Everyone is an artist, and anything and everything is art (except painters and paintings)! Words have come to mean, if not their precise opposite, something quite different from what is or was in the dictionary. Literally now means figuratively (ex., “It was literally raining cats and dogs!”). Random means all sorts of things, like cool,…
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The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [Here I present an argument that art must be beautiful. Note that beauty signifies being visually captivating, compelling, or interesting, and doesn’t mean it’s…
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[I use “rant” to designate posts where I just write extemporaneously, usually over a cup of coffee or two. They have an advantage of sorts, in that the flow is uninterrupted, and I can only talk about what I already know.] This is one of those things where we just look at one side of…
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If you can’t beat ’em. Ban ’em! While Facebook and Instagram ostensibly banned “far right extremists”, banning people one doesn’t agree with itself resembles a “far right extremist” tactic. Banishing the opposition grates against my more progressive sensibility. Censorship is a tool historically associated with abuse of power, silencing dissent, and squashing the underdog. The…
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One of the oldest techniques I use to invent imagery is to just make a bunch of marks and see what I see. I sometimes make a bunch of thumbnail sketches, and then choose whichever one inspires me at the moment. I made about a dozen thumbs before making my most recent piece (above right…
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I wrote this days ago, and then just sat on it, because, an opinion piece about why opinion is inherently an insufficient projection upon reality is self-cancelling. On second thought, that was the point. Reality is boundless and unfathomable, hence any opinions, beliefs, and conclusions about it are mere projections upon it, something to tether…
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[When you know what you are supposed to think, it means that you aren’t supposed to think.] I wrote a whole article about this, and then decided I don’t want to engage or react to the radical left (or right) ideologues, or poison my peace of mind with their neurosis (anymore), if I can help…
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Righteous political posturing is not synonymous with significant artistic achievement. The art world is so afraid of the political moralists that it is compelled to make any trivial political protest into front-page art news, and refuses to criticize it, even as art. Allow me to put a little perspective on this boring-ass, preachy, completely unoriginal…
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According to an article in artnetnews, the key is merely to be picked up by a big name venue early in your career. Sorry everyone else, your actual art is irrelevant, and THAT is F’ing pathetic. This is super depressing shit, and stupid. News flash: terminal myopia is not the right metaphor for visual art…
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This photo makes me angry. I haven’t seen or suspected anything could be this delusional in the art world since Jeff Koons claimed he improved upon old-master paintings by affixing a gaudy, blue gazing ball to assistant-painted copies of them. It’s not just that Schnabel had the arrogance to curate his own work next to…
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If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after basically being fed through a neural network (which can change age, gender, etc.), then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from alternate universes. This…
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The current paradigm is Investment, which is cynically boring in terms of art appreciation, and tragically myopic. Art is reduced to objects with price-tags on them that investors gamble on, while also trying to influence the market by promoting the artists they invest in, and so on. The end result is a handful of superstar…
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Anything that opposes art is probably immoral, even or especially when it wraps itself in the cloak of morality. The least we can ask of moral crusaders is that they are fighting for the highest good, and not merely advocating for their own special interests and personal benefit in and through alienating and disenfranchising others.…
Read MoreLoud Alien Noize did a feature on my Selfies From Alternate Universes series. Click on the pic or the link to check it out, and he’s got lots of other fascinating content about art, music, film, and culture.
Seriously folks, the public reaction to this series has been somewhere between milquetoast and viscous (and stupid) attacks. But, uh, Tobe Damit at Loud Alien Noise and a few other people whose opinions matter to me really dig it. Perhaps more people will catch on over time, and I should do more of these.
Selfies from Alternate Universes ”All of these digital paintings are based on my humble visage” says Eric Wayne. I been keeping an eye on him and when I saw the first samples of the ”Selfish-Selfies” as he had already called them, I knew he was onto something. Finally someone had found a way to make […]
via Eric Wayne — Loud Alien Noize
Note: I don’t recall every using the phrase “selfish selfies”, ’cause that has a rather negative connotation. Though I might have said “self-ish” (as in self-ish portraits, because they are not exactly self-portraits) which has a very different meaning.
~ Ends
WARNING: I wrote this in the course of a day, when I was in a particularly dark mood, and not worried about hyperbolic excess. I then shelved it as too negative. later I reconsidered it, and saw it had some good, honest bits, and a few passages with rhetorical flair. Now I share it as…
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This is a style of B&W drawing I return to again and again. Not only have I done at least 10 using the same approach recently, I used to use the same technique for charcoal drawings 25 years ago. The procedure is super simple and direct, and it relies entirely on my imagination, memory, and…
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If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after being fed through Faceapp (which can change age, gender, etc.), then altered in Photoshop, and then painted in Corel Painter. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from parallel dimensions or…
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If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after being fed through Faceapp (which can change age, gender, etc.), then altered in Photoshop, and then painted in Corel Painter. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from parallel dimensions or…
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A small graphic from WordPress appeared a couple days ago notifying me that I’ve been blogging for 5 years. Two things come immediately to mind when faced with that fact. One is that I’ve continued to blog, and expand my site far beyond what I could have ever conceived when I started. I have 560…
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Matt Damon suggested that the punishment should fit the crime, and for this thought-crime the public deemed the fitting punishment to be the end of his career. This is the sad story in which an actor is forced to apologize for reminding us that we shouldn’t exact extreme punishment for minor transgressions. The irony being…
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Recently I did a post about bad luck. Things can always get worse. Today I was on one of my long early morning walks and a car pulled up along side me. The driver yelled something. I wondered what the hell he could be upset about. I’m just some guy walking and most the people…
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This is the color version of a drawing I finished earlier this month: And this was based on a ball-point sketch I did in a lined pad of paper: I like the color version with its Impressionist colors and treatment, but the B&W I feel is more mesmerizing. Maybe that’s just how I feel at…
Read MoreHere are my generous and perspicacious supporters through Patreon or Paypal (who also choose to be listed). They help make it possible for me to continue making challenging new fine art images and writing art criticism and other articles. If you’d like to contribute (for as little as $1 a month), in which case I…
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[Rant, which means I write this in one go, no editing. There’s a certain poetry to how sentences just unravel like a coiled rug. But mostly I don’t have time to write my more academic articles right now, and that’s because I’m much more subsumed in making my own art. Wait, I’d better do one…
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I got a notification today from WordPress that I’ve posted 500 times. I wouldn’t have thought it was that much. I remember counting my art criticism articles at one point when there were 50. But of course this includes all my art posts as well. A lot of people come and go in the blogging…
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What is Real in Art: With a Revaluation of Brian Ashbee’s Infamous “Art Bollocks” So much of the art of the recent past can be seen as attempts to get away from mere images, and confront the viewer with the real… ~ Brian Ashbee, 1999. The real in art is the evidence of self-awareness, or…
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Impasto liquid metal paint. Notice how some brush strokes carve into the Android head. If you don’t know my work, this is digital. This is a new direction I’m exploring, and you might expect some more offerings in a similar vein. The technique is something I’m developing on my own and can be a little…
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You can see how I’m working here. Very directly. Just laying down color and then looking at it for images, then starting to manifest them. This one’s already surprising me. I wrote more about what it’s about, and why I’m digging where it’s going, but I deleted it. If I say too much, I might…
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