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

I don't think your life is meaningless...

"I don't think your life is meaningless."

"You don't?"

"No."


"But...listen, you've just been saying life is meaningless so how can..?"

"I changed my mind."

"But...Why?"

"Thermodynamic miracles...events with odds against so astronomically they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing."

"And yet in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeeting; siring this precise son, that exact daughter..."

"...until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children copeting for fertilization, it was you, only you that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold...that is the crowning unlikelihood. The Thermodynamic miracle."

"But...if me, my birth, if thats a thermodynamic miracle...I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!"

"Yes. Anybody in the world."

"...But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget...I forget."

"We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away."

"Come...dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly."

"Dry your eyes...and let's go home."

(From Watchmen: Alan Moore)

Scapula!

AAAAAHHHH!!!!

Today I Know What I Want to Do but I Don't Know What For

This is a painting that I did as my interpretation of "The Aeon."

My whole weekend has been spent staring at cat bones. bhwew!