I'm Not Picasso

To paraphrase Tom Jefferson, we hold that truth to be self-evident.  I only say it to illustrate the notion that my boy Pablo was a machine when it came to painting.  And there are lessons to be taken from that which I have not learned.

Me?  I'm having some trouble with the painting.  To be honest.  Between that fucking astronaut staring me in the face every time I walk into the studio, plus finishing up Uncle Sam, plus feeding you goddam people content, plus grappling with a range of social media questions, plus my almost monomaniacal focus on the PeaceWorks Project, the paint is just not coming out of my tube.

If you know what I mean.

You're flaccid.
Yes, in a sort of a way.  Although I'm not at all comfortable with that terminology.
You just said nothing was coming out of your tube.  I just took it to its logical conclusion.
Well stop it.

Anyway, the whole thing throws me into a bit of a pit of depression.  Which manifests itself partly by making me not want to paint.  Which depresses me.  Can you see the pattern?

A blind man could see the pattern.

Anyway, as a way of battling out of the hole, I'm resuscitating and revamping an old blog called PaintingTheStreetWeekly.  As I think I note in that blog's overview, I was a cartoonist long before I became a painter.  Which isn't exactly true, but still, I've been a cartoonist -- a paid one -- and it was a long time ago, so work with it.  And since a lot of my paintings have writing on them and exhibit what you might call a satirical bent, the line between my work and cartooning is vague.  And a lot of the time I have something I want to talk about which doesn't merit a whole painting but which does merit cranking up my ArtRage computer program and generating a computerized study for a painting.

This is the one I did this morning ...

Which I kind of like.  It was, as so many of these things are, inspired by an article in the Times that I read over breakfast.   "As The Market Heats Up, Trading Slips Into Shadows" by Nathaniel Popper.

You can see the clear connection with my Map of Troy series, of which this is one ...

Which is a work on paper, not on computer.  Odd, it takes less time to do the painting on paper than it does to do the study on computer, but let's not even get into that.

The idea is to bing one of these boys out on a weekly basis, print them in small editions, sell them for a relative pittance, and, through this, somehow re-find my sense of whatever.

Thank God Lent is over.