Now I can reveal the big project that Mike Adams and I have been spending every available minute on this past couple of weeks. A few months ago I began talking to friends like Alexey Steele, Mike Adams, Tony Pro and Peter Adams about the need for an academic and philosophical foundation for the revival [...]
In the studio I’ve worked on the flesh of the hanged man a little more, adding whites into the highlights and blue into the shadows and the hair. I’ve scraped plenty of Cadmium Red into the lower arm, reasoning that because he’s hanging upside down his blood would have descended to the lowest parts of [...]
Peter Trippi posed some excellent questions to the panel that provoked some good discussion. Still on my mind: In the movie “Michael Collins” the leader of the revolutionaries says to the eponymous hero, “If we are to create the Republic, we must act as if it already exists”. I think this is true of the [...]
After a few days of humming and hahing I’ve committed to editing the Traveler and Magician paintings from their earlier square composition. Now rectangles, the compositions look much better balanced, with the focus of attention moving down to the sun and the hand and face of the Traveler, while in the Magician the relationship of [...]
I’ve just cracked open a collection of essays from a conference titled “Gnosis and Hermeticism” which looks promising, although I want to get through Dante’s Paradiso before I really get stuck in. There’s a passage in the introduction that I liked: “…one openly fights an enemy as long as one fears that he still might [...]
There’s a hypnotic quality to painting the morning glory that is quite pleasant – time passes differently when the focus is so closely confined to a small area of canvas. Hours can pass by without mark, quietly slipping into the past, while leaves and flowers accumulate on the canvas, slowly building a mass of gradually [...]
I want to look at a caveat from the great master painter William Bouguereau, who I regard with awe: “I detest realism” he told us, “for it is nothing but photography, neither more nor less! Well, if you are a painter it is so that you can do better than photography, so that you can [...]
I won’t dwell on this much longer, but I got interested in the death of Post-modernism after reading Docx’s article, and found another article with a different, rather bleak take on the whole thing which suggests that after post-modernism we are entering a cultural desert ruled by instant messaging and vote-driven reality tv shows. I [...]
I’ve just finished reading this fascinating article about a retrospective of post modern art at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. My friend Michael Adams commented that the article really helps to put the New Romantic Figure exhibit into context. From the end of the piece: “These three ideas, of specificity, of values and [...]
A link to the newspaper story in the Star has been doing the rounds on Facebook, producing an amusing comment from one peeved visitor who said “these painters are the art world’s equivalent of the tea party”. Didn’t Donald Trump say something like “I don’t care what you say about me, just spell my name [...]
