Notes from an Easel-56-Death of Winter

Brushes are growing threadbare again, and a journey to the art store to replenish my fine sables is one of the few things that hinge on me completing the piece in time for the solstice. I find myself in that plateau place where my hunger to progress to the next piece is making the completion of this one feel like an epic struggle.

Unrelatedly related, I read something artist Terry Rodgers said in this months Juxtapoz, about the difference between American and European audiences being that the latter are a little more comfortable with difficult subject matter. Speaking of Americans he says that they 'live in an isolated fairyland and are subjected to amazing religious-based fantasies.' I can concur, although his penchant for painting large photo realistic scenes of debauchery set his mettle a little more in the camp of extreme than my own, it's something I've contemplated a lot of late. For all the peer back slappery I enjoy, I am still not commercially in favor here. It seems all about becoming a name and a gimmick, and perhaps it being the season, I am feeling the draw of Europe because of chronic homesickness, but I do imagine that my art would sit more comfortably in a gallery in say-Vladivostok-than Malibu. The grasp of the human condition is simply surfeit here, the enduring grasp is for the superficial, the contrivance of emotion without feeling-that thing of being constantly connected through Twitter without ever connecting, the paranoid narcissistic horror of aging annihilated by the bronzed skin pulled back across every botoxed cheekbone.

I get lost in the romantic notion of living and working in a studio loft in Berlin or Amsterdam, and wonder if I could make more of a living from my art, in a place where the ravages of suffering are written in the pockmarks and shrapnel pits of the landscape.

Unrelated, I had to laugh today when I read about a progressive church (an oxymoron if ever I heard one) in New Zealand, whose vainglorious attempts to appeal with the unholy masses, extended to a billboard that has the church up in arms (when aren't they) and would give Ron English a run for his money: