Paintings, both finished and not.
This is what I've been working on in the past month or two. Some of these are finished, but most of them are not. Lately I've kind of been working on them all simultaneosly and changing them a lot. Paintings over paintings over paintings. Maybe in a few more weeks I'll post some more images and maybe I'll have a few of the same ones when they are completed. Enjoy!

Here are some images of my masks. Ritual masks for the every day routine.


dreaming mask

fun mask

birthday mask

smoking mask

process performance for ceramic structures

Somethin' good! The Cramps

So recently I've been watching some movies. Last week I watched The Wizard of Oz with a couple friends and it had been way too long since I've seen that movie - 1o years maybe? Scary, I know, and I was really amazed at how good that movie is. It's colorful, fun, creepy, symbolic, imaginative and best of all - there's a moral to the story! What I'm getting at is that I hardly remembered this movie from my childhood - which is not right.
A few days ago, I saw another movie, which I remembered just as much, if not more than the wizard of Oz. When I was in maybe 5th grade I saw the Jim Carrey movie Me, Myself and Irene - which was absolutely terrible. I didn't like it at all the other week, and I hope I didn't like it that much then either, but I only remembered a few parts of it from when I was a kid. How do movies like this effect someone in their childhood? I feel like a lot of it was over my head at the time, but I should have been watching the wizard of Oz instead. Better late than never, right?

It's time to go see the wizard.

I'm going to do a painting about this.

RED

I think red is my favorite color. Right now I'm hooked on it, and a lot of the art that I've been drawn to has specific uses of RED.

Red is a complex color I think, and has the most associations as far as the other colors go. But to me, red is passion, red is pressure, red is strong, hot and boiling. Cadmium red, right out of the tube. Why would you mix it!? it looks so good already.

Look at how this artist uses red. He is HOT

http://www.maximkantor.com/index.html

Guston

So, to add to my last post about Guston.

I said that there has to be great reason in making such a change in his artistic approach, and seeing the evolution of his art is essential to understand this progression. His later 'cartoon-like' paintings were not only a change from the abstract expressionist (but not really) color pieces, but were a rediscovery of his earlier self. His earliest work, before his non-objective phase, was containing imagery of Ku-klux klan members and war. He got caught up in the painting itself and made a name for himself as an abstract painter, selling many works, and later was no longer content with it. After returning to his early subject matter he became a more experienced version of the artist that he always was once again (thanks for pointing that out, Shetabi). THAT is real honesty.

Moral of the story:

Honesty is the best policy

don't lie to yourself

and don't lie to others either!