I am back in Florida. I have set up my painting studio and I am creating fresh, new works on canvas. I am selling these paintings exclusively through ebay. I have decided to focus on large works on canvas. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I am also posting youtube videos of me describing my paintings with the inspiration that brought them into being. This first link describes the work "Sea at Night". I will be posting more videos shortly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BevSVvwbmi4&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
First few days in Santa Fe as a Native
My first evening in Santa Fe I spent the night in a Walmart parking lot. I woke up that morning and went to Starbucks. My roommate situation with the newspaper reporter that looked like Gywneth Paltrow did not materialize. There was some lady outside the Starbucks and I asked if I could take a photo of her.
Some time went by and suddenly it was mid afternoon and I was essentially homeless in Santa Fe. I kind of panicked and considered moving to Taos or Las Vegas, NM. However, I soon regained my composure and went for a drive around town. I looked at some lofts and mobile homes. Then I just gave up and checked in to the hostel.
When I checked in to the hostel I saw that August was there. He was in the same room a month and a half ago when I visited the first time. He had secured a good job as a shoe salesman at Dillards. He was currently living in a tent in an arroyo near his job. The reason he had checked in was to just get a couple nights break from outdoor living. He had a number of poetry books with him. He was a fellow alumni from Loyola University in New Orleans. We talked about Art, Literature and Music. He shared some song with me from an album called New Electronic Music where this lady is talking and it slow degenerates into pure noise. I really liked it.
Soon after I saw Caitlin who I had met the last time I was there too. She had made the loop of Taos, Colorado and Santa Fe and had finally decided on Santa Fe. Now she was working at the Hostel. I told her that I knew I would see her. I also, ran into Rusty. He was back to put the finishing touches on the mural of Zozobra. He had his family come visit. The next day I painted some paintings with his daughter outside. I was just going to show her some of my work and then she started talking about paintings and what type of paintings she wanted to do and I just got the stuff out and we started painting in front of the hostel.
I also met a gifted Anthropologist named Pabla. She was able to tell that I had spent time outside of America just by listening to my accent for a few moments. I told her that I had lived in Oslo, Norway for a six months in highschool. She had just returned from a ceremony with the 95 year old chief of the Taos Pueblo. She told me about the ceremony and it was very interesting. I will try to put a link to her paper. She was very knowledgeable about human behavior and customs across many different cultures. She had several astute observations about humanity.
Santa Fe is a very inspiring place for artists. The mountains are in the distance. The sky is constantly changing, the clouds movement casts strange shadows over the landscape. Sometimes there appears to be a spotlight straight from heaven. I have officially parked the Mercedes.
My new form of transportation is the singlespeed track bike(probably the best 200 bucks I spent in 2010). I ride it on a back trail that winds its way beside an arroyo and the train tracks. The great thing about the trail is that it is totally in nature. There are no cars whizzing by. Today I saw a Bluejay fluttering towards earth as I whizzed by at 19 miles an hour.
On Tuesday I went to the Farmers Market at the Railyard which is near Downtown. There are several galleries down there and a youth graffiti training station called Warehouse 21. The Market was very colorful. There was also the Axle gallery.
It immediately reminded me of Courbet's Tent of Realism that he set up outside the Lourve in Paris. If you have never heard of the Tent of Realism I would encourage you to look it up. This has got to be my most favorite gallery of all time. The guy who invented this is a genius. He has combined high Art and a concession truck into a place for Art afficianados to interact in a very personal way with the Art. I just decided I want to have my first solo show in his Gallery.
When I checked in to the hostel I saw that August was there. He was in the same room a month and a half ago when I visited the first time. He had secured a good job as a shoe salesman at Dillards. He was currently living in a tent in an arroyo near his job. The reason he had checked in was to just get a couple nights break from outdoor living. He had a number of poetry books with him. He was a fellow alumni from Loyola University in New Orleans. We talked about Art, Literature and Music. He shared some song with me from an album called New Electronic Music where this lady is talking and it slow degenerates into pure noise. I really liked it.
Soon after I saw Caitlin who I had met the last time I was there too. She had made the loop of Taos, Colorado and Santa Fe and had finally decided on Santa Fe. Now she was working at the Hostel. I told her that I knew I would see her. I also, ran into Rusty. He was back to put the finishing touches on the mural of Zozobra. He had his family come visit. The next day I painted some paintings with his daughter outside. I was just going to show her some of my work and then she started talking about paintings and what type of paintings she wanted to do and I just got the stuff out and we started painting in front of the hostel.
I also met a gifted Anthropologist named Pabla. She was able to tell that I had spent time outside of America just by listening to my accent for a few moments. I told her that I had lived in Oslo, Norway for a six months in highschool. She had just returned from a ceremony with the 95 year old chief of the Taos Pueblo. She told me about the ceremony and it was very interesting. I will try to put a link to her paper. She was very knowledgeable about human behavior and customs across many different cultures. She had several astute observations about humanity.
Santa Fe is a very inspiring place for artists. The mountains are in the distance. The sky is constantly changing, the clouds movement casts strange shadows over the landscape. Sometimes there appears to be a spotlight straight from heaven. I have officially parked the Mercedes.
My new form of transportation is the singlespeed track bike(probably the best 200 bucks I spent in 2010). I ride it on a back trail that winds its way beside an arroyo and the train tracks. The great thing about the trail is that it is totally in nature. There are no cars whizzing by. Today I saw a Bluejay fluttering towards earth as I whizzed by at 19 miles an hour.
On Tuesday I went to the Farmers Market at the Railyard which is near Downtown. There are several galleries down there and a youth graffiti training station called Warehouse 21. The Market was very colorful. There was also the Axle gallery.
It immediately reminded me of Courbet's Tent of Realism that he set up outside the Lourve in Paris. If you have never heard of the Tent of Realism I would encourage you to look it up. This has got to be my most favorite gallery of all time. The guy who invented this is a genius. He has combined high Art and a concession truck into a place for Art afficianados to interact in a very personal way with the Art. I just decided I want to have my first solo show in his Gallery.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Santa Fe and The Theatre of the Mind
Journeying through the hot Texas landscape of July 2011. I made my way towards Santa Fe. I was leaving Dallas. I wondered if there was a Santa Fe of the imagination. Could there be a Santa Fe of the mind? I decided to let go a disappear into the journey. I was delighted to notice how the landscape changed ever so subtly as the terra firma gradually gave way to desert and then high desert. As I drew nearer there were these awesome grey cumulus clouds the dominated the sky. The light shone through them in a tortured chiaroscuro simultaneously lightening and darkening different parts of the landscape. On impulse I began photographing through the windows of the Benz at 70 miles per hour.
The road began to twist and turn upward. I was overcome by this feeling of drama and emotion, partially produced by the landscape. This was a place I had never been before and I wanted to surrender myself totally to the experience. On the outskirts of town I noticed that there were winding roads that followed the contours of the landscape. The streets were clean and lined with houses set back from the street. The yards looked like the were just filled with native shrubs and colored gravel. Two teenagers passed me driving a Black Landrover.
I stopped at McDonalds as I neared my destination(the Hostel on Cerrillos). I used the restroom and noticed there were Hispanic and Indian people in the restaurant but I felt at one with them. We belonged here despite any sideways glances I recieved. I got back in the Benz and wound my way to the Hostel following the voice instructions of the woman from my GPS. The drive from McDonalds to the Hostel reminded me of life. The road was under construction and it twisted and turned and you couldn’t see what was around the next corner. Upon arrival I went in to the lobby of the hostel. There was a young blond kid running around and the clerk explained that his mother was on a daytrip and he was watching the kid.
The sun was setting and some people had gathered in the parking lot to watch it through the haze of the distant burning fires. Some dude named Rusty was standing there. He was about 45 years old with redish blond hair. He had an eight inch goatee that was kept safely in check by five rubberbands. He was chatting with an Austrailian Hippie lady that was the mother of the boy who was running around the lobby when I arrived.
Rusty was there on business. He was painting a mural of a giant effigy that is burned every year on the day of the dead. This effigy probably inspired the Burning Man Festival. He was up from Tuscon. Outside the hostel there was a small Toyota pickup and it had a Masonic sticker on it. The sticker reminded me of my friend Barry the Texas Painter.
He has an obsession with the Mason’s, Masonic Rituals, Masonic beliefs and Ideas and has developed an original theological concept that uses the Mason's core beliefs as a point of departure that he has named "the God Sized Void".
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