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[Nov. 21st, 2009|03:51 pm] |
I had spent the afternoon out in town, collecting objects for my next still-life: a grimy tumbler, a bulky black rotary phone. I'd just walked out of a 7-11 where I picked up my last object for the day, a pack of Lucky Strikes, and sat down under a monumental equestrial statue of an armored man holding a war-pick. The Lucky Strikes had no interest for me--the first cigarettes I've ever bought, likely to be the only--but the pack of candy I got at the same time was calling me.
As equestrian statues tend to be, this one stands in the middle of a square. I was watching people go about their lives when a dreadlocked-man in his mid twenties stood up, hoisted a portable stereo, and pressed play.
"Beat it! Beat it!" shrilled Michael from the stereo, and the crowd suddenly coalesced into rows of sixteen year old dancers. They stepped, kicked, and clapped in rough unison for perhaps a minute, before the song gave out a last beat it, the dancers gave two mighty stomps, and then, as if a year of entropy crashed down in a moment, the flash mob dancers dissolved into a crowd. |
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[Nov. 18th, 2009|08:47 am] |
A tap on the spacebar, and my laptop picked a song. Sinatra singing "As Time Goes By". The recording is fuzzy and hollow, as if voice and orchestra are coming from a great distance.
Out from a surface of thick, ropey paint, an old man stares with eyes both haunted and empty. In his hand, he holds a bunch of forget-me-nots, dead.
I know from previous visits to the cafe that he mountain of whipped cream will taste amazing--fresh, with no hint of chemical or sugar--but it's already dissolving into my hot chocolate, sending rivers down the side of my mug. Outside the cafe, a comedy troupe dressed as a marching band gone terribly wrong plays that one bit from the 1812.
There is a joy that bubbles up at times unexpected, when you've gone to bed tired, having dragged a few more minutes out of the day for some cause, when you stand in front of an easle and find your weight shifting from foot to foot in time with a reel that sounds only in your mind. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 14th, 2009|02:19 pm] |
My--rather messy--corner of the studio. I spend the morning here, painting pears or still-lifes or whatever. The afternoon, I go just down the hall to the model room. Fourteen people behind easels, one on the stand. The fourteen march back and forth for three hours: observe, paint, observe, paint, observe... |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|08:42 pm] |
Robbie, wearing a coyote-skin cap he purchased at a gun show in Fort Worth.
This is a three-hour portrait sketch from Face Club, wherein students take turns posing for each other.
Formerly a medevac chopper pilot in Afghanistan, Robbie's ambition is to be a portrait painter. Merely by being what he is, a conservative-libertarian Texan in Sweden, he regularly forces the world into revealing that--although Americans may well be as provincial as they are said to be--provincialism is a disease of the human race, not restricted by nationality. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|08:50 am] |
Well, you can stake that claim --
Good work is the key to good fortune
Winners take that praise
Losers seldom take that blame
If they don't take that game
And sometimes the winner takes nothing
We draw our own designs
But fortune has to make that frame.
Out of the most able people I've known, I can't think of any who didn't work their balls off. Necessary, but not sufficient. Where would any of us be, had we been, say, born in Carthage in 148 BC? |
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[Nov. 10th, 2009|02:33 pm] |
"Well, should we dress up for the opening?" asked Amelia.
"You guys are artists," said Joakim, a jolly Viking, head of the studio, and a driving force behind and major contributer to the show, Immortal Works. "Wear whatever you want. And give invitations to a bunch of rich people."
The evening of the show came--Friday night. The end of the week; we've all just finished our five-week model paintings, and I, at least, am feeling punchy. Dressed up, in a certain version of dressed up--grey houndstooth slacks, blue-and-white shirt with Mandarin collar, sloppy grey cravat, and an overcoat I bought in Japan a thousand years ago. We waited in the rain, under a bus awning, a half-dozen would-be painters.
"Youre supposed to be meeting Michael?" asked Birgitta.
"Yeah, he should be here now."
Per Elev, pale and elvish: "Hey, is that that special umbrella?"
"You have no idea. Not just special, but magic. It's a homosexual detector." I point the umbrella at Dhiman, Tor Petter, then click a button on the handle as I pass it over Per Elev. The tip lights up flashing pink, in perhaps the most useless umbrella-feature imaginable. "Oh, burn!"
The bus arrives. Looking for still-absent Michael, I line up to board with the others. Before I have a foot on the steps, a car abruptly stops behind me, and Mikey leans out the window. "We're running late!". His girlfriend Cecilia is in the passenger seat. She should already be at the show, pouring wine. "Get in the car!" We're off.
Three hours later, the real guests of the opening have gone, and the odd scent of people with money has left the gallery. Those who remain are painters, students, models, most drunk on the gallery's wine.
"It was a strong show, such a strong show."
"I'm just glad people sent good works. When we decided what to name the show, and realized it would be a pretty big deal, I was starting to be afraid people would just send in leftover crap."
"What happened to that one sculpture? Christ on the Cross? It's in the catalogue..."
"Oh, the artist's a... what's the English? A fuckup. First he couldn't get the bronze made, so he was going to send a plaster, but that didn't work either."
"That's a shame. But still... Such a strong show. I feel like we've really raised our own bar."
"It was good. I'm on the record saying that I can draw better than Nerdrum's students with a piece of charcoal stuck in my ass, but it was good to have such a range of work there."
"Definitely. From that big allegory in the manner of Reubens to Dan's abstract value-arrangement masquerading as terracotta and garlic. We've all got a lot of work to be doing." |
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[Nov. 5th, 2009|08:39 am] |
I leave my apartment for school, then run back in, pointing excitedly out the door. My gesticulations pull my roommates away from The Last Airbender to look out the door. Snow, fat lazy flakes drifting down from a lavender sky.
On the way to school, flakes collect and, melted, glitter on my blazer. One hand, shoved into my pocket is warm, the other doing duty holding my lunch. Did I really not see snow in England and Sweden last year, or was I too distracted to notice? If not, not since Japan Each brush against my nose or lips seems to come from a memory. Or perhaps not a memory, but a haiku--something that invokes something large, but is silent when the time comes to explain itself.
I laugh, a little, and think about skipping school. Hello, friend. Hello hello hello.. But no; perhaps at some fuure date, if it lies thick on the ground. Right now, it's already coming down wetter and wetter, less snowlike by the moment. |
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[Nov. 4th, 2009|08:25 am] |
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I really can't get any more fussed about Maine than I did about California. I'd suppose marriage is a human institution, and if so, it's up to people to define. If we go with, I don't know, it's for something, I guess. Love, right?, it implies one answer about who is eligible. If we presume the institution has some function beyond conveying that a relationship is serious, though, it implies other eligible candidate-pools. I really have no strong opinions on the way to maximize social utility, except to say that I suspect heterosexual relations are in some sense fundamentally different from homosexual. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|08:06 am] |
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In the skeleton of an unfinished building, an arc welder throws a fan of flickering shadows on the cement roof, bright and beautiful against the dark-at-16:30 sky. The train rolls on, and leaves the light behind. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|04:16 pm] |
Looking at my still-life, which foregoes the customary dusty terracotta & onions for glass, steel, and plastic, and listening to myself talk about my project of dissolving the figure into abstract designs, and noticing the fact I do my composition homework on my laptop, I am wondering how the dude who thinks about throwing over painting to run off and be a Chaucerian became the closest thing we have to a token member of the modern world. *
* Everyone should read Dr. Johnston, again and again and again, but I never should have let myself start idly toying with his methods of structuring a sentence. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|12:34 pm] |
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Glob by glob, paint goes down on the canvas--thick here, thin there, wet here, dry there. As I build up texture, try to make important things come out and other things recede, I keep thinking of violin lessons--where to crescendo, where to keep a regular rythm and where to add a little swing. Somehow, in a way I can't explain, it's all the same thing. |
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[Nov. 2nd, 2009|08:40 am] |
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Perhaps one should go into the arts, if one should go into the arts, to understand that living hard may be the easy choice--is it harder to start your day with a belt of whisky and a fistful of analgesics, or an alarm before dawn and a bowl of oatmeal? One is banal, the other romantic--but perhaps we are far enough past the romantics to be cynical about their idealistic cynicism; in other words, was there more Byron could have done for Greece than die for it? |
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| An interesting temporal ordering of events |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|12:09 pm] |
1. I brush my head on something
2. I jerk my head back
3. I become aware of jerking my head back
4. I become aware of something brushing my head |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|08:03 am] |
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
W.H. Auden
If memory holds from a few years back, the critics read this poem as a parody; a joking display of bathos; one, I remember, said it was a mockery of then-popular songs, which is no doubt true. Can you not laugh at the exaspirated demand to shut up that damn dog?
If to read the poem straight, though, is to commit a sin of adolescent obviousness, to stop at calling it a parody is to miss the point from the other direction. Surely a core of genuine sorrow runs through the poem, clad in parody the same way adults hide their own sorrow in overstatement and jokes, in an alienated and cynical world where one cannot just cry "I grieve!" The sorrow of loyalty to something gone, in a world stripped of the pathetic fallacy and indifferent, where the dog still barks and all things carry on, even when all things have crumbled to their end. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|04:41 pm] |
In the model room. The model is long gone. Some students finish a few details, others pack up, others set up for evening drawing
Academician 1: Can you believe respected members of the Swedish art establishment are literally calling us Nazis, just because we're representational painters?
Academician 2: We should change the school logo to a stylized version of the SS insignia and only let in Aryans, just to spite them.
Aca. 1: Well, we're almost all Scandinavians to begin with. We're pretty white. Except for Dhiman.
Aca. 2: Technically, Dhiman is the most Aryan of all of us!
Aca. 3: Technically, /I'm/ the most Arian of all of us! I believe Christ was a created entity!
All: ...
Aca. 4: Technically, they came from over the mountains. Why are you calling me a barbarian? |
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[Oct. 27th, 2009|12:40 pm] |
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Five years ago, asked what I thought I would be, or be doing, in five years, I answered that I'd be cool enough to have been worth keeping in touch with, be dating someone amazing, and be having exhibitions of work. Now, at a fair remove, I find the entire list peculiar, for its insecurity, for the things I thought I wanted, and for the fact that I've exhausted myself making the last item come true. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 23rd, 2009|02:29 pm] |
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Is it possible to use, particularly in reference to oneself, the verbs 'ponder' or 'muse' without sounding like a total git? |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 22nd, 2009|08:17 am] |
Mi: "...and when we were there, we saw Otzi the Iceman!"
Ma: "Otzi? I thought his name was Bootsy."
Ke: "It is. He's the earliest concrete evidence scientists have for the development of funk. They found him frozen, still clutching his guitar."
Mi: "Frozen in mid-slap!" |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 14th, 2009|08:32 am] |
I've spent slightly more that two years at the Florence Academy. In that time, I've copied nineteenth century French drawings, drawn casts of antique statuary, painted more casts, and worked from the model for around twelve hundred hours. Yesterday, I finished the pear project.
The pear project goes as follows: you set up a brown pear, and paint it for a week. Then put up a new canvas, and paint the pear in a day. Then take the pear away and paint it from memory. This proved to be a surprisingly cool exercise, but is really significant because after it comes still-life.
Now, the previous projects have all been pretty controlled stuff. Still-life, though, I concieve, design, and compose myself. In other words, it seems to be the first time one is actually doing art at the academy. Cool. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 11th, 2009|11:35 am] |
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I lean against the train wall, sometimes looking at my own shadow-racooned eyes in the window, but mostly at the streets passing by, and the beautiful, blonde people going from bar to club to bar. Then the lovely grey brick streets of the city center have gone, and we roll past darkened strip malls and sushi shops. Headphones in my ears as I listen to tracks 25 and 26 on repeat, wondering how it came to be that watching the world pass outside a train is when I feel at ease. Another train passes on the parallel tracks, and I look over into it, wondering if it might be a Chuo-Sobu bound for Chiba Central, wondering if I might meet eyes for a fraction of an instant with the ghost of a lad with dyed red hair. |
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