Category Archives: Goiddios

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Tisk Raker (version 2)

Bike rides—I love riding my bike down to the Rio Grande here because of the sweet smell. I think it’s because of the willow trees. They seem to be weeping sweetness because it’s Spring. And It’s just getting so green by the river. I have a problem with this kind of green in this image however because Photoshop likes to default to it as one edits and manipulates an image of art. Nonetheless, I had been wanting to challenge myself using this green in a way that I like. This particular version of the original artwork naturally drew me to like it upon the first hue manipulation I did of it. 

I titled this drawing Tisk Raker. It’s a play on words for “risk taker.” It’s supposed to denote the quality of intensity as expressed by an intense green. Intense colors can be symbolic of intensities in people and their personalities. I have a lot of Scorpio energy in me, according to Western astrology, and my birth chart. Scorpios seek out intensity and often find it in extreme emotions, experiences, and people. 

My made up word “tisk” can be taken as tsk, as in “tsk, tsk, tsk”, like when an elder shames a child about some mischief that the kid got into. The word “rake” has multiple meanings as well. It’s, of course, rake, as in a leaf or garden rake. It can also be understood as the male version of a siren. Sirens are the Greek mythological creatures who flung themselves into the sea after a hero named Odysseus was able to pass them by on his journeys by surviving their singing as he had himself tied to the mast of his ship. Sirens, as contemporarily understood, are female seducers who few are unable to pass by without being hypnotized by their beauty. I like how I unwittingly made a shadow effect for some of the black lines due to the oil transfer copy I traced on to the surface of the original drawing.

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May 15, 2021 · 4:10 am
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The Fulgurating Figaro

Impossible triangle. You want me to make sense. Here, I don’t have to. I can be a nut, and I can be an artist. I like imagining lands of hypnogogia that lie in between this physical reality we live in and the one next door. Time is more of a mockery in this land, sort of like a surrealist landscape. The lines with arrows and points on the ends of them that I draw as part of my current style of art are symbolic of dimensional angles of space, time, and other dimensions that we don’t normally perceive. 

Marketers tell me I should make everything about you so that I’ll hit so many rights in your brain that you’ll identify with me and my art and will then endorse me. If I did that, I’d waste all my creative energy trying to please you. While you are indeed worthy of pleasing, I’d still rather just have fun exploring my mind here and let you read about the news. 

Here, I can divide up an impossible triangle so that it flips out like pages in a book as it tries to fly into a sky that has no up or down. I used to go to this travel agency in Fremont, Nebraska when I was a kid to get some tickets for a flight back home to California when I was visiting my grandparents during the summer. On the wall, they had all these different clocks with different times on them representing different places and time zones. 

Later in life, I learned that time is relative according to Einstein’s science. In my study of psychology, I also learned from authors of psychology and new age that time doesn’t exist in the greater reality as everything is always here and now. We just perceive things in a succession since we are aligned with a program to see, do, and experience things in successions. Otherwise we’d be overwhelmed with information and we wouldn’t cope. 

I titled this piece The Fulgurating Figaro for shits and giggles. Fulguration is defined as the destruction of small growth or areas of tissue using diathermy. A figaro is a barber. I tamed the wildness of your imagination so you could succeed the rest of the picture in your own mind, time, and space.

 

Media: Digital print printed on quality paper

Dimensions: 35 x 27 inches (size can be adjusted as needed)

Price for an unmatted print is: $90.00

Please email me at artofevan@hotmail if you want it framed with glass to discuss pricing

$90.00 For Ltd Edition Print

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October 4, 2020 · 2:56 am
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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

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September 21, 2020 · 4:39 am
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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

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September 9, 2020 · 3:58 am
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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

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September 4, 2020 · 9:10 pm
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Pastel Ash

It’s called Pastel Ash because I used pastels to make strikes around the macaroni shape. I digitally amalgamated another drawing I made into this piece. It looks like some weathered trash stuck together you might find by the side of the road. Beside your fallible psychological analysis, I encourage you to find beauty in trash laying around. Maybe you could pick it up and use it for something, like a work of art.

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January 10, 2020 · 5:45 pm
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Hold

I am going to share this piece here for the first time I’ve shared on WordPress for a long time. I call it Hold. It’s a digital manipulation of a mixed media collage drawing I did a couple years ago. I like the endless multiple meanings found in the word hold. The complete abstract character of it gives it even more liberation with meaning and enables you to create your own story of it for yourself.

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January 9, 2020 · 2:46 am
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Vis a Vis (version 7)

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A lot of conjunctions of styles I’ve been working on and combinations of media are going on in this landmark piece. It can be traced back to a drawing I made several years ago called Microscopic Works of Light, which is on my Facebook Art of eVan page. It’s the style I used for the tails trailing on behind each head in this piece which are extant of that earlier mosaic style.

My earlier mosaic styles convey organic, micro-organic, mythological, and esoteric themes. This piece here is a revival of that quality that still beckons expression from me. The two heads are like unidentified mythological characters meeting each other in a semi-physical state, coming face to face with one another for a meeting of the self.

Long ago, I’d read some of Edgar Cayce’s readings he’d given for clients requesting spiritual help and insight into their problems. In readings he addressed as karmic, he would often use the term “meeting of the self” to describe how karmic attachments a soul may still possess that wrap one back again and again into similar situations to attempt to successfully deal with. It’s also a paradox to meet oneself as oneself, so the self is often dealt with through others who reflect back the attitudes one must deal with in oneself.

While taking anatomy and physiology classes for the healthcare education I enrolled in, I became fascinated by how many muscle groups and nerve networks there are in the human face. Around the same time, I’d read some articles about mirror neurons and how we are wired to mirror peoples expressions and moods around us. So for example, if you start eating an ice-cream cone in front of me with my favorite ice-cream on it, I will probably start salivating. I’d be mirroring your activity in my nervous system, though I don’t have an ice-cream cone in my hand.

With this piece of art, I tried to illustrate my idea of cubism. My idea is to get similar perspectives of a certain object, such as a human head, from different sources. The idea is to cut up those sources into different shapes and fit them into the shape of a head again. This implies a psychological effect of different spaces and different times compiled into one tangible object, heads in this case. I believe that muscles and nerves hold memories, and those memories are assimilated from different places, different people, and different times, thus creating psychological chimeras from memory.

A chimera is a Greek mythological beast that is put together or created from different animals. So it might have the hooves of a horse, and the head of a lion for example. In today’s biological science, chimerism means that a single organism has cells with two distinct genotypes. For example, the two genotypes could be the hemopoiesis of two different blood types within the single organism.

My art evolved from using the mosaic style established centuries ago in early Christian, Late Roman, and Byzantine art. It evolved into this style I’m describing now, which is chimeric. The whole idea is the building of something—anything—from something small, elementary, and simple into larger and more complicated structures and processes. This pretty much what life does anyway. It also includes the breakdown, entropy, and decaying of complex forms, only to rise again in new forms.

Many enlightened souls have declared that the ultimate reality is oneness, and that all this separation we normally see is just an illusion of separation while we all remain in perfect oneness throughout eternity.

In order for anything to exist and for anything to be perceived, as we understand perception in our physical bodies, there has to be movement. Movement has to be accompanied by space and time. What creates what? What if all three of these elements of existence create each other in a triangulated continuum? Space is filled with things, even on the smallest levels, and things are filled with space on the smallest of levels.

In order for something to exist, it must be contrasted and differentiated with something else. This brings in the idea of Ying and Yang and primal creation. From complete stillness and unity, movement has to be initiated, and, in order for movement to be initiated, a fracturing of oneness has to be accomplished. Yet, the balance of oneness is still maintained by circular and cyclical movements. Thus everything is still bound to complete oneness as it pinwheels throughout the cosmos forever repeating cycles until oneness is accepted once again, instead of infinite illusions of separation.

I compare the idea of Ying and Yang and the idea of primordial movement to binary blackholes rotating around one another creating vibrations of gravity waves throughout the ocean of space and time, creating space and time, influencing space and time, tweaking space and time, like musicians and cosmic dancers filling an auditorium and stage with movements of life.

Specifications:

Title: Vis a Vis (version 7)

Source mediums: Water-based and alcohol based ink, and magazine and copy machine cutouts on paper as collage

Source drawing completed: 8/31/2018

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 in which case the additional costs will be calculated and added)

Digital manipulation completed: 11/10/2018

Dimensions of print: 36 inches by 29 inches

Number of limited edition prints: 25

Investment of print not framed: $100.00

Investment of print framed: $550 (shipping included)

Contact me: evan_travnicek@yahoo.com

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November 12, 2018 · 8:13 am
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Height of the Humble Hoach (version 3)

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Obviously I’m not worried about perfection here in a traditionally understood standardized, mainstream, commercial art sense. I also realize I’m really not creating anything breakthrough or revolutionary here as well. Nevertheless, the attempt here is to convey a sense of freedom and liberation from having to perform well in the execution of a work of art. There are innumerable decisions one makes in creating a work of art, and there are perhaps even more possible decisions one decides not to make, that could potentially be made, while making art. Many artists take the route of “what looks best” and “will this look cool to so-and-so?” Even art that’s intended to be rebellious on the surface is frequently merely an attempt to please another, or a group of people, when one probes a little deeper into the motivation of why an artist made this or that piece.

I realize many artists make their art out of a passion and love for what they do primarily. Yet, I still maintain that artists don’t live in a vacuum, and some of us must realize, at some point, that we are making art to show to the public, and to different audiences. It’s just inevitable that we will wonder how our art will be received. The more authentic and original an artist’s work is, the more we may worry how others will perceive it. Letting go of these worries is ultimately the best though. Some artists can’t let go however, and we get caught in webs, jobs, and circles of trying to please someone or a group of people.

I usually steer clear of posting works of art that are displayed on horizontal rectangular picture planes because of how they are reduced in size to the viewer when looking at them on a standard sized computer monitor. If you are using a smart phone, I suppose you could turn your handheld device horizontally in order to see more detail. Problem solved. This is one of my attempts to please you I suppose.

I call this piece Height of the Humble Hoach. It just came to me as I was playing with rhyming variations on the title “Flight of the Bumble Roach” written by The Residents. I didn’t know that hoach is a word, but it actually is. I looked it up and it means to be “full of” or “swarming with” according to the English Oxford dictionary. Its origins come from historical Europe with meanings of to “move jerkily” or to “shake to and fro.” I thought the object in the middle of the picture sort of resembled a bumblebee or some other winged insect. It looks like it’s cruising through the air too.

I wanted to experiment with tearing up drawings I made after soaking them in water and gluing them to new drawings, thus creating textures and layers. This piece you see here is part of a larger drawing I made for an art group I’m a part of with friends. That drawing is called “Absorb” and I haven’t posted it publicly online yet. This piece is basically the left side of Absorb, and it’s turned ninety degrees and flipped horizontally. This differentiated it enough for me to regard it as a piece in itself. For the foundation drawing Absorb, I applied some diluted white acrylic paint as splatters which soaked into the already wet surface. You can see some of that cloudiness in this representation. I also sprinkled some salt on top of the previously mentioned applications which created some interesting small craters and pocks.

 

Specifications:

Title: Height of the Humble Hoach (version 3)

Source mediums: Water-based and alcohol based ink on paper torn, and recombined with magazine print glued to paper as collage

Source drawing completed: 6/29/2018

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: 7/31/2018

Dimensions of print: 32 inches by 11 inches

Number of limited edition prints: 25

Investment of print not framed: $65.00

Investment of print framed: $400 (shipping included)

Contact me: evan_travnicek@yahoo.com

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August 3, 2018 · 9:06 pm
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Staggering Stride (version 1)

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It looks like a boat. It looks like a water strider—those bugs I used to see skate around on the surfaces of ditch water after big rainstorms in Nebraska. It also makes me think of the Mahayana and Hinayana, which are boats, or vehicles, figuratively, in Buddhist epistemology. It looks like the boat could be seen as traveling across a large body of water on the surface of a planet. You can see the curved horizon of this planet on the right side of the picture. I like how the boat appears closely to you as the viewer, but the planet appears as if it’s tens of thousands of miles away. It gives it the sense of multiple points of view—an expanded sense of perception—as may be experienced in dreams while observing something.

When a string on a cello or a guitar is plucked, it vibrates back and forth in order to produce the sound it makes. The string actually moves in a circular motion, like a jump rope might. I have noticed that vibrating strings make the shape of a boat or ship between the insertion points. Physicists have taught us that matter is really just non-physical energy at sub-atomic levels. Some theorize that matter is fundamentally made of superstrings as theorized about in superstring theory. Thus all matter is just countless superstrings harmonizing and cacophanizing everywhere.

In Judeo-Christian literature, you can read about Noah’s Ark, and the story about the world flooding due to God’s wrath. I don’t want to try to prove the veracity of this story here, but I do want to make associations and correlations for artistic and intellectual purposes. The bow of a ship is designed to “cut” through water with the least amount of resistance as possible. Thus they have narrow wedged rostrums. The idea of the least amount of resistance is also found in Taoism, as Lao Tzu wrote that water seeks the path of least resistance as it travels down the folds, crevices, and foothills of mountains.

The idea I want to emphasize here is “the least amount of resistance as possible.” This is actually a strategy that applies to people—us—manipulating and managing matter and life in general with the best outcomes in mind. For example, when I enter into a new social situation, I like to scope and gauge things before I start accepting more responsibility, management, and control. It’s my method—one of several—of attempting to create harmony.

Getting more abstract here, I imagine that certain combinations of sounds, melodies, and jingles can act as codes in environments  so as to produce certain effects. Codes, perhaps, to open doors or to lock them. Basically, waves of all kinds—physical or non-physical—are patterns, and if they are harmonious with other wave patterns, then I believe they have to potential to create beneficial situations. Beneficial to knowledgeable users of course.

 

Specifications:

Title: Staggering Stride (version 1)

Source mediums: Water-based ink, alcohol-based marker, pencil, water, and rubbing alcohol on paper, manipulated digitally with Photoshop

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: 4/10/2018

Dimensions of print: 45 inches by 34 inches

Number of limited edition prints: 25

Contact me: artofevan@hotmail.com

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April 11, 2018 · 7:31 am