Tag Archives: Abstract

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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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One-Way to Another v.2 (original, washed)

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. 

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February 19, 2021 · 7:02 am
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The Uncontrollable Seascaper and the Colony Transporter on an Alien Planet” v.4

It looks like a fucked up oil painting. Good. It’s not. It’s a trad-digital mixed media piece. The blue strokes and swirls look like an unfinished Van Gogh painting. But I selected part of them and placed them overtop another drawing I made a while back called “Ich Self?” The swirls come from Luna, the professional marker drawing I made of a picture of a model. John Marin is somewhat of an inspiration here. 

I titled this piece a long title. I used to be a landscaper and I wanted to imagine what it would be like to be a seascaper, if there is such a thing. Anyway, I made it up. I imagined him to be rather uncontrollable, like the rest of nature. So this piece looked like a seascape to me. And the uncontrolled part is the superimposed strokes of blue. The seascaper is more of a spirit, rather than physical, hence the swirling strokes. 

The big elliptical shape on the horizon in the sky I imagined to be a colony transporter of a selection of people transported from one planet to another. I think a galactic collision was going on at where they were from, so their planet needed to be evacuated. They found this alien earth like pearl and decided to unknowingly disturb the native alien seascaper by making it a home.

I guess the seascaper will have to split into multiple ghosts equivalent to the number of space farers on the craft and haunt them. I guess the ghosts will have to follow the offsprings for generations to come in order to “even” the score for invading the once peaceful alien planet. I’m sure a good science fiction story could be outlined from such a spawn of rambling. 

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February 12, 2021 · 2:35 am
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The Organic Mechanic (version 4)

This piece looks like a rather distressed and urgent abstract. I felt satisfied with the results I manipulated in photoshop to seduce out the dramatic and psychedelic qualities laying hidden in the original drawing. I named it The Organic Mechanic because the gradients and color transitions are more organic and natural rather than perfectly pixelated and mathematically calculated. I think our authoritarian social media rulers should take note of this character and remove the unnaturally selective algorithms they have restrained the world with. 

This picture looks like a scene of destruction to me. It’s completely abstract though. The skeletal structure resembles a dilapidating building or dead shrub somewhere on a prairie or desert landscape. I’m all about seeing through things, like having x-ray vision. I like finding metaphors within metaphors, and, when it comes to art, I find visual metaphors. They can become quite universal like the spine of a book articulating all of its pages. 

I feel obligated to write more about this piece, but I don’t know what else to write. I just spontaneously pulled out some sable brushes, a jar of water, and my watercolors and freely applied some colorful strokes to an 11 by 14 inch page in one of my sketchbooks one night. I then applied ink from a pen that I knew would bleed beautifully under the influence of water then stroked over it with a large flathead sable brush. Just thinking about those brushes makes me feel good vibes. 

Media: Digital print printed on quality paper

Dimensions: 30 x 22 inches (size can be adjusted as needed)

Price for an unmatted print is: $90.00

Please email me if you want it framed with glass to discuss pricing

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December 27, 2020 · 6:00 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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Late Wifting Wu (version 5)

Oh well. I already named it. I was listening to The Residents while making the drawing for this image. Yes, the original drawing looks different than this. See the original on my Instagram account. The Residents made a song called Weight Lifting Lulu. It provokes the imagination to say the least. While making this drawing, it was late. I made up the word “wifting”. I haven’t determined exactly what it means yet. I’ll probably leave it that way. The word wu sounds Chinese…

…And it is. I searched it with my cadre of elite digital pigeons. Upon their return, I discovered Wu is a river in China. Rivers are symbolic of “the way” or the Tao in Chinese philosophy. There’s an ancient Chinese philosophy manuscript called the Tao Te Ching and the author, Lao Tzu, discusses “the way” frequently in that profound text. Instead of exploring the way here, I encourage you to read the Tao Te Ching to see what kind of neurological artichokes you might butter up in yourself and discover. 

I already posted version four of this drawing on my Instagram account, along with the original drawing. I wanted to post this one here on my WordPress page because it feels more definitive and final in a contemporaneous sense. None of my art is final however. In my head, art is like a flowing river of ideas that I pay attention to sometimes. The ideas are like fish that I have to catch by jotting them down in sketchpads in the moment. Otherwise, they disappear, never to inspire me again. So I have to wait for another school of ideas. 

This version expresses the random foundational brushwork I prepared the surface with before drawing on it. In fact, the surface is the blue oil paint I painted on to a piece of paper to use as a transfer medium for The Abandoned Teleportation Device. It’s just a 3d depiction of a wire mesh I created inspired by iron fence vector and abstract artists from the 20th century. 

Medium: Ltd. edition print (25)

Dimensions: 34 x 28 inches (not framed) 

Framed and with glass, this piece is: $450.00

Unmatted print is: $95.00

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September 17, 2020 · 5:59 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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Tom Sawyer (washed) v.10

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

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

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

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

Price for an unmatted print is: $90.00

$90.00 For Ltd Edition Print

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September 1, 2020 · 6:06 am
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Blue Heart Mountain

I captured this selection of a couple drawings I layered together because it emphasized this concept of letting the forces of nature do their things as I draw and create. Media have minds of their own often times I’ve noticed over the years. It first started with this notion of working with works of art I wasn’t satisfied with and not giving up and loving them anyway. Then it developed into this idea of capitalizing on mistakes as abstract expressionists showed me. Finally I realized I am a part of nature and I act upon and within nature as a natural force myself, so art just became this flow of letting all these forces of nature interact with each other and selecting material that gave me satisfaction. And so I share this satisfaction.

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January 15, 2020 · 8:37 pm