I'd like you to come to my party if you're not too busy picking dead leaves off stuff in your garden

So I'm in this art show called Corpus Exuberis with my friends in Pangloss Gravitron at the Emmanuel Gallery in Denver. The show will be up for almost two months, so we decided to have a party there this Thursday (August 15),  just because. It'll be sort of like a second opening. Or a pre-closing.  I'm proud to say the show is pretty darn good and worth seeing all on its own, yet I'd much rather have you come see it while I'm there.

But here's the thing: I wasn't going to tell you about this party. I was hoping you'd hear about it from somebody really cool, or read about it in WestWord, and that would make you want to join us. Then just today I was talking with Meagen, who's also in the show, and she admitted she hasn't been telling people either, out of a similar over-cautiousness about burning her friends out with too many event requests. So here we are just hoping people will somehow get the idea that our party is the happening place to be, but we're not promoting it because no one wants to be a burden to their friends. You see, I know your inbox is jammed up with a lot of requests to attend cool events by cool people all over town. I know this because I'm on a lot of the same lists that you are, and my Facebook calendar is overflowing with "maybes."  But I've just recently realized the "maybe" box mostly gets checked by friends who really have no intention of coming to your event. These people genuinely like you, and support your efforts, and they want you to know that. But they're not coming. They're picking dead leaves off their tomato plants, because that's another thing that really has to get done.

Let's all just admit we're a little burned out by the flood of social media event requests. I'm glad I get them. It's good to know what's going on, and at the last minute I might just like to show up to that barbecue fundraiser at that guy's house down in Castle Rock who I only met once. But in the meantime, I'm trying to take it easy on my own friends, so much so that it turns out I haven't sent one email out to my list this year. Not one. I'm afraid my hesitance to add to the social noise has distanced me somewhat from the people who are genuinely interested in what I've been up to. It's tricky stuff, navigating the intricacies of social etiquette with such a blunt and invasive technology. But now I'm putting it out there. This is the show I'd like you to come see. It's in two days. A whole bunch of your friends will probably be there. Plus, even if you came to the opening there will be some surprises. Meagen now has an audio component to her installation, I've added a hacked Talking View-Master to the show, and Tracy has made much progress towards the completion of her live painting "Tracing Grace."

Tracy will also demonstrate and invite others to test the effects of the prototypes built in support of "Grace's Law" (above) in the back courtyard of Emmanuel Gallery.  Documentation of levels of exuberance before, during, and after use will continue throughout the night. Plus we'll have live tunes by Amber Hamilton and Beer provided by Cannonball Creek Brewing Company.

Details are Here. Please join us if you're not doing some other thing.

Trail Etiquette

Every Sunday, the multi-use trails in Colorado are clogged with all sorts of weekend adventurers, from bird watchers to horseback riders, and each group simply tolerates the others. Horseback riders don't much like dog walkers. Fly-fishers and bird watchers dislike anyone who talks. And everyone wishes the mountain bikers were on some other course, including all the mountain bikers. Over the years I've flirted with membership in most of these tribes (except fly-fishing), and I can vouch that each has it's own rationale for why it should own the right of way, yet somehow we all manage to share the trails, and sometimes even a couple of beers back at the parking lot.

Because I hike all over the state, often by myself, I've made a lot of amateur psychographic observations about these user groups. In terms of general sociability, horseback riders rank up at the top. They are way chattier and kinder-spirited than all other trail users. Possibly this is because the horse is doing all the work, leaving riders free to socialize. The more physically demanding sports like mountain biking are at the anti-social end of the scale. But I give bikers a pass on the friendliness test, since most of them are riding at the extreme edge of their own abilities (regardless of skill level) and therefore are just barely in control of what they are doing. They've got both eyes glued to a spot about three feet ahead of their front tire, and may not even notice that you've pasted yourself uncomfortably against a rock wall in order to let them by. They rarely say hello, but they always thank you if they notice you scurrying off the trail to get out of their way.

By far, the most anti-social group I've ever encountered are the trail runners. I'm talking the "elite athlete" kind. The wild-eyed, sweat-glazed, barely-dressed men and women training for Iron Man type competitions. The kind that don't wear earbuds because they stopped needing workout mixes years ago. You might wonder how many of these people there can be out there. Well, I can tell you that their numbers are way over-represented in and around Boulder on any given Sunday.

I've tried trail running a few times and know it is grueling and that the last thing you need is to keep running into people and dogs and kids shambling around ahead of you on the trail, especially the chatty inattentive ones. Trail runners are focused on staying in the zone, which means keeping their heart-rates up and their brains basted in endorphins, all the while dodging roots and rocks. It's serious business. The "thousand yard stare" on their faces isn't the same kind you use on a city street when you pass a stranger but feel obliged not to interact, instead pretending there is something impossibly interesting just up ahead. The trail runner stare is ghostly and unselfconscious. If these athletes pass you without responding to your "good morning," and it makes you feel crappy and invisible, it isn't personal. The "F-U" they seem to radiate isn't for you specifically. Far from it, they are just trying to be alone, while going fast, in public, and you are simply an obstacle.

Usually when you meet someone on a trail there's a neutral moment of interpersonal positioning where each of you has to quickly decide whether or not to say hello. First you smile. If the other person smiles back, you're safe to venture a "good morning" or a simple "hey there." Whoever is more outgoing or socially dominant usually makes this move first. It's not a conversation. It's simply a kind way of acknowledging the other person, putting them at ease, and letting them know you think they're okay. Even dogs do it. When dogs meet on the trail, one will often raise its tail and begin wagging. Seeing this signal, the other dog will do the same (if all goes well). Even if they pass each other quickly with little subsequent interaction, the message was sent, received, and responded to in-kind. A simple dog hello.

After the first couple of trail runners passed me today without returning my morning salutations, I decided to do a little experiment. I greeted each person I met in exactly the same way. I looked them in the eye and simply said hello, in a friendly, but not unctuous manner. Even if they passed me from behind I did this. Then I inventoried the reactions. 14 of 20 trail runners did not respond. The six who did were surprisingly enthusiastic. I passed an additional 11 hikers, all responded in-kind. I even lucked out and saw three horseback riders, and as if to prove my point, all three launched into some story about seeing a bear cross the highway way up ahead and how one of the horses stopped in its tracks and refused to go any further so they had to turn around and ride this here trail we were on and did I know where it came out…? 

At the end of the day, my gripe about trail etiquette may be entirely inconsequential. I know this. I know it's everybody's right to not reciprocate social niceties, and to practice one's chosen sport interaction-free. If that's your choice, hooray for you. But I can't help thinking that each infinitesimal act of kindness (or its inverse) has to amount to something bigger. The same way the moon's pull on individual water molecules is immeasurable, but add up a few quadrillion, and you've got a tide.

On the way to the trailhead this morning some guy was tailgating me. I was going 52 in a 50 mph zone, so I figured he should pass me or just back off. Finally I stuck my arm out the window and waved him back with as much force as I could put into the gesture. It worked. He dropped back 3 car lengths, then 5, then 10. A few minutes later when I turned into the South Mesa Trail parking lot I noticed him take the turn also. As he got out of his car I made a mental note of what he looked like. Bald 40-ish white guy. Backpack. Hiking alone. Inevitably, an hour later we came upon each other from two separate trails that intersected. I gave him a wave. The friendly kind this time. He stuck his hand up in response. His wave said "sorry I tailgated you," mine said "no worries dude." His wave quickly added, "Enjoy your hike." Mine seconded, "You too." Our waves did all this in about one second, without aid of spoken language, and with neither of us breaking stride. I was already enjoying my hike, but just then it got a little bit better. Enough that I could feel the difference.

Break It To Make It

Hacked and modded Talking View-Master.

In the world of "Hacks & Mods," my efforts are rather unsophisticated. In case these words haven't made an appearance on your buzz-word radar yet, they refer to the practice of hacking, modifying, and sometimes "circuit bending" existing electronic hardware (usually off-the-shelf consumer stuff) in attempt to improve, or completely change the intended use of an item. While most of the hack & mod crowd are weekend hobbyists and seekers of whiz-bang novelty, there is a strident political stance to the efforts of many of the more advanced and experimental practitioners. You don't have to poke around their sites for very long before you notice a certain "anti-establishment" tone to a lot of the posts. Hacks are shared freely in an deliberate attempt to undermine the corporate control of technology and to democratize the re-engineered results. These folks believe strongly in freeing up technology and giving creative control to the little guy. Never mind most of us little guys wouldn't know what to do with that creative control. Program a Roomba to fetch a martini?  

Somewhere along this continuum between science fair tinkerers and revolutionary super nerds, you'll find a growing crowd of artists who practice hacking and modding. My own projects have centered on store-bought toys that were "re-imagined" or commandeered for alternative uses. This sort of re-contextualizing of objects is an extension of the kind of thinking that goes into my paintings. A couple of years ago I did a piece for Dana Cain's Love Show that involved a talking plush toy that I modded to read Craigslist "Missed Connections" in a monotone computer voice to gallery visitors.

Lonesome Bear reads Craigslist personals to gallery visitors

My latest project involves an old Talking View-Master that I found in a junk shop on Colfax. It came with a set of reels, which included a 3-D tour of the first Apollo moon landing in 1969. To my delight, when I got home I discovered it still works. Each Talking View-Master reel comes with a tiny clear plastic record attached, which spins at 78 RPM, containing a separate recorded message for each of the slides on the reel. When the user presses a button, a stylus engages the record, and the message plays over a tinny speaker inside the viewer.

 Record is clear so that light may pass through to slides.

I had this thing for over a year before it occurred to me that I should punk it. I began to imagine the bland 70's audio narration set to a spacey dub track. So I began trying to figure out how to digitize the sound on the little records, then "re-mix" it with a hi quality stereo audio track, and finally get it back onto the Talking View-Master. The thing was going to need a digital audio player, some decent headphones, and a reengineered front panel. The result is what you see here.

Before and after

I hollowed out the View-Master of all it's unnecessary hardware, this included the motor, stylus and speaker assembly. When modding, you often have to decide whether or not to permanently disable a feature or function in order to accommodate some new use. This decision can sometimes border on the philosophical, like whether or not to spray-paint some sad old piece of furniture that came down through your family. In my case, I needed room inside the View-Master to embed a digital audio player, some circuitry for the headphones and a charging mechanism. This meant my lovely 40 year old toy would lose much of its pure vintage charm, and all of its antique value. Fortunately, you can still find Talking View-Masters on Ebay. And for those of you lucky enough to already have one, its value just increased by some infinitesimal amount since I just removed mine from the available pool of functioning antique toys! So be it.

This tweaked View-Master now joins the suite of space exploration-related artworks that I've been creating over the past several years. It will be available for playing at the Pangloss Gravitron party at Emmanuel Gallery on August 15th, and during the Artist's Talk on August 29th.

If you don't make it to the show, here is a link to the audio remix I did of the View-Master moon-landing narration. Enjoy.

Holding Pattern - repost

1980.

Right after college I had a job as a security guard on the graveyard shift at The Fayette Shopping Mall in Lexington Kentucky. With my B.A. in art, this was the best I could do at the time. I suspected it was possibly the worst job ever, but didn't have much to compare it to. One night, just before Christmas, I found a bottle of Wild Turkey Kentucky bourbon in my mail cubby in the security office at the mall. A little tag said Merry Xmas, from the management. I made it about halfway through that shift without touching it.

One of my most dreaded obligations as a mall cop was investigating cars that had been left overnight in the parking lot. Usually these cars were parked way off in the darkest stretches of the lot, near the railroad tracks. They often contained people having sex. It was my duty to ask them to move along. If the cars were empty I was supposed to affix a giant day-glo sticker that read PARKING VIOLATION to the driver's side window. I discovered right away that people having drunk sex in a mall parking lot in Kentucky are not super welcoming to a kid with a badge, a flashlight and a can of mace. Certain that they had better weapons than I did, I took to doing this part of my job as the sun was coming up, when most of the cars were gone.

One night after a midnight showing of Rocky Horror at the cineplex, I found a bag of weed on the floor near the theater exit doors. I made a gift of it to the guys who ran the cleaning service, who I knew to be stoners. In return, I enlisted their help with my parking lot woes. They had a large vacuum sweeper truck which was used every night to scrub trash off the lot. This truck had lights all over it and the vacuum motor was insanely loud. The cleaning guys were in the habit of sweeping the lot at a troublingly high speed, probably because they were bored out of their skulls. That's where I got the idea to have them use their truck to gently intimidate anyone they might happen upon in a parked car. They took to this task with relish. It was as if I had just given them a promotion. Needless to say my trouble with parkers went away pretty quickly.

About half of my nightly rounds took place outside the mall. This involved creeping around the dumpsters in the loading bays behind all the stores with my mag light. After being startled out of my wits a couple of times by dumpster divers, I took to finding ways to make enough noise that the mall's nocturnal fringe dwellers would have a chance to scatter, and I could avoid confrontation altogether. Around this same time, inexplicably, a saxophone showed up in the Mall's lost and found. After weeks of eying it and hoping no one would claim it, I decided to borrow the horn. I bought a fresh pack of reeds, certain I could teach myself to play. I really wanted to be in a band, and this was back when everyone was adding horns to their rock bands. So I took to playing the borrowed horn at work, figuring I could use it both as a warning device on my rounds, and to stave off the mind-numbing dullness of being alone and awake in a mall at night.

My supervisor surprised me one night when I was sitting in the information kiosk practicing scales. He never said a thing about the horn, but that was likely because I had some goods on him that he was eager for me never to mention. One night I'd gotten to work a little early and caught him having sex with the manager from the Orange Julius on the black vinyl couch in the security office. He'd swung his one free hand at me as if to bat me away. I left quickly, but took the time to re-lock the door on my way out. I went and sat in my car until exactly midnight. When I re-entered the office to start my shift they were gone. I propped the office door open to air it out. I don't know if it needed airing out because I wasn't breathing through my nose. I wasn't taking chances. The Orange Julius lady never looked me in the eye after that, and I never said a thing to anyone. I enjoyed thinking my chances were pretty good at landing the next open slot on the day shift. That was until I was caught with the horn, and knew I'd been trumped.

The night I found my holiday gift of bourbon the skies opened up with a deluge that was weeks overdue - the kind of rain that stalls cars in underpasses and makes traffic lights blink red. I needed to start my rounds, but stood in the doorway waiting for the downpour to let up, feeling stuck, in more ways than one. I had recently admitted to myself that I was hopelessly trapped in some sort of holding pattern, without enough velocity to escape. Most of my friends from school had found jobs elsewhere or moved back home with their parents, while I stayed behind in the small college town and tried to imagine how to be an artist. I had spent a year at the mall and only had a folder of bad poetry and some rudimentary horn skills to show for my effort. Not to mention a reputation at the mall as an utter freak show. By day, I was attempting to carry on making paintings, exactly like I had just spent four years doing in school, but the handful I managed to complete looked exactly like an amalgam of my former professor's work.  Discouraged, I took to translating rock lyrics into french, a language I'd studied for three years but knew I'd never travel enough to really use. By the time I finished translating all the lyrics for Supertramp's "Breakfast in America" I knew something had to change. I had set my sights somewhat randomly on Chicago, and had pinned all my hopes on moving there to pursue the life-creative. I'd only visited the city twice before, and had no friends there, but was certain I wanted to live there. I knew the city would wake me up, if I could just scrape up enough money to get there. In preparation, I had already started dressing like an artist. I was wearing intentionally ironic suits from thrift stores. I stopped listening to Supertramp and Genesis in favor of Talking Heads and Patti Smith. If I wasn't yet an artist, I was damn sure going to do a good impersonation of one. There's some wisdom in the cliché, "fake it till you make it," and that was as close as I came to having a strategy.

The rain never did let up, and I knew it wasn't going to. Not that night. So I twisted off the cap on the bourbon, took a big gulp, stashed it back in my mail cubby, then headed out on my rounds. After all, I was 22 years old, and in charge of the entire Fayette Mall in Lexington Kentucky. I had a flashlight, a can of mace, it was raining, and I had a saxophone. I knew what to do.

Fake Friends

Some of us (myself included) aren't doing our homework.

I've been on Facebook for seven years now, and in that time I've managed to get connected to 370 friends.  Call me old fashioned, but I figure I should at least know someone - or know of them - if I'm going to let them into my Face World. Up until recently that's been my standard, and though it's left me with a rather humble friend count, (given the time frame), I don't have to worry about any of them violating my trust or causing me any sort of cyber-grief.

Lately, however, I've let my guard down a couple of times. Maybe it's because I am, after all, somewhat prone to Friend-Count Anxiety Disorder, or maybe like most of us, I love it when someone young and attractive wants to be my friend.  Either way, my recent lower standard for friend acceptance was based on whether or not the request came from someone who was already friends with the people in my existing network. I was making an assumption that these folks had already done the vetting.  But I was mistaken.


Meet "Millie"

According to Facebook, 55 of my close associates are already friends with Millie. A quick scan of these friends revealed that most of them are middle aged Denver artists, like me. Maybe as a group we are just more accepting, or less attentive to privacy concerns, or maybe it's the titillation of a request from a "hottie." Regardless, 55 of you said yes to Millie, though I highly doubt a single one of you knows her in real life.

Something about Millie never seemed quite right to me, so I didn't accept her overture of friendship when I received it six months ago. But I didn't reject it either. Instead I left her request unanswered in my Facebook inbox, where it sits to this day. Maybe I left it unanswered because I was waiting for Millie to prove she was "real" by showing up in my friend's news feeds. Or maybe It's because I wanted to write this blog and needed it for reference, either way Millie remains unconvincing to me. A glance at her Facebook Timeline reveals no narrative whatsoever, just a handful of boudoir "selfies," each of them with the heads cropped out of the photos, so that we are to assume they're all of the same person. I don't believe it's too grave a violation of good taste for me to categorize Millie as a fraudulent, composite Skank. Call me judgmental.

 

 If you do a reverse image search on Millie, what you'll find is that this stolen picture appears on a whopping 428 separate websites, all of them NSFW (that's Not Safe For Work, for those of you over 50, or who don't work in a cube farm). The origin of this picture is lost in the hall of mirrors of internet image piracy. It's impossible to know anything at all about the girl in this photo. We can't know whether she's a Millie or a Cassidy or a Tiffany. We don't know if she was a paid model or a kid whose picture was hijacked while sexting to her boyfriend. All indications of authorship, origin and intent have been stripped from the photo. All that is left is an artifact of desire. One that keeps on giving, apparently.

 
Meet "Jennifer"

According to Facebook, many of you are friends with Jennifer. Anyone care to vouch for her? I said yes to her request, assuming that she was someone I had recently met at a big art opening. She looked kind of familiar. I figured she would drop to the bottom of my active friends list along with all the other ex-coworkers, friends from high school and distant relatives who never really interact with me on Facebook, but all of whom are technically still my friends. Unfortunately, "Jennifer" had other ideas. One was to message me at 1:30 in the morning recently with four separate messages:

I added you because I liked ur photo.

Have u met any cool people on here?

I have to log off right now

Whats your cell number? I can jus text you right now

I couldn't unfriend Jennifer fast enough, but having awoken from a deep sleep, this normally simple procedure required immense mental effort. The next day I took to Google for a reverse image search, and learned that there are dozens of "Jennifers," "Jessicas," and "Ashleys" all using this same profile picture on Facebook.

This morning it occurred to me that I should check and see if any of my profile pics were being used falsely on the web. So I did a search on the following two images, which have both been used as my profile picture.

Not surprisingly, the one on the left didn't return any results other than the original post on Facebook. It seems the one thing no one is pretending to be on the web is an average looking middle aged white guy. We're more likely the ones doing the pretending.  But the other shot of me below the summit of Mount Yale returned 23 instances of misuse. So as long as you're doing something sporty, exotic or ballsy, people are going to want to steal it. I felt flattered and incensed at the same time.

The moral of the story

Okay, there isn't really a moral. Maybe we should just agree that these are sure some weird times, and there's a whole lot of info we need to collaborate on to help each other stay safe and sane. I suspect we could all use a little Amish-ization every now and then. The Amish aren't against technology per se. They are resistant to adopt any technology that doesn't directly support the strengthening of their communities, or that causes one to be selfish or prideful, or that distracts from the fundamental business of being faithful to God. For them, pretty much everything new and shiny falls into that category. In our world, we've tacitly agreed that participating in social media is critical to our communal well-being. Social media is the new "watering hole" and we can't possibly pull ourselves away from its influence in our culture. The real objective then, is to help each other become as smart as we can possibly be in this big out-of-control social experiment. To that end, I have a few recommendations to help ferret out the Millies.

First, don't assume your friends are any more on-the-ball with vetting friend requests than you are. Make a little effort to figure out if a person seems to be real and trustworthy. An empty timeline is a bad sign. So is a request from a user who just joined Facebook. Consider limiting access for people you don't know well. Facebook allows you control over which friends see what info. Get familiar with your privacy settings. If there's any doubt, don't accept a friendship request from someone unknown. There is no obligation to say yes to a total stranger.  Here is a link to seven critical things you can do to control Facebook privacy settings.
http://www.abine.com/blog/2012/do-your-privacy-a-favor-control-the-7-most-critical-facebook-settings-post-timeline/

Second, consider building a separate Facebook "Page" for your business. Broadly speaking, your Facebook profile is for your friends and family. Pages are for businesses and public personalities. A lot of my friends are artists or folks who operate small businesses. To us, the line between friends, supporters and customers is a fuzzy one. A few folks I know operate their Facebook profiles like Friend Farms, actively requesting and accepting pretty much any friend request, because they are trying to grow a business or increase exposure for their creative careers. Problem is, by design, a Facebook profile is set up to share personal info. If you want a tighter grip on who sees what, you'll have to get pretty granular with your privacy settings. Pages, on the other hand, are set up to provide more filtering and protection of personal info. Most folks find managing both a profile and a page to be a pain in the ass, but if you want to keep your customers out of your living room, and your clients out of your vacation photo albums, then you'll give it some consideration. Also worth mentioning, you're never going to track interaction with a Facebook profile, but pages have built in analytics for every post – something potentially useful if you're actively using Facebook to reach customers.

Third, get in the habit of doing some research. Reverse image searches can help you discover if something is amiss with someone's image usage (or one of your own!). There are several search engines offering reverse image searching, but Google is by far the most powerful. Bookmark this link, or better yet, keep it open in a browser tab.
http://images.google.com.
To understand how Google image search works, click here.

While you're at it, bookmark Snopes.com, a go-to site for hoax busting. There are other sites useful for putting the kibosh on internet hoaxes, but Snopes is the granddaddy of them all, and since many hoaxes circulate for years and years, it's good to have a "granddaddy" to reference. Also, Snopes is useful to keep open while you're on Facebook, particularly during election time. It can help defuse needless hostility caused by images with bogus facts and figures like this much-shared classic:

Read the Snopes debunking of the info in this graphic

Lastly, don't forget how easy it is to unfriend someone on Facebook. Go to your Friends list in Facebook. For each person on the list there is a "Friends" button to the right of their picture. Hover over it and you'll get a pop-up menu. Scroll to the bottom and select Unfriend. That's it. They won't get a notification, you will simply not show up in their friend list anymore. Welcome to passive/aggressive friends management at its finest!

Certainly there's more you can do, short of swearing off Facebook entirely, to protect your personal information.  I'm not overly paranoid with this stuff so I've just mentioned a few things that are top of mind. You may have additional strategies. I've gone back to playing it safe with the friend requests for starters.

Be safe. And say hi to Millie, if you see her.

No card says it

Mom and Dad, 1957

High up on my list of troublesome irks is the occasional need to buy a greeting card. Mother's Day cards are especially problematic. From a distance, most of them look exactly like sympathy cards. Clusters of embossed flowers with loopy, Sorry-For-Your-Loss typography. I always feel a little self-conscious when I reach for one. Opening them seems like stealing a peek at someone's diary. Not a diary that contains unguarded truth or salacious revelations. The other kind. The kind that is emotionally tidy and desperate to be read.

Being a writer of greeting cards has to be a thankless undertaking. You'd have to churn out messages with appealing moods and textures that seem at least partially truthful, while keeping the messages general enough to be somewhat attractive to large numbers of people. The cards you wrote would need to be wistful, but not melancholy, nuanced, but not emotionally complex. And above all, they would need to accommodate the various elephants in the room without even a hint of their presence. An impossible task. One designed to fail. No wonder then that selecting the right card is an exercise in finding the one that fails the least to say what you mean.

When I was a kid my parents socialized a lot in our home, but my brother and I never got to stay up late and hang out with the grownups. We'd be tucked in bed at the appointed hour no matter what. I used to love drifting off to sleep to the sounds of adults laughing and telling stories down the hall.  The stories probably weren't meant for young ears, but I wasn't much interested in their content anyway. It was enough to know the people in charge of my world were happy, and to hear them cut loose with their friends was reassuring. My mother's voice was musical and floated above the others in a pleasing way. To this day I equate the sound of her laughter with a sense of well-being, but to my knowledge there is no card that says Dear Mom, Thanks For Laughing.

One afternoon when I was about ten my cousin and I made a fort out of a refrigerator box. We cut tiny holes for windows and decorated the inside walls with magic markers. Our mural quickly degenerated into scatological hieroglyphics. My cousin spelled out every dirty word we could think of, while I drew anatomically incorrect naked ladies. We giggled ourselves silly. Later, my aunt discovered our debauchery and called my mother to accuse me of being a bad influence. I listened from the next room as I heard my mother say, "My son doesn't even know those words." Up until this moment my mom had convinced herself that she was successfully raising the only child in history that not only did not use cuss words, he didn't even know them. Never mind I could conjugate them backwards and forwards. My mother has always given me the benefit of the doubt, whether I deserved it or not. I'd be thrilled to find a card thanking her for that.

I may have been off the hook for the swear words, but not so the drawings. No one even had to ask who did them. I got grounded, but not long after that my mom got me private art lessons. Partly it was to keep me out of trouble, but also she had been paying attention to my constant art making and thought it might be something worth formally encouraging. When I look back at those drawings they seem completely unremarkable, with the possible exception of my dinosaurs. They were tight. Regardless of what my mom's motivation was, knowingly or not, she set me on the path I'm still on today. But try as I may, I can't find a card that thanks her for taking my dinosaur drawings seriously.

At a certain point I stopped letting my mother kiss me in public. After that I began dodging her good-night kisses. The moisture on her lips would make a little cold spot on my cheek that I'd instantly wipe off. That was probably hurtful to her, but I wouldn't have known. She persisted for a while, trying to win me back from my own impending adolescence, but I was pulling away, growing up - and apart. There were times when I would have gone back and reclaimed a few of those unwanted kisses, but the road to adulthood allows no u-turns. If I chose to be sentimental about it, I'd look for a card that let my mom know her affection wasn't lost on me. Not even in those surly teen years.

 Mom, actual size.

These days I only see my parents two or three times a year. With 2000 miles between us, that's the best we can manage. My mom always wears her orthopedic hiking shoes when she comes out here to Colorado. I fix her and dad up with some trekking poles, and they oblige me as I take them on the mildest trails I can find. We've been hiking together for years. It's what we do. On a recent trip I drove them up a remote jeep trail to have a picnic on a mountain pass high above Crested Butte, Colorado. It was a blustery summer day and the sun beat down on us through the thin atmosphere at 11,000' elevation. We spread our picnic on the hood of the car and washed down turkey sandwiches with Gatorade. Far below us the valley sloped into a glacial bowl filled with summer's fading wildflowers. The first hint of storm clouds were lazily assembling on the horizon. Above us towered Cinnamon Mountain. I knew my folks would never have chosen that place for a picnic, and that my mother was way outside her comfort zone, what with the 4-wheeling, lack of guard rails, and no restrooms. They indulged me, because as mid-westerners, my family is easily smitten with the severe beauty of Colorado, but also because they are learning to trust me to deliver them safely to and fro in the wilderness – which is something.  If I could find a card that said Dear Mom, Thanks For 4-Wheeling With Me, I'd feel like I was getting somewhere.

It's foolish to think something from a card rack could tell my stories for me, or could be grateful in ways that really mattered. No card does that. Flowers don't do it either, though they are an excellent place to start. There are many other ways to be thankful, and I'm just beginning to explore them.

Happy Mother's Day.

For Jeanine Howell

Lifting the Lid

 Double Rainbow Plans Acrylic and ink on canvas, 46" x 46", 2013

This is a different sort of blog post for me. I've never really been interested in talking about "process" where it concerns my own artwork, mostly because I'm just a painter, and there's no real mystery to what I do. I'm not interacting with mold cultures or programming micro-controllers in the name of art. There's nothing "performative" or interactive about what I do. I sit in front of an easel and slowly render things.

But like most folks, I'm fascinated with the details of other artist's creative practices. There are some artists I'd love to hang out with and watch while they work. It would probably be pretty boring, not to mention totally creepy and distracting for the artist, but I would jump at the chance to see how they get from A to B. In the big picture, an artist's sources of inspiration, his or her work-flow habits, whether or not they're a drinker, and who they sleep with aren't supposed to matter. Art is supposed to be able to "stand on its own" without leaning on a bunch of stories. But I can't help suspect that art never, ever does stand on its own. Not entirely. Social context and the artist's personal history always inform the work. It's one thing to know Mark Rothko intended his paintings to be "spiritual," it's another to know he was a depressed suicidal alcoholic who sought transcendence through his creative practice. Each painting he completed was a milestone on a desperate journey of self-redemption. We might look back now and decide he was tragic, but at the height of his fame, Rothko painted like his life depended on it - like each painting would keep him in the world a little longer.

These sorts of stories aren't just told to keep kids awake in art survey classes. They help give us access to an artist's psyche, and to place them in a meaningful historic context. It is impossible to know these tales and not be influenced by them. We are, after all, story-telling creatures.

So without further delay, I've decided to lift the lid on my own process. Not because I think there is anything novel about it, but because its ordinariness allows uncomplicated access to the ideas behind the work. 

 

Double Rainbow

Recently, I ran across this double rainbow diagram while perusing images in an old science textbook. I am drawn to these kinds of diagrams because they are attempts to describe complex principles in highly abstract manner meant for ease of instruction. But I also like them for their metaphorical potential when the viewing context is deliberately shifted. I kept returning to this image from time to time to see if I could build a painting around it. Rather than looking like a description of how double rainbows actually work, it began to look like a plan for how to make one, if such a thing were possible. The title Double Rainbow Plans popped into my mind, and almost immediately I wondered what sort of person would be making plans for a double rainbow. A child, probably. Someone beginning to imagine the life ahead. Someone maybe on the doorstep of puberty. Someone with a lot of belief, and more than a little uncertainty.

Around this same time I began exploring the idea of doing "double-portraits." These show two views of the same person interacting with him/herself. It was a rather literal way of picturing the self split along the lines of belief/doubt, action/inaction, confidence/fear, and so on. I began looking at my friend's children as possible models. Preferably the parents would be creative types, so there wouldn't need to be a whole lot of cajoling and explaining. When you're asking to photograph someone's children, there's a whole Pandora's box of concerns that could spring open. Fore sure it needed to be done by a professional photographer in a real studio, not in my basement studio; and with a parent present and involved. It was going to cost money.

Pretty quickly I thought of an artist friend I have, Jennifer Jeannelle, and remembered that her kids were not only the right age, and the right sort of "look" I was going for, but having an artist for a mom, they were used to being roped into wacky creative endeavors. I had even seen them doing performance art. I didn't know Jennifer that well, so when I reached out to her it was with great faith that this would make sense to her. I described the double rainbow and the double portrait over the phone without showing her anything. Immediately she began offering great suggestions on wardrobe. She also sold the idea to her kids, Sophie and Eric, so I knew this was going to work. The photographer Anthony Camera was available to do the shoot, and the kids had the following week off for spring break. Perfect.

For the main image, I wanted Sophie to be holding hands with herself. This would involve some Photoshopping, but with Eric's "stand-in" hand to hold, I knew I could get what I wanted. What I hadn't counted on was the sibling's lack of enthusiasm for holding hands with each other. After some coaxing, they settled into their roles, with instructions to keep their hands in exactly the same spot so each of the shots would more or less line up when they switched chairs. The images above show Eric leaning comically away from his sister. Though he wasn't thrilled about holding her hand, he is leaning because we needed him to keep his shadow off of her.

Sophie was directed to have two distinct attitudes in the shot. On the left, she stares straight ahead into the camera, with a look of confidence and the tiniest hint of a smile. This version of herself was to be capable and in-charge. Her other "self" was to lean slightly away, with a look of uncertainty. Both kids took this assignment seriously and gave me exactly what I was looking for, with almost no effort.

After staring at these shots for a couple of days, I decided I liked the effect of the gray sweep we shot the kids against. I had intended to replace it with something else, but the gray began to grow on me.  It just needed some sort of graphic element in the background to activate the space.  I also decided that I didn't like the theater seats in the shot and began looking on Google for something more dramatic. I found a French settee that was shot at a workable angle and had an interesting look. By changing the color from burnt orange to lime green it achieved a pleasant ridiculousness that contrasted nicely with the seriousness of French furniture. The scroll fragments in the background were "stock" illustrations left over from a graphic design job that I licensed them for, but never used.   They went well with the settee, and helped frame the central figures in a way I liked.

At this point I should say that most artists pursue a certain "look" that strikes the right balance between what is expected of them, and what allows for a satisfying deviation from that same expectation. Call it a "style," or if that's too crass, think of it as artistic parameters. Either way, an artist often does a given thing simply because it is the kind of thing they've decided they do. This is part of what gives a body of work coherence. I chose the graphic scrolls in the background because I've been using flat graphics like that for quite some time, and because lately I've shifted toward combining imagery that is contradictory in terms of historical period, allowing me no fixed reference point in time.

After a week of planning, shooting and Photoshopping, it was finally time to make a painting. Along the way I'd decided that this painting needed real presence. I wanted to make it life-size, but it would have been about 6' square. I settled on 46" square, which corresponds to the largest size I can fit in my car.

I've always been up-front about my use of a video projector to rough-in the outlines of my imagery on a blank canvas. I want the proportions to be right, especially with the human figure, and I simply don't have the time, skill, or interest to render everything freehand. I adore the people who can do that, but I'm not one of them. That said, I only trace the outside shape of things. There's simply no point in getting too granular with the tracing lines, because as soon as you begin applying paint you cover them up. One way or another, a painter has to know how to render something using paint. Hence, all the photos taped to my canvas for reference.

Usually, when I get near the completion of a painting I find need to put it away for a few days and go do something else, because by then it has completely taken over my brain and I can't even see it anymore. The hope is that when I return to it again I might actually be able to apprehend it with some degree of clarity. It's usually then when some detail pops out at me and I realized I've gotten a shadow wrong or made a leg too big. After a few rounds like this the work settles into its final form. If all goes well the work may begin to make me smile. Sometimes I really dig it and rush it onto Facebook. Days later I may decide it's not done.

Sometimes I can labor over a painting for weeks without knowing whether it's any good. When it isn't, I have no trouble marching it out to the garage. I've got literally dozens of canvases languishing out there, waiting to be reborn as entirely different paintings. But when it is good, and you move it out to your gallery, it's surprising how big a hole it can leave in your psyche. I'm usually lost for a few days when a painting I love leaves the studio. It stands to reason, given the dozens (sometimes hundreds) of hours I've spent conjuring the thing into being. I miss the people in my paintings. Sometimes I just miss the presence of the thing. Still it takes me by surprise when it's gone, and the only workable remedy is to get started on another one.