The Comfy Towel art by Darren Daz Cox. This was an attempt to capture that awesome feeling of being wrapped up in a big fluffy towel!!
I was thinking of the famous painting by Edgar Germain Hilaire Degas where the model is sitting on a fluffy towel. He excelled in capturing how the light fell on the figure and regardless of certain stuffy art history texts, I believe he posed the model with her towel, not only to show that she had just bathed but was comfortable and in a state of luxury rather than it being some kind of endless chore in the drudgery of everyday life!Frau bei der Toilette painting by Edgar Germain Hilaire Degas.
Below is a flyer by Holly for the awesome Peoria area folk rock band Something With Trees!
Something With Trees flyer by Holly Eitenmiller. You can keep up with Something With Trees at their website http://www.somethingwithtrees.com.
And this one is a digitally enhanced pencil sketch a of hippy girl! Holly is making a flyer for a 60′s themed concert and so I was inspired to draw from her happiness vibes!
Double Hippy Chick art by Darren Daz Cox
Trippy and cute art just randomly put together on a snowy morning in January 2012!
And below is a sculpture I did some years back in porcelain clay, I am inspiring myself to make some Fimo clay sculptures!

More art and recipes coming up!!

Willy Wonka: But Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he he always wanted.
Charlie Bucket: What happened?
Willy Wonka: He lived happily ever after.

Sometimes the art just flows. I don’t need to suffer to do great art as the cliche might go.
Most of my art exists in glorious potential, simmering deliciously in my mind. The sketch above is a mural idea, actually the bottom part with the top part having angels bouncing on clouds.
The sketch below is a representation of the ‘attention’ concept that girls work with in their social development, without that concept we would not have dance! I suppose they invented it to keep from being eaten by bears and saber tooth tigers. I’m not really concerned about the science though, I’m just an observer of happiness and creativity.

Below is Dancer with a bouquet of flowers (The Star of the ballet) by the mighty Edgar Degas.
Degas was the original Painter Of Light!! Visit WikiPaintings for lots of good stuff from Degas!

In a lot of ways this painting symbolizes the attention concept for me. She is so happy, she is the center of attention and no bears will be able to eat her as she is loved, and the crowd would rush to save her should a bear, or saber tooth tiger were to rush the stage looking for lunch.
Speaking of saber tooth tigers, come on down to the Speakeasy Art Center this year for the Wine Share concerts in the art gallery! You bring your wine, and common sense, and have a good time!
Flyer by Holly! She can make one for your event too!

And here is a nifty liquified pic I made of a photo taken of holly this unseasonably warm January!

and here is my collage for my Facebook page cover pic!

I have sooo much art and so much abundance! Have a great day everyone!

At this point I’ve added four different green’s and three yellow oil paints. The orange pink red layer is underway then a layer of violet!  Photographs don’t really do oil paintings justice, the color is really vibrant in the light,  in some ways this painting is more like Mark Rothko’s color field paintings than a landscape, at least to me. 

My friend Pamster asked me what were the trees looking at down the hill? hehe, funny how it takes another person’s comment to make the picture take on a whole new direction! I was thinking about having faeries flying around so I think I’ll have them flying from the lower left corner up! I’ve been wanting to paint simple faeries like John Anster Fitzgerald did in his Fairies Looking Through an Open Window painting.

This is one of my all time favorite paintings, look at how punkrock the faerie at the window looks! The white allows for a rainbow of colors to be added subtly, and heck the faerie at the top has violet while the one at the bottom (punk faerie) has red, the extremes of the spectrum! I keep thinking about light, from the pure joy of seeing rainbows from crystals to the holographic universe theories.  I’m not a scientist and I don’t have any spiritual insights to share but I do know that there is a magic in art.

hmmm I guess this is a point for the faeries! Faeries 1, Angels 0

TinEye.com, It’s not perfect yet (my art isn’t indexed yet *wah*) but it sure is satisfying to find a larger sized image of a great piece of art you stumble across!

…and here’s some of my art (on this blog it’s generally 500 pixels wide but I have larger versions out there too and would like Tin Eye to index my stuff so people can quickly find a larger size so they print it out or make it a quality desktop pic!).

"She had no use for my heart" Fine art by Darren Daz Cox, pencil and then the liquify filter in Photoshop.

I now need a wall to paint on about the same size of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel.

Below is an excellent pic from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistine_Chapel

Michelangelo’s Last Judgement fresco in the Sistine Chapel

I have proven to myself that I can paint big with my 20ft by 10ft oil paint mural in the Speakeasy Art Center and gallery in Pekin Illinois. Now I wish to go bigger and really expand the ideas I started. Here is a detail of my current work that you can see on the third floor of the Speakeasy Art Center, across from the courthouse in Pekin Illinois (there are many other cool artist’s there too with lots to see but please don’t disturb their work!).

Pekin Illinois trippy mural at the Speakeasy Art Center July 12 2010 by Darren Daz Cox

I’ve been working on some smaller paintings with the idea to have something I can sell but you can’t get the detail in a small work that you can with something huge. It is nice to share art and allow people to own something that I put time and effort into.  Below are some of my current small works that will be available to whomever wishes to own them for a modest contribution. I figure I’ll sell my small paintings for $99.00 US which is a sum most anyone with a job can afford and will appreciate in value as my work gets more and more noticed.

Angel of Ambiguity oil painting by Darren Daz Cox

Angel of Ascention oil painting by Darren Daz Cox

Fern Faerie oil painting by Darren Daz Cox

These oil paintings are obviously unfinished but I work on as much as I can without forcing the work. If it becomes a chore or a "job" then it doesn’t turn out well so I take my time and slowly build up a picture while I think good thoughts! It is important to me that the quantum intent associated with my art is of a positive nature and while that has no apparent relevance in a world where scientists cannot measure such things it is very important to me,,,

What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?
Michelangelo

Jen was kind enough to include one of my paintings in a blog post of hers on Shine (Yahoo’s new blog service) . she enjoys the world of art and posed the question in another post – What Is Art Worth?

One of my pet peeves is this constant association of everything to a monetary value and then status being associated with that monetary value as it makes struggling artists worth more dead than alive. Society is enriched by artists in ways beyond mere money, we add color to your community, we show you an alternative to being ‘normal’…

Vincent Van Gogh was what you’d call a ‘leech on society’ while he was alive, he was a starry eyed dreamer who mooched off of his family, a slacker, a bum living a childish fantasy of being a famous painter, he wallowed in the luxury of dedicating his life to the arts while real men worked at real jobs, yeah, most people wouldn’t like Vincent Van Gogh if he was alive today.

Amazingly people revere him as something close to holy now that his paintings are so famous, everyone knows the story of how he only sold one or two paintings in his lifetime and many assume that had a direct affect on why he killed himself, after all, if people are rich they live happily ever after, except Kurt Cobain, there’s always that exception to the rule right?.

I think if people stopped talking about how much they think art is worth in terms of cash then maybe the conversation would be about why art is important in other ways.  I think this whole ‘price’ thing is the lowest common denominator designed to distance the masses from the wealthy elite.

Van Gogh mostly painted the poorest of the working people, he considered their toil to be a tribute to God not some kind of punishment or failure that made them unable to purchase his art.

"Inspire, be inspired and appreciate" – Dannion Brinkley on the meaning of life.

It’s actually kind of insulting to make Van Gogh into a money machine when his whole life revolved around making art based on the most humble of surroundings.

Why is art a ‘commodity’ anyway? You realize that Van Gogh could easily have made art that was similar to what he saw was selling in his day but chose to follow his own muse instead of making a ‘commodity’.

In so many ways Van Gogh stood against making art into a mere ‘commodity’ and I feel he would be saddened that his legacy is reduced to tabloid journalism talking about how much his "commodities" are worth, his personal psychological problems and who got famous by simply being rich enough to buy his work.

(Jen asked) "How can one become an image consultant for dead people?"  I assume you mean how does someone get to decide how much a dead persons art is worth in terms of money Jen?

Art is only worth what someone will pay for it, there are no rules, just be convincing, memorize all the prices of what art has sold for, find some rich people who don’t want to spend those extra millions to help the very same type of people that Van Gogh painted and tell them how much more important they will be if they buy the art for a lot of money, the more they pay the more famous they become. Make sure you get a fat commission and some of that fame for yourself.

I think that if you are rich enough to buy a Van Gogh painting you are rich enough to buy some art books for your local schools, buy the kids a trip to a museum, fund their art department, do something other than gloat over the prize because if you are only collecting art or selling it as a commodity then you can’t see the real beauty of it in my opinion.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.
Vincent Van Gogh

Self portrait of Elisabeth Louise Vigee LeBrun and her daughter Julie

I love Elisabeth Louise Vigee LeBrun, well, I love her art and how her life inspires me, she’s actually been dead for a couple hundred years and heck, for all I know I might be a reincarnation of her, a hairy hetero manly macho version that is haha! She lived from 1755 until 1852.

Madame Vigée Le Brun brought out the beauty in all her subjects, she painted to inspire and to make people happy.

Many people have been conditioned to accept that Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Mona Lisa is epotome of portrature but it’s a little clunky and enigmatic for my taste compared to much of the work by the prolific genius of Elisabeth Louise Vigee LeBrun.

Leonardo was a lot of things, a lot of good things but he was also a nemisis to my hero Michaelangelo and to Mikes student, and number one fan, Giorgio Vasari (30 July 1511 – 27 June 1574) who literally wrote the first (modern) art history book, one that we have used ever since as the closest – albiet wonderfully biased glimpse into the lives of the artists.

I am a dreamer and a romantic in the classical sense, and suffered from the sin of day dreaming in school, heck I still day dream constantly and while it doesn’t make me money, it does allow me to fully appreciate the inspiration I allow myself to savor.

Art should inspire and be appreciated rather than be quantified and scientifically explained in a list of what the artist did and who they did it for (yawn) I’m sorry, but a CV/resume is so pointless for an artist in my opinion, if you have to have a list of stuff you’ve done to convince someone that you are a great artist then you’re obviously too busy primping yourself to actually work on your art and therefore you are, like leonardo, a dandy and probably, like Leonardo, wear fine velvet robes instead of keeping your shoes on for weeks at a time like Michaelangelo! That’s a metaphor but it’s literal too.

anyway, here’s a wonderful painting by Elisabeth Louise Vigee LeBrun, she was one of the painters in the court of marie Antoinette if you want to have a general time frame for the life time when this was done.

Bather by Elisabeth Louise Vigee LeBrun the model was her daughter Julie

Go to the link below for a website with tons of information and the lovely art of Elisabeth Louise Vigee LeBrun

http://www.batguano.com/vigee.html

her autobiography is also available for free in it’s entirity, and it’s worth a look!

I will begin by speaking of my childhood, which is the symbol, so to say, of my whole life, since my love for painting declared itself in my earliest youth. I was sent to a boarding-school at the age of six, and remained there until I was eleven. During that time I scrawled on everything at all seasons; my copy-books, and even my schoolmates’, I decorated with marginal drawings of heads, some full-face, others in profile; on the walls of the dormitory I drew faces and landscapes with coloured chalks. So it may easily be imagined how often I was condemned to bread and water. I made use of my leisure moments outdoors in tracing any figures on the ground that happened to come into my head. At seven or eight, I remember, I made a picture by lamplight of a man with a beard, which I have kept until this very day. When my father saw it he went into transports of joy, exclaiming, "You will be a painter, child, if ever there was one!"

I mention these facts to show what an inborn passion for the art I possessed. Nor has that passion ever diminished; it seems to me that it has even gone on growing with time, for to-day I feel under the spell of it as much as ever, and shall, I hope, until the hour of death. It is, indeed, to this divine passion that I owe, not only my fortune, but my felicity, because it has always been the means of bringing me together with the most delightful and most distinguished men and women in Europe. The recollection of all the notable people I have known often cheers me in times of solitude.

http://www.batguano.com/vlblsmemoirs.html

A person suggested that creativity was personal yet art should consider the needs of others. I say No.

I have to say that art has no responsibility to anyone except it’s maker. Jackson Pollock didn’t heed the responsibility to make art that was ‘understandable’ or helpful or informative or  even ascetically "good" (to the majority of people at the time) yet he became one of the most famous artists ever.

Social responsibility changes over time and what one generation takes for granted another frowns upon or makes illegal. Girls used to get married at 13 and so if you painted a child bride back then it was a normal genre scene, now it is either a fairy tale painting or some psychological split with reality, perhaps in a criminal way. Balthus would never make it into a gallery these days because of current versions of social responsibility, yet his work is in the Met right across from a Gauguin painting.

A hundred years ago if you painted a certain leaf of the cannibus plant you were probably a botanist or illustrating a historical thesis, perhaps on the founding of America, a proud patriot and could hold your head high *ahem* in society, but now if you painted the very same leaf  society says that you are probably a druggie and will be automatically labeled and catagorized, guilty by association at the very least.   That same leaf art is now  "harmful to society" see what I’m saying here? The art is still the same exact art but society decides who YOU are for making it.

I don’t think that society should have any influence on art, art is art and if others like it that’s great, if not then it is still art and just as valid a persuit as any other thing, perhaps one day others will appreciate that art but there’s hardly a prerequisite for art to be considered "good" or "acceptable".

Did Vincent Van Gogh have a responsibility to give up his ‘crazy dream of being a painter’ and become a productive member of society instead of a "leech" when it was obvious that no one outside his friends appreciated his art?

Society is like your mother, or a friendly guidance counselor, it wants you to do "well" for your own good, for the good of society but unfortunately it only considers the short term. I think Van Gogh would have killed himself sooner if he had given up painting and became a church janitor, which would probably be the only job he’d feel comfortable doing!

Society is healthy when people are allowed to "fail" in the short term because in the long term those failures might just be our proudest accomplisments, heck the US government itself used Jackson Pollock’s ‘action paintings’ as a ‘weapon’ in the cold war (because the Soviets were so proud of their ‘realism’ and therefore ‘behind the times’ etc).

~* The cat in the Tree – illustration by Darren Daz Cox*~

If someone trys to tell you that your art isn’t showing ‘social responsibilty’ you know what you can tell them to kiss!

The universe gave my roommate and I  the choice to either have this cat freeze and/or starve to death or take it in so we have a cat now!

Dannion Brinkley says that you are met by your pets when you die and see things through their eyes when you have a panoramic life review so it will be cool to see how happy the poor thing was to have a home after being outside in the cold rain for a day after her owners abandoned her.

We haven’t really decided on a name for her yet. I was leaning towards "Vincent" because half of one of her ears is missing (and I love Vincent van Gogh!) but Vincent isn’t a girls name so we’ll just let fate decide her official name.

Oh, before I forget, I just wanted to mention that the mighty Phillip Jose Farmer passed away the other day, he was one of the masters of sci-fi and lived in the little town that I do, Peoria Illinois. I bet his panoramic life review was full of love and admiration!

The other day I had the weirdest deja-vu while looking at the biography of Kenyan Cox (pic to the left), who, as far as I know is no relation, but he sure matches me to a dozen decimal places (as Robert Heinlein might have said!).  We look kind of similar and share a last name but it’s all the other weird little things that made me think I might have been a reincarnation of him.

First of all he was a totally dedicated artist, so dedicated that one of his famous quotes is "I paint because I cannot help it—because I love the work itself and would rather be a miserably bad painter than a successful man in any other work—because the mere joy of trying and even the excitement of failure are the only true pleasures for me.”^[1]

That is exactly how I feel about art!!!

Kenyon Cox was extremely successful and influencial as well walking the walk by painting nudes that the USA wasn’t quite liberal enough to accept in his day, but as is the case with art celebrities (such as our shared hero, Michaelangelo),  the public will be tollerant when they respect the artist. People painted and sculpted nudes centuries before Michaelangelo, but as Sha Na Na  re-defined the Do Wop classics and the Ramones revved up pop music to make pop punk , Michaelangelo took his poses to the extreme and the Baroque period of art that followed the Renaissance was an extended tribute to the doors that Michaelangelo had opened.

I have always expressed a desire to paint murals and have participated in many, heck, I even painted one during basic training in the Air Force haha! and you might know the name Kenyon Cox as one of the great American Muralists, and I have always written cheesy poetry that rhymes and so did Kenyon Cox.

She lived in Florence centuries ago,

That lady smiling there.

What her name or rank I do not know—

I know that she was fair.

For some great man — his name, like hers, forgot

And faded from Men’s sight—

Loved her — he must have loved her — and has wrought

This bust for our delight.

Whether he gained her love of had her scorn

Full happy was his fate.

He saw her, heard her speak; he was not born

Four hundred years too late.

The palace throngs in every room but this —

Here I am left alone.

Love, there is none to see — I press a kiss

             Upon thy lips of stone.

I love it! The wirdest deja-vu, and you’ll laugh or just just think I’m nuts, but trust that this is true, is that I totally remember writing a  girls name, scratching it rather, on the back of a metal badge, and while I totally remember the badge and even scratching the name in it, I can’t remember the girl, if there actually was one. So, after all the David Wilcock talks and blog entries, I have concluded that I am the reincarnation of Kenyon Cox! Why because that name was the name of his wife!

Kenyon painted this portrait of her and lived happily ever after with her, Louise Howland King Cox.

"And so, to our modern imagination, the neglected and misunderstood genius has become the very type of the great artist, and we have allowed our belief in him to color and distort our vision of the history of art. We have come to look upon the great artists of all times as an unhappy race struggling against the inappreciation of a stupid public, starving in garrets and waiting long for tardy recognition.

The very reverse of this is true. With the exception of Rembrandt, who himself lived in a time of political revolution and of the emergence to power of a burgher class, you will scarce find an unappreciated genius in the whole history of art until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The great masters of the Renaissance, from Giotto to Veronese, were men of their time, sharing and interpreting the ideals of those around them, and were recognized and patronized as such. Rembrandt’s greatest contemporary, Rubens, was painter in ordinary to half the courts of Europe, and Velazquez was the friend and companion of his king. Watteau and Boucher and Fragonard painted for the frivolous nobility of the eighteenth century just what that nobility wanted, and even the precursors of the Revolution, sober and honest Chardin, Greuze the sentimental, had no difficulty in making themselves understood, until the revolutionist David became dictator to the art of Europe and swept them into the rubbish heap with the rest.

It is not until the beginning of what is known as the Romantic movement, under the Restoration, that the misunderstood painter of genius definitely appears. Millet, Corot, Rousseau were trying, with magnificent powers and perfect single-mindedness, to restore the art of painting which the Revolution had destroyed. They were men of the utmost nobility and simplicity of character, as far as possible from the gloomy, fantastic, vain, and egotistical person that we have come to accept as the type of unappreciated genius; they were classically minded and conservative, worshippers of the great art of the past; but they were without a public and they suffered bitter discouragement and long neglect. Upon their experience is founded that legend of the unpopularity of all great artists which has grown to astonishing proportions. Accepting this legend, and believing that all great artists are misunderstood, the artist has come to cherish a scorn of the public for which he works and to pretend a greater scorn than he feels. He cannot believe himself great unless he is misunderstood, and he hugs his unpopularity to himself as a sign of genius and arrives at that sublime affectation which answers praise of his work with an exclamation of dismay: "Is it as bad as that?" He invents new excesses and eccentricities to insure misunderstanding, and proclaims the doctrine that, as anything great must be incomprehensible, so anything incomprehensible must be great. And the public has taken him, at least partly, at his word. He may or may not be great, but he is certainly incomprehensible and probably a little mad. Until he succeeds the public looks upon the artist as a more or less harmless lunatic. When he succeeds it is willing to exalt him into a kind of god and to worship his eccentricities as a part of his divinity. So we arrive at a belief in the insanity of genius. What would Raphael have thought of such a notion, or that consummate man of the world, Titian? What would the serene and mighty Veronese have thought of it, or the cool, clear-seeing Velazquez? How his Excellency the Ambassador of his Most Catholic Majesty, glorious Peter Paul Rubens, would have laughed!"

The paragraphs above were Taken from

ARTIST AND PUBLIC

AND OTHER
ESSAYS ON ART SUBJECTS

BY

KENYON COX

brilliant!!!

 I’m referring to a metaphysical concept of big rather than about scale of artwork but I am striving to make paintings as big as I possibly can to really maximize the effect of the grandeur of art (and as they did in the Renaissance, the grandeur of mankind imbued by the gift of creativity from God).

Look at what happened when the Medici decided to take their personal love of creativity and invest heavily in it – The Renaissance, resulting in  art that has dominated the art world for five centuries due to the saturation of mega-talent given a chance to flourish.  For those of us living in the Peoria and Pekin Illinois area in the 21st century we have people like Todd Thompson to thank for a re-birth of culture in Pekin Illinois.

Todd and Steve Foster took a chance and invested in the building at 353 Court Street and with the help of Pekin Main Street Director Leigh Ann Matthews and the legendary artist and teacher Doug Goessman that investment is paying off in ways far beyond mere money.

Last night was the opening of the show for the artist’s that have a studio within the Speakeasy Art Center and the show will be up until Aug 28 2010 when another great group of artworks will be exhibited. See the flyer at the end of this post that I took from the Speakeasy Art Center Facebook page (please friend them!). I also borrowed this picture that they posted of the show to show how well they lighted my huge painting, which really made me happy! Thanks Doug! (he also made the Warhol-esque silkscreen on canvas painting next to mine in this pic)

Speakeasy Art Center Pekin Illinois 353 Court St. Resident Artist Show August 2010

Check out Ed Emmons’s blog http://www.ourtimesinpekin.com/ for some great photos of the show and just about every Pekin Illinois cultural event of the summer so far! Awesome artist’s like Alec DeJesus, Trinidy Patterson and Nikole and Eric Cooney (all of which have art at the show!) have really been putting in the time and effort to make this excellent for all of us and it’s a wonderful thing.

Below is a painting I have at the show that I will send to my friend Jane who was literally there when I decided to become an ‘great artist’, not to just do art for fun like I did but to make art my life and I have stuck with it ever since. Jane has become pretty famous under her alter-ego of Wynx Whiplash and is still the same sweet goth chick I knew back then. In fact, pretty much all the artist’s I knew from that time period have stuck with art and have really excelled. I will honor you all in a future blog post!

Goth Girl oil painting by Darren Daz Cox

I wanted to put the painting below in the show but the frame I had broke and it really needs to have a gold frame to make the blue really blue!

Time Traveling Dolphin oil painting by Darren Daz Cox

and here is the flyer (I didn’t make this so all rights reserved by whomever did) for the resident Artist’s show going on until August 28 2010 at 353 Court St. Pekin Illinois (across from the court house!).

Residential Artists show until Aug 28 2010 at The Speakeasy Art Center 353 Court St. Pekin Illinois

Are murals art? This was a question posed in an art forum and obviously the answer is yes but why would someone even pose that question?

Many of mankind’s most treasured artworks are murals..
Michelangelo’s "Last Judgement", Raphael’s "Galatea", Leonardo’s "Last Supper" and Botticelli’s "St. Augustine", Gozzoli’s  "Procession of the Magi" the Byzantine church murals. *takes a breath*
The very history of mankind  is seen through the murals of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks (yup, they had murals too, look for  the tombs at Vergina ), the Dunhuang Grottoes in China, the Roman villas, the cave paintings in Lascaux, Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Rivera’s work, all beyond priceless art and all of it mere paint on walls that a mere human being put there.

Where’s Giotto when you need him! He was the early Renaissance master who ‘officially’ took mural painting out of the dark ages by demanding his work be considered more than mere craftsmanship!

Being proud of what you do is not a sin, this concept of being humble about your art is just cultural conditioning. Let me clarify what I’m saying here with an example taken from our most basic questions, why are we here? why do I ask why?

Cultural conditioning gives us two acceptable answers to those questions, one, the scientific theory that we are just random chance protein molecules (grow-mate-die) or the religious view where someone else has already figured it all out (follow the rules or else). But that’s not the whole truth.

Truth is what art is all about. Oh sure you can strap a paintbrush to an elephants tail and make ‘art’ or make a propaganda poster with your  skewed opinion of reality on it but it’s still truth, it reflects light to your eyes and  you are allowed, by your innate free will to either like it or dismiss it, all you have to do is look at it and decide for yourself. When others decide for you what truth is and you just accept their opinion, you live in denial of the whole truth.

You might be nodding your head and thinking that you, the free thinker, are not a slave to cultural conditioning but we all have our boundaries. What makes you free is to see how the boundaries can be crossed, to know that ‘nothing is impossible’.

When Piero Manzoni canned his faeces it was a continuation of his artistic exploration into uniqueness which, when looked at from the intended angle (it wasn’t a joke), empowers all of us. A can of his shit (it was labelled ‘artist’s shit’ btw) sold for $61000 at the prestigious Tate Gallery in London. In a related by shit-as-art theme, I just watched a documentary of GG Allin for 3$ on demand via my cable tv,  the best part is when GG muses that if he hadn’t had followed his dream of being a punk rock star he’d probably have killed someone (and been in jail his whole life).

I just saw on my local news a story about a small tent city of homeless men who a judge will decide wether to force them to move (from public land) or not. They refused all attempts at help! the ungrateful beasts! and did you know that homeless men have "been known to fight and drink alcohol *pause* at parties". Good lord, who is less sane? GG Allin or the tv bimbo who litterally said that? Isn’t "sports" basicly condoning fighting and alcohol? If the impending bird flu pandemic happens and society sinks into anarchy like tv news teases us with – who do you think will survive? the pampered twits who read the news or those rugged homeless men?

I know I’m rambling now but just know that  you are important, you are not just a random DNA connection seeking to perpetuate itself like a virus nor are you some wretched puppet waiting for the religious master to activate you and you sure as hell don’t have to accept that what you do to express yourself isn’t valid.

So do your art without giving a shit what others think. Spray paint a mural to express yourself, spray paint the local tv station to show your disgust at their glorifcation of violence and it’s alcohol soaked fans but zero empathy for alcohol soaked violent homeless people. Take a dump on a tv sports casters bed and call it art hell, no one is reading this except a data mining robot for an evil corporation, and you, hairy armpit girl, my one reader *sob* I love you!

The greatest masters have never done pictures "out of their heads."  is a quote from The Painter in Oil, by Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst who was pretty strict in his opinion of how an artist should paint the figure, directly from a live model or suffer artistic failure!

I challenge this closed-minded thinking and propose that you can get better results by working "out of your head".

Parkhurst was also a student of arguably the most proficent painter of all time, William Bougereau.  Being proficient however doesn’t necessarily equate to "good", after all, most people don’t know who Bougereau was but most everyone has heard of Vincent Van Gogh and a majority of them consider Van Gogh to be a "good" painter.

 Van Gogh sold so few paintings because most art patrons in his time expected work in the neo-classical/accademic style of painters like Alexandre Cabanel. Cabanel, like Bougereau, painted with a technical perfection that had echoes of Renaissance master Raphael.  Raphael will forever be beloved and stand as one of the greatest masters, so why not seek to reach his level of perfection? When you work from a live model and know all the techniques to make a 2d picture look 3d you can produce some stunning paintings, but you have to add in the human factor to be considered "good". 

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don’t care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. – Emile Zola

Poor old Cabanel and Bougereau were only upholding the ideals of masters like Raphael when they blocked the Impressionists from the salon, they thought they knew what was "good" based on an idealized perfection that could only be achieved through superior craftsmanship. But craftsmanship alone is not enough for things to be regarded as good.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman. - Emile Zola

I think that the sketches Michelangelo did ‘out of his head’ rank among his finest work, here is one of them.

MICHELANGELO di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

(b. 1475, Caprese, d. 1564, Roma)

The Fall of Phaethon

c. 1533

Black chalk, 41,3 x 23,4 cm

Royal Library, Windsor UK

Michelangelo made many erotic drawings for Tommaso dei Cavalieri, including the Rape of Ganymede, The Punishment of Tityus and this one with Phaethon being zapped by Zeus for his reckless behavior.

This is a drawing that Michelangelo drew for pleasure, a drawing with real passion and stands as sweet example of non-accademic proficency, perhaps Parkhurst had never seen this sketch at the time of writing his book?

Another example that counters Parkhurst’s statement is arguably the most famous and referenced figure drawing of all time, Leonardo DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. No model was used for that one!

I suggest that if want to stand out of the crowd and shine then seek to be good at what you do rather than to be proficient at what you do. This is not mere sematics. Proficiency encourages work that seeks to reach an ideal, an ideal is a generic concept and generic concepts don’t grab you by the heart until they are made specific. Making something specific requires that you make your stand, get off the fence and lay your cards down etc etc. You can be romantic but you don’t truely know what love is until you take that leap and risk having your heart broken.

The first time people saw Michelangelos fresco of god as a rugged old man with white hair it captured the imaginations of all who saw it, but a thousand variations on the theme later the idealized concept of god as a white haired man loses it’s punch no matter how well it is painted. 

Thomas Kinkaid’s lighthouses and sunbeams show the concept of god in a different but far more popular way these days and while Kinkaid is not highly regarded as an innovative painter he did take that leap to make his art specific to something rather than just follow the idealized concept of ‘pretty art is good’.  Take that leap, find a step off point before reaching ‘perfection’ and don’t be afraid to pull an idea out of your head.

I just saw the documentary on tv about how computers can analyze paintings known to be authentic and then pick out a fake based on a number of logical algorithms. The show had an impressive looking fake made of a van Gogh painting by an ‘expert on creating fakes to help museums find fakes’  and then three teams of computer geeks used their computers to find the fake out of a stack of photos taken of the fake and authentic van Gogh paintings.

The geeks, of course, used their amazing brains and high tech toys to save the museums of the world from being ‘ripped off’ by unscrupulous villains who might fool them into spending millions on a ‘fake’ painting and they all lived happily ever after.

Of course, as long as people are in charge of the machines and people desire money, then people will lie, including the lab techs and museums *gasp*.

Whether a painting in a museum is authentic or not is ultimately up to you, at the very least, make up your own mind about whether you like something or not.

The honesty that matters is your personal honesty, as Vincent van Gogh himself wrote in these words to his brother Theo.

"Believe me, in art matters the saying, "Honesty is the best policy," is true; rather more trouble on a serious study than a kind of chic to flatter the public. Sometimes in moments of worry I have longed for some of that chic, but thinking it over I say, No, let me be true to myself, and express severe, rough but true things in a rough manner. I shall not run after the art lovers or dealers; let whoever wants to come to me. In due time we shall reap, if we faint not!"

The reason why history has remembered our friend Vincent is because he didn’t sell out, he didn’t make art in a style that was currently selling because he was following a muse, and we as a society like that. We wouldn’t know who he was If he had been a regular guy, you know, someone with a normal career like a computer tech or someone who paints fake paintings for museums (so they can tell what a fake looks like, not to increase their revenue by pretending the fakes are real because unlike the rest of society, museums care about authenticity more than money!)

Wow, another painting is finished! And I only started this one, along with the Springtime Maiden two years ago haha!

Ok, so I have to sign it and finish up the frame but it’s done. I found some really nice dried pressed flowers on sale for a dollar at Michaels and had a thought of adding them onto the painting in the abstract yellow blobs – but I will refrain, it’s done dammit! This next one which I have now titled, is almost done, just one more layer or so on the dress and maybe some shadows in the foreground, but I’m entering this one in the next Art Alliance of Monmouth County art show on the 30th of this month so it’ll be dry and done too!

Everyone loves the surreal paintings of Salvador Dali and while I’m not quite as technically proficient as ol’ Sal yet, it is a total thrill to be able to paint something in that genre. I am quite proud of the sculptural forms in the background, one day I would like to sculpt them! Just in case you think I’m on a little ego trip, this is what I was drawing in High School, and then in the air force right before I went to college to become an artist. I had never painted a landscape or drawn a female figure that didn’t look like a Neanderthal cross dresser on PCP. Oh by the way Neanderthal Cross Dressers on PCP aka NCDPCP is the name of my new punk band, a punk band so hardcore that we’ve already broken up before we recorded anything or played a single gig! But yeah, being an artist happens in your mind first and anyone can learn to make 3D objects on a 2D surface, that’s a learned skill like riding a bike or playing "Iron Man" by Black Sabbath on guitar. The Italian Renaissance spawned hundreds of painters who learned realism like people learn a foreign language today. It’s easier if you start young and are immersed in it but pretty much anyone can do it. You don’t have to be ‘good’! It’s not a contest!!! Being an artist is like being in a punk band, you are because you say you are, you don’t need a record label or fans or talent, you just need the will to be one and you are.

I think it was Giorgio Vasari that attributed Leonardo Da Vinci as saying "If you can draw a horse then you can draw anything", regardless of the authenticity of that statement I love the idea of having a maxim or a gnome (a saying that instructs concisely) that challenges and inspires. I use the horse motif as a way of showing myself the current ‘level’ of my drawing.

The goal isn’t to reach a level of realism that mimics nature in it’s glory, It’s to take realism and show your personality with it like Michelangelo’s The Fall of Phaethon, which in my opinion is the finest horse art drawing ever. The test is to create a universal motif that is presented uniquely.

I don’t believe in moralistic rules for creating art, art is art no matter how you approach it. If you, for example, take a photograph and copy it it’s still valid art, but I think, as with Michelangelo’s sketches he made for Tommaso dei Cavalieri (like The Fall of Phaeton), you can do better than just striving for realism.

I’ve found that the times I’ve used a photographic reference in my work that the end result doesn’t have as much magic as when I draw something out of my head, but I take art from the romantic angle. Paul Cézanne said to his friend the poet and journalist Joachim Gasquet (about Napoleon portraitist Jacques-Louis David), "David killed painting. The conventional stereotype was introduced. They wanted to paint the ideal foot, the ideal hand, the perfect face and belly -the supreme being. They banished character. What makes a great painter is the character he gives to everything he touches – salience, movement, passion; for passionate serenity does exist." Cézanne was generalizing of course as there is no doubt that David’s brilliant equestrian painting Napoleon at St. Bernard is bursting with passion and arguably as romantic as anything even the mighty Eugine Delacroix painted but still, he had a point, and of course proved it for all time by making impressionism (and it’s children) the dominant force in painting.

Passionate serenity would be an appropriate definition of Van Gogh’s paintings for sure!

I know that not everyone wants to be an artist, even if you are brave enough to attempt it, there is an indoctrinated Darwinian hierarchy of perceived standards you have to fight against, but I hope you find something you do well and keep trying, year after year, to add your unique touch to it.

You don’t have to be ‘as good as’ in anything you do, just do what you do as good as you can and you’ll find that passionate serenity.

This horse, below, was drawn in 2006, I struggled mightily with it, and while the horse is perhaps the least interesting part of the illustration it is important to me to see where I was and where the ride can take me…

You should search for the pink horse painting by Ken Kiff (the link I had posted is now dead), I think it’s the second most beautiful horse painting of all time (the first being Paul Gauguin’s The White Horse). Actually, the two compliment each other and if I ruled the art world, I’d have the two paintings hanging side by side!

Oh, and for the record, I am much more of a Michelangelo fan than a Leonardo Da Vinci fan but I think Leonardo drew some of the best horses ever in his cartoon (old use of the word meaning pre-painting sketch) for The Battle of Anghiari  (that Rubens so famously copied).