Penultimate Peril

“Richard Nixon Back Again”

Billy Joel, We Didn’t Start the Fire.

The working title for this one might end up being “The Artifice of Fraud”,”Cognitive Dissidence”, “Origins of a Black Hole” or something entirely different. Given these time’s it was created in, there shouldn’t be much of a symbolic leap over what, or rather “whom” it’s about.

That it’s the penultimate piece to a series about ill omens and man’s predisposition toward self annihilation, may have fresh and foreboding significance, given the US and the former Soviet Unions recent withdrawal from the nuclear arms treaty.

If we survive the years ahead, at the very least the best historical legacy we could look forward to, may be the flourishing of art that reflects the period we live in.

For instance, the atrocities of Spain's bloody war produced Goya's Distasters of War,  the horrors of Otto Dix's nightmarish hellscapes, sprung from the decay of first WW trenches, Philip Guston's eviscerating scrawls showcased the Nixon years, and Peter Howson's sprawling canvases rose from the stark degradation and inhumanity of Bosnia's war.

If there is one thing safe to assume, it’s that we live in fertile times for works of such scope.

Having just viewed Velvet Buzzsaw on Netflix, I'm heartened by the fact that for all the droll and ugly depiction of artifice and hollow pretension in the Contemporary Art World, at least Hollywood seems in on the secret that Dark figurative painting, is the most authentic art of substance.

Albeit if the artist was mad, unknown and dead.

Still...

One more to go before showtime, long nights of back breaking daubing and blind panic before showtime. 


While you wait to see the new stuff, here's some old stuff-a blast from the past when I was unknown, mad at the world and may as well have been dead. Encompassing the decade 1987 to 1997, for what were my wilderness years, I've uploaded a gallery of curio's for those who might be curious . 

The Liar | Mixed media on canvas panel | 11" x 18" (1997)

Whilst I wish I could include the long since lost Dalinian neurotic etchings of '84, or the following summer painting Eric Fischl style nudes,  what remains are I think, my first embryonic stumbling's through the same spiritual dark matter that has consumed my work for my entire artistic life. 


Click the link below to see more:


1987-1997

The Ghost of Vincent.

"The sadness will last forever."
Van Goghs proported final words to Theo

This shall be my first Halloween for some time that I am not exhibiting anywhere.  
Enough ghosts and demons currently in the studio at any rate. 

There's the ghost of Vincent for instance, pinned to my wall, glaring accusingly with one withering eye. The other one-his left one-is looking resigned, filled with marine-flecked melancholy and suffering. That particular eye haunts my own work right now, imposing itself into each canvas like the plucked orb of Horus. 

Did Vincent truly suffer I wonder? 

The romantique parable is of his self imposed exile in Arles amongst spud headed peasants, harboring Daddy issues and a gradual realization of the gargantuan shadow cast by Rembrandt, whilst his search to capture light in liquescence and Oriental line became the vainglorious quest of a failed alchemist. All on his brothers dime I might add, until he ravaged sibling good will and stipend on Absinthe, harlots and Japanese art prints. 
Not the suffering of brokeback tilling of fields from dusk till dawn with the peasants he gilded, or even the nine to five for poor old Vince, just the artifice of the syphilitic Libertine in a garret, the actor slumming it for the Academy. 

 Vincent the artist messiah, the flameheaded madman suffering needlessly, and dying penuriously wretched to save the future of contemporary Art. Vincent a standard bearer for greatness equated with drug addled, ritualized self sacrifice. Vincent the veritable Lou Reed of Modern Art. Vincent and the second shooter, because a death doesn't truly become a myth without a hefty (over)dose of conspiracy.

Mischievous brats with bad aim or not,there go Rothko,Pollock and his ilk making martyrs of us all.Or at least suffering taken to its histrionic, ignoble endpoint with Granto's trite Eye-jaculations;

The residual misery stain's the 20th century and beyond, thicker than impasto, making soothsayers of passive observers hoping to unravel an element of raw human truth amongst the chaos of stumbled ill rendering, whilst faded print's of sunflower's hang innocuously from a million vestibule wall's. 

Fuck you Vincent.

William Utermohlen and the con of contemporary, by Van Gough

 "Nothing is true, and everything is permitted"
William Burroughs

I've been thinking about William Utermohlen a lot lately, and contemporary art and my 'place' in it. I do that periodically, and Poor Williams story is none better than a yardstick to beat one's self with. William-for the uninitiated- was an artist who continued to catalog himself throughout his twelve year descent into the hellish grip of Alzheimer's.

All the works above are by William-first to last , a period between 1967 and 2000. Hard to believe isn't it?  You can see all the progressions (or regressions) in between. The last one looks like the scrawls of child, or even Modern Art. What does that say about Contemporary Art then? That it is a self conscious affectation at portraying an unraveled mind? That it is the self imposed attempt at naivety? That it is the deliberate nihilism of virtuosity? All those questions share something in common. They are all predisposed intentions-a luxury poor William didn't have. Instead, he could only watch the years of bravura technique he had developed trickle away to the abstract resonance of dying brain matter, to formless, hollow shapes barely comprising substance or meaning.
The uninitiated for Post Modernist sake, might want to wank on and argue that the later renderings display more of a kind of tortured tumultuous vitality than the first portrait. Not poor William though. He would know such posturing was a lie, Sadly,William can no longer argue at all.

I ask again then, what does that tell us about Contemporary art? About the people who paint it? About the people who buy it? About the curators who peddle it? You see, I believe there's a perpetual lie being told in "Modern art" and it goes deeper than the con of the contemporary, and the sin of the cynical dollar value. It is one that forgoes suffusion for suffering.  The telling for technique. What it doesn't do, and what it doesn't want you to do, is look deeper, to think beyond the designer paint spattered facade and your home furnishings.It doesn't want you to be propelled by the rich magic in allegory, to become attuned to the symbolism of rite, because the historical power encoded in classicism,the veiled aspiration of heightened reality has been designated to become a relic collecting dust and trustees in museums and stately mansions. It is the artifact of privilege, the heritage of elite lineage. 

Why did this happen? Could it be that there is something else going on beyond the hustle of the Emporer's new clothes?

If you will indulge me for a moment longer... there's a scene in Polanski's movie the 9th Gate (based on the novel The Club Dumas) , in which Johnny Depp comes into possession of a grimoire (said to be written by old Nick himself) which contains illustrations imbued with powerful totems,capable of manifesting Satan (the light bringer) on earth.
It's a poor movie, made by a Director in recess, jaded by his own dark dabbling's no less, but my point is this-there is power in Ancient symbols. In well constructed, beautifully rendered, analogous images. One need only seek out the work of Bosch, Raphael, Carravagio, Goya or Blake to see the alchemy of inherent hermetic symbols expressed.

Where is any of that in Modern Art? If Modern life is a construct of our times, then so is the culture that informs it. But who exactly informs it? Who evaluates its worth? Is it the collectors? The so called 1% with warehouses of Hirst's and Warhol's? Is it the media, bought and sold by corporate advertising? Who are the arbiters of taste? You or I? What cereal do you buy and where did you hear about it?

Do you see where I am going with this? As my old friend John Liddy used to intone through white knuckles;

"Whats the fucking point damn it!?"

You see, I believe the depiction of anything beyond surface has become a problem, or at least diminished to the fuck you moniker of low brow or a Billy Childish ism. The other side is that the value of Art is now designated by the sterotypical notion that there are idiot savants in the gutter, comprising wizened kids under the delusion that scrawling on a wall is anti-establishment, when the irony of course is that their heroes are as entrenched in establishment as it gets and laughing all the way to the Banksy.
For that matter, isn't it also the case that if graffiti is the provenance of the street, with that democratization comes the terrible equation that skill no longer has any cachet, art no longer any value? Whose laughing then?

  Bottom line, you are being lied to: Duchamp was a chump. Pollock was bollocks. Rothko was bought by Rothschild. Your pristine hotel boardroom, Ikea Scandinavian model, with it's matching curtains and "edgy" Rothko reproduction is a crass lie and you are lying to yourselves and your notion of high art intelligence if you buy into it, because minimalism is as minimalism does-an empty shell in a vacant lot, with nothing beyond the incoherent blurt echoing the self proclaimed white box. It asks you to be a reflection of the same blank drivel, to look for relevance in the nothing and be content in its hollow. It has no cachet, no reference, no aspiration. It is the masturbatory scrawl of diminished intelligence with grand pretension. It is keeping you 'down' and it is the death and dearth of the magic and alchemical rite of artistry.

An insult in fact to the life's work of artists like William Utermohlen.

Celestine

Extinction Dance
60" x 48"
Acrylic on canvas

Someone I've recently had the good fortune of getting to know is a lovely young artist who goes by the name of Celestine. Having exhibited together at a couple of group shows here, it was a real pleasure the other day then to be given a personal tour of her solo exhibition at Pulse gallery.

Celestine-or Fei as I know her-was raised in China, and although she trained briefly in what she calls 'the Russian school of painting' when she was young, didn't begin her artistic odyssey until very recently.

One would never know.

The mess you left behind
30" x 24"
Oil on canvas

Her work seems thematically placed somewhere between the sensual half light of 80's film noir stained by an underbelly of vice and the muscular strokes of expressionism. Her paintings give that uneasy vantage point, through the so called Hollywood high life, late night last bubbles of bourbon and cocaine, and the toxic haze of cigar smoke.

The brittle beautiful child of Terry Rodgers and Eric Fischl without the sterility.

Beautiful Liar
40" x 40"
Oil on canvas

Sadly it's the final day before her show comes down, but anyone in the vicinity should catch this showcase if they can. Everyone else should follow what she does here-I fully intend to:

Celestine-in Darkness and Light.

Idealising in Idyllwild.

If we could live anywhere, it would be in a place like Idyllwild. That's where we spent Memorial weekend, in a little wood cabin-just the sound of rustled leaves and woodpeckers to break the tranquility, or hiking through nature trails beneath the brow of Mount Tahquitz.

Naturally, I love towns that are like a frozen pocket of time- little mom 'n pop shops cluttered with old books and antiquity, dirt roads lined with rusty old trucks.
So I was surprised then, that it also has a good deal of gallery's, betraying the usual hobbyist fare with some really strong contemporary work *

The food was naturally wonderful because I had the best chef in the world-Lani, concocting the most mouth watering deliciousness-hearty fuel for those long steep walks, food for the very soul.
In an ideal world, a world shrunk to the size of small town, a world small enough to make sense of, I would enliven days spent in seclusion of an airy studio there, in an enclave overlooking the mist covered peaks.

It would be perfect.
It would be enough.

*paintings Carol Mills

Naked contemporary

Here's a quick nude study in oil I did today just for fun. I think that I could spend my days in painted contemplation of the human form, I suppose it's the transcendence of adulation, the depth of just merely relating or some such wank.

Talking of playing with yourself, Huff Post had an article today entitled Top Ten Artists to watch. Unsurprisingly, Bruce Helander almost creams his gussets with genuflection,over a selection that wouldn't look out of place in a Home Depot skip or Fukushima landfill.

David Ellis-'True Value'

Notably in the list, was the only figurative piece by artist Peter Buechler, although it's hard to actually label the piece figurative, since he has chosen to decapitate the study leaving an empty featureless, muddy gray background.
Which on reflection, is probably as near a testament to the whole sorry travesty of contemporary art as one can get. I dare say he wasn't thinking that when he painted it, just cynically playing to the gallery no doubt, but with dross like Will Ryman's 'Roses' endorsed as a yardstick by the White House National Endowment for Arts, what hope is there for the future of Art.

The Con in Contemporary

"a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.”-Albert Campus, describing most Abstract Art.
This past week, I've seen an abstract that reminded me a smear I once saw on a toilet wall at Milton Keynes bus depot go for $5,000 at a downtown gallery.

Today I discovered that a reproduction from a San Diego 'artist' of Bosch's Earthly delights cut into odd jigsaw pieces had been sold for $25,000 on EBay.

Is it little wonder that I grow despondent daily, about the kind of patronage afforded philistines here?