I’m going to go step-by-step through the stages of one of my recent paintings. I know this has been done before, but it’s not been done by me. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis in sculpture but I’ve been known to slap some paint on a canvas or a board. In school, the sculpture kids always seemed less pretentious than the other majors, not afraid to get dirty and drink cheap beer. And not drinking cheap beer and looking dirty for the sake of irony or trendiness. Lack of artistic pretense is my modus operandi de artifex. Art that is art because ‘I’m-an-artist-and-I-fucking-made-it’ can be fun, but I think its overproliferation hurts the image of modern art in the eyes of those without detailed knowledge of art history. And that’s bad.

This isn’t a “realistic” painting that I’ve done. It’s a reproduction of a graphic that should be recognizable to many people, the Wonder Woman symbol. But the vernacular meaning of realism gets bandied about so much without any thought. It means that a painting looks like a photograph. Experimental photography proves that photography is not what is real. And neither is painting. Or was it at any time in its history. People see smaller-than-life images of paintings and think that’s what those paintings look like. But it’s not. I’ve seen a Richard Estes in person and it does not look like a photo. From a distance it does but if you get as close as the museum security will let you, you’ll see brush strokes and the texture of paint on canvas. You want paint that looks like a photo, go to the old masters. I hesitate to say that that kind of Masters licked surface technique is lost now, but I’m sure it’s rare.

Well, fuck. So my pretention is showing.

I’ll try to illustrate the painting process like one would explain how he built a backyard deck instead of how he redefined genres while referencing Dada, Neo-Dada and the films of Andy Warhol, in the process of building a deck.

Wonder Woman!

Acrylic paint is one of your more opaque mediums, meaning you can’t see through it so much. Watercolor is a transparent medium, I’ve used waters and was pretty good at it at one point, and oil paint is a semi-opaque medium, or so is my understanding; I’ve never used them. But whatever. The important thing is the pigment in the actual paint. Whatever medium it is. There are quality acrylics, oils and watercolors and they’ll behave better than some off-brand, Michaels craft shit. I can afford mediocre to to above average acrylics but I still sketched out my Wonder Woman logo like a draftsman. Partially because I’m anal-retentive in regards to precision and also so I’d know where not to put the red undercoat. The anal precision comes from the sculpture learnin’ but if I could afford a ton of high quality acrylics, Id’ve probably just smeared a bunch of red on the canvas then painted the yellow logo over top (intense colors like red will show through a yellow, with my affordable paints, the canvas and pencil draft marks showed through my yellow until a couple coats were added). I didn’t take a picture of my base sketch but here’s the roughed out red base coat:

I’ve wanted to emulate Ben Day dots on canvas for a while. I don’t know much about Roy Lichtenstein. A little research on his methods may have helped me. Anyway, here’s Space Ghost mourning the death of his giant, mutated sea monkey.

Acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 2010.

I’m not much of a painter. It was more to teach myself how to mask the canvas to create the dots. They are not as prominent as I wanted but attempting actual CMYK printing techniques is beyond beyond the scope of my ambition.

To anyone thinking of getting a BFA in sculpture, don’t be surprised if something like this exchange becomes common:

“You majored in art?”

“Yes. Yes, always with clay.”

I’ve been calling this a ‘shelf’ or an ‘entertainment center’ based on how pretentious I felt at the moment. I made it to hold my DVDs, video games and DVD/video game accessories. After I finished it, I filled it with movies in about ten minutes and still have a few left over. There’s also no room for games. At some point I may have to add more vertical real estate.

The flat pack, manufactured lumber entertainment center it’s replacing was a half foot or so deeper. This new one has made my bedroom look quite a bit bigger. The old pseudOkea thing was over a foot taller. The new one is less than two feet (≈ 18″-19″). I felt the urge to build some low furniture for some reason.

It was constructed with limited fasteners, three screws actually. The screws are only there because they helped level the top shelf; I was going to use dowels.

Made. Traced. Recreated. Semantics…

I found it in a calendar of old University of Georgia football artwork. Mostly game program covers. I don’t know why it has disappeared. It’s fucking awesome. And reminds me of this guy.

My recreation here needs some touch up but it’s OK for now.

Next step: touch up.

Following step: contacting whoever handles merchandising for the school.

I got bored and decided to make this:

The impetus was curiosity regarding the frequency of the word ‘car’ in Springsteen songs. I’ll probably play with it later but it took a while and I’m tired of it. Copy-pasting everything from Tracks kinda kicked my ass.

Update: Ok, I copy and pasted every lyric to (almost) every Bruce Springsteen song off of BruceSpringsteen.net, his official site. I wasn’t very scientific. I tried to include the chorus once then subsequent refrains were omitted. I didn’t know if songs like “I’m Goin’ Down” or “Land of Hopes and Dreams” would affect the cloud or if their frequent repetition of word (down and train respectively for my examples) or if such words in such song would be statistically insignificant. Keep reading →

I remembered this as a not-too-bad explanation of how to make an investment mold. I pruned 3-4 pages of emotional subplot, adverbs and indecisive qualifying clauses off of it. It’s still probably not done.

I’m going to make an investment mold today.

Investment (Lost Wax Investment, specifically) is a very old, and calculatedly insane, way of creating a cast metal sculpture.

Make an object, ultimately out of wax, which is called a positive. Create a pour cup, something like a large target to pour the metal into, that will become the funnel through which you pour the metal. Connect this funnel to the object via tubular wax pathways, known as gates, for the metal to eventually flow through. Connect more, smaller pathways, called vents, to the object to allow any trapped gas to escape.

Then create a cylindrical shell of a mixture called investment around the wax positive. Mix up the investment in a liquid form and pour it into the round flask. Investment contains plaster which will harden a few minutes after it’s poured.

Insert into kiln, raise temperature over the course of a day to 1000 degrees and hold for one day. Wax melts out; on the third day, you’re ready to pour metal. You’ve created a white cylinder with a void in it in the shape of your positive, pour cup, gates and vents. Keep reading →

Just thought I’d post this since I found it on a drive while looking for an unrelated image. I find it quite funny and wasn’t previously able to locate it through the usual methods.

Apologies to whoever actually made it.

I should really start using this thing again. It’s like I’ve been paying for domain registration (and hosting to a far lesser but more expensive extent) just so someone wouldn’t hold my .coms for ransom.

I just added some high resolution images to my portfolio. I also pared down the blogroll a while ago but that’s always been pretty useless. Oh yeah, I deleted some writing I didn’t like anymore. Also useless stuff. The art is what’s important. I keep some of my best dust on it.

One of my favorite assemblage artists has died. I bought Bruce Conner’s retrospective 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story a few years ago and I’m glad I did. His early work was very influential on me. It consisted of haunting and intriguing assemblages and collages in his early years before he branched out into experimental and often irreverent works that included many short films. Here’s a rundown with some great links that was posted over at BoingBoing.