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Chad Dugas, Alchemical Spectre

Trips to the quantum cosmic supermarket feeding back loops and twirls of consciousness spraying off the Christened waves of Oversoul.  Back flips through candy cane mind gardens and free falls into dark, twirling vortexes of Scorpion lairs.

My friend, brother, cohort, colleague, collaborator, co-inspirator, infinite jester on the checkerboard of life...Chad Dugas.  I don't know if you can call him an artist, a fool, a genius, an idiot savant, anarchic yogi or what?  I have never met anyone like him.  I would call him a Wizard Alchemist who dabbles in all of the above when it suits his fancy or he is conjuring up his tutelary spirits.  Either way, we started in the rave scene back to the old traditional college days to later years in Gotham, hashing it out in the bat cave.  Blessings brother from here to there.

UFO and Wondermountains

Felix Guattari's Interesting Assemblage of his 4 Ontological Functions

Montauk Alien

Plex Needs Cheese

Con $ Piracy

There is a dark side that seeks to control through manipulative means.  It lives within each and everyone of us, as well as without.  When we engage the world, we are in a conspiracy.  Con-Spirare.  Spirits living and breathing together.  The more light we become, the more aware we become of our psychic power.  We can use this to cut through the dark and shed light on an occult world.  There is nothing to really fear, but since we all have to pay a price, death awaits.  Make use of your time, fight the dark with peace, be creative, share your talents and ideas with others and bring something of true value to this world.

The forces that seek to control us are ultimately extensions of ourselves.  When we become more integrated and spiritual, we will watch these aspects fade away with time.

Universal Transformer Clown

Exits of the Heart

No stones left for the elders
I exit stages from the heart
a new beginning sets me free
from old chains of past woes
Once again children rain down to eternal shores
Linear places of solar bliss
no judgment comes from the One
only time and space
to contain you
like we have seen
again and again
our destiny is
time forgotten in
the shake of a tremoring
world

Montauk Project

Me in my studio at SVA 1997

Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt

Tommy in his apartment in Hell's Kitchen.  Tommy was my teacher at SVA.  I think he is a true artist.  Not a pedant per se, but someone who "walks the walk".  There were so many @$$wholes at SVA, but Tommy had the voice that said, "do it your own way!".  Not that any artist needs anyone to tell them that, but institutions are full of them and more and more the method is about total conformity.  The other extreme are people who quit and rebel and think it makes them somehow more "real".  SVA for me was a way to get into NYC.  Otherwise, I would have had to live on the street.  I was still trying to carve it out as a graffiti artist then, but I discovered early on, as much as I was influenced by graffiti, I did not want to just be another graffiti artist. 

Tommy was a protege of Jack Smith.

Meta Aranoidicus-Paul Laffoley

I talk about Paul pretty much all of the time in one way or another.  I have never met another artist like him.  For me, Paul is perhaps the greatest artistic genius I have ever met.  I think of him as a friend as well.  I have had at least the  pleasure of being in his studio and talking with him from time to time.  I have the highest respect for him and his influence is without question.

This is a design that for me takes Gaudi's spiritual leanings and brings to a scientifically visionary form of completion.  Paul is possibly our Leonardo da Vinci.

Virtual Baroque and World Wide Web

I am realizing more and more that this baroque nature in the arts is a "Virtual Baroque", because it is a reference to the pluralism in styles evident in the visual field and is deeply connected to technological orgy which supports it virtually.  The World Wide Web is a "virtual galaxy gallery" and assemblage of ideas and visual creations.

Very simply it is a feedback loop as well, as in the concept put forth by Cybernetics, which simultaneously creates a virtual realm that flowers and grows rhythmically.  However, it is loops within loops, all dispersed, interconnected like wires in some Brazilian favela.  It works somehow, but there is no way to decipher the "how".  I see a multitude of art/visual cultural galaxies, each one independent, yet connect to a larger picture.  There is always an interplay of dualities, however they forge chaos and order in such a way that the play-doh quality allows all potential formations.

Just go the mall today (in any suburban town for that matter) and look around you at the globalism that jumps out into your face.

There are so many styles, ideas and realities coming together, brands being melded, identities being forged, cultures "clashing".

It is a tessellated, fractalized field of sociocultural experience.

There is no beginning or end, only change.

It is evident that there would naturally be some psychosis developing as a result of this schizoid experience, but yet, it is being held together by technological bliss, the tap of texting or the next Twitter feed.

I sit back and watch and keep on drawing.

Homage to Joel Hodgson and MST3K

Life is a critique of a silly movie... Happy 2013.

Sailor Clown Lost at SEE

2013 is Psychic Clean Up Time

OK...now that is over, the so called, dreaded end date of 12.21.12, we are still here.

However, I wonder, what is the next creative step?

After listening to Michael Tsarion for the past 2000 hours, no just kidding :), I have come to the understanding that now more than ever it is time to step inside the mirror room of Self and stare deeply so that a new consciousness is at hand.

Also, it is time to open up the closet of the mind and and clean it thoroughly.  As MT says, going through the darkness and the cosmic tyranny is a part of the purging process so that one comes to their own sovereign self hood, untainted by the manipulations and conspiracies of others.

No need to do anything but just be your self.  Now if we could just solve the incessant money problem, then all would possibly be well.

Wizard, 2012

Jonathan Feldschuh, Hadron Collider

Jonathan Feldschuh is one of the smartest painters alive.  He has a degree, Summa Cum Laude from Harvard in Physics.  I admire the architectonic visionary qualities I decipher from his work.  I believe it to be an interplay between science and art that is very poetic.

Postmodernism, Baroque Universe of Styles, Art Jungle

Modernism paved the way towards the world in which we live in now.  Based on often Utopian ideations, its sense of the artistic progression of world transformation was unceasingly historical.  History was something made by great minds who were fully conscious of their doings.

Postmodernism took that and flipped it, deconstructed it, parodied it, made it ironic and well, like Martin Kippenberger, made you wonder "why" in the first place.  As the Talking Heads said, it "Stopped Making Sense".

Why?  Well, the high end postmodern academic critique sliced, diced and disintegrated any sense of subjective worthiness, all the while building a hyper-capitalist art world empire.  You had to be in the know and if you had money to spare, it was all fair game and didn't really matter any way.  Like they say, all is fair in love and war, right? 

Well, not exactly.  In the end, intertexuality breeds more excuses to regurgitate more stylistic fancies and tangents.  As is evident by the plethora of artists and styles today, there has never been an end to artistic aspiration either.  As we can see, after postmodernism, it is hard to understand what it is all about however.  To me and to whatever degree as I have stated before in other writings, there is a baroque quality (a "Virtual Baroque") to the art world today.  This may be merely superficial and unimportant to recognize, but I mean it in the sense that if you take the overall visual field at this point, it is an overgrown jungle of ideas, representations, styles, genres and derivations.

The thing is, is that postmodern parody is over, as is the need to be ironic.  I hate to hear every time a painting gets critiqued that it doesn't pass the art world taste test due to its perceived sincerity or seriousness.  However, even if it is sincere, it doesn't change the fact that it lives out its existence in a universe like pool of visual expressions.  To some degree this relationship with all the other art "out there" makes it simply meaningless.  It is ironic still how anyone can take art seriously at all.  However, in postmodernism this was the artifice and now that is tired too.

What I think is that it is beautiful to see all this art.  It means something...however vague, regarding the fact that visual culture ceases to die.  What I believe is that we are in fact bringing new levels of meaning to all of it.  Artists are even more sophisticated than before and educated.  So many artists have MFA's today for example and although this is not a requisite to making great art, it is a testament to the level of knowledge and sophistication that is out there.

We are increasingly challenged by the attempt at some level of meaning.  Cutting through the jungle means simultaneously adding to its overgrowth.  It will not only grow over, but more ferociously than before.