new /old vanitas images

(the last two paintings are mine) inkblot and vanitas reference. They are still not finished...

CHECK OUT: make vanitas your own project at Alexia Goethe Gallery...

http://www.alexiagoethegallery.com/x/exhibitions.html?exid=42

this is a great contemporary art space in London. when i walked in, in 2008 the space was filled with a great big unsteady cubby house construction...and when i was in new york a few months later i saw more huge cubbyhouse ensembles in a gallery there by a differnt artist...and and and and...when i was in LA in 2002 i also saw an entire gallery of smaller cubby houses, rich scent of pine flooding the room. and also a guy in my art class at uni in SD was making unsteady kitchen cabinet structures in a wavemotion...it links. but this is not the point...ill get to cubby houses eventually. today its vanitas.

(copied from web page:)
The New Vanitas Project, 2005 (Gary Setzer & Jennifer Locke)
The New Vanitas Project is a reinterpretation of Jan Van Huysum’s 1722 painting, Fruit Piece, aligning its theme (the brevity of life) with its contemporary counterparts. The centerpiece of the space is a plastic-flower recreation of Van Huysum’s impossible cross-seasonal arrangement warmed by artificial sunlight-spectrum bulbs. The flanking video monitors scroll phrases modeled after advertising slogans and self-help idioms. Clean electronic music swirls around the space, finishing off the plastic utopian ambience.

ON NEW VANITAS AND OLD IDEAS (not copied from web page)

So before I go on and on about what I love at the moment. I have to say I have been loving this idea forever...excuse the irony. Vanitas paintings accentuate the transience of vanity, celebrate temporality...
celebrating...maybe.. i think celebrating- Nietzsche you can quote as celebrating with his Zarathustra character saw the positives in it...the 16th and 17th century original vanitas painters of course leave more mystery, images could be seen as more ambiguous than words. more suggestion than statement.
look up Ecclesiastes (yes the Bible)... an interesting piece of philosophy.
....so existentialism comes in (I'm refusing to follow this lead in time restraint fashion)and so does melting candles and time issues. yes. more leads not to follow.

so i was thinking of my new ideas for a show in april, thinking is where it is at that's all... but it might be a lot more subtle, (and glossy). and maybe even pink

other:
Michael Zafros is a great reference with his glossy Archibald prize entry 2009, so is the ever famous Damian Hirst's diamond skull and Ricky Swallow's wonderful carved wooden skulls and temporal objects (see Below) there are thousands of examples...if you care to look.
It is an old topic, and a continually revisited one, particularly now, where we are removing ourselves more and more from identifying ourselves with decaying matter, and thriving on a more materialistic or virtually constructed self.

no judgement intended I promise.
I find this area fascinating...not scary or macab.
and now I am tired and haven't constructed any of my join the dots or game watercolours.

helsinki art treasure

... some more of the art that does more than blow my hair back.



I want to start my 'oil crayon melted into cast sculptures and draw them away into nothing" sculptures...but i have to wait until august. so instead i will adore..

TARJA PITKÄNEN-WALTER and pretty much all of helsinki's art...wow
as a tease.
it's a pity i cant stay awake all day and night and work on ideas without need for food or money.
perhaps i should stop saying that. instead i play on the internet to further the time demand.

Helsinki was by far my favourite place to visit for finding art treasure. for looking and memory only, on my budget, but this is priceless and pervades all barriers. on the upside at least i don't have to worry about transporting and reassemblage costs. and the work fuses, distorts grows and metamorphoses outside of it's physical form, creating a dialogue- in my mind and now in a blog (and so the viral effect continues)

I saw Tarja's work at the EMMA in helsinki,
there was an exhibition on wood carving at the time, her work was in a room to the side. i might also add, all i wanted to do for a very long 6 months away from my workshop was carve wood. but then i just painted when i got home.
i love the idea of the mark made, double image and temporality, all this I see in Tarja's paint sculptures, on surface, support, being the representation and the thing itself at the same time, (image/sculpture). there is actually this theory, i forget the formal title, but it is to do with quantum physics. an atom can be in several places at once, an awe striking concept. which in itself is magic. but if we (people) can be truely isolated in space, like at Quantum levels, then it is possible we can be in two places at once. (maybe this helps explain things like consciousness and memory, time bla bla bla.) Theres an aside to this also called the Heizenberg uncertainty period. meaning things can pop in and out of existance. but with my limited understanding thsi seems to be an excuse.

the fact that one atom can communicate with another atom at the otherside of the world almost instantaneously also bamboozles me. time/space ideas evade me. but it opens up my curiousity.

maybe in August i can start on my melted oil pastel multi cast sculptures. and then i want to play with casting chalk sculptures,. the important part will be the drawing away of the thing itself, heightening the temporality, the metamorphosing of forms.
I actually started a sculpture project like this when i was living in San Diego - 2002. i made a mould of an egg and i would press loose powder into half of it, and gently tap it out on the surface of a mirror, so that effectively you have a whole, image of an egg, half delicate and temporary, that would blow away with the wind, and the other half (the reflection) was solid, untoucahable, until the loose powder would work decompose, disappear. this reminds me of Aikos work funnily enough (see earlier post. but the work expressed the two were co-dependant. duplicit.
planting them all around campus at UCSD, it was interpreted more as a work about cocaine than temporality, very funny. but totally not what i was getting at! though the dialogue was interesting!

i also tried to do something similar to Tarja, with my paint sculptures,. weeks of drying thick layers of acrylic on aluminium trays, peeling them off and stacking them into a tower.the surface/representation becomes the thing itself. but my professor, Ruben Ortiz Torres was more interested in some funny thing i made out of sewing toilet paper. he was into pop culture and i think wanted to follow that lead of consumer trash...maybe, i couldnt read his mind. to be honest, at the time all i wanted to do was just paint. but he wanted us to think.

on temporality shape shifting- i also grinded, cut, sawed and blended away the objects in my kitchen (food and packaging and some chairs and clothes) into tiny pigments/particles, colour coded and made a mandala that year for a sculpture class. not before donating my coffee machine and blankets to the homeless art students that lived in the studio before i flew back to Oz. i had all intentions of doing the same to an old car upon return, and drawing a representation of the car. mandala style, loose pigment on the floor. but instead, i just began to do simple paintings.
one day

i wish i had documented it. Jesse Rider (aka Jesse Coward UCSD science undergraduate friend that disappeared in to corporate NY somewhere in 2003) if you ever read my blog.....please send me the photos you took that night at the exhibition.and i would love to see you again too.) you never know- if we can be in two places at once than something small like this ccould happen. worth a shot! haha
i can apply for grants with this stuff - not the pwetty pictures I am doing now.

more Finnish art to follow: in the meantime: check out:
http://www.kiasma.fi/
http://www.emma.museum/eng/about/index.php
http://www.pitkanen-walter.net/stage2/flash2/kiasma.html