Category Archives: Art of eVan

Substantiate.

I’m thinking about different mediums here; the passage of one medium through another. Perhaps a being in possession of one state passing through the state of another setting, like a fish gliding through water.

It’s another hybridized amalgamation of mine. The background collage is a physical collage of text, ads, and diagrams from books, magazines and printouts I glued together. The hollowed out female form is a digital photo I worked with extensively to bring it to the state you see here. If you’re keen, you may notice traces of association with Apex of a Heart.

I titled it Anna’s Amorphic Hour for poetic reasons. Playing with the interfacing of words with images, and defining their relationships, is obviously what I do. I like how the mouth and voice initiates the “a” sound with each word in the title. Even the word “hour” begins with an “a” sound; A-A-A. Am I suggesting a triple A rating of something?

The female form—Anna—is passing through a sea of stabilized text, words, and diagrams. I say stabilized because none of the background material runs at diagonal angles; it’s all up, down, left, and right. Anna is in a state of mind that allows her to feel the magnificent space in her own being, even her own so-called physical being. She recently discovered that matter is mostly composed of vast swaths of space between all the sub-atomic particles that constitute her body and everything around her.

For some reason, this realization triggered Anna to fly into a sort of religious trance in which she thought of herself as an hourglass, and, when others look at her, they see through her as if she were a fish-tank. A moving fish-tank that is. So there are material things you can see through the portal form of Anna’s figure. Some of them are more material than others as they tune in and out of the plane through which she is passing.

I am harkened back to Lewis Carroll’s novel, Through the Looking-Glass, as I write about Anna’s little adventure here. While there may be connections, Anna is by no means Alice. Anna lives in the 21st century, and has quite an imagination. She and I paddle ideas back and forth with each other as if we were playing ping pong at a self-help retreat. I had known for many years now of the overwhelming amounts of space that exists between the elements of so-called matter. Moreover, I know that matter itself is basically quanta of energy; bundled up super-strings if you will.

I plan on telling Anna about this at our next informal tournament of idea paddling. In the meanwhile, I’m enjoying the passage of thought as I hammer out this waking dream and encode it into a few words for you. Won’t you join us in this four dimensional panorama that keeps on trying to adjust time with space in bubbles of illusion?

Overstand.

Lately I’ve been pondering on an idea Marx wrote about. He wrote that “religion is the opium of the people.” Of course Marx was an atheist who thought he was above the superstitious masses of his days, stubbornly carried over from Europe’s Dark Ages prior to the Renaissance. I disagree with Marx on many points, but many others make sense to me. This idea of religion is something that I recently felt necessary to work out intellectually.

I wrote about my personal experiences with religion and family recently, and what they mean to me. I don’t think I’ll explore my intimate memories here because I want to engage in contemporary topics that are much more broad and general to the public at large.

I realized something very core and basic to America’s two mainstream political parties lately, and micro-blogged about them right after. I didn’t fully explore them then however, as Twitter doesn’t allow for longer descriptions for each tweet on its platform. So I essentially abstracted the core values of America’s left and right mainstream politics in relation to guns and religion in light of the recent tragedy in Orlando, whether if it was staged or actual.

The left basically sees that regulating weapons more in America is the way to peace, while turning a blind eye to the Democratic party selling arms to “rebels” in Syria to overthrow Bashar Al Assad’s government. The right basically sees that regulating and monitoring religion in America—specifically the Muslim faith—is the way to peace, while turning a blind eye to the failed wars waged in the Middle East that have forced millions of native people there into being homeless refugees overrunning Europe.

I personally believe that more federal regulation of anything won’t change anything. Peoples’ faiths will not be determined from centralized authority. Gun sales surge after mass shootings, and people get more religiously active after these tragedies, as well, in order to try to find some meaning in it all. It is well known to many that “war is money.” As sick as it sounds, the facts indicate that mass shootings and war increase religious activity, and weapons sales. They probably increase sales in other markets too.

I can’t help but seeing politics as religion for some people. If I’m brutally honest, politics has turned into a kind of religion for me, as I monitor the reporting, talking, and campaigning from both sides of America’s politics practically every day now. I have found no field of human activity filled with more idiocy, hypocrisy, and dysfunction than politics. Yet, politics have so much emotional energy involved in them that one can’t ignore. I have found that emotional energy is where decisions lie with everyone, rather than reason and logic.

As much as I’d like to believe that humankind is salvageable through reason, science, and logic, I know that these fine human features aren’t the crux around which humankind tethers. Indeed, I have found that religion is the opium of the masses. The word religion, itself, means the practice of re-ligating oneself to a congregation devoted to God, Christ, Allah, Buddha, or whatever, at regular intervals. The root word of ligament is found in the word religion. A ligament connects bones and muscles together in animal and human organisms. In an immaterial sense, people are ligated together into a community, a group, a congregation, a state, a nation, etc., in religion.

If one looks closer, one finds that religions are ritualistic beliefs and practices, involving prayer, sacrifice, service, and appointed regular and special community events. This is the same thing we all do in our secular lives anyway. Driving is a second nature ritual, eating is, using the bathroom, talking, writing… pretty much everything we do is a ritual. Some of those rituals can be quite irrational, but they serve soul assuaging purposes, or psychic tension releasing purposes, or security seeking purposes.

This new work of art of mine, titled The New Handheld Garden for You and Blue, is a subtle play upon all I’ve discussed thus far. It introduces the idea of handheld devices. You are probably looking at it with your own handheld device right now. It brings to your awareness to how our contemporary world revolves around the internet and handheld devices. These seem to be the new religion, as rituals are securely fastened to using them everyday for everyone, and, in many cases, for many hours a day. The handheld device is the new alter upon which one and all sacrifice their prayers. Prayers are old-fashioned ways of making desires acceptable to God. The internet is full of desires, and has websites across the planet, ready to accept your credit card number.

The center of interest in this digital collage emanates from the borderline psychedelic poppy flowers. They are symbolic of religion being the opium of the people. I feel they are a very appropriate symbol to use to shine forth from the screen of your handheld alter, or gallery, or device. The dark pinwheel spinning in the sky is symbolic of Summer showers cleaning the sky as they pass overhead, cooling our days sometimes as nature’s swamp coolers.

I titled this piece Wendy’s Sandy Waves. It’s a young woman sitting on a beach. I used a previous drawing I’d made last year called Topology of Hearts, Hands, and Minds for the patterns you see in her upper torso, the foreground, and backgrounds.

The idea here looks as if you stumbled upon a mermaid on a shore in your wild daydreams. I made sure the fishnet hose make the woman’s legs look like scales on a fish, thus alluding to my abstract pisciform drawings.

Delving deeper, I wanted to convey how beauty can have a tendency to reduce one’s ability to reason, analyze, and calculate. In particular, I’m thinking of how a woman’s physical attractiveness can paralyze an average guy’s ability to reason and think clearly in her presence. I interpret this as a form of power. I have no desire to alter that power either because I enjoy women’s beauty.

There are other things that can cloud, not only a guy’s reasoning abilities, but anyone’s reasoning abilities, such as the emotion of sadness for example. Sadness is in fact used in marketing and advertising so as to weaken a target audience’s natural resistance to being exploited. It’s called “sadvertising.” One ploy I have noticed, since my grandmother used to send checks in the mail to different organizations playing on her pity, is the usage of starving children, abused animals, or desecrated landscapes due to corporate-state greed.

Those last three examples I used are definitely unfortunate activities that do overwhelmingly occur in our world, and I am glad that there are people who stand up against them and work to stop them. What I want to describe here however is a point that I’d like you to be aware of. Those unfortunate events are specifically used by some people to weaken your critical thinking abilities in order to get you to open your wallet to them.

The same goes for beauty. Again, I have no interest in campaigning to stopping the usage of beauty throughout advertising. In fact, I encourage and celebrate it. What I’d briefly like to teach is the retainment of your critical thinking faculties for your own good in the face of manipulations that might otherwise overwhelm you.

Long ago, Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, wrote about rhetoric, and how rhetoric is used to deceive, to persuade, and to seduce. Politicians of all time are good examples of how speeches, debates, and campaigns are used relentlessly to manipulate populations. Questionable stories from centralized media treatment plants are repeated ad infinitum to instill thought for the mainstream. Extensive logical arguments can be used to wear out a target audience’s mind for example, and then heart rending situations can be presented to basically emotionally body-slam them.

In mythology, mermaids are sometimes seen as rescuers for seafarers encountering water bound perils. Water is often a symbol of emotions, and stormy seas are symbols of overwhelming emotion. A mermaid can be seen as a saving emissary for a wayward soul caught in the torrents of his or her emotional deluges. So my work of art here is intended to bring peace, but also excitement and wonder to you as you explore new landscapes in your mind.

I realize some people see me as cold and calculating, and in some ways they are right. The word calculate has the Latin root word calculi in it, which means stone. My name Evan in Hebrew means stone. So I find myself playing roles of calculating, analyzing, and assessing according to my name.

This is La Fleur version number two. It’s basically a color inversion of La Fleur version one. I wanted to play upon the artistic concept of repetition. It’s a concept pop artists use often in order to convey a manufactured, impersonal, assembly line quality. Somehow, in my opinion, the life is supposed to seep through the slight imperfections and malignments so that you, the viewer (and co-creator), pick up on it.

In this image, I’m playing further with the idea that space is actually brimming with unseen things. I’m making those things seen here. So I’m using a template from a squatting human form to embody space, and that space suggests innumerable microscopic forms. There is that same quality in the space surrounding the body, too.

It speaks for itself. Let me be lazy and let your active imagination empower itself to roam across constellations and landscapes for your own self. Enjoy.

There’s just so much going on with this piece that I don’t know where to begin. I’m embarrassed to observe that the orange poppy flowers unconsciously associate with Donald Trump’s red hair. I’m not a Trump supporter, so please don’t think that this piece is propaganda NIP (neuro-imagistic-programming) for his campaign. Also, don’t label me as a Hillary supporter. In no way do I support that prison industrial complex expanding, Goldman Sachs worshiping criminal. I must, however, explain that my unconscious mind sometimes produces things in my art and writing that seem to be contradictory or opposed to what my conscious mind thinks.

Like Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump is a trending phenomenon in politics because he represents a figure that supposedly stands opposed to “the establishment.” The establishment, of course, represents people such as the Clintons and the Bushes. I personally still am not convinced that either one of these “rebel” politicians on the left or the right truly stand for the people of America and the rest of the world. Endless facts produced by the left and the right condemning one another can easily point out how neither Trump nor Sanders will right the wrongs inside and outside of America.

I personally like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy of self-reliance, independence, and freedom. It’s hard to fathom that Emerson was actually an American philosopher. Americans of today are completely reliant on Washington’s politicians to make them feel better about themselves, to tell them how to tie their shoes, for paychecks, and to regain senses of security by bashing the other party’s side well enough into some kind of temporary submission through a centralized corporate-state merged media complex. I feel that Trump, and even Sanders, still represent the neurotic attachment Americans have to super-heroes developed by the film industry. No politician will ever be able to save anyone, regardless of party. Alas! But I’m talking to myself again. Anyway, at least I’m filling some space writing here that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to fill at least.

I got interested in drawing poppies and doing something more with them in art projects this Spring when I saw them blossoming around in my neighborhood. Their orange-red insistence, when looking at them, is unmistakable. It’s like they want to say something no other flower can. Poppies are known for being a source of opium and opiates. There are many other species however, most of which have no opiate properties. According to official science, there are about 775 known species.

Because of the association of poppies and opium is strong in this image, I can’t help but notice that the stems of the poppy flowers extending from the green center look like hypodermic needles. I want to stop here and explain that in no way do I advocate heroin usage. I will strongly point out what I think the drive behind such addictive behaviors is however. Since heroin usage is trending in America currently, I think this is caused by peoples’ needs to feel free like a kid again; people want to escape the ______ reality they are surrounded with in an unfree, law imprisoned world. Drugs, in general, give people a physical and internal permission to be, feel, and act out being an innocent child again, because, certainly, the authoritarian authorities roaming the landscapes of America’s aging cities will never give anyone permission to behave questionably like a child again.

Because real freedom has been stamped out of the American spirit in favor of the world’s largest military, millions of laws, and directions on how to pick your nose properly, citizens have been relegated to unconsciously seeking ways to experience the freedom that is their natural heritage in some way again. Unfortunately, it would seem that politicians are the only ones who have the power to give citizens permission to feel their rage, and drugs are the only sources that allow them to feel their innocence and freedom again.

The mandelic vortices surrounding the bush of flowers look like they could symbolically represent storm clouds, suggesting a rainy season. New Mexico, a desert, has been getting rain recently. We are entering a season locals call “the Monsoon Season” here in New Mexico. Officially, it’s called the North American Monsoon System (NAMS)for the Southwestern region of the United States. It’s a season that lasts from about June 15th, to September 30th where we get lots of rain, and it’s more humid than the usual dry, arid climate of the Southwestern desert.

I find that this image has associations with the Burning Bush as it spoke to Moses in the Old Testament of the Western Bible. Moses asked the Burning Bush who it was, and it replied “I am that I am.” This, to me, simply means that God can be anything. Everything is ultimately one to me anyway. It’s just that existence decided to break apart into an infinite number of pieces in order to experience self-hood and other-hood. In the oneness, I don’t know who to blame for all the suffering of separation: Was it God or one’s self who decided to become separate? God or you? How would you know since there was no difference in the beginning? Anyway, the flowers surrounding the bush can be symbolic of all the colorful personalities that have sprung forth from the One.

In between all the colorful personalities, you can observe, if you look closer, what appear to be birds with their wings extended between the two rows of flowers. They look like they could be Baltimore Orioles. I had not intended this effect while creating the tree-shaped bush of flowers. They are quite fitting actors for a piece such as this since it is a natural Summer scene.

The stems of the flowers, and the blades of grass, forming a half-star formation coming up from the bottom of the picture to the middle left looks like it could be the body of a primordial beast arising from the bowels of the earth. The sky is a rich pastel, but a darker blue, suggesting that the time of day in which this scene is depicted could be approaching dusk, giving the setting a more mysterious quality. It looks like there are many insects in the sky, indicating the beginning of the Summer season. There are moths, beetles, flies, little spiders and gnats flying around. Though it looks like an approaching nighttime scene, this picture is overwhelmingly a Summer season picture.

The missiles, or flying insect looking projectiles issuing forth from the edges of the flowers, look like totem poles, indicating an native island tribe quality, or perhaps an Alaskan tribe quality. I get the idea of blowguns, too.

There’s an artsy, unique style and fashion store at the outdoor Albuquerque Uptown mall called Anthropologie that uses art works consisting of natural found objects, and other media, crafted into improvised, mimicked, animate and inanimate lifeforms, such as water bugs, tree stumps, and other things. These art works are installed and/or hung on the walls throughout the store. I have found myself to be particularly impressed by them, and the store as a whole. I have never seen any store like it ever before. I feel that this image has elements of that kind of style to it, but it still remains my own.

I know some artists feel that no idea, method, approach, or style is possessed completely by any one artist, but I must say that no two individuals are exactly alike on earth. From this, I conclude that an artist’s signature style is truly his or her individual style. Others can imitate, and they do; some even do a certain style better than the original artist, but they still will never truly be the artist who produced the original style or theme.

One of the latest cultural rages is to have tattoos all over your body. I’ve noticed this trend increasingly over the last several years. Up in Nebraska, people are mostly conservative, so I didn’t see too many folk with tattoos all over their bodies when I lived there. I suppose more people had tattoos in the inner city of Omaha however. I bet this trend has increased there, too.

Here in Albuquerque, I see so many people with tattoos. Just workers in restaurants and super warehouse stores. I suppose people in the higher echelons of business and corruption just cover up their tattoos with long sleeve button-ups and ties. Is this ghetto? I’m rather proud of myself for not having a single tattoo on my body. It’s a symbol—or absence of a symbol—of my stubborn independence and to not give in to peer pressure. Yes, peer pressure continues on after high-school and college. It just upgrades to cars, lawns, bodies, wives, husbands, kids, and cell-phones. The fun of never having enough never stops.

I believe the fetish with having tattoos stems from the general aversive American attitude towards touching people, other than loved ones and relatives. I believe the ritual of getting a tattoo creates a very impressive—and painful—memory on one’s body. To me, it’s sort of a destructive activity, but that’s just my opinion. I know that tribes of cultures, not engaged in the obsession with worshiping technology, use tattoos for religious purposes. I haven’t researched those purposes to any degree, so I can’t expound on that right now.

I’m just noting the trend with tattoos. I’m also linking that trend with this new work of mine. Sophia, the name for the model I used in this piece, looks like she has large areas of tattoos on her integumentary system. The pattern of this tattoo is Meme Catcher, an altered illustration of mine that I blogged about at the end of 2015. In Gnosticism, Sophia was the syzygy of Christ. In other words she was the feminine expression of Christ.

Sophia is a Greek name, which means wisdom. Wisdom is connected with knowledge, but I’m not sure if they mean exactly the same thing. When it comes to non-physical terms, such as intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom, it becomes much more difficult to define and separate the terms so that they are understood in isolated and individual ways.

The tattoo on Sophia’s body looks like it has depth to it—like it looks like you are peering into another dimension—and the frame of Sophia’s body is the doorway as her skin peels away in a metaphysical apoptosis in her meditative physically unbinding state. She is sitting in a meditative posture I learned in Karate called Seiza. It is a posture from which a person can get up easier than from a full lotus meditative posture. Karate, by the way, is another activity Americans engage in as a hobby, which—not surprising to me—involves contact and touching other people.

In this image, however, the model is alone. She sits alone. While being alone isn’t necessarily necessary in order to meditate, it does create a state conducive to more intimate contact with the universe, God, one’s higher self, or whatever however. I put a drop shadow to the right of Sophia giving the contents past her body a sense of depth as if they were on a wall.

On the lower left hand of the picture are the words are “desperate struggle for self-determination.” I like the chasm your imagination engages in to find connection between a young woman meditating and whatever image you get for a “desperate struggle for self-determination.” The way I interpret that is that decision-making truly lies within oneself, and is acted on by oneself and oneself alone. Hence, the singular meditative figure.

I’m filling a national need here by overwhelming you with visual clutter. Since I’m an American in this current lifetime, I can’t help but let my artistic sensibilities express contemporary perceptions, imbalances, desires, dreams, and lacks in America’s collective unconscious. Of course, I can’t speak for everyone, but I can take a slice out of American pie and help you take a bite out of it with your eyes.

This piece is actually inspired by a pal on Twitter of mine who is a remarkable poet, and the song by The Velvet Underground called Rock and Roll. Rus Khomutoff, on Twitter, sometimes sends me links online of radio stations in New York because he’s from Brooklyn. I’ve never been to New York myself, but I sometimes think my vibe would jive well with certain scenes, cafes, dance clubs, music stores, galleries, and bookstores there.

This piece has also hints of Japan’s Rising Sun flag. Recently, President Obama made an official apology to Japan for the United States’ annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the end of world war two. Washington and Wall Street helped to industrialize Japan after world war two, and I think that the mechanical engine parts represented in this piece are symbolic of that.

Another association that comes to mind is Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses album, and how its front cover has sound megaphones attached to a pole on a landscape. Is it dawn or dusk in that image by Martyn Atkins? If it is indeed dawn, then that’s just one more link to Japan’s Rising Sun flag.

A pastime ritual of some Americans is collecting things, from coins, to stamps, to all kinds of retro and antique objects. I think this piece helps to convey that sense. After the Great Depression of the 1930s, my grandmother clung to a tendency to hold on to things, even items of trash. In my six year stay with her and my parents on our family farm, I started using some of that trash, media, and old materials from the past for art projects.

The need to have things together, to have enough to survive, and to be able to be within reach of necessities come to mind. Unconsciously, if many Americans could, they’d probably grab every other nation on the planet and pull them close to the United States for close monitoring and access to resources. The word arthropod transverses the middle of this illustration, indicating an organism, such as an insect, that uses feet, limbs, and joints to walk, thus implying the need to walk across water as an act of faith to touch other things and organisms.

My work here is part of a larger series called Mechanical Organisms, which is part of the overarching Micro-Chimerisms project that continues to be ongoing in the Art of eVan repertoire.

Arising from a piece I created called Mechanoreceptors back in 2012, Candy’s Candid Chaos was recently formed. I have been wanting to continue working on the female form in combination with my arabesque and mosaic designs. A lot of unexpected synchronicities occurred in the process of creating this piece.

I selected the silhouette from a picture of a nude female and placed my drawing, Mechanoreceptors, behind it. I unwittingly created a background for her form without knowing that it would become the background later. Then I selected the design filled silhouette and placed it on the background as the foreground. I’m enjoying it because of how the image, as a whole, merges together nicely due to the color combinations, and the intricate mosaic pieces.

The head of the woman looks like it has a gust of wind, or a breeze, wrapping around it. The circular shape circumscribing her middle torso fits together nicely with the left hand border and the rest of the background.

As a whole, this piece looks like it’s more random, rather than premeditated and organized by your average artist. The unexpected results from chaos and experimentation are what I have practiced for many years now. I feel this piece exemplifies that well. I named the female Candy in this piece. I imagined that Candy enters a world of chaos sometimes so that she can merge with its infinite, less defined nuances of imagination and space.

Chaos, being the original state of creation, gives rise to inchoate forms as they seek more and more definition as time unfolds. In this rather undefined state, Candy seeks a candid exposure of her multifaceted expressions.

As an artist, I have found the female form to be one of the most enjoyable forms to study and master drawing and painting. I gather endless inspiration from the female form. It seemed appropriate to me to add a hint of a story behind the female forms I sometimes use in my art so as to add a dimension of depth and character. I would like to ask some of my female friends some stories they’d be willing to share with me so I can expand upon them with my art and my writing.