic drawing.
one is more fully painted, which will take a while.
another one was this very basic idea, basically
just the sketch, digitally jazzed up. i liked it
because the actual drawing is so interesting,
and this highlights it where a more fully painted
version might obscure it. then again, there's no
excuse why i shouldn't be able to work out some-
thing that sells both the raw drawing and more
realized color/painting treatment. i figure there
is always a solution... it's just the artists job to
figure it out!

so here's the 1st color version:



can't wait to get back to it!
(not to mention that hulk pic, and the
kiss pic, and batman/catwoman, etc...)

also left out...

in march, i was trashing the whitney "modern art"
exhibit. (there were a few good pieces, but they
just highlighted the overall failure of the thing.)
i contrasted the whitney to the MoMA (Museum
of Modern Art).

one of the whitney pieces was several words spelled
out on the wall with lumps of what was presumably
meant to look like shit. literally. but they didn't look
like shit, they looked like lumps of brown play-dough,
which they probably were. i have no idea what the piece
was "about", i didn't see any explanatory blurb. which
is fine by me — it's one thing to have some blurb
explaining the emotional context of a work, or calling
out subtle nuances, that's fine. but if you need a written
crutch just to explain the point of shit names on the
wall, you should probably stop being a lazy and pre-
tentious goof.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE MOMA... there is a display
of a small, packaged can from the 1930s. the label is
in italian, but the placard translates the label as "100%
artist's shit". guess what the medium is? that's right...
can, paper label, and artist's shit. maybe you like it,
maybe you hate it, but you definitely have a reaction!
and (assuming you can read italian) the art is completely
self-explanatory — at least, when an artist proudly
packages and displays his own shit in a museum, you
can at least guess what he's saying... about art, about
artists, about museums, whatever.

so i think it is awesome.