Radio Signals Art

Slideshow

Radio — Sun, 29 May 2011 19:31:05 +0000

By way of explanation for my absence and for this article, I should say this: I have written over 75,000 words on a novel in two months. As a result, I haven’t been doing a lot of drawing or painting lately, except an obligatory sketchbook whose contents aren’t really worth posting. Those drawings are simply hand exercises in my daily routine. Make bed. Wash dishes. Draw thing. Cook dinner. Shower.

It is when I write that I have transformed into my feverish and desperate artistic self, the me that happens when I open my mouth to say something that transcends my capacity to understand all at once. Even my verbal muse misses the visual expression, and so I have spent my web-surfing time looking at contemporary paintings, admiring my favorites, letting them move me, and parsing the message.

What they have said, in a remarkably tight zeitgeist-curated chorus, is that our bodies have gone somewhere and we are ambivalent about being abandoned. I see bones, wounds, amputations. I see animal parts, skins, heads. I see frozen faces, serene in their detachment, their emotions implied effectively in groundbreaking ways, but without the help of muscles and skin or smiles and eyes. I see trees, rooting and reaching.

In the lingering perfection of form, the insistence on symbolic representationalism, I see an unwillingness to take our bodies all the way back. Whatever it is that we have purchased at the cost of our own flesh is too costly to simply discard.

The message is that we want to be animals. We want to cut open our weird little synthetic shells and find out what is the most human thing about us. We want to experience our bodies, to frown and smile without typing a single parenthesis, to grow fur and get dirty. It is evident beyond visual art, even in the parlance. It used to be cool, then it was tight, now: the filthier the better.

We don’t have the words to express it, and if we did they wouldn’t fit into an email or a facebook status, so we are developing a system of hieroglyphs, an alphabet of images that we all somehow understand the minute we touch them with our eyes, the only part of us that regularly gets filthy.

There was nothing left to do but rest.

Radio — Fri, 13 May 2011 04:32:08 +0000

I’d like to thank my very patient model on this one.

On tiny limbs

Radio — Wed, 04 May 2011 04:54:54 +0000

On tinier limbs, the little things. Feeling poetic.

BRB, writing a novel.

Radio — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:00:17 +0000

So for the last three or four weeks I have been working on a pretty monumental writing project and in the meantime visual art is hanging back like a wallflower at a middle school dance.

A study of studying.

Radio — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 19:03:32 +0000

I am out at a coffee shop today and I found it easier to sketch than to write, with all the noise.

She called about overalls and

Radio — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:12:34 +0000

I had her over for tea. I borrowed her bone structure.

The things he doesn’t know about himself…

Radio — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 16:57:17 +0000

… Are the things he thinks he knows about everybody else.

This is the era of the phrase.

Radio — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 22:47:03 +0000

(This phrase crossed my mind to describe our era)

Not bad.

Radio — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 23:22:44 +0000

Since I started sending free tiny drawings to people who have donated to the red cross or salvation army for Japan, I have received many different kinds of proof of donation. I have been given everything from forwarded online receipts, mobile screenshots of text message donations, a photo of a paper receipt, and even a photo of a phone with text messages on the screen.

But the best so far is this, the sender explained,

I have something better than a receipt – we started a collection within my agency for the American Red Cross. We sold tickets for a dollar that put people into a raffle for a PTO day. So far we have raised close to 1K. I attached a pic.

not bad right?

Not bad at all!