August 2006 Archives

I am using the term "Left Bank" as an almost ironic approximation of the Parisian nomenclature--completely inappropriately describing the Pacific coast. My time here in California has been a study in extremes. With financial success has come a whole new array of challenges, details of which are tedious and extremely human (which is why I have created a weblog to detail them for the public's amusement and boredom).

Artistically it is a time between experiment and refinement--where inspiration is consistently tempered by the aforementioned challenges--and the newly available methods of wasting time that previously were denied me by my financial status.

There's a crater where there once was a beating heart. What a clichee, no? I wonder at myself, so entirely hamstrung and for no good reason, unless perhaps the weight of an increasing experience bows me down to the servitude of the addict--an addiction to servitude to unreason.

There's no way to do any justice to the enormity of Mauna Loa. Even seeing it, somehow, is simply not enough sensation to allow for the vastness, the weight, the patience, the permanence of this gentle whale of a rock. And yet it is neither gentle, nor permanent...

Quizzical too, are the shapes of land here on Hawai'i. From the heights above Hawi, the land seems to tilt into the sky, the ocean falling under it in some Escher-eque impossibility. The dance of hula could be loosely seen to reflect this tortuous seeming reality...

Sometimes I wonder if I live in a world of reality. I am consistently anguished by the difference between reality and expectation--of something improved. Reality, though, sometimes seems to be an exercise in disappointment--where reality dives below the level I perceive it to be normally.

People are a problem. It is always shocking to me to realize the level of ignorance, selfishness, and meanness that people contain--it isn't just people's ability to exhibit these manifestations, but the often intrinsic 'self' that is these things. I am incapacitated by my inability to understand how a person can be unreasonable.

Society is even worse, when its apathy and satisfaction lead the larger whole to expect nothing greater from its individual components...well, it is quite impossible to expect better when that expectation marks you as a deviant from society, when the offensive party can call upon a majority to support their offensive.

Ethics are a problem

Ethics are not morality, and ethics are often personal...yet, one wonders...with enough perceptiveness and compassion, would one not be able to formulate an ethical consideration that would benefit the greater good? I know the greater good is a misnomer, but there is an ability on my part to sense some longer-term gain; some benefit above and beyond the satisfaction of immediate desires--why am I so alone in this?

I loathe ignorant people, which means I loathe people. And why, dear conscience, did I ever move my person into this dismal suburb? There is no other god here than money. But where will I go that is different?

These images are largely the product of the initial cross-over from doodling in boring schoolbooks to assertive doodles on art paper, and using increasingly more involved media.

Munich is a fantastic city for the creative personality.

Essentially this is experiment, rather than finished art, though in experimenting, some marvelous happenstances were arrived-at.

1992 found me predominantly in Munich and Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

Munich, 1992 was the beginning of an affair with elitism, with classical forms, as pronounced in the Pinakotheken, Alte and Neue, where Greek vases, marbles, and archaeologica were displayed, and where the modern masters from Ruebens to Kandinsky had their home. My personal forms begin to take on an exasperated and hectic quality as I adjusted by personal aesthetic to the new knowledge I was acquiring.

It almost appears that I would be relinquishing art, by a contrast to the 'Schlaraffenland' that compassed me...but the reality was an improved sense of balance and space.

Augsburg is the continuation of that effect, though the fear that I would 'inevitably' end up back in the US predicated ruin for this initial creative bout--something necessary to the advancement and revamping of U_N_A_R_T, an element of my persona that would lead to what you'll see in later years, including pattern building, art-decodence, and the current style, which I'll call 'caribou,' a reference to its influencing by Seattle - Pacific Northwestern Native Peoples.