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.
Title: Brown Dwarf (version 1) Media: gel and ballpoint pens on paper Original drawing: 8 x 11 inches Print: 24 x 32 inches Contact: artofevan@hotmail.com
At first, I was thinking of titling this piece Twisted Mountain because of the twisting formation I drew in the foreground. The idea here grew from the Rub el Hizb form I drew at the beginning of this drawing. Rub el Hizb is an Islamic star, it’s an eight pointed star, as opposed to the six pointed star of the Star of David. I just like the shape of it. It reminds me of a mathematical attempt to estimate Pi, the circumference of a circle, and represent it as a finite number.
The overlapping squares make me think of frames, as in picture frames. Frames attempt to capture beauty, or a thing of interest, for an artist and his or her audiences. It’s like the light of this star is being bound by a limiting frame. I drew some parallelogram mosaic pieces surrounding the black frame holding the star bound in its place in the sky.
After making these observations, I decided to title this piece Brown Dwarf. I remembered from an astronomy class at RCC that there are stars called brown dwarfs, which are astronomical bodies that are between planets and stars. So they’re becoming stars. Jupiter is considered a potential star, but both brown dwarf stars and Jupiter are not massive enough to sustain the nuclear fusion that is necessary to turn hydrogen into helium at their cores.
This drawing is composed of ballpoint, and gel pens as media that I used to draw on paper media. It took me a longer time to complete because drawing each mosaic square with these pens was a patient and extensive process. If you are interested in the original drawing, or if you are interested in acquisitioning a high quality, ltd edition print of it, please email me at artofevan@hotmail.com. The print edition of this piece is limited to 25.
Media: Digital print on paper Limited edition print of 25 Dimensions: 30 inches by 24 inches Price framed: $500.00 Price non-framed: $100.00 (Shipping included in price)
I thought I made up the word “bock“, which is included in the title for this piece. But then I searched for the word upon a suspicion that it might be an obscure word not commonly used. Sure enough, it is an actual word. It’s a dark lager beer with a high alcohol content, which is made in the Fall and drunk in the Spring. This just added more interesting character to the story behind the title I used.
It looks like a murky, smokey phenomenon, for the center of interest in this image, in an underground cavern on an alien moon. The smokey or gray parts look like halos, adding a mysterious spooky quality to them. Like they are the ectoplasm from supernatural activity.
It’s titled Laking a Twine for a Bock. I changed some letters and words in the expression Paul Klee used “taking a line for a walk” when he summarized what he did when he made art. As I mentioned, this piece looks like its an abstract scape of an underground cavern, so there is what looks like a pool of molten lava in the foreground to me. The pool of molten lava associates with the word in the title “lake.” This image was derived from a physical drawing I made with pens, markers, and paint that had almost nothing to do with this current digital incarnation. That’s why this one is “version 20.” I made 19 prior versions.
Twine associates with the word “line” and both of these things can be used to wind up in loops or other shapes. The fact that the illustration has a dark theme to it associates with the word “bock”, which means dark beer. I made the drawing neither in the Spring nor the Fall, but I feel it still can be visually consumed for those who have a taste for this form of edification.
I remember seeing a science fiction novel laying around the house when I was a kid about some kind of intelligent lifeforms that live on the surface of a star. I couldn’t remember the name of that novel, nor who the author was. Neither could my dad when I asked him about it. So I decided to put ye olde SEO to work on Google to see what popped up. After a few rewordings, I found a novel called Dragon’s Egg, by Robert L. Forward. I realized that this is the novel that I remember from childhood because it’s about intelligent creatures the size of sesame seeds who live life at a pace of a million times faster than humans on a neutron star with a gravity of 67 billion times more than Earth. Humorously, the creatures are called “cheela.” Cheelas on Earth are Indian pancakes.
I mention that novel because it’s always been an inspiration lingering in the back of my head of intelligent lifeforms that don’t necessarily take the humanoid form, but still possess consciously intelligent organizing powers and abilities. That’s what I think of when I look at this artwork. I also think of Paul Klee’s puppets and dolls.
In this image, I’m trying to visualize characterized organizing functions of intelligences other than human, which is rather difficult to do because most people have little to no interest in anything nonhuman. So I’m trying to make them human related in the form of art so as to establish connections with the imagination and unconscious mind more than the daily drag of basic survivalism. This segues into Carl Jung‘s idea of the unconscious mind, and Richard Schwartz‘s concept of parts in psychology to me because the parts Schwartz describes composing the human psyche are sometimes “mute” or they don’t communicate by words, but they are still there.
Opening up this doorway leads to shamanism I’ve found, which starts with Jung’s concept of the Active Imagination, which actually is a book about the topic that he wrote. Other ideas come to mind, such as The Trickster, as described by Joseph Campbell, and his research into ancient myths.
Digitized media on paper Dimensions: 32 inches x 25 inches Ltd Edition print to 25
I don’t know what to write about this. It makes me think of some of Georges Braque’s paintings. Braque certainly inspires me. His form of cubism is more human, more warm in my opinion. At least some of his later work.
This piece is like a still life. It doesn’t seem that inspiring to me though. I’ve been struggling to develop a style I feel passionate about for the last decade or so. I lost my studio in Nebraska when I moved to this ghetto state of sociopathy in 2006.
In Nebraska, I was creating large paintings like Paradigm Shift, and The Socratic Tree. I was getting into truly mixed media of trash, dirt, sawdust, found objects, branches, fabrics, nails, and twigs. I was really on to something developing my own body of work. But, as change in life is merciless with its lessons of spiritual tragedy, the farm became a family loss.
I struggle with my own bitterness. Since I was born, life has had a love affair of depriving me of many things others take for granted. I wrote one time in a sketchbook from the 1990s that “my art is my lifelong love affair” or something like that. Life loves to taunt me with beautiful trolls who love throwing salt on my mortally afflicted heart because the trolls see me as being more blessed than they are, so they have to “get back.” It doesn’t matter how much I really actually suffer to them. Their weltanschauung is all that matters to their mortally limited beliefs.
I realize that last paragraph leaves me wide open to the criticisms and judgements of lifeless world leaders whose life purpose it is to destroy life as they profess in lies about saving life, covertly stalking radio hosts looking for a bit o’ sensation to get ratings from, economists in denial of their own bitterness and distrust, and self-delusion made rockstar, zen-master, life coaches jumping out from YouTube like ravenous piranhas tripping out on the latest marketing juice.
Oh well, I’m letting it flow and it feels fucking good. Blame is a thing I struggle with for life too. It feels good to take my power back at times when I realize the blame game has got too out of hand in my head. I just feel repelled by all the pop self-help gurus and their choruses of “take full responsibility for your life” bullshit. I really don’t think they know what they’re talking about as they market their narcissism to other lost souls.
So this piece really does echo some of the shit I want to use for more serious, detailed, more involved, bigger works. Its got paper cutout stuff pasted on the surface. I used pencil shading in some parts. I drew my trademark line drawing, circuit-like doodles over the various surfaces thereafter and then applied water to make the contours bleed.
I wanted to experiment with a border that looks like the piece is mounted on a board for display. I’ve been feeling annoyed with the borders I’ve been making digitally for my art online. They were intended to look like matting boards of a variety of colors. I’ve just been feeling like they are too cheesy however recently. I may change my mind again about it after posting this recent piece with no e-matting, but a mount on which the piece is fixed.
It looks like there is an Ouroboros that constitutes the light green annulus that occupies the center of interest. I hadn’t intended that effect while I was in the process of making it. I needed to bust out of another rut or block I’ve been in. So this piece is representative of that. There really was no pre-planning or preparation for it, other than the style I’ve been using for the last few years. I just cut out some material from weird fashion magazines after I’d drawn the shapes with pro-markers. I’m still entertaining mixed media concepts, which usually includes markers, pens, pencil, cutouts and simple chemical transformation processes.
I let a lot of things get in the way of my creative actions, and it becomes, not just battles that are swiftly won, but internal wars with my habits, my conflicting desires, and my obsession with politics. This piece looks like a knot in a way, giving some symbolism to my conflicts. I got interested in topological knots a few years ago because of how I realized they represented complex closed loops and how I imagine they characterize psychological compulsions, obsessions, and other self-limiting habits. I wanted to make something creative out of something destructive, and hopefully helpful to others.
I’ve been reading books by Moshe Feldenkrais, a Ukrainian-Israeli engineer and physicist who developed a body awareness and movement training process. I recently finished reading Body & Mature Behavior, a book he wrote after world war two. He discusses the balancing senses as found in the ears, and, more specifically, the semicircular canals. If you pull up a diagram of these structures, you can see that my illustration associates with them. I hadn’t intended this either.
I titled this one Five Corner Room. I’m playing with the optical illusions of dimensions again here. It’s an idea that satisfies my impossibly thinking mind. You want to know what I think. Well, here it is. I also enjoy seeing landscapes of translucency in my mind. I’m trying to think back to when I first started that idea. It goes back to when I started making plans to paint a painting I titled Paradigm Shift in 2001.
I was very inspired by Paul Klee, the Swiss artist from the 20th century then, as I still am. I’d always liked how he created broad planes of color enclosed by geometric contours of lines of oil from the transfer drawing techniques he used. I made this idea back then called the Word World, a world in which words versed the planes of objects. I thought of it like a panorama through using the third dimension to illustrate the idea. In my mind, words could be placed behind words for associations and layers of awareness and attention.
This work is a continuation with the current theme presented in the blog post previous to this one with the peice therein titled Pythagorean Meme. I mentioned the painting I painted titled Paradigm Shift because this current theme bears a kinship with that earlier expression of mine when I was producing larger works in oil and mixed media on canvas. I plan on posting that painting here on WordPress, and/or my Google blogspot. I found that I posted it to my Twitter account in 2012.
For this recent work, I’ve cut out applying water and rubbing alcohol as washes after drawing images. While I believe that process is an important step to my current artworks, I needed to try cutting that step out in order to simplify things for myself. It’s just a basic concept that the more steps one must take to get a desired result, the more likely frustration can corrupt the process. Assimilating collage work into my illustrations is another step that causes more labor. Nevertheless, the more variables an artist introduces into his or her work processes, the more surprises and new innovations are likely.
I feel like there is so much more that can be done with cubism, and optical illusions. It seems like artists of the 20th century—in western worlds at least—allowed themselves to get lazy on creativity, imagination, and innovation. As it always seems to throughout the ages, I think art got institutionalized by elite tastes in the 20th century up to now here in the 21st century.
I use the term “elite tastes” because it’s more accurate than the 19th century term “bourgeois tastes.” The term bourgeois comes from Marxism which negatively frames entrepreneurs, small business owners, and non-elite class libertarians. Most of us alive today have grown up in a world that has been manufactured by Marxist oriented agendas because of an elite, government, corporate, political, ruling class. I say that because of the current, primary, global monetary system that has evolved from the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve was created because of a few destabilizing events that occurred a few years after the beginning of the 20th century, one of which was the Panic of 1907 from which culminated because of an earthquake that occurred in San Francisco in 1906. Deposits were unavailable for weeks while money was needed for an economic boom.
The Federal Reserve was formed in 1913 by bankers, headed by J.P. Morgan, and political authorities in the United States Senate at the time to remedy businesses and shortages and lack of access to money. This is why I say that it was the first major tool of socialism for elites, bankers, politicians, and other titans of the time. It was formed to bail out banks, industries, and commerce. While it helped to stabilize the economy for smaller businesses too, its main purpose was to create an institution—a socialized insurance policy—against failure for elites.
So this has been going on for longer than a hundred years here in America, creating a permanent class of politicians who merely revolve through doors of banking, politicking, war-making, and sausage making. In summary, we have had a class of royalty under “capitalist” monikers, something the founders of the US fought to free itself from British Royal rule.
I wrote the last three paragraphs to set the context in which art in America has developed. Artists have never been narrated as being titans of finance, or savvy businessmen. Artists have always been subordinate to elite, ruling classes, whether if it was being a scribe in ancient Egypt, a court painter in Victorian Europe, or an intelligence-propaganda asset of the political tyranny of the CIA.
It’s especially hard for artists to get a foot in the world today because we aren’t creating anything excessively dopamine stimulating, such as porn (I realize some are); anything convenient and immediately gratifying like a sugar-carb permeated snack; or socially useful like an iPhone, which provides a handheld desktop for an endless amount of entertainment, guidance, media-making and editing, business, or social media apps.
In order for artists in America to really succeed with a self-sustaining, independence supporting income, we have to be connected to and socially pleasing to wealthy collectors, politicians, bankers, gallery owners, most all of whom are left-leaning. I note here a phenomenon of right-leaning politics to be less imaginative, daring, and innovative in the arts. I think that’s because conservatives are naturally rule and law abiding, whereas liberals tend to be more free with breaking rules.
I conclude this blog by saying the cliche that only one percent of artists “make it” with their careers as artists because of this highly selective, socialized, hand-picked world of western art. Most everyone is in debt to the debt making machine of Washington and its magical acts of fiduciary conned-fidence. At its core, money is what really, really matters to most people. And art is a fleeting oddity that passes by one’s scrolling through digital media on a handheld device. It’s hardly even an entertaining pleasure to most people anymore.
I titled this piece Pythagorean Meme because of its geometric shapes. They look like abstract housing structures on a landscape. The idea echoes the Bauhaus architectural school as well as mortgages for housing and the FDIC. I used the word meme in the title because I didn’t want to use the word dream. Dream is overly used in my opinion, but it still communicates so much about our illusion based world that’s relevant. So I sublimated it with an associated rhyming word.
As you may know, I’ve been fascinated with optical illusion art for the last few years at least. I’ve always loved the Bauhaus artists and philosophies of art. The word bauhaus has meaning to me because it contains the word house in its German form, and housing, home, security, family, mortgaging, financing, etc. are all associated with it. Art is housed by housing, shelter, and environmentally protecting structures. This recent style of art is enabling me to explore more of that and expand upon it with my own vision. Theo Van Doesburg is an inspiration, as well as Oscar Reutersvard.
Got science in the corner. The upper right corner. Gee, I wonder why? It’s backwards, too. Surrounded by red. Like a red flag. Anyway, I haven’t posted here for a while. I was in the process of upgrading to a new computer. A much needed necessity for speeding things up.
This piece is approaching the amalgamator-y hyper-bred-ization I’ve been wanting to execute. So I got some inspiration from contemporary pop artist I googled and discovered—Armand Karpov. He hollows out selections of human figures so that just an empty silhouette is left and then puts a layer of something entirely different under the profile. This is just so fascinating to me, so I thought I’d experiment with that idea here.
Sometimes I think it’s just too easy slapping these digital images together. Like there should be more work in creating them. I get jealous of Photoshop and how easy it is for this program to just instantly display some of the finest details after adjusting a few filters. This also inspires me as well however in my own traditional creative processes. I also realize that I put in hours and hours of work to make original pieces in traditional media.
This piece works for me because it’s the back of a beautiful woman. Previously, I had wanted to do work with models who have tattoos and do some creative combos with my own abstract style along with material created in collaborations with models. I still plan on doing this, but right now, I immediately was able to spit out this piece after a few processes of selecting parts and pieces of imagery from different files.
I allow my selecting to be crude so that the randomness can be worked into new synchronous combinations. I draw inspiration from industrial music and punk rock art, as well as pop art in my hybrid amalgamations. The title “Dvop Your Duo” was used as a title for this piece because I found the letters “dvop” and “duo” on a random file off the internet and I liked how it sounded. It sounded like a notetaker writing dvop as a shorthand of “develop.”
Dvop Your Duo, to me, means developing your second body as Robert Monroe and Robert Bruce describe the non-physical body we all supposedly possess as non-physical beings. Our non-physical natures remain mostly unconscious as we are all wired up to survive life in physical bodies, which require most of our conscious attention. Well, when you meditate, for example, you actually start to develop your second body as you become more aware of it.
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.
Well, Blunty Wunty is at it again. I had to experiment. Things are coming together more nicely in this piece. My subconscious mind is getting a better grasp on approximating and harmonizing mixed media, such as paper cutouts, watercolor, pro markers, pen & ink, and water & alcohol washes. This style that compels me to continue with it is leading me into interesting spaces and ideas. I’m still not satisfied of my own take on impossible shape-scapes.
I’m trying to convey the sense of multiple timelines or probabilities with the conflicting, angular, arrowheaded lines I weave my pictures with now. It’s like you’re in a dimension above this third dimension in which you can see autonomous little probabilities that you can chute down into if you want to. The setting is on a landscape in the spirit of 20th century surrealist settings.
I thought of the building as some kind of ore mining machine on another planet. It looked sort of Eastern in earth terms to me however. Like it could be an abstract depiction of a mosque. That round bulbous head, and all. The cutouts are from discarded printouts from my dad’s space game, gardening magazines, and printouts of my own previous artworks I’d posted years ago on social media.
