Category Archives: Art of eVan

Image

Tom Sawyer (version 1.a)

The art of sheer randomness and utter whim is actually not that haphazard. This image is based on a mixed media drawing I finished up in August, 2020. I manipulated the hell out of it in Photoshop, and this is the closest image to what the original looks like with regard to the colors and composition. To make the drawing, I used a design I’d previously drawn as a template for a manual, handcrafted, oil transfer print on to another surface of paper. The background noise in the space is intentional. I rely on its randomness and unconsciousness to express movements in an illusory space from the pressure of my hands as they work to draw whatever design I want to transfer.

Please note that this new blog post is a repeat of my past blogpost, Tom Sawyer (version 10). I repeated it here because I needed some blog content to go along with the new post. I just upgraded my WordPress page to a premium account for freelancers, and I want to post something new on it so I can insert the new payments feature I now offer on my website for people to purchase prints, like this one from me…

Theory of Mind research shows us that the unconscious mind is 30,000 times more powerful than the conscious mind. This is why the phenomenon of resistance to change seems to be so universal to humankind. Surrealist artists hoped to express contents and elements of the unconscious mind through their art and poetry mostly using dream imagery and symbolism. 

I take the unconscious mind to another level of expression. Of course it’s based on Paul Klee’s work and main method of creating art—the oil transfer technique—but the level I take it to is the work I do in Photoshop which allows me to use filters that that emphasize, alter, highlight, and distinguish elements and effects in my art that would otherwise be mostly hidden. In effect, I’m making the invisible visible. I emphasize ambience, space, and unnoticed particles and entities.

When he was still with us on earth, Art Bell used to have ghost hunting experts on his show for interviews. The ones I listened to explained that they used recording equipment in abandoned locations that were said to be haunted. They wanted to see what kind of possible ghostly, intelligent, semi-comprehensible, audible information they could pick up with their equipment. I like to think of my art making as a process similar to EVP recordings in spirit. 

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote a classic volume of philosophy called The Critique of Pure Reason. I was lead to look at this book because of a really cool book I’d read several years ago called Art Theory For Beginners. I recommend anyone interested in the thought processes behind Western art to read that book for a much better understanding of Western art. It’s not in depth, but it touches on so many philosophical and historical understandings of great art and the time periods it was made in. 

Kant questions what is a thing in itself? Can we really know what a thing is without the biases, and finite perceptions of our localized, politicized brains? Hence, abstract art seems to be becoming more interesting to people. So the title to this piece is Chalked Up Tchotchke. Yes, I saw that word tchotchke recently on my Twitter feed. It basically means something that’s more decorative rather than functional. 

Price for an unmatted print is: $90.00

$90.00 For Ltd Edition Print

Leave a comment

September 27, 2020 · 1:07 am
Image

Compass of Social Media (version 2)

I was thinking about our increasingly dominated, controlled, pimped, and monopolized internet social media lately. I heard from one of Rollo Tomassi’s shows that there’s some kind of ethics manager heading an ethics committee for the internet that has been established because of how out of control social media have gotten. I didn’t put the words out of control in that last sentence in parentheses because I think the addictive baseline that social media exist for is out of control. But I don’t believe our out of control government that’s at the end of its spend-forever-and-pay-nothing-back addiction can or should do anything about it. It’s up to us to control ourselves. But I don’t even believe we can control ourselves. I believe our unconscious minds, instincts, motivations, and habits are vastly more powerful than our conscious decision making minds are. 

I note this former Facebook executive who spoke out about how destructive Facebook and social media are to human relationships.

This piece has text integrated in it. I was thinking of Guillaume Apollinaire when I wrote it and made the composition with the text into what you see here. I decided to make a whimsical, poetic, abstract art image based on what I’ve been watching for a long time with social media controls. Most of us know that social media controllers have made algorithms to weed out and promote those who play the game correctly in their idea of natural selection in a digital age social media context. I found an article that discusses “how to beat” Instagram’s algorithms. Why does one have to beat the algorithms? To get you to engage and addict yourself to Instagram more?

The image is just an abstract, playful mockery of what we live in today as netizens, colonized and controlled by social media oligarchs who camcord us without our consent and trade this info among themselves like human trading professions of the past. It’s a selection from a previous image I posted here I titled Chalked Up Tchotchke. 

Medium: Ltd. edition print (25)

Dimensions: 33 x 19 inches (not framed) 

Framed and with glass, this piece is: $450.00

Unmatted print is: $95.00

Leave a comment

September 21, 2020 · 4:39 am
Image

The Abandoned Teleportation Device

It looks sorry. And that’s the point. I was trying to find a word or a metaphorical title to name this piece. I thought of the word “desolate.” When I thought of that word, I saw the root word “sol” in it, which means sun in Latin. Then I thought of how desolate could mean a metaphorical definition pertaining to “de-sun-ating” something, or abandoning something, or taking the life out of something. I associate the word sol with the word soul. So it could mean “de-souling” something. That, indeed, would make something sorry. 

When I was a little boy, I used to collect Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars. I remember I found this one Matchbox car that was all beat up one time somewhere, like maybe on a school playground or a parking lot somewhere. It was tossed by another kid who probably got a new car and lost interest in this old beat up one. I liked this car, even though it was all beat up with paint chipping on it. It was like a yellow 1970 Mustang with flames on it. It still raced well in a straight line across my living room floor when I raced it with my other cars. 

I liked this little car because I felt like its strength shone through all the abuse it took from its previous owner. The beat up character of the car made me like it even more. To me, as I look back on the lesson of this memory, it means to me that life still goes on after abandonment, and desolation. It doesn’t end. In fact, life can be even more grand, and more fulfilling after being abandoned and desolated because of the abandonment and desolation.

How does this relate to this piece I’m posting now? The beat up, crude, sorry character of this drawing is actually supposed to highlight its utter uniqueness and individuality. The basic design of it—a triangular composition—emphasizes its strength. The triangle, in architecture, is one of the most stable structures. 

A couple days ago, I got re-inspired to work on impossible shape ideas as introduced to the art world by Roger Penrose, the famous mathematician. In my skeletal, contour, line drawing work, I like deconstructing shapes, but not completely. Just enough to suggest other possibilities than the completions of corners, shapes and expected endings. 

I thought of how the impossible triangle suggests a fourth dimension in a two dimensional drawing as the eye travels around the triangle to see how the fuck it’s possible to end up where one started. This suggested to me a time machine, or a teleportation machine. In this 21st century age, a machine would more likely be called a device, so I named this piece “The Abandoned Teleportation Device” as a possible story of some inventor who tossed this idea away into the annals of trashed history, a place where untold amounts of history are tossed, not to mention all the probabilities that also exist in nascent, unattended states. 

It worked out fine in this reality, too, because I actually did teleport one medium to another by using the oil transfer drawing technique. This seriously gives credence to the idea of a ghost imprinting itself from one reality into another, such as ours, and appearing more like an imperfect, “empty”, white noise distorted apparition. 

Medium: Ltd. edition print (25)

Dimensions: 35 x 29 inches (not framed) 

Framed and with glass, this piece is: $450.00

Unmatted print is: $95.00

1 Comment

September 9, 2020 · 3:58 am
Image

Chalked Up Tchotchke v.3b (flipped)

The art of sheer randomness and utter whim is actually not that haphazard. This image is based on a mixed media drawing I made last night. I manipulated the hell out of it in Photoshop, and this is one of the images that resulted from that process. To make the drawing, I used a design I’d previously drawn as a template for a manual, handcrafted, oil transfer print on to another surface of paper. The background noise in the space is intentional. I rely on its randomness and unconsciousness to express movements in an illusory space from the pressure of my hands as they work to draw whatever design I want to transfer.

Theory of Mind research shows us that the unconscious mind is 30,000 times more powerful than the conscious mind. This is why the phenomenon of resistance to change seems to be so universal to humankind. Surrealist artists hoped to express contents and elements of the unconscious mind through their art and poetry mostly using dream imagery and symbolism. 

I take the unconscious mind to another level of expression. Of course it’s based on Paul Klee’s work and main method of creating art—the oil transfer technique—but the level I take it to is the work I do in Photoshop which allows me to use filters that that emphasize, alter, highlight, and distinguish elements and effects in my art that would otherwise be mostly hidden. In effect, I’m making the invisible visible. I emphasize ambience, space, and unnoticed particles and entities.

When he was still with us on earth, Art Bell used to have ghost hunting experts on his show for interviews. The ones I listened to explained that they used recording equipment in abandoned locations that were said to be haunted. They wanted to see what kind of possible ghostly, intelligent, semi-comprehensible, audible information they could pick up with their equipment. I like to think of my art making as a process similar to EVP recordings in spirit. 

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote a classic volume of philosophy called The Critique of Pure Reason. I was lead to look at this book because of a really cool book I’d read several years ago called Art Theory For Beginners. I recommend anyone interested in the thought processes behind Western art to read that book for a much better understanding of Western art. It’s not in depth, but it touches on so many philosophical and historical understandings of great art and the time periods it was made in. 

Kant questions what is a thing in itself? Can we really know what a thing is without the biases, and finite perceptions of our localized, politicized brains? Hence, abstract art seems to be becoming more interesting to people. So the title to this piece is Chalked Up Tchotchke. Yes, I saw that word tchotchke recently on my Twitter feed. It basically means something that’s more decorative rather than functional. 

Media: Ltd. edition print (25)

Dimensions: 36 x 22 inches (not framed) 

Framed and with glass, this piece is: $450.00

Unmatted print is: $95.00

2 Comments

September 4, 2020 · 9:10 pm
Image

Tom Sawyer (washed) v.10

I titled this piece “Tom Sawyer.” It was a pretty random creation. I just saw some cutout material that I decided to paste on to a piece of paper. I had no conscious idea that the text on the cutout material I discarded from previous works included text about Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer. The character I ended up drawing in this illustration I decided would fit as an abstraction of Tom Sawyer. Moreover, it’s a name everyone has heard of. It’s also a classic American great.

I support great American art from history—when it’s good that is (by my own standards). What I’m doing here is integrating styles I’ve been working on over the years. Perhaps you’ve noticed, I haven’t been able to bridge the gap between my life arts nude drawings and paintings, and my imaginary and abstract stuff. Great art is known by a strong, relatively consistent style. Most everyone who has taken an art history class can identify a piece by Picasso for example.

Many artists have early and later periods of art. Usually a great artist’s early art is not recognized by collectors and publishers. Moreover, there are countless great artists who are not recognized much by Western media. For example, the Spanish artist, Modest Cuixart, is an artist of great fascination by myself, but I’d never heard of him before until I dug around artists of Catalan who lived in the same time period as Antoni Tapies. 

Anyhow, the styles I integrated in this piece are my stylized line art, my mosaic art, and my collage art. They came together in this piece with a composition that satiated my standard for asymmetrical balancing. My attempt at creating an illusion of space worked out well. The character is like a top spinning at the center of a large pot that has an atrium decorated with colorful and intricate mosaic pieces. 

Price for an unmatted print is: $90.00

$90.00 For Ltd Edition Print

1 Comment

September 1, 2020 · 6:06 am
Image

Allicin

This domain is finally paid for, so I might as well use it! Here is a painting I completed a few days ago. It’s derived from an image I flipped left to right and then inverted the colors. The model’s skin is therefore blue here. I wanted to create that effect. Since the world adjacent to ours, in this peculiar hyperdimension of fake time, is a sort of an inversion that mocks our world because it doesn’t have to abide by our rules, I gave it a spooky ghostly quality.

I love drawing models. I encourage other artists to join life drawing classes. So much skill and keenness of perception is gained from hours of practice drawing and painting the human figure. I titled this piece Allicin as allusion to the property found in garlic. Garlic is a smelly spice or herb to eat, but it’s health benefits excel past many other health foods. For example, Allicin is known to significantly reduce hypertension for people with high blood pressure. Allicin is my model for relaxing me. I love her.

1 Comment

June 22, 2020 · 5:57 am
Image

Minnie the Manx Playing with Pranx & Tanx (original)

image 4-27-20 at 10.53 pm

I love absurd, long old titles for artworks. It’s like how The Surrealists did it. Surrealism is a label; it’s a designation; it points the viewer’s mind in a curious direction; it creates a predicament; an irresolvable frustration that is resolved in utter nonsense. But you know that utter nonsense is sense to the unconscious mind, even while the conscious mind abjectly rejects such bafflement.

I’ve come to see smoke used symbolically as prayers, or intense thoughts. The flaming head of this girl is the smoke on the horizon of revolutions to come. The idea of playing with tanks and pranks, along with a ball of something with “God” printed on it denotes the naïveté of playing with life, DNA, spirituality, psychology, technology, religion, deeply held beliefs, youth, the elderly, and on and on and so forth.

We have a new domain of action in life called the internet. We’ve never had this before in our known little chiaroscuro of history crafted for us by our leaders. Many of us are also waking up to previously denied and suppressed psychological and spiritual powers, such as psychic perceptions and so forth. Our potentials are indeed baffling. Yet, the powers that be remain eager to stay on top and retain the illusions, fallacies, and paradigms they’ve always enjoyed without question.

Leave a comment

May 9, 2020 · 2:10 am
Image

Mr. Hearthead

This isn’t a final piece here. It’s just one of the last sketch drawings I made in my recently finished sketch journal titled Art Aches. I post it here to relieve the stress that the unfree, algorithmically discriminating Instagram creates for artists it doesn’t like. Mr Hearthead has unconscious relations to two other characters who were banished to the shadows of Instagram called Iggy Noory and Spallison Sparker. WordPress is treating the Art of eVan better lately, so I thought I’d see how it treats Mr Hearthead. Mr Hearthead is an unconscious character who is derived from the heart and the head.

Leave a comment

February 11, 2020 · 10:15 pm
Image

Your Stonewashed Dubba Dubba (v.1)

Since Instagram is continuing to insist on being a major ____sucker in suppressing me and my art page there, I’m going to post here again like I originally intended. Since Facebook took over Instagram, it has turned from the hottest social media into a basket case bottom dweller. Everyone I show this piece to loves it and says it should sell for thousands in a gallery. Too bad most art galleries are also vampiric ____suckers as well. Thanks for your support, those of you who aren’t fair weather flaky ghosts blown by the wafts of fake social media winds.

Leave a comment

February 11, 2020 · 7:23 am
Image

Such by Such (version 7)

SuchBySuch7ematted

I call this one Such by Such. SXS could be a shortened version of the title. This particular image here is version seven. I had fun tweaking the filtering and color adjustments in Photoshop to reach the results you see. I pasted paper cut out from magazines, and drew alcohol-based marker, and water-based pens on paper to complete the work. I then proceeded to my usual next step of applying water, rubbing alcohol, and lacquer thinner to achieve the psychedelic tie dye effects. The work I do in Photoshop helps to emphasize, exaggerate, and alter the natural bleeding effects that I evoke in physical media.

This current style I’ve been exploring and experimenting with currently utilizing basic lines, points, planes, some shading, and colors is a certain kind of style that mimics a scientific or mathematic spirit. The point, line, and plane are one and two dimensional visual concepts. They can be implied with the third dimension on a two dimensional picture plane by using drawing techniques established since the European Renaissance.

The fourth dimension was theorized about by Einstein in the 20th century. Simultaneously, art in the 20th century started exploring four dimensional visualizations and concepts. Artists, such as Pablo Picasso, M.C. Escher, and Salvador Dali, explored these time warping, perspective fracturing, mind bending, multiple simultaneous points of view ideas in visual art, thus giving a kind of experience for viewers viewing these artist’s works.

I’d say that this idea of multiple points of view was developed by Paul Cezanne and perhaps Eduard Manet, both great French Impressionist, and post-Impressionist artists, first. I think Picasso and Georges Braque would agree. These two artists were inspired by Cezanne and readily admitted so. They developed what they called “scientific cubism,” which takes Cezanne’s nascent perspective distortions into greater degrees of perspective fracturing and bending, thus accomplishing cubes of space, looked at from varying, disjointed points of view, for viewers to see of a whole object.

Braque and Picasso used physical objects, such as people, guitars, and tables, to represent their semi-abstract ideas in their paintings. I’d like to think that I’m taking this concept of cubism a step further by drawing completely abstract lines and shapes that aren’t attempting to represent anything but themselves as abstract lines and shapes. When combined, I often note that they have certain dimensional and cubist qualities to them. They hint at a fourth dimension for me. I simplified the idea of measuring space in the title of this piece by calling it Such by Such because I did not attempt to measure the four dimensional mimicking nature of it. I suppose I was lazy in that regard. Oh well.

 

Specifications:

Title: Such By Such (version 7)

Source mediums: Water-based ink, alcohol-based marker, water, rubbing alcohol, and lacquer thinner on paper, manipulated digitally with filters

Print medium: Hewlett Packard printer ink from Hewlett Packard DesignJet Z2100 printer on Hewlett Packard print paper (Note: print can be made with archival paper and printer if requested)

Digital manipulation completed: 3/13/2018

Dimensions of print: 31 inches by 36 inches

Number of limited edition prints: 25

Contact me: artofevan@hotmail.com

Leave a comment

March 14, 2018 · 5:52 am