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.
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.
A lot of ideas are coming together in this piece. Both, with my nuanced techniques I’ve developed in my evolution, and also the science fiction philosophy I’ve formed from reading different books over the years. I posted some beginning stages of this piece on Instagram while I was working on it, and, while in an inspired state, some things came together for me as to an explanation—a story—to illuminate such an image.
I’ve had my own experiences in the dream world that revealed a universe populated with more life than our current official myths propagated by our civilization here on earth. It was just a dream, but it seemed so real to me. So real, in fact, that I found my “self” in another person’s body. Living a life on another planet. I was part of an elite cadre of secret soldiers, sort of like how ninja were trained to be mercenaries in feudal Japan.
I may have to tell that story for another time because it coincides with so many ideas authors have written about. For example, the test tubes people are born from in Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Moreover, I realize what I’m blogging sounds absolutely nuts, and discredits my penchant for truth, but, oh well, I’m a creative person, and I love imagination and creativity.
For this image, I associated what I’d learned from Joe McMoneagle, the US Army remote viewer, and how he described at a MUFON Conference that intelligent life, like ourselves on earth, live in a certain bandwidth of consciousness, and this bandwidth can be identified physically as a certain distance from the center of our galaxy populating the arms circumnavigating around the center. I imagine that higher intelligences operate at higher, less physical frequencies, and they’d be able to function in the higher radiation regions closer to the center of our galaxy.
I imagined this woman as a person living life on another planet somewhat near our star system. The civilization she lives in is more advanced technologically. But she is human or humanoid. She is an impressionistic vision of the cybernetic human in service to “the singularity” there. She says “unfortunately, the human model, found scattered around on various planets in the galaxy, are stuck in a spiritual, moral, and ethical quandary in which evolution is a loop that spins like a washing machine for higher intelligences as they collect the incredible amounts of wasteful energy that is a byproduct of humans and human activity.”
I titled this piece “Realization of the Sold I Are” because realization is a word used by spiritual gurus, such as Yogananda for “self realization” as a path to enlightenment. I used the words “Sold I Are” because they are disjointed misspellings of the word “soldier.” I imagined her to be a soldier from another world attempting to survive the ordeal of time/space travel. She realizes that our souls are sold into worlds, such as the one we live in, and that our individual selves are not singular, but multiple, thus comprising of multiple probable selves and multiple probable realities as Jane Roberts discussed in her books.
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
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
The art of sheer randomness and utter whim is actually not that haphazard. This image is based on a mixed media drawing I finished up in August, 2020. I manipulated the hell out of it in Photoshop, and this is the closest image to what the original looks like with regard to the colors and composition. 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.
Please note that this new blog post is a repeat of my past blogpost, Tom Sawyer (version 10). I repeated it here because I needed some blog content to go along with the new post. I just upgraded my WordPress page to a premium account for freelancers, and I want to post something new on it so I can insert the new payments feature I now offer on my website for people to purchase prints, like this one from me…
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.
Art of eVan 