I call this one Hour Shed, as in shedding an hour of time. I think of it as an abstract, psychedelic landscape with a warped horizon. A couple of billowing clouds hover overhead, which are more like doorways to other dimensions. I just really have fun scanning drawings I make with mixed media. With the drawing I made for this piece, I used water-based ink pens (a Schneider pen), and alcohol based marker drawn on a small sketchpad. I then applied some water with an excellent flat head paint brush to make the water-based ink bleed. I let that dry, and then applied some ammonia as an experiment to see how the already applied media would interact with it. It didn’t really do much.
I then splashed some lacquer thinner over the surface of the drawing, which made the alcohol based marker bleed, and also the ink from the Schneider pen bled. After that dried, I applied some rubbing alcohol. The results left what I wanted: Discolored, blurred, cloudy, ambient, faded, psychedelic, bled effects.
I’d recently been listening to authors and documentaries discussing the hippie culture in Laurel Canyon during the 1960s. I already knew that the CIA covertly experimented with LSD on people unbeknownst to them. I also knew that the US government really wanted to find a way to divert anti-war protesters from attracting too much attention for being against the Vietnam war. So what I discovered is that the CIA helped to create the hippie counter-culture so as to discredit anti-war protesters and to divert young people into drugs, cheap sex, and other demoralizing activities.
I have always enjoyed abstract and psychedelic art. Much of my inspiration comes from the hippie counter-culture, including a lot of the music produced from that era. It’s just that I now see what purpose that scene served. Today, it’s plain to me that entertainers, artists, actors, and public figures get fame, attention and money because they agree to the CIA’s terms of spreading “American” cultural hegemony across the globe.
It has been known for years now that the American Abstract Expressionist movement was financed and nurtured by the CIA so that America could claim a culture of its own on the world stage. Centralized planners felt that America really had no art or culture up to that point when the Abstract Expressionists were forming, so the CIA decided to create a world stage for them. Again, I’m not repelled by the counter-culture movement of the Abstract Expressionists. I just note that they were allowed to become famous because they had secret state backing.
In my learning and research into art methods, techniques, psychological values, and history, I have come to conclude (perhaps for the time being) that art serves imperial purposes. It is used as propaganda. It entertains, amuses, impresses, catches attention, and thereby communicates messages consciously and unconsciously. An Italian Marxist named Antonio Gramsci called the proliferation of imperial culture, art, and propaganda cultural hegemony. This means that a dominant state—or superpower—superimposes its entertainment industry, such as Hollywood for example, on to subordinate states, thereby achieving a psychological penetration of the collective population.
Specifications:
Title: Hour Shed (version 4)
Source mediums: Water-based ink, alcohol-based marker altered by water, ammonia, lacquer thinner, and rubbing alcohol on paper, digitally combined with organic material
Print medium: Hewlett Packard printer ink from Hewlett Packard DesignJet Z2100 printer on Hewlett Packard print paper (Note: print can be made with archival paper and printer if requested)
Digital manipulation completed: 9/18/2017
Dimensions of print: 30 inches by 16 inches
Number of limited edition prints: 25
Investment of print not framed: $80
Investment of print framed with glass: $400.00 (shipping included)
Contact me: artofevan@hotmail.co
Art of eVan 