Wacky

What is with all these inanimate object-love related stop motion animations?



Also, how weird is this? This is a photo of frozen broccoli packaging.





























IT'S PEOPLE!!!

Well...

This is how my day was, how was yours?

Huge Chunks of Whale Blubber Falling Everywhere

I stumbled across this today and thought it was pretty wonderful. What do you do when you have a dead whale on your hands? The same thing we seem to do with all of our problems. Blow them up.

Oh, and here is the actual news video.

In which I ponder a few things but fail to get stuck in a tight spot.

I have this friend that I don't see much anymore. We ran into each other about a year ago and at some point in our conversation we realized we were both at that time reading 'A Confederacy of Dunces.' About a month ago, I ran into that same friend, and we realized we were both reading 'The Master and Margarita.' We don't talk much, so it was pretty coincidental. Obviously, we are attracted to the same things. It just struck me as odd.
I picked up 'A Confederacy of Dunces' purely by chance, browsing in a used book store. The cover intrigued me. As for 'The Master and Margarita' I was at Wickerman in PA, sitting on a covered wagon, watching fire spinners and listening to crazy techno in the middle of the woods, having a conversations about books with a new friend and he told me I must absolutely read this book. So the friend who keeps reading the same books as me, obviously our circumstances for finding them are different, but we keep stumbling across the same things.
So I watched 'Zeitgeist' the other night, which by the way is a german word which is pretty fantastic meaning the spirit of the times, which talks about a sort of collective consciousness... or is it subconscious?...and there are clips in 'Zeitgeist' from this movie 'Network' of which I had never heard or seen, but based on the clips I thought it sounded fantastic. What do you know, tonight a friend called and said "Hey...wanna watch this movie with me? It's called Network." So of course I watched it and it was pretty amazing.
Here is a little clip. Maybe you've seen it?

You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here, you're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do. Why, whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion.

Who loves Halloween?

I do!


I've been getting into the holiday spirit by making some masks.
So...what else can I do to procrastinate from my school work besides booze it up on the town? You guessed it:














Make a puppet!















And then kill it!

Zeitgeist Addendum

This is very long but worth watching. If you haven't already seen 'Zeitgeist' start with that. This is a part 2.

Tee Hee Hee

The stuff of dreams...

The Sandman. A Stop Motion Animated Short Film By Paul Berry.
The film was nominated for an Oscar in 1991. Paul died tragically in 2001 of a tumor. He also worked on The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. Models and sets by Ian Mackinnon who set up Mackinnon and Saunders in Manchester, UK. They went on to create the models for Corpse Bride.

Paul Berry "The Sandman"
by vibliographer

And this:








I used to have a link to the 1979 version with a soundtrack I liked better...It came in the night by A raincoat.
Here is that song:





RW: Rabbit's Moon is a very directly emotional film.

KA: It's what I call a nocturne, a dream about me. It's about unrequited love and the moon is a symbol, as it has been in romantic literature, of the unattainable. The moon has always been something that's longed for. I use the figures of Commedia: Pierrot, the lost clown; Columbine, the flirt; and Harlequin, who's the devil, the trickster.

RW: Your harlequin is very spiteful.

KA: So he is. The world, to Harlequin, is a comedy. To him, it's uproarious to trick - to trip people up. Harlequin is Lucifer. To look at it from Harlequin's standpoint - which may be the devil's point of view - he's having a good time. In other words, Harlequin has no complexes; his approach to the world is very direct. You can call him cruel, but he is also a survivor and Pierrot the sad sack is not.

But Wait... There's more!

While we're on Jan:
How's bout a little meat love?

And while we're on the topic of love between inanimate objects:

I could eat Jan for every meal of the day!

Also, check out his fantastic film: Lunacy!

Some illustrations...

For this I was asked to illustration several "performances" from top left to bottom right: contain/support, communication, transportation, maintenance, recreation, and protection.


















And this is a portrait I did of Tom Waits because I love him.

eye heart magritte

Rene Magritte is one of my favorite artists. His painting, The False Mirror, was my inspiration for this piece.
René Magritte described his paintings by saying,
"My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, "What does that mean?". It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."

Attack of the Cabbage Creatures

Some of my art...

In 2005 I had an assignment to create an installation piece within two blocks of our Art Foundation building. I gathered a bunch of sticks and leaves, created an anatomically correct skeleton, and buried it in a creepy alley. Two ladies were driving by when I buried it. They stopped the car and started screaming at me. Then they got out of the car all freaking out, saying they thought I was burying a real body. I held my hands above my head and said, "It's ok, I'm an art student!"














This one was done in February of 2008. It's an illustration of a dream I had. In the dream I was taking a shower. At first, I didn't realize it was a dream. I was kinda zoned out watching the water stream off of me. I could feel the heat of the water. Everything seemed very real. But then my stomach started to hurt really bad and I doubled over in pain. A snake began to come out of my bell button, and then went down my leg and into the drain. At the moment the snake's tail left my belly button blood started gushing out and I got dizzy and passed out. When I woke up I was actually in the shower.




This is an Egon Shiele style self portrait. Not much else to say about that. I think it was from 2006.















The assignment for this was to illustration "One is not half of two, two is half of one." Being the geek I am, I thought DNA!














This one is also about a dream. I had an itching feeling and I kept scratching, but couldn't satisfy it. Eventually I ended up ripping open my chest and my heart started to strangle me. Self set-up.













For this I had to take a photo illustrating "It was the best of times, It was the worst of times."

My Logo



Also super old, a photocollage/painting type deal.

perspective changes everything

I can be endlessly inspired by David Hockney. The idea for this piece happened after I saw "The Scrabble Game."





Hockney considers a photograph is ’still to the point of being frozen, that a photograph excludes more than it revels’, and a photograph is constructed in ways which are contrary to natural vision and traditional art. Using multiple pictures he adds a sense of timing, movement, perspective and composition that is not possible to express so completely using a single image. For example in a person we may see different aspects of personality.

Mandala

This is my personal mandala. It is from early 2005.

Mandala: circle, community, connection

consciousness of seeing
consciousness of hearing
consciousness of tasting
consciousness of smelling
consciousness of the body
consciousness of thinking
consciousness of the I
basic consciousness

(come from the four outer circles of the mandala [8 tombs])

Diamond: symbol of nature of the mind, clear but shows all colors
lotus: roots in the mud, blossoms toward light
Bell: emptiness, boundless openness, gives room for wisdom

mandalas radiate outward and inward--flower, snail shells, atoms, sliced fruit
[a cell is greater than the sum of its parts]

microcosm: community or unity that is an epitome of a larger unity
macrocosm: a complex that is a large scale reproduction of one of its constituents
- a mandala is the microcosm and the macrocosm; actual moment in time
-synthesis of distinctive elements in a unified scheme representing the basic nature of existence (for personal growth)

Spiral: perpetual motion of life, spring like coils, latent power, presenting a picture of life as an endless evolutionary process bound with cycles of time, each loop brings us back to the same place, but takes us to a higher, more evolved level

White: Delusion of ignorance becomes wisdom of reality
Yellow: Delusion of pride becomes wisdom of sameness
Red: delusion of attachment becomes wisdom of discernment
Blue: delusion of anger becomes wisdom of mirror-like wisdom

The center of the mandala is the essence (is the heart)
all of our experiences can be enlightening; world is interdependent, seeing the everyday world through the joy of realization

Center: copulating couple
- union of form and emptiness that underlies all of reality
-fusion of compassion and wisdom in the awakened mind
-ordinary bliss of the orgasm
(extolled as a widow to underlying/fundamental mind of pure being)
[in the moment of orgasm we drop our baggage and move away from the dominance of conceptual thought--sexual bliss as a vehicle for opening the mind]

let disturbances come and go, more grist for the mill
"Falling in love is a mystical time of ego dissolution" -Freud

Our culture with its aggressive promulgation of sexuality has difficulty cultivating the more subtle but powerful energy of passionate intimacy

hook, lasso, chain, bell: summoning, tying, binding, intoxicating
passion is a vehicle for containing the incendiary mix of anger and desire

complete attunement has a suffocating effect/attraction based in otherness and difference as much as it depends on recurrent harmony or satisfaction

"It is only when two people forget themselves in each others presence that they can recognize each other"
Wisdom emerges in the space around words as much as the wisdom itself
a mind that is already full can not take in anything new, full of opinions and preconceptions, in order to find happiness empty yourself, happiness comes from letting go

according the to Dalai Lama seeking happiness is the purpose of life

We are looking for a way to feel more real, to feel more real we have to push ourselves further into the unkown

The inner place where the golden spiral ends is sometimes called the eye of god
1.0 to 1.61803... is called the DIVINE proportion, PHI
lotus petals would be arranged at 0.618034 petals per turn--best possible exposure for the flower
emptiness is an understandig of ones true nature, an intuition of the absence of inherent identity
Nature vs Nurture