riotbread - Working

+ Wrenchin' on my Ride +

3/30/2018

+ and turn the screw +

What's it been now? Like three years since I started painting again? Two years since I quit smoking cigarettes. (Damn, that was tough). Much of my art has progressed exactly as I thought it would, which is to say that I have been working for up to three years on some very dense works of destroyed art that will take some uncertain number of further years to finish and which will probably never be shown outside of my home because, well, they are dense works of destroyed art. There are not too many of us that see the beauty in that, which is maybe a good thing for humankind.

+ and turn the screw +

i'll fly away in the morning...

Of the turns my art has taken, of the forks that have flown, these little works were the most unexpected. I am generally not into representations, overt symbols, or anything that could qualify as explicitly decorative but the innocence of these works surprised me. I did not know I had that it in me, honestly. I like that they keep me busy.

Sidebar: Every time I paint, my baby girl wants to paint too, so I set her up a little station next to mine. The last time I was working on my little birds she copied what I was doing when I wasn't paying attention. Super cute.

+ and turn the screw +

& then I created some other creatures. Paintings that were not destroyed, with fertile surfaces of wax, minerals, and cultivated colour. I was indifferent to these works, with my calloused, unvarnished heart. And these works were hung in restaurants and co-working spaces where they got bought and won the blue ribbon just like at the county fair and I met good people so go figure. Sometimes it pays in a number of ways not to destroy my art.

Doesn't mean I'll stop. I'll keep turning that screw & hitting the surface hard.

+ and turn the screw +

ENCAUSTIC EVOLUTIONS: i'll fly away in the morning

1/13/2018

New work. Busy work. I need to be working. I've got so many things going on in my life. Busy life. Working hard, family life, always learning. Creating. My abstract art takes so damn long to create! My abstract art is the slowest thing in my life. I love it.

A large part of the process involved with creating my abstract art is the process of not touching it while it weathers for long periods of time. But I've got energy and I've got the need to be creating all.the.damn.time. These hands don't idle. So I've got this new body of work I got going on. Little paintings, little birds.

This work was made by hand-cutting the silhouettes into Union Square heavy weight paper. The paper was then painted with hot encaustic paint. Encaustic paint is a mixture of beeswax, damar resin and pigment. Some of the tools typically used include a heat gun, a pastry torch and hot plates. Generally, I use R&F encaustic medium and pigment sticks, though I often make my own from scratch. When the cut paper is painted, an uncut paper is also painted, and the two are collaged together onto a DaVinci hardwood panel.

These are called "Evolutions" because each new work is cut from a copy of the previous work. Since these are hand cut, slight variations occur each time. These variations, as well as more directed changes, will make the works change slowly over time.

The story: I've got a restless soul that can be traced back to my early childhood in Southern California. While all the other kids were busy playing games, I'd spend countless hours on swings or in the tops of trees watching the birds and daydreaming that I could fly away with them to wherever they were going. That sense of restless wonder never left and I've spent the last four decades moving to & fro between California, Texas, and Florida. My home in Austin, like many places I've lived, is very close to the airport. I enjoy watching the steady flow of airplanes coming and going, knowing that each plane is full of people, all with their own unique motivations and destinations. Now, with this body of work, that sense of restless wonder is captured with a flock of small paintings. I love watching these paintings fly away, leaving me to wonder where they’ve taken off to.

East Austin Studio Tour 2017

11/6/2017

When you stop by my place for this year's EAST, be prepared for a very active environment. Working outdoors, I create, destroy, and reconstruct temporal objects using encaustic, oil, heat, weather and time. (and time again)

November 11-12 & November 18-19
11 am - 5 pm

Stop #493
6311 Crumley Ln – (512) 696-9676

artist statement #391

11/3/2017

The fidelity of images, statements, bodies, or time is not trustworthy . There are already enough fictions in life and so the creation of more representations, pictures, or images is superfluous and totally unnecessary. An existential vulture could accomplish far more by pulling apart representations as a means to pick away at the artifice of perception. I paint pictures so that I may wipe away the memory of the picture.

(I destroy images.) There are no illusions present.

To accomplish this dissolution, my work relies on physically building up and degrading the surface over a long period of time, with force, again and again. While brushes and paint are as familiar with my art as hammers, sandpaper and gasoline, time and nature are far more familiar with my art than my own hand and my own mind. This art spends most of it’s time outside, hanging from trees, buried in garden beds and resting on rooftops, shaped by sun, soil, foliage, wind, rain, and that absolute Texas summer heat.

Currently I am reintroducing representational images back into my work. These representations will be utilized as a means of furthering my argument that images do not exist.

I will render the images nonexistent, before your very eyes.

Bleed the wax.

9/29/2017

I bled the wax from this painting (and one of it's siblings, too). I actually didn't totally know what I was up to at the beginning of summer. I set this painting and it's sister up on the slightest of slight inclines in that circle of the yard the gets spot-on hot sun from 2PM - 5PM. And I let them drip drip drip all summer long.

The first month or two the pigmented wax bled and bled. I figured it would all run and then be gone. And then the end of July arrived and it was like 107° for a straight week hard. The wax that bled turned transparent, leaving behind only pigments.

I'm not totally sure what is next for these works. The bleeding of the wax and the long time spent outside have faded the luster. Perhaps it's time to lay down a fresh skin of wax to bleed next summer.

Back to Black, and White

9/9/2017

I often struggle with defining my art for people. Defining abstract art is an arduous task in and of itself. My personal abstract art has it's origins in dada, punk, and existential philosophy, guided by a hard-fought life lived with force under the umbrella of a postmodern capitalist society. In a sense, my abstract art is my punk manner of expressing love for living in force while rejecting simple ideas, like commodity and definition.

(While you and i have lips and voices which
are for kissing and to sing with
who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

ee cummings

voices to voices

That said, I can't explain where I got the itch to start capturing representational images again. I dusted off my camera, a 1984 Canon T70, and bought some black & white film. My intention is for these images to end up inhabiting my abstract work. For that to happen they will have to follow a path of physical & digital processes that will move the images through several mediums before they are ready. Right here with the camera is where it all starts. I don't know why I'm doing this but I can't wait to see where it goes.

Rumors

8/26/2017

There's a rumor going around that my work "rumors of war (dropped a bomb on me)" will be in the AVAA Member's Show at the Austin Art Space Gallery. Come check out the show September 8th - October 7th. The opening reception will be on September 9th, with live music from 6-8.

"rumors of war (dropped on bomb on me)" is a graphite and encaustic work on paper. I drew the scene while listening to news reports of the war. From San Salvador to Raqqa, war has been the background noise of my life. There's all this fighting and killing and machines, exploded, civilian casualties, insurgencies, covert operations. Drones are flown by kids in California, dropping bombs by happy hour. One bomb was so big, they made her the matriarch and you can watch her blow on youtube, though we can never be sure how many people she killed.

And all this goes on, what can I do? I go on living my life. I don't believe in war on principle but I also pay my taxes. On and on the war it goes. The army's a good way to get out of the ghetto, the barrio, suburbia. Machines are built and destroyed. Lives are ruined, extinguished. And I see it all on my phone. I read about it in the morning with my coffee, on the bus, on the toilet, in my bed at night. This war, I live with, this war without end, this underpinning of our society. Maybe in a few centuries they won't show our art in museums. They'll exhibit our trucks, improvised explosive devices, mortars and rifles, night-vision goggles, our bloodied boots and exploded cars.

not like that (it is)

6/11/2017

The Art That.

I’m not trying to make Some Thing that Looks Nice.

I’m not really an artist.

If I had to be a Thing I’d be more like a “quote/unquote” philosopher than an artist.

I’d also say that i do not put much stock in.

(art)

or ) philosophy ( i don’t care about art.

, as philosophy don’t give a damn ~

that time.

3/31/2017

Lying awake during a cold, moonless night in the Mojave desert I listened to the sounds of coyotes and freight trains. Unable to sleep as thoughts about the eternity of time and of infinite space washed through me, I felt as if I were floating without the ability to control my direction in the midst of a massive vacuum. I was seven years old. That same sense of existing in a vacuum, facing down the full expanse of time never left so I've tried many different methods of facing it, the most productive of which has been art.
I utilize art to express an essence of time passing and of being all at once. I want my art to illustrate the b-theory of time: an object exists throughout all of the points of time that it has been in existence. I attempt to illustrate time both passing and of being with a method that relies on the repeated growth, destruction and growth of a painting's surface. My art does not exist as an object or illustration; this art exists as a temporal body.

To Acrylic or Not?

3/25/2017

I am attempting to decide whether or not I should paint with acrylics again. When I created all of my lost art I switched easily between acrylic and encaustic/oil media. I used to say that I shared my thoughts with acrylic and I shared my soul with oil and encaustic. After I lost all of my art and moved to Austin I decided to only paint with my soul.

Lately I've considered painting with acrylic again. I'm not totally sure why. There are some pretty Big Deal life changes afloat. Some of these changes scare my wallet and I worry that I only want to paint acrylic because I know that I can turn them quick.

The quickness of the media is one of the reasons I enjoyed creating acrylic art. In a sense it was as if I painted acrylics to pass the time while waiting for my oil and encaustic works to cure. I like the quickness of the media but when I was young I liked the quickness of many things that I used to do until I got smart enough to stop doing them.

What do you think?