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Daucus Carota

I titled this piece Daucus Carota because it is based on the memory of a wildflower in my grandmother’s garden that once was on our farm in Nebraska. The common rube name is “Queen Anne’s Lace.” The Latin name means “wild carrot.” It has a smell that’s similar to the carrot. I like the plateau quality of the bloom of this flower when it’s fully in bloom.

My grandmother Ella was considered a wildflower expert in the community there in Eastern Nebraska when she was alive. I am so grateful to have had such a wise and wonderful grandmother as her. When I was growing up, we would visit my grandmother and my grandfather in the Summer time when school was out. She had three big gardens full of vegetables and wildflowers. The whole farm of two acres was like a botanical garden.

When I moved there to Nebraska in 2000, I advanced my art significantly due to a generous expansion of space and found materials to use for experimentation and integration into my art. I’m starting to do that a little more now that I’m budding into a little more freedom after a lifetime of heavy people pleasing.

I’m exploring more mixed media in this piece as I layered the surface of the piece with various cutouts from magazines and printouts. I then drew with acrylic pens and water based pens, along with watercolors painted with brushes. It was an unplanned piece, spur of the moment. Perhaps it was waiting in my unconscious mind however, and the time was ripe to let it bloom. 

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July 30, 2026 · 2:41 am
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Nonplussed

Nonplussed is the title of this piece. I titled it that because of the big plus sign I drew in it. I feel like being nonplussed is being in an undetermined state as it applies to quantum physics because it refers to someone who doesn’t know yet how to react in a given circumstance. On the other hand, it also refers to someone who is unperturbed or remains free of being disconcerted in a given circumstance. Being nonplussed is contradictory between opposing contexts. Therefore, I see it as being in a quantum state of indetermination ultimately.

The fact that I drew a plus sign in the drawing suggests a kind of first aid association and its universal application for emergencies. The impossible and abstract optical illusory visual distortions and alignments add to the unperturbed confusion on how to react to it. Yet the illustration, as a whole, has evenly spaced lines and structures that reassure the viewer with some safety with curiosity, leading the imagination on to what may be next around corners. 

The drawing is done on a paper collage assembled surface with diluted acrylic paint on top of it for blending and binding. I applied lines with an oil paint transfer technique, water based pen ink, and pencil. The oil based transfer technique left rough areas of misprint markings from the paintbrush I used on the oil paint transfer surface, adding a carelessly tossed and neglected character, which, upon rediscovery, adds more character and uniqueness. I used pen, watercolor, and acrylic paint for the colors distributed across the picture. 

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June 17, 2026 · 7:59 pm
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Synthesized Judgement (original)

Synthesized Judgement (October 22nd, 2025), by Evan Travnicek. Mixed media on paper. Dimensions: 10.5″ x 17.5″

Behind not caring, there are layers of care. The ballerina’s back is faced towards the viewer as she faces an audience in her world. I didn’t consciously plan this piece. It just happened as I successively selected cutouts from magazines that I cut out. It isn’t exactly William S. Burroughs’ cutup technique to poke into the unknown universe for inspiration because I allowed my conscious self to be a main part in the creative process. My muse guided me. 

This piece was me positively smashing through another long creative block. Creatively working through the vicissitudes of life, mean people, and one’s own unseen shadow can be a route to more creativity and growth. It looks like the ballerina is flipping off whoever is to her left as she walks forward. The manufactured flower is completely turned away from the ballerina. I wasn’t thinking about these psychological things when I was making the piece. 

The perspective leading off into an unseen horizon lining the top background of this illustration unifies the divergences in the foreground, thus suggesting peace. I created a major theme of stability because of the dominant horizontal lines composing the image, but inside that stability are imperfections creating dynamic qualities that cause interest for the viewer. 

I feel this is the most successful formal piece I have made since Foothill Neighborhood because I incorporated cutouts, acrylic washes, pen and ink, gauche, watercolor, and oil paint based transfer drawing techniques. This process used to be new to me, so I didn’t feel like I had a handle on it, but with this piece, I feel more confident in how I handled its outcome. 

I titled this piece Synthesized Judgement because I’ve been re-reading The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant lately, and he wrote about how our minds synthesize our worlds and the contents of our minds into a synthetic unity so that we understand things in an orderly way better. I took a creative route to illustrate what our minds do with this image because of the cutouts from magazines, the lines defining objects, people, and boundaries, and the colors adding degrees of intensity for character and variation.

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October 25, 2025 · 8:35 pm
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The Tension Between Reality and the Unknown

The Tension Between Reality and the Unknown (January 2002), by Evan Travnicek. Mixed media on stretched canvas. Dimensions: 59.75″ x 29″

This painting was created in 2002. I was starting to experiment with mixed media on canvas as I expanded my palette from using only artist’s oil paint. I have continued my mixed media passion to this day. It comes from the do-it-yourself, punk rock, ad hoc spirit of the late 1970s, which was, and still is, in many ways, a symbolic sacrifice of ideal, traditional visions of perfection in order to get out of one’s own way for the purpose of creating in the moment rather than waiting for the perfect moment. 

A passion for the line in art is expressed here. I was experimenting with variations in stylized lines. There is something technological and biological about it. Lines, as seen in nature, are really just surfaces of objects as seen level with the surface, rather than perpendicular to the surface. 

The leaves of the plant I represented in this painting are called mallow, which is a common garden weed found in the midwest. I like their kidney shape. I also like the natural corrugation that fans out from the center of the leaves which creates a kind of rooftop effect for lighted and shaded surfaces on the leaves.

I find one of the most neutral colors one can use for a background to be raw umber mixed with some titanium white. It’s like the middle grey used in traditional photography which reflects about 18% of light that falls on it. The rest of the surface has a gentle absorbing sense about it, including the green colors in the foreground. The nascent forming qualities of the background give a platform on which lines can be defined. 

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October 6, 2025 · 8:05 pm
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Prior River (original and version 2)

It’s mixed media. I used a reed pen and diluted black Chinese ink from a vitamin supplement bottle converted into an ink well. My foundation is working with oil paint, but my work in recent decades has transitioned into wet and dry mixed media, on and off of digital media doc makers. 

This drawing harkens back to a painting I made in 2002 called The Tension Between Reality and the Unknown. I will post that painting here after posting the versions of this drawing I want to post first. Then I’ll link the painting to its title so you can look at it for ease of viewing. 

I’ll admit that I have been struggling with regulating my time, space, and mind with my smartphone usage and social media. I’ve posted authors, videos, and articles about the targeted map to addiction that social media giants and smartphone makers have made out of the human brain to exploit maximum usage of their apps and devices on my X account to raise awareness about this problem that I believe most people with smartphones struggle with. 

My art is about relationships and connections. The internet and social media are about relationships and connections, too, but in a much different way. The colors, shapes, and lines are what represent relationships in my art. Maximum time, and data output from their users are what represent relationships for social media giants. I’m not anti-smart phone or anti-social media however. I am pro strategizing ways to maximize my own creative powers so I can be more active in working on my vision rather than passively scrolling through other peoples’ lives. 

I realize that the still images made by a relatively unknown artist are like muted forms on digital wallpaper of cyberspace living rooms, but I don’t care. I realize typing something like that out doesn’t particularly help me promote myself as a confident and ambitious character out of a romance novel. Fuck that shit. I’d rather just be raw & real as I continue to fight and struggle on my path of positive passion.

Prior River has connections to a main theme in my dreams. I sometimes dream about walking down to a river from a gradually descending series of river banks. I realized that this theme has connections to my childhood memories of traveling down Dellyne Avenue NW, and Taylor Ranch Drive to go to Albuquerque. The Rio Grande is at the base of descending down the bank on which Taylor Ranch Drive is paved. This part of the city was still rather undeveloped back in the 1980s, so it really was part of the outskirts. 

I suppose Prior River is symbolic of making connections to a river of life from the past that’s still there. It connects me to how creative I used to be and still am. 

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September 29, 2025 · 3:32 am
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Abstract Bookshelf of Orbs (versions 1,2,4, & 5)

These pieces are purely abstract and completely digital with no input from traditional media. I’m playing with depth in an almost totally abstract sense because of how the objects are placed in seeming progressions of foreground to background, thus making sense in a three dimensional way while eliminating all lighting, curvature, and shadow. I read somewhere that the more abstract the art of a culture or society is, the more totalitarian it is because abstractions in any field abstract from the natural or manmade world and reduce the forms, shapes, colors, and objects to basics and bold colors. I suppose there may be some truth to that, but the point of this blog is to, by and large, escape politics, economics, and government. I just find myself fascinated by abstract art. There is so much more that can be done with it.

I was thinking of Hans Hoffman’s ideas about tensions between objects, or painted areas, on a picture plane in this series. I was particularly intrigued by how the three circular shapes don’t overlap each other and have space between each other, but they still convey a sense of foreground and background. The circle in the middle of the picture plane is almost like the center of attention while it still is sensed as a background object. It could be the planes surrounding the circles that help to give the sense of depth. The weight of the image tends towards the lower left hand side of the picture because of all the spaces being filled with different colors and shapes.

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September 3, 2025 · 8:26 pm
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Foothill Neighborhood

Foothill Neighborhood

2024

Original mixed media watercolor on homemade paper collage surface

24” x 10”

This image is digitally mounted

They look like robots walking around in the foothills of a southwestern landscape. The little characters on the paths look like those characters in Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballet. This ballet is an inspiration for this piece. That, and, of course, the Bauhaus school of art and design. I have been reading Paul Klee’s volume one book titled The Thinking Eye, which goes into detail about his thought processes and theories behind his abstract art. I’ve learned a lot so far about space, line, shape, and color.

Gradients and progressions stand out in particular to me currently. The illusory creation of space using delineated gradients and progressions will never cease to repel and fascinate me in cycles of disgust and redemption. I get disgusted by the limitations of two dimensions to work with in attempting to suggest dimensions past the third. But I then get fascinated by the possibility of successfully visually communicating dimensions past the third utilizing only the surface of a two dimensional plane. 

The simultaneity is already accomplished on a two dimensional surface because you don’t see the eventful sequences of times I built up the image you’re looking at. You just see it all at once. This instantaneous production reflected in your mind is a doorway to other dimensions. 

This mixed media watercolor painting is painted on glued together pieces of paper, pages from magazines, and printouts. Before drawing the linear composition, in which I filled in the spaces with watercolors, I washed the surface with a diluted primer paint so that the images and text from the collaged surface would show through to the eye, hence subtly emphasizing the notion of layers built up through sessions of work and time. I used variations of the color yellow to fill the spaces of the buildings because yellow is a bright, warm, outstanding color to use against a more neutral background. 

I intentionally made a progression from light to dark with the lines dividing the landscape from foreground to background, and then the sky. The sky is an evening or early morning dark blue. I wanted to convey the idea of a staff or lines on a sheet of musical notes. The staff is the hilly lines of the landscape and the notes are the buildings and the characters walking around on the paths. Hence my joy of capturing the illusion of space with abstracted lines, shapes, and colors. 

Evan Travnicek

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June 25, 2024 · 4:51 am
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W.E.F.U. Ough Ough (original)

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the illusory nature of art. Also the broad application of art as used by the human species. I’ll be impressionistic with my notation here. I notice things in different fields of study, activity, history, and observation and I connect them together. This is one of my strengths—ideation—as defined by Gallup’s Talent Assessment Test. Being an artist helps me see relationships and connect disparate parts as I highlight and explain the connections.

The Ancient Chinese philosopher of war, Sun Tzu, noted in one of his passages of wisdom “appear weak when you are strong, and appear strong when you are weak.” So, right here, I see the connection between war and art. The connection is that art mimes, imitates, and even mocks reality, and war capitalizes on the mistakes opponents make in assessing the rapidly changing contours of reality. 

The Op Art movement from the 20th century manipulated illusions of perspective and played with tricks of visual perception that created illusions of movement and tension. This movement stemmed from Modern Art in general whose revolution was born in the 19th century with masters like Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne. More specifically, Op Art seems to have at least been inspired by Hans Hoffman and his ideas about intervals of tension between shapes and colors as they “stacked” upon each other on a two dimensional surface. 

Collectively, we have taken illusion to an entirely new universe called the cyber domain, which adds a dimension that both destroys and accelerates creativity. The amount of diversion found in the galaxies of clickbait and casino modeled slot machine social media destroys creativity in my opinion. But this is all due to the predation on the weaknesses of human passions and lack of discipline training. Luckily, with the artist who has a tenacious vision, these time consuming, life wasting passions are cast aside for self transfixing creative endeavors. 

In my piece that I present to you presently in your handheld or home computer world, I suggest nascently what I described in the previous paragraphs. I’m creating tension for the eye between the red and green colors used for the left and right sides of the picture. I also employ illusions and distortions of perspective with the roughly drawn circuit like lines encompassing and networking the shapes. The shapes look like electrical tops spinning remotely by wi-fi controllers on a split tabletop. I intentionally added the misprints, smudges, and ink debris to the surface to give it a slightly uncalibrated early 20th century printmaking machine character. 

The media used are colored pencil, Schneider pens, ballpoint pens, oil transfer printing, gauche, and water discolored with old bits of India ink and charcoal. The title, W.E.F.U. Ough Ough, seems to suggest world economic fuck off, off, off (as in, someone coughing). 

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January 14, 2024 · 2:40 am
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Event Too O2 (original)

Event Too O2 (original)
Image derived from mixed media on paper
Standard print size: 32 x 26 inches
Contact artofevan@hotmail.com for interest

This piece is inspired by the fake news industry, which really took hold after the Telecommunications Act in 1996 signed by Bill Clinton into law. Basically corporate media lobbies secured the First Amendment for themselves and allowed mergers to consolidate corporate media into now just six major corporations. This piece is also inspired by Deleuze and Gauttari’s Anti-Oedipus, which takes an schizophrenic conception of reality based on the basic motive of desire. A third concept I wanted to illustrate here is the concept of approximation as I express it in my collage forms of art. I’m also reminded of that scene from Pulp Fiction where the agent is telling the two main characters what to do to cover up a murder scene. A huge credit goes to Immanuel Kant and what I learned about his philosophy centering on perception, a major philosophy from which contemporary cognitive psychology derives its concepts. 

The concept of approximation is expressed in this piece by my connection of disparate realities gathered together from different magazine sources and cutting out pieces from pages for usage in collage work. I put all the pieces together here in this landscape so that they’re seamless enough to pass as unnoticed (hopefully), but I’m emphasizing the disparate realities in hopes of creating an entertaining and enjoyable work of art for my audience. This associates with William S. Burroughs’ cut up technique, which associates with the media / film industry’s regular profession of editing and recombining clips and scenes so as to tell a story to audiences. It’s like they “make” anachronisms and turn them into linear stories.

I’m definitely inspired by cubist concepts of showing viewers different angles of view simultaneously of objects or scenes here. The grids of contours and lines crossing each other and ending with colored arrows and dots symbolize the often confused, fear-based, misleading directions that media tell people and society to go in. This is why I think of Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Gauttari. They discuss schizophrenia in that book as a mass of undifferentiated confusion, like found in nature. They also wrote about the use of things that don’t work, that are purposeless, and that break down in society as serving other purposes. 

I think of French philosopher Baudrillard’s concepts of signs and symbols in society, which frequently have no intrinsic value in themselves, but, because they are associated with societally accepted symbols and avatars of value, they then possess value in themselves, albeit as near holograms or illusions parasitizing from things of real value, potentially distracting audiences from things of real value and redirecting attentions to things of false value. Perhaps the collection and assimilation of many valueless items here in this collage build up into a gestalt of something that possesses value, which work synergistically to create something even greater than the sum of the items.

The title Event Too O2 associates with the historical Event 201, at which the world of western elites gathered together in 2019 to play out and discuss a hypothetical pandemic a year before the real pandemic took place. I feel that the confusion of conflating the pandemic with supposed manmade climate change, along with societal disparities among the different classes that politicians exploit with heart deceiving lies is sufficiently displayed here in this illustration with a kind of surrealistic madness as female heads on tanks (talking heads of the corporate media military industrial complex) battle it out as spectacles on manufactured landscapes for listeners and viewers to to come to conclusions approved of by the ruling classes. 

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October 6, 2022 · 12:17 am
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Sir Vick L Os (version 7)

Sir Vick L Os (version 7)
Image derived from mixed/digital media
Standard print size: 32 x 24 inches
Contact artofevan@hotmail.com for interest

I titled this one Sir Vick L Os. I’m sure your inquisitive mind will figure out the Phoenician phake nooz. Geek beyond geek and squeak past squeak. The original drawing is of different colors than this variation. I thought I’d park my attention on this variation and write a li’l randomness about it for a blog.

I recently got some soft oil pastels because I wanted to experiment combining drawings using them with ink pens and washes. So that’s what I did with the original drawing of this piece. The original is drawn on a 7.5 x 10 inch piece of paper. The varied prints of it, manipulated in photoshop, can be of larger sizes. For economic reasons, I like to stick to the standard sizes so I can frame them more expediently.

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August 11, 2022 · 3:02 am