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.