Definitions of Day

Why draw?

2010-07-14T12:45:00.000-04:00

In my art and writing I seek to expose the aesthetics of thought, be it scientific, religious or commonplace observation of day to day life that is governed by the habit of swimming in whatever mixture of linguistics and culture that you happen to be immersed in. All habitual thought is blinding. Even eternal questioning that is my vice.

There is an escapist self-aggrandizing trend in the arts that takes reality, truth, expression as something not unlike dough to be shaped by the artist's hand, the artists and the marketer of selfish abandon being one. It is a less obvious trend than blunt political propaganda, more subtle and more hypnotizing. In my art, I seek to destroy this.

I am a student of massage therapy, as it is one of the few professions whose entire value system is based on the respect of anther person's past, present and future, their space, their reality, their pain and their healing. It's one of the very few occupations that teaches you to be within reality and face it with your whole being rather than run, fix, mold, change, fight, categorize or endlessly purchase. The world of art has a lot to learn from this delicate yet powerful directness that is akin to the most direct of arts - music.

Of course this brings up an excuse to obsess over the marriage of form and content, but, if there is one thing you want to know that matters - in art, in massage, in life - it is simply this: your INTENT.

On micro-celebrity culture.

2009-07-30T16:15:00.004-04:00

NPR's Kojo Nnamdi sits down with Hal Niedzviecki, author of "The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and our Neighbors (City Lights, San Francisco) and founder of the Broken Pencil Magazine to examine the transition of pop culture into peep culture. Facebook, bloggging and twitter, here we go.

I happen to hate the term, but the observation is on point and something I have been mulling over lately, as any self-respecting element of the synchronicity should be doing.

For the first time in nine years of life in America I feel in tune with it's culture: facebook addiction, voyerism, cybersex, google and wiki over institutionalized learning; all creation digital... self as a brand, self unmentioned, self partitioned for the public eye. Everyone's in the yellow papers now, but IS privacy a commodity to be exchanged for attention, as Hal states? And by the way, what a great name...

I believe there is a place in this whirlpool for a person to preserve their dignity and live in line with the honor of their life and the REAL. For myself, I must formulate a rule in order to stay sane in the pull of this mass addiction:

No digital act shall be taken as an end in itself. Only as a means to create the REAL.

Not vice versa. I will not join the obsession with publicizing one's own life out of the sheer kick of the quasi underground celebrity. What I will give is art. Work. Creation. Yes it may be personal, as any human being is limited by their person, but do not for a second fall into the false assumption that you know me. And I will respect you in return in not assuming that your blog and facebook posts sum up even such a small part of you, as your character.

Creation of the REAL is what justifies it all for me. Under this falls the original premise of facebook: bringing connection to family and friends that are far away. Clearly, it has gone beyond that, into the realm of micro-journalism, micro-celebrity. Simply said, we got our village back, and we must learn to live in it, without detaching from the notion of full life, full emotion and full connection. It is exquisitely satisfying to be a part of a movement, a collective if you will, but at the end of the day it will drive you crazy if your society is only accessible by sitting for hours, in front of a screen, in an isolated room, alone. Might as well start plugging hoses in our necks.

Maybe not everyone goes online in such isolation, of course. Hey maybe I'm behind on this, since I ain't got no hand-held, but the idea of people sitting TOGETHER each on their own computer absolutely disconnected, when they could turn around and... talk is even more frightening. And so, the only plausible way to maintain one's humanity, humility, and honor Life is to treat the damned gadgets as gadgets?

It's tougher than that... Microblogging does create real responses. The sense of knowing a person from their actions and responses to events publicly visible to everyone comes naturally, like in class or at work, and is experienced with fantastic authenticity. But it is NOT who the person is, no matter how revealing their web presence may be. In addition to that, there are minor and absolutely informal, undocumented, sub-groups that form solely around a style of using micro-blogging. Some insist on detached sarcasm, some on emotional honesty, some on religious piety, and others still... spam their way into sex. The more people you have friended the more judgement you may get based on your style of sharing, let alone the things in your life you make public.

What we must remember is that even if people are adopting the ideas of marketing and branding in their web presence, they are not a company, they are not a household product, they are not a character in a book, they are not merchandise attached to a reality series. They are a human being. If you find yourself incapable of feeling compassion for them, think twice before assuming anything else their web presence makes you feel is authentic.

And so, returning to the idea of creation of the REAL. What has been the story of mass media up until now? The printing press, book binding, calligraphy, literacy... It was a process of democratization of an originally elite privilege: to have a voice. In writing, as in lithography, printing has gone hand in hand with the spread of literacy (verbal or visual), but it has never been an end in itself. Even within the art form of printmaking, the idea of a print as a final product is superimposed on its original function and maintained artificially through limiting a number of copies. To jack up the price. And subsequently make the work inaccessible to anyone who can't afford it. The intrinsic power of print, however, has always been in mass communication and mass availability. And that power has been used in facilitating transformation in the realm of the real. From manifestos to newspapers to ad campaigns, a voice is not a trivial ability to posses. It is certainly not a mere vocal chord to satisfy selfish whims of hysteria with attention grabbing fits.

Perhaps, as a society, as a synchronicity, we are experiencing transformation from this choral howl, but as individuals, we are at risk of drowning in it. Perhaps being less obsessed with individuality is not all that bad, and about time (you know... the Age of Aquarius and all that), but there is nothing good in a mass indulging in a lobotomizing and debasing addiction. No matter what cyber life offers, it is a removal from Reality. A tool. If used towards Reality it is of great value, as an end in itself... well, it's the Matrix.

My Teacher, Sterling!

2009-05-30T19:45:00.001-04:00

This is as close as I could get to Bill Clinton.

2008-10-14T17:16:00.005-04:00

Former US president Bill Clinton came to a Democratic rally at the VCU Commons court last Sunday to give a speech in support of Obama. Virginia being a swing state these days, there is a lot more campaigning going on than before the last election, and I have to admit there is a selling point to in-person campaigning. Being used to everything in the world of politics happening pretty much on televesion I have seen and been a part of the overwhelming feeling of distance and irrelevance to politics among the young and the not-so-wealthy. Politics on TV is show-entertainment, popularity contest made epic, and with world order implications that we know of mostly from Comedy Central.

Now when somebody like former president himself comes to your university, stands right where you normally try to quickly munch some lunch on a windy day between classes, how can one not feel like all of a sudden your life is politically important and your vote is needed and all that. You see a political figure as a man of normal proportions and with physical limbs that he uses to shake hands and to point when he says something particularly crowd-pleasing.
The "humble" factor, the grass roots aesthetics will get you if the rhetoric doesn't. A party rally is a rock concert without music, and the crowd leaves with a sense of involvement. Is that sense an illusion, or the real thing which ends up moving social change one way or the other...?

Artist’s Statement

2008-01-28T22:33:00.000-05:00

Looking back at the last year in the Communication Arts department and comparing what then was the edge of my interest in subject matter and intent for the act of making art at all, I can see things come into clarity and that edge advancing. In the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom in life and in the study of art as meditation thereon, that growth is the source of satisfaction and harmony. That growth is the root of confidence that any young person needs in order to abandon the view of oneself as an isolated object of the world’s ways, at whose discretion there is only art as some self-instantiating expression-form, that is in essence nothing but outsourcing of frustrations with such a reactive role. Through growth that reveals the interplay of change and of the constants, one can finally know—and not merely muse about—leadership.

A year ago describing what inspired me and the issues that have had the most impact on my work I wrote of the subtleties of moments in everyday life: feelings left unspoken, intentions not mentioned, people’s postures, their faces as records of their emotional lives. I wrote that I was very drawn to vague suggestions of something that was important to the point of being fateful, yet remained indistinct, not captured, and for that reason sublime. I drew reverent records of the moments that contained such revelation, but always seemingly against some kind of uncertainty of the worth of such an approach, because the result would so often present itself as a nice drawing, charged with intense internalization and important at least within the school, probably, only to me.

I believe it was that development that was always tightly entwined with my affair with the immigrant Latin American culture. Besides the haven it offered me as an immigrant and its inseverable connection to my earliest lessons in music, that I still draw from in visual communication, (a study of classical guitar in a Russian music school was seeped in the Latin influences as they were understood by Russian musicality, and perhaps imported through the peculiar political friendship between the Soviet Union and Cuba), immersion into a culture of immigrant Peruvian youth, clashed with the immigrant Russian, Bolivian, Italian and Jewish contingents, gave me a world within which my drawings, or writings for that matter, were inseparable from the reality it was their aim to describe.

Somehow, either ignored or written off as too mystical in the prevalent young pragmatic Anglo-Saxon America, it is the nature of communication in so many cultural groups to maintain and wholly recognize the level of intent underneath the spoken. This level is integral to creation of art that is worthwhile. It is a level that yields to form just like material paint and expressible idea. It is the very carrier of Magic Realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Ernesto Barreda. Barreda’s images of South America are no mere peculiarities of his choice of descriptive form, inexistent outside of the semantics of his imaginings. They have a presence in reality, and relevance. They are made of the same substance that was woven into the presence of the young immigrant men that had grown up in the regions he painted.

I seek to travel to Peru to distill my understanding of this phenomenon from any misinterpretation of that country’s culture that may be convenient for me to imagine now. I no longer doubt the importance of painting revelatory work and no longer view it as a self-centered act, as long as one is observant of the outside world and conscious of the nature of observation. I want to paint Peru, as it is, remembering all I’ve learned of it, remembering nothing but what’s in front of me.

I do not want to paint my idea of Peru and its culture, as I do not want to paint a life of a traveler uninformed by travel. My intention is to keep a visual record of my journey through Peruvian land as directly as it is possible through the act of drawing. Upon return I intend to produce a series of paintings informed by what I will learn of Peru, Latin America, the people and the land, myself, the paint, and the carrying power of intent inscribed in a work of art, capable of giving so much more to the viewer than just something to look at. For, though a work of art might not describe or explain reality as a static objective extraction of truths, it can reaffirm what we within that reality are capable of doing by being a result of such an act.

On Illegal Immigration and Labor

2007-12-13T15:11:00.001-05:00

I do hope that this piece is clear enough to not need explanation, but I'll explain it, just in case. The assignment in class was an illustration on any article related to the current debate about illegal immigration. I went through a number of ideas relaying the inadequacy of the legal system in meeting the reality of immigration: the generations, the families, the ties to the new land, the mistreatment. But instead of focusing on the problems of the system, I chose to bring attention to the contribution of the illegal laborers to our society that plenty of people consider negligible because it is a convenient thought.

I wanted to celebrate the physical act of making a city, in a way as a symbol for the life physically lived there--perhaps a life without rights, but an undeniable life.

The original version of the image had businessman-looking boots on the right side, indicating in one dimension the people who own (by standing on it) the city others built for them, and in another dimension--the juxtaposition of the immigrant hands to the city-owners' boots, that exposed the body language of social classes. Who hasn't got the right to own has got to kneel, even though they spend themselves to make what is owned.

This element was eliminated under the direction of my teacher, Sterling, who said that the boots standing on the city would destroy the credibility of the transformation of bricks into buildings. He is probably right about that. So this piece, rather than being about the contrast of classes, became mostly about the act of making, the physicality of maintaining an environment that makes you attached to it, whether you wanted to be a part of it in the first place or not. I attempted to bring that out by roughing out the texture of the bricks, bringing their physicality into focus.
I am not sure if I succeeded in delivering all these thoughts through the piece, but I hope that the thoughts gave it an emotional validity.

Any comments are welcome, as always.

Internet Withdrawal

2007-09-16T15:58:00.000-04:00

It may appear as a not particularly prolific time in my studies, but it's simply the fact that I have no internet, and posting images on the web now seems like an obtrusive hassle. Internetless state requires so much more organization and planning.
I am drawing a lot in my Sketchbooks, mostly ideas and characters for school projects rather than personal work. I have also been exploring the use of brush pens, sketching a lot, and find myself in a strange state of being glued to the influence of Caricature drawing. While it's true that I had sought that job in the first place in order to train myself to loosen up my character designs, make them more animatable and expressive, it's a strange feeling to be drawing cartoons now while my aesthetic sentiments very often lean towards stylized but not "cartoony" animation, towards anatomically realistic humans and expressive gesture. Yet it seems that I am having quite a successful time drawing toons.
I suppose instead of worrying about it I am going to simply explore where this route takes me. My goal right now is to achieve diversity in styles in order to have a library of them available to me when I want to tell a story.
It appears to be again, the time for explosive patience. Disciplined practice and hunter-like observation. There will come a time when I will make use of the invested study, but now something about the state of air around me tells me it is time to hold my horses.

Anima

2007-07-14T02:22:00.000-04:00

The series entitled “Anima” in its completion is meant to be a book, but at this point it is a collection of scans, sketches and thumbnails. I started working on it my freshman year of college, and I believe it to mark a certain turning point in my art, specifically my realization of the themes and the metalogic of dreams that have always preoccupied me and informed the process by which I construct an image. “Anima” from an obsession has come to be a sanctuary in a certain sense, where I am free to explore as deep as I want having come to realize that the laws that govern this explorative creation are consistent, intuitive, and mine.
The cover page for the series started out as a high school senior project for which I spent a class sketching in the band room and later produced some finished pieces using the sketches as reference. While some of the pieces actually incorporated the things I observed visually, this image came from a different sort of observation. It was at first a mere allegory for music, but later on became apparent as an image that is as connected to me as dream that lets you know everything you deny while awake. I believe it to be appropriate for the cover page of “Anima” because it is an introduction into the process of image formulation the series have come to be structured on. It may be mistaken for self-consious symbolism but mataphor is the air of this world I reveal not its translation. It has very little to do with what I have learned of Tarot, or Jung, or Lacan or the subconsious, for it has everything to do with what I do NOT know.
This is my folklore.

From a collection of invasively intense mystery obsessions such as these:

the content of Anima is going to evolve to explore a wider range of emotion and connection. And, as it will include the Russian series, and the following doodles once they are complete, it will have to be a blend of the loose and comforting in appearance pencil work that delivers a good illusion of physical space with the meticulous line work above with which space becomes only a container for the invisible.

Oh and the bruja is back. I think at this point her character is the most solid representation of the wisest part of me. And in that sense, Anima is her.

Working at King's Dominion as a Caricature Artist

2007-07-08T01:13:00.000-04:00

It's an interesting summer job. For the first few weeks of working there I felt as though I was stuck in the date I had at the park a long long time ago. Funnel cake stands and Rocky music and the heat in the snippets of those slightly uncomfortable instances when you suddenly know you have been in this place before and you would be much happier about it if the passage of time and your life travels made just a bit more sense in conjunction.
But gradually everything became routine, of course. Watching people adamantly having fun because they paid their good money for it is probably the most redeeming part of having all my time taken up by the long commute and the sketching and the standing. I meet people I normally probably wouldn't, even though I am not one to avoid conversations with strangers by default. It is simply that people seem to be in a very special state at a theme park where excitement and moneysqweezing is pumped into them at every corner, while they can enjoy the comfort zone of their friends and family and act like a park employee is at best a fun dispenser who of all things is definitely not human enough to expect any politeness. I suppose I am saying that it is fun watching people be rude to me, but that is just the worst case scenario. Some are very nice and rich.
Anyway, before I start musing about the experience of being a sales person which I am not morally o.k. with but seem to have a knack for, I am going to post some sketches I did after I started working as a "caricature artist." If anybody ever suspected me of being capable of drawing only realistic sad-looking naked people, here, see some variety.
Next thing to study for me is drawing clothes. Drawing from John Galliano and his madness.

“Humanity Lobotomy” Net Neutrality Open Source Documentary

2007-04-17T12:03:00.000-04:00

Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

Headache Material

2007-04-09T16:37:00.000-04:00

Cannot write a poem again, but I have to. I am already a few weeks behind on the poetry quota for my English class, but sometimes I just can't get words out of a headache. The truth is I actually wrote a pagefull today but it is no good.
I haven't been writing emails either because frankly I am sick of them. It's that kind of stage when I am very happy to have facebook. Because it organizes things for me, much better than an email inbox. There will come a point when I will want to free my life records from the influence of the software I use for it, but right now it's just nice to have things in place somewehere and accessible. This isn't mere complaining, I am actually thinking of a form of narrative that would be appropriate for the content and I am not even sure whether it should be one big project or a combination of little ones. Should things be left to the style of the era they emerged from, or should they be revisited? And how introspective should any of this even be, when there is a need for looking outwards along with the inascapable innerness in art...

I guess it is the problem of having developped a recognizable focus on autobiography in my work. I'm not sure if I can ever escape that or whether I even want to.

Ooh! But Alex just came by and got me some chocolate. And now everything is better.