on shortcutting soul

Masterpiece



Foreshortening



Detail



Vandals



Witnesses


Sometimes at the end of the day, i admit stumbling into the local Price Chopper and purchasing the plastic box labeled "Sweet Cornbread," in desperation to chomp into something other than the pen gritted between my teeth during the last meeting.
You can eat a lot of "Sweet Cornbread" b/c it's: sweet, greasy and kind of tasty. But if the machine that mixed the batter missed some spots, you experience the merciless bite of baking soda.
Even worse, some batches have random kernels inside, which are usually clustered all in one spot in the pan. Faulty composition.

But hey, i can throw paint on a wall willy-nilly too.

Which brings me to recent email from friend Dale, in which he writes about doppelgangers...the split, the reality, maybe the sincerity, the struggle (that's my interpretation of what he said, anyway) of creating digital vs. "real" art. He's feeling the pressure of bumped-up dates of gallery shows, for which new "real-deal" work is needed, and he's been playing on his mac.
Will the real artist please stand up?


Pillow Talk


Resist and Relax


He's not alone: perhaps it's the guilt for being able to make images so fast, so fun, so software. Forget the ever-popular "it's just another tool" mantra: it is, and it isn't.
It ain't a paintbrush nor a pastel (even though it can feign smudging like one) and the hand sure is not involved in the same way, and the body doesn't feel engaged like it does after you've "really" created.

And besides, we of a certain, "experience level" on this planet were trained in the opposite direction and belief system.
It fries your circuits to think it and by intimate association you, could be deemed wrong. or obsolete.




Flesh and blood creators are scandalous, irreverent, just as the organic-brown-rice-flour-blue-cornbread thieves were above. Computers are not.

Suddenly a machine to intervene; there's something spookily 3rd-person about it in a way printing presses are not.
My guess is that vibratory properties of the work shift, the more electrical connection occurs at creation. And therefore the different feel, feeling, resonance of the work compared to standing in the presence of thick paint on canvas.

A voyeur who didn't go to art school and has no ability to actually finesse his/her way out of a design crisis with the miracle of creative cunning, heshe stands at the ready to make whatever changes you wish.
This apprentice needs no hand strength nor motor skills, forgive the bad joke, to erase, blot, scrape, or blend. With a seductive lack of kinesthetic effort, all is possible, fixable, reproducible and impermanent, just click.
Instant death, instant birth.
Instant karma.


Menestra

Like making crudité your sustenance, there's no heat. Unlike menestra de verduras, made a jillion ways, upon which i survived for a couple of months while studying in Spain, its ultimate alchemy based upon variation and length of heat. Old world, new world; can't we be roomies, cohabitate sans combat.


It looks beautiful



Hurry, get it done.
You shower too long.
Get the shot, Werner, for godssakes.
Can you imagine.

Who will we be when all the Cézannes are gone.

Like doing el Camino de Santiago in a golf cart,




or praying in a pew instead
of on the road,




somehow it doesn't translate.