It’s just a wee bit odd to propose this as the first in a new series, as this is a core example of the type of art I do going back decades, including the technique (though I used to do this in charcoal). Let me just dredge up one of those real quick. The reason…
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At Eternity’s Gate is to the painter, Vincent Van Gogh, what the paintings in the movie are to his own: an atrocity. I’ve been excited to see this movie for a long time, mostly because it stars Willem Dafoe as Van Gogh. The only actor that might have been more fun to cast in the…
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[Note before I get started. I’m not a tortured artist, and have no mental illnesses or addictions. I’m not even prone to depression. If there are no extenuating circumstances, I’m told I can be annoyingly chipper, especially in the mornings. The way I usually choose to deal with things is with light humor.] I was…
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The question has come up a lot recently about whether or not we can separate the artist from the art, and it’s usually in the bad sense. The conclusion comes first, and it’s that a bad person can’t be a good artist. We then work on our arguments, which have to be correct, because we’ve…
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Some of you may have already seen a short video I shared, on Instagram, showing some of the techniques I used. This is #2 in a just started, ongoing series of everyday observations. They are realistic renderings of photos I take of my environment. The subjects aren’t supposed to be dramatic, but are studies of…
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Hi folks. This is a updated version of the one I made for the first 25 heads, but I added more frames between images so it’s smoother, and this time I did it in strict chronological order (last time I did it in a way that I thought would give better results, but sometimes faces…
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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. I…
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What makes my runaway rants rants is that I write them in one go, initially without editing. I will go back and fix my more egregious typos, misspellings, and so on, but not change the flow. The ideas come one after the other, without an outline. It’s a way to keep it simple, but also…
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Don’t worry folks, I haven’t thrown in the towel and become a still-life artist. This work, and I intend to do more, are “practice” pieces intended to develop my skills are rendering things like lighting, shading, volumes, shapes, modeling, perspective, textures, and other realistic details. I often try to create such realistic elements in works…
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Sometimes I say or do something that’s so obvious to me that I can’t believe nobody else has done it or said it. Apparently the above is an original quote by me [I also made the graphic.]. You can even take out the “for mental masturbation” part, and “art is not a conversation piece” is…
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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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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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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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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. There…
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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. Dear…
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One of the good things left about the Internet and social media is that we can still discover artists we appreciate on our own, before they become popular. Amy Regutti (a.k.a. “spacethrob” on Instagram), with her deceptively simple, brightly-colored, and peculiar paintings of mannequin-like, animated figures is one of the more unique artistic voices I’ve…
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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. It’s…
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I’ve been picking away at this one for a while, abandoned it a couple times, and finally finished it. It was more difficult than my prior piece for this series (below), and the main difference is just that I used a smoother brush. The smoother brush is more technical and demanding in terms of rendering…
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My last article was an attempt (I like to think a successful one) at disentangling the verbose “theory” of Roland Barthes that “The Author is Dead”. I shared my article in a couple Reddit forums, one being “philosophy” and the other “art theory”. There were a lot of responses, most the initial ones fairly reasonable,…
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The belief that “the author is dead” is one of the unquestioned bad ideas that has become gospel in the art world. It’s usually just asserted — along with its companion notions that originality is impossible, and the artist’s intent is irrelevant — as if to deny it is as hopelessly naive as denying evolution.…
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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.…
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I used an old-ish free program to create morphs between images for the 1st 25 pieces in my SFAU series. I have to do it mechanically by creating reference points between images, and so on. I zoomed in and cropped on the faces where necessary, so it’s just the faces and not the whole paintings.…
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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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Skulls are really good practice, and interesting. Even though I got my MFA a quarter century ago, I regularly learn new things (ex., a sculpting program like Zbrush), or hone my skills. In the last two days I knocked out a couple skulls. They took about 60-90 minutes each. There are multiple reasons this is…
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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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