Art of eVan

I set out on a journey to rediscover black ink writing pens that bleed. I had found a couple brands while I lived in Nebraska that did behave in such a manner; and I had produced a whole new metaphorical style with them in many drawings during a creative spell with pen and paper media while I lived there. Of course, since I moved to New Mexico, life has been rather uncertain as my losses and gains with various day jobs occurred over the years. But more to the point, I have been lacking a stable, long-term studio on which I can rely for my creative pursuits. So, in the meanwhile, I make drawings, instead of large scale mixed media paintings like I used to in the large basement of my family’s farmhouse.

An artist needs stability in order to proliferate. If life is constantly throwing an artist around, the artist will generally be discouraged and obstructed from being able to grow any kind of roots for creative sustenance. An artist exemplifies the archetypal inner child: rebellious, prankster, fun-loving, drama-creating, irresponsible, wildly imaginative, innovative, etc. Many artists don’t have a strong inner adult or parent to help guide them towards discipline, and, hopefully, prosperity. So, some get lost in addictions, and other frivolous, fruitless activities.

Artists are dependent on those who buy their work, and the contracts they sign with a variety of employers, collectors, gallery owners. In other words, if an artist was not born into wealth, then they will basically have to prostitute themselves and their talents around until they manage to get lucky enough to establish a more long-term flotilla of security.

This is not how the original drawing looks. I tweaked, and inverted the colors so that it looks psychedelic. I’m enjoying a random, almost spastic, dyskinesic, but liberating state I had been trying to develop in my creative immersions in Nebraska here in this illustration. I first drew the large elliptical and circular shapes on some sketch paper with some colored Bic markers. A couple of the markers I used were drying out due to age, so I went home and finished up the background with some newer markers.

I drew a preparatory structure with a hard pencil of what would later become the black bled lines you see in this image. Then I dribbled some acetone on the colors which successfully gave it more bleeding and distortion, sort of like tie-die. I added some water based pen colors as dots in the corners, nooks, and crannies here and there so that when I finally applied broad strokes of water across the paper plane, they bled well along with the black pen lines.

I consider this a member of my Goiddios series because it is not a digital / traditional hybrid amalgamation; the composition is true to the original drawing, save for the color manipulations. Remember, the Goiddios series is an effort in the direction of using traditional media. I may use some combining and hybridization, but the general spirit is traditional media. Specifically, pen, paper, glue, brush, chemicals, cutouts, and water based mediums. The idea is to steer closer to the physical plane, rather than the electronic plane of art.

I titled this one Hydrozen Perogia for word play. So here you have some image play and word play combined, literally. Not only did I produce some visual titillation, I also pasted some cutout text from magazines into this piece. I think some of the text comes from National Geographic magazines from the 1970s. Anyway, I have a bunch of text already cutout from various sources stored up from previous projects ready to be used for future projects.

Every once in a while, I’ll get some interesting titles for artworks and songs traveling through my head. More often than not, I’m engaged in some activity that requires my immediate attention—like driving—when I get these inspirations. So I have to attempt to use mental notations and flags to help me remember to write or draw them down when I get a chance.

My invented word “Hydrozen” is derived from hydrogen, the most basic type of atom on the elemental chart. It’s also an atom that composes part of the molecule for water: H2O, meaning, two hydrogen atoms, and one oxygen atom, which join together and share electrons in order to balance themselves out and produce what we know of as water. My second invented word is “Perogia” is derived from perigee, which is the point in the orbit of the moon or a satellite at which it is nearest to earth.

In medieval philosophy, water is considered an element, along with fire, earth, and air. Water is the dominant medium I used in the formation of this illustration. However, the large lobular shapes you see composing much of the space surrounding the line work were drawn with Sharpie type pens, which are not water based. The brand of markers I used for this beginning stage are called HobbyColour™. Like Sharpie, I believe the liquid compound ingredients are alcohol variants, such as propanol, butanol, diacetone mixed with different dye colorings. Don’t ask me what those are made of.

Chemistry is a subject that interests me lately. The subatomic particles, atoms, and molecules that compose everything we see are also determinant elements for artistic productions as well. They influence the outcomes of art works. While I appreciate digital art, digital art can’t imitate the natural influences of nanoscopic forces in the physical world. Water can’t really be controlled for example, so I just let it bleed.

Here I am back again. This time with a little more chaos. I’d been hinting that I like clutter, randomness, and crudeness as expressions of art in some of my social media posts lately. And I had been developing this current style as well. You’ll notice Paul Klee’s influence on my style. I’m not ashamed to admit that his work deeply impressed me long ago, and I wanted to continue taking the line that he started for a walk as if he passed a torch to me.

The previous work, Obnubilators, I posted to this one, is an initial representative of the free hand, basic contour designs I’ve been working on. This work, I titled Deft Barrel, is an inversion of the black line however. I basically inverted the black to white, thus producing a ghost-like effect, associable to Kirlian photography. And that’s what I feel I’m doing anyways—capturing the impressions of ghosts who let me capture facets of their energy in works of art.

I drew my designs on a a collage I had prepared months ago. The collage involved cut-out motor diagrams, and text from various sources. I got some ink pens that bleed when water is applied to the paper the ink is drawn on. Some pens don’t bleed with water. Even acetone doesn’t dissolve it or make it bleed, so I have to test the pens I think I need before I buy them. I also applied some other colorful water-based pens so as to add to the psychedelia.

Art, to me, is a balance between mastering elements of control, and letting processes and developments take paths and lives of their own. I must be the one to initiate action, but most of the time I don’t have a complete vision in my head of the outcome. That’s the exciting part to me; I enjoy surprising myself with unintended results in art. Everything that surrounds me has the potential to be used for artistic purposes. I just have to engage whatever it is that’s around me with an art spirit.

These are like charms to me. They’re derived from fancy iron fence vector designs. I just like the empty frame quality the black line structures provide for the eye. The thin black lines composing each design you see here in this picture are like the bones in a body; they are the iron structures interpenetrating the otherworldly cloud systems and paint strokes comprising the background.

I like to think of each design as a spell. When you write something, you spell it out. But you don’t think about writing as being spell-casting because school taught you that “spell,” in a writing context, is nothing more than blinking your eye. Yet, like sentences capture imagination and thought, these designs here also capture imagination and thought in a more abstract sense. They’re further down the diving board than the logic found in sentences.

I often find myself excessively bound by the rules of this world, which spurns my imagination so much that I end up criticizing every idea that comes to me. One of the main methods I use to counter mine and the world’s anti-imagination trend is to scribble freely on cheap paper. I got a pack of loose leaf college ruled paper at the store for $0.88 cents in order to make a physical portal for me to break free and express some simple ideas. The blue lines on college ruled paper bleeds when water is applied to it, giving the images produced interesting ambient backgrounds.

Yesterday, a friend of mine had an art show opening at the North Fourth Art Center here in town, and I attended. It was the first time I’d ever been to this art center; it was the first time I’d ever heard of this place. I was shocked. I thought I knew all of the art centers and galleries here in Albuquerque, but I was gratefully surprised to find that there is a lot more going on in the arts in my city than I knew. Catherine Lynch is currently showing her work there, and I encourage any of you in town to visit the center, and maybe even purchase one or some of her works on display.

After looking at Catherine’s works, I looked at the other works on display around the center. The gallery curator, Christopher MacQueen, took me and a couple other people on a tour around the center and explained to us that the center has art programs designed for people with disabilities. The main thing that stood out to me in looking at almost all of their art is that their strokes were confident, and the colors they used are bold. There was no hint of shame in any of the works I looked at. This truly inspired me, and reconnected me to my conviction that this world has gotten out of hand with rules, laws, regulations, and suppressed social conflict.

These designs here on this visual vignette I’m showing you are more delicate, but they still convey more of a sense of off the cuff, free hand exploration. Water can’t be controlled, so I use it frequently in pieces like this. Me and Catherine were talking about the unconscious forces that work through an artist yesterday while discussing the process of making art. We both agreed that, while it seems like these forces are beyond an artist’s control, they still happen because of the artist’s acts of creation.

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.