A Fan Writes

A fan writes:

For the record, recent blog entries are becoming a bit too diary-like, for my tastes.

To which I would, of course, reply:

a) Isn't it supposed to be like a diary?
b) You don't like it? Write your own fucking blog.

That bit of bookkeeping aside, I've now finally completely stepped away from this whole alien thing. Turns out I'm not an alien; I'm a prophet.

I knew it was something.

Why, you ask, do I think I'm a prophet?

Well, two reasons:

a) Not less than a couple of days after my screed about women's feet in strappy sandals, no less an authority than The Washington Post essentially mirrored my concerns. Lacking the poetic vision you encounter here at the Year of Magical Painting, they missed the asparagus analogy, but otherwise...

Here's a graphic. I'm particularly troubled by:

I) the hammertoe illustration
II) likewise the bunion
III) their obvious use of Hillary Clinton as a leg model. Shouldn't she be campaigning?



b) As many may know, one of the Gibb boys was the mentoring artist on American Idol. Me? I was never a massive fan of the BGs during their Saturday Night Fever disco thing. But I did like the early stuff. And all day today I've been humming the tune and whatever words I can scratch up to "To love somebody." And tonight, what song does Andy, or Barry, or whoever it was (these people are like the Ramones), choose to sing? "To love somebody."

So something is up.

Tomorrow, I will show you what the hell is happening with my painting of Bobby Lee. To give you a preview, the idea is to use blue painter's tape to rim six grid squares (out of a total of 30). These squares will then be drawn and painted. Once dry, they will be sealed off by additional tape, so the squares next to them will be painted in a "vacuum." And so on, until the thing is roughly finished. At which point, I'll expose all the squares and we'll see what we'll see.

It sounds a bit like a game show, doesn't it?

More likely, it will look a bit disjointed. Which is good. Adds dynamic disjunction. I'll then do two things:

a) Treat the image as a whole for a couple of layers, throwing down some paint just to pull the damned thing back together
b) Paint (perhaps in a natural style, with a brush, rather than dripped) a dogwood branch across the bottom of the image, also to pull the damned thing back together, plus give Virginia the cheese, to a degree, plus pimp up a kind of faux-Asian woodcut thing.

All this said, the intent is to get back to a more clearly defined grid. This was successful for me with my painting of Chuck Close, but I've never quite achieved the same fully-defined grid in subsequent paintings. So that's something to shoot for.

This, of course, is me on my way to a halloween party dressed as Andy Gibb.:



Tomorrow will also feature, assuming a level of energy on my part, an expanded version of El Toro Negro with an in-depth blow-by-blow of the 5-Boro Bike Tour weekend.

This is "Close, But Not Quite"--as discussed above.



This is "Elena In The Morning"--which features a grid created by laying twine across the face of the canvas and gessoing over it. This, I must tell you, is a stunning painting in real life. Around the edge you can see that the twine extends about an inch and a half on each side, creating both its own "frame" as well as the effect you see in cartooning when they draw lines around an image to suggest excitement, vibrancy, or, in this case, dynamic disjunction.