Saturday, February 27, 2016

Some notes


One of the things I have struggled with is trying to figure out how to use my iPhone in a way that supports my creative process, and not be a huge time suck on my eyeballs. I had never really played with notes before, but the last few weeks i have been keeping daily notes on my phone, mostly painting titles...the results have been fascinating to me, it reads more like poetry, not what I intended. I have been posting these painting titles on my Twitter feed as a kind of thought experiment...sometimes the titles refer to actual pieces, but the titles themselves have been evocative enough to do the work that one of my pieces might do alone...but the fun of this, besides the shameless promotion, is that they work.



carnal acrobatics and death squares 
red and white triangles 
candy corn scattered in blood
yesterday was heavy tomorrow was better-
cultivation restart-spam 
mesh implant-spam 
dogstar inside the breath of trees
stars and clouds
dogstar
we love inside the breath of trees
we live inside the breath of trees
laniakea
shinein yoku-forest bathing

the great attractor
the garden of virtual delights
covered in black
there are no werewolves, its just owls
cape disappointment
cape lookout
gravitational waves detected
saying less saying more is really fucking confusing in this world
give me back my black david bowie
soul sick dogs
collective loving commence
i said the wrong thing 
i looked in the wrong place
the ocean is our home
walking hand in hand with all of our dead ones
saló
excuse-make
it seems to have seasons
theres a lot of things i didnt take serious
none of your fucking business dad stroller toddler
the union of a broad field of vision with a flat picture plane
gleizes writes that we can only know our sensations...what a lonely world
is a spaceship a work of art? is a computer a work of art...etc...adapted from abstraction création pamphlet question "is a locomotive a work of art?"
soft islam...
"life is a puzzling puff of wind" aerial energy jean arp
the perfect work of art gives beauty and bread
carnal musings twitter duck feed thought poems
burn pit dogs
fine art is a good tag for etsy seo
bull cuckold threesome masculine pinata
one soulsick dog in the laundry room
frail forms carried in pink
raisin bran short hair wind in the fir
old pink volcano, two furry pennies, thanks universe
superblaster kisses
bread and butter art
2 soulsick dogs stuck in a laundry room
still life with sex toy and mushrooms
still life with sex toy and marshmallows
i think the thing i have wanted with this body of work is to present a life as in a vision, as a succession of visionary states, or visions seen in a trance. id like to think these images offer a glimpse into a softer unknown, closer to us than strange, a soft alienation, there is something of the eternal in these paintings, or clumsy attempts at it anyway...art that is completely at the service of a vision of reality-it should be noted i am very interested in representing reality in my work, but one that leaves the door wide open...by the moon  and the sun i shall know you
vertigo birds
3 soulsick dogs by a burn pit
seated figure with black cat
seated form w black cat
when the moon wears a sweater
2 soulsick dogs walking along a lake of grease
orange vase green leaves thin mints bouquet
the raccoons are not what they seem
giant woman masturbating in an empty office
one soulsick dog staring directly into your eyes
economic dogpile
two soulsick dogs feeding at the hand of a prickly prophet
2 soulsick dogs discussing the image of god
snowwhite faith dwarves
2 soulsick dogs surrounded by the visually deaf
twin of eyeless toy (gene talk)
come on moon you can do better than that
in the dream house...
one spork red shadow distant earth
by the mouth of all that is pure
two soulsick dogs trending on youtube
10 soulsick dogs staring directly at you
2 soulsick dogs staring at 2 men gently electrocuting a tree
weird buy my art video bunny mask my ugly grey shirt julian claire louis operating little puppets of yellow soulsick dog heads with red borders, making mewly monster noises, much gnashing of teeth-operating them on a tree branch-cuts to doug firs-kids dancing-the word tree in green, tree spoken, image of soulsick dog piece, ommmming in the background, rabbit, buy my art info etc
3 soulsick dogs stuck in a tree
one soulsick dog shitting on a rainbow
one soulsick dog studying a bottle of nutritional supplements
one hungry soulsick dog-bones
red blonde with hungry bones

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Some News!

heres an update from looking glass and myself, whats going on in the world of looking glass and christopher st john



looking glass is taking a hiatus…i was happy with the essay i wrote about steve storzs work and have been happy to let that simmer while i focus on my own work. the feedback i got from some people lets me know that folks were happy to read something that was more personal and more in depth about art…regretably that might limit my audience, but i have some other essays planned on some of the other looking glass artists we showed. 

my work has been taking quite an interesting turn…essentially i have three bodies of ideas that overlap in a weird vin diagram fashion…beauty:suffering:something else
the something else and where that overlaps with beauty and suffering is my oil painting, and it has been nice to liberate my painting in general from obsessive drawing and the suffering of my figurative work. i have marked that map very well, and i know what i need to pull from there to make the oils resonate…suffering should be there, we live in a frenetic and troubled world, but we need to skip along to the next chapter as is our want…or is it the next berry we are after? jean arp writes, “life is a puzzling puff of wind”, and it seems more puzzling every year. is there room for artists who still take a stand on the notion of quiet?

i have begun a series of small paintings focused on animals, dogs actually, soulsick dogs…the pieces are funny to me, i enjoy using animals to talk about the difficulties of living in this world, animal bodies, hungry bodies, all the masses of teeth and elbows shoving each other aside in the economic dog pile of american society. 

i have taken to twitter again…writing has always been an important part of my process and titles and pieces of things come to me regularly…sometimes these chunks are better as imagined things, and that has been fun to play with..im also canvasing out into social media again…pinterest, twitter, facebook, instagram, tumblr (which is personally my favorite because of the ease it allows in viewing images and finding blogs which dovetail with my interests)
Christopher St. John's Twitter feed

i am also on pinterest :) its mostly a place to recycle old pieces that folks don't have to find on the website...updated as i feel like it, but mostly kept up to date

Christopher St. John's Pinterest Board

i have a show coming up in april at guardino gallery here in portland…very excited about this body of work…i have been unpacking since coming back from my residency in detroit and i like where i am at in my work.. landscapes, flowers, nudes, still lifes, glitter, death…


Guardino Gallery in PDX