The Fine Art and Design Blog of Darren Daz Cox

here are two oil paintings that now have added onto them wet acrylic gel medium that looks white until it dries and then it turns clear.

The green and red are watered down tinted glue which is essentially liquid plastic that drys transparent. Plenty of standard elmers/white school glue has been added also.

The mixture will crackle randomly and create some nice effects!

This is acrylic paints on canvas then sprayed gold then oil paints! It’s getting done, slowly..
I’m trying to capture the feeling of ‘gloriousness’ hehe, is that a real word? But that’s the word that comes to mind. I love combining realism with more abstract motifs and I love have multiple light sources as it makes the pictures come alive in your mind!

In other art news, I decided to make a few virtual art galleries again in SecondLife (after a long absence, which seems to be a pattern with my art, I’ll stop one type of art for a while and try another and when i come back to the first it is with a renewed vigor not seen by many (hehe that’s an interpolation of the poetry from the mighty Henry Rollins).

You might see my really cool personal logo around the sims of SecondLife, my avatar is called Daz Honey! 

This is the type of thing I want to show the wfabi.org people, this is graphic design from a fine art perspective which is a precious commodity in this world where that ipod silhouette idea gets rehashed over and over until people just don’t notice it anymore. Graphic design needs to be fresh or people don’t look at it, they see it, but they don’t look and that is the difference between a successful design and just another design.

 WFABI Mission: To define standards to aid in the design, development and marketing of websites, from the teachings of experiential fellows; to help produce a "better internet"

I know graphic design, I graduated with a BS in graphic design in 1999 and have been ‘experimental’ ever since. My friend Scott Tranchitella (DJ Disaster) and I built our own graphic design studio and taught ourselves to become media experts. We built websites, bought domain names and made a thousand graphics (see the logo on the wall behind DJ Disaster in the photograph below). We built a recording studio with a sound booth and used pro-tools, we bought a professional broadcast tv camera and half a dozen M2 decks and learned Final Cut, we produced and recorded several albums worth of original music (Homer Simplex) to use for our indy movies and commercials, we acted and produced in a weekly live comedy radio show and streamed several stations 24/7 from our studio to promote the artists we had recorded, often writing the beats for the hip hop tracks to suit the clients, we even started work on an internet tv show before I left for Michigan (and eventually wound up here close to NYC).

That’s just the work part, after all, everyone and their grandma is an amature graphic designer and videographer these days, children make CSS that can rival the pros (seen Neopets lately?) and social networking experts are a dime a dozen, so the actual nuts and bolts of software wrangling isn’t that important when you can crowdsource a project to the most available, cost effective and proficient person you know third hand on twitter. Proficiency can be hired but originality has to be sought out.

I’m 42, I’ve been around the block, hell, I went to school on three different continents. I’ve moved dozens and dozens of times, each time refining what is most important to take with me and discarding the rest. I have little left of my childhood except the same dreams that surface like liquid gold each time I create something great. I’ve been wealthy, I’ve starved, I’ve had great love affairs and I’ve been miserably lonely but I’ve always been an artist. It’s not a jay oh bee as that means someone elses rules, it’s not a career as that means it has to end, I fully intend to follow in the footsteps of Michelangelo and Picasso and be a old man who makes interesting things, by then I should be pretty damn good don’t you think!

If you want people to brainstorm about making a better internet, I would be a good choice I think!

I’m on a creative streak, this one is part of my violet on gold series, it is activated by the light in the room hitting it and it will always look slightly different as you pass by it. I’m not sure what the next phase of this one is but it will happen!
 

 Acrylic on canvas (8×10) painted white and then light blue and then gold. The effect makes me think of old plaster and old paint and patina. This one does have a story but the theme of love and lust and loss is universal, perhaps you see a different narrative but it stands as it is, perhaps my finest surrealist work…

and below are three more I’ve been working on in the last few days!

~*Alien Abduction - acrylics and florescent tempera on canvas by Darren Daz Cox*~

I painted this one in 1998 while I was studying graphic design at Bradley U. in Peoria Illinois. I love florescent tempera paint, it is relatively cheap and available in just about every drug store and makes great special efffects under black light, even if you think you have no artistic talent - you can feel like a genius under blacklight with your fingers in some pots of florescent tempera!

I’m now on at least half of all the social networks out there hehe, see if you can find me! Hopefully I’ll just post here and everywhere gets a copy of this post or a link to it.

I like the idea of having my original creations suddenly available for people to just happen upon it. Art can trigger memories and wonderfully strange thoughts, it can inspire your own creativity and that is a good thing!

I remember reading a sci-fi story in my scandalous youth about how humans were offered a trade of advanced knowledge for something the aliens didn’t have and the aliens finally accepted the idea of paint from us. I think that is so cool, after all, if you had the technology to make things non-corrodible and had holographic 3D artwork etc you could totally miss out on (or forget) the magic of paint!

~*gold starfish and box and ceramic mutant made in 1984 by Darren Daz Cox*~
Trust me, if you are feeling bored, depressed or have writer block, try this, buy a can of gold spray paint, get some rocks off the ground, or those old seashells laying around, and spray them (outside! safety first!!). Spray paint dries very quickly! Then gather up your handful of treasure and gloat! Gold makes you feel better, it just does, and it doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money. There is something magical about making something old and ‘worthless’ look shiny and precious, it will make you happy!
~*The Tempest - acrylic and tinted glue over an old framed print by Darren Daz Cox plus gold painted figures made by an artisan lost to history but still appreciated!*~

Gold paint unites all things it touches, from the humblest plastic toy and rusty Zippo case to archaeological artifacts that The Antiques Roadshow obliges us to keep in their ‘natural state’ if only for the sake of monetary compensation.

These clay figures, above, had been collected by my step-dad and passed on to me. They had spent decades in a satin-padded glass-covered display-box, a coffin, and while they might have some historical significance to a particular scholar, they are now painted gold. When you think about what they represent, a proud family, it seems to be a nice tribute to the artist because I’m guessing that had he owned a 7 dollar can of quality gold spray paint he would have sprayed them too, rather than to have them remain scorched from the fire.

Oh I know how ‘authentic’ works but really, we spoiled modern world people totally romanticize the external parts of primitive living. What primitive cultures have that we can’t exploit we are generally taught is merely base superstition, yet the chances are you’ve had some pretty deep thoughts and even profound experiences while sitting around a campfire under the stars and heck, the Dogone tribe in Mali, West Africa, has more astronomical knowledge than 99.99% of our college graduates and they don’t even have electricity or a written language ha!
~**~