a new year

so i returned the camera. i took a bunch of cool photos, but ended deleting them by accident. life is funny like that. anyways hey! it's the last day of 2010! what did i learn this year? that you don't need much other than love and friendship. that i'm better off with keeping my mouth shut. i learned that evil is not all that bad. that people are really flakey, and that i'm kind of a walking penis sometimes. i learned a lot of things, laughed a bunch and cried a little. regular person type stuff. so hey, enjoy the last photos i took and happy new years!

glass angel

so here's the painting i did the other night with a little help from my friend trent. 20 hours + trent's help = rad painting. i'm not sure if he know's that he helped me ha.

i sent it today to florida for the art/heart show i mentioned a few weeks ago. gah i wanted to do 3 paintings but i had this terrible art block.. if i had the money i would have sent a few doors down but since i'm broke as hell i couldn't... i'm lucky i got to send this one. i've given the piece to the show, so all the proceeds go to the charity. for the kids people! if you're in florida next month go to the show buy some stuff and help out your fellow humans. it's for the kids man!

guerrilla art show!

so last night was fun. i set up shop at a closed liquor store that had the doors boarded up, right between several bars.. i had five paintings (2 doors two panels and one glued cigarette box's) and in between the doors i nailed a piece of wall paper. i had decided earlier to do a live painting, to help pass the time.. and also as a way to do some illegal art on the down-low. i painted a cliche gabrielesque face but then i started cutting parts out here and there and immediately painted over the holes... thus turning the painting into a stencil as well.. at one point there were several police right next to me because of some sort of bar-related mishap.. it was very entertaining to be doing something like i was, with a spotlight on me, getting away with mischief right under the laws nose. rad. as for my first stencil, you can check it out on sprague nexct to the ridpath.. kinda sloppy, but sorta hesh and thus i still like it.

this is a picture of the painting i did last night.. some random drunk dude took with his cell. not the best pic but whatever. man it was cold out!

i wish you could see this in person :(

so i looked at the head on a plate painting i did for zach... and i didn't like the composition.. it wasn't "zazzy" enough for a gabriel, so i spent over 20 hours re-painting it. of course i don't have much of in the way of photography, so my lady took this picture for me.. but this one you really should see in person. it's got a surprise in it but i won't tell. it's funny how much this piece cost me, the paint isn't free after all, and i've spent a lot of time on it... just to give it away. honestly i don't like that one bit. i deserve to get something out of this. sigh. but i won't. meh. whatever.

so yeah here is my current work in progress.

i had a discussion last night while i was working on it, about how, if i feel apprehensive about how dark something is then it's kinda like an indicator i'm on the right track... as far as the whole "scary" thing goes... i was apprehensive about putting the head on a plate ala john the baptist..

i'm guess you know what i did. heh.

yeah this monstrosity is for this guy zack. i'm not getting paid, he said it was for some event as part of a raffle or something. dude wanted something "winter themed" and i'm like "there is nothing more wintery than a persons head on a plate with tentacles coming out of the mouth strangling a bird, right?"

so, word to the wise, you want free art, you're gonna get something unexpected. heh.

i've been naughty :(

i had the dawning realization that i'll prolly never be taken seriously as an artist ( maybe because i use non-words like "prolly"?). i'm untrained, uncultured, i don't know jack about modern art, and only a tad about art history. i paint ugly things that people tend to not like, and i'll most likely never be in serious galleries. sure, i've had shows here and there, but i'm not gonna be in the louvre any time soon. i'm ok with not being accepted or taken seriously and what-have-you, BUT... i do want people to see my work. maybe it's vanity. i never showed it when i was younger, but someone very wise told me if i am not showing the work i'm just masturbating, and that has stuck with me ever since. half (or more) of my art is actually played out with the observer. seeing is believing, so to speak. thus, well, i'm gonna start putting my art where people have no choice but to see it. take that! the current series i'm going to be working on is this idea i had about class-ism and the privileged few, entitled "have/have not". keep both eyes out...

seriously? again? GAH!

*insert loud, long audible sigh here

so a few months back i posted a blog about a mural i had to fix because of graphitti, not that i'm anti graphitti, it's just what "they" did to the mural wasn't cover it with more art but rather just screw up my mural by replacing my anatomical heart with a symbol heart.. i didn't groove on it. anyways, i go down to where the mural is sometimes, it's a really pretty neighborhood... and lo! the mural is screwed up even worse than before.. but this time it was the city, repairing the concrete.. so yeah. i had to repaint the mural. AGAIN. maybe i should give up, just not care...

but thats not my style really.

i am not finished, i need to find a ladder and figure out a new motif for the giant white space (it used to say "never stop reaching). anybody got some ideas?

adventures in couch surfing

so this couch surfer is named cheeks, and i met him last year. he just walked into my old house like he owned the joint and i just was stoked on how chubby, gregarious and playful he was. he disappeared for a bit and one day he showed up, alot skinnier, his side shaved with a huge sewn up gash in the middle. he now shows up at my squat frequently, eats some cat food and gets love every-other day or so. i hope he sticks around for the winter.. even though i'm allergic to cats i still love them. especially cheeks :)

from the garden to the kitchen

just because i'm a starving artist doesn't mean i actually starve. it just means my art is terrible and thus i'm broke. to circumvent this lack of money, i garden and cook my meals. fast food is dumb.

today i picked some apples, dug up some carrots, found a potato and picked some peppermint, tomatoes and of course garlic.

simmered for 20 minutes with some soy milk and curry and sea salt, and of course cooked some rice at the same time.

yum. taste bud orgasm. you have no clue.

book cover?

so this poet i know named david is getting published again and he asked to use an image from my one of my sketchbooks. sweet. i got some work to do on it but yeah. sweet.

adventures in couch surfing

the other day i get a knock on the garage door, and lo! infront of me are two travelling hippies and their two hippy children. they were in town on their way to a festival where they intended to play some music and needed a place to stay for a few nights. done and done. i fed them spaghetti and the kids snaked my private cookie stash. dylan , sunny and kids, i hope your travels continue safely and that the hash flows freely for you. :)

remember, talk is cheap, it's all about action. help people, be the change.

small potatoes

so slugs ate up the leaves to my potatoes, so yeah, they didn't grow all that much.. infact everything from the ol' guerrilla garden turned out kinda small, but what the hell, it has been fun! garlic and carrots. tomatoes are still not ready (but soon!)

war shall never be finished

this is a workinprogress photo of "war", 3rd in the series and the heaviest damn thing i've ever had the misfortune to haul all over the place. i left it unfinnished at this point, for i think maybe war is an unending thing, that which can never be finnished.. but i have a few issues with the piece that i shall dial down before i show it. as with most of my posts, this is a terrible photo so my apa polly logies. esentially it's a big blast door from an unnameable basement, and like all in this series is found metal. this one is great as a screen of sorts akin to those asian style folding screens, and as such is one of my more utilitarian works. hey, y'know what? thanks for reading this. i frickin' love you.

adventures in couch surfing

all the names have been changed to protect the paranoid. gotta love security culture :|

so it's been brought to my attention that though i'm technically homeless, the squat where i reside is able to facilitate other folks, and as such i have hosted a fair number of travelling folks, whether anarcho-train kids or hippies or squeegee punx. so, i'm gonna start blogging about my guests, in an attempt to remind folks that being human is something even the poorest of the poor can do. so with no further ado, meet "grif". it's funny, i saw him with a backpack on, we walked and talked a bit, then he noticed my spoke card on my bike, done by a kid named "swampy" who fell off a train almost two years ago, and whom i hosted after his spill. grif said "swampy!" and i said "wait you know this guy?" turns out they were friends. it is a small world, right? and of course they both know my spiritually adopted sister MJ. but alot of people know her.

A Walk to Beautiful

i fricking' love pbs and the nova program. visit this page to watch the moving, emmy award winner "a walk to beautiful" and maybe if you can, donate to keep television sane. public broadcasting, proving socialism works since 1970!
A Walk to Beautiful | NOVA | PBS Video

gaza in portland 2010

so yeah. i love gaza. i went and saw them a few months ago, remember my true believers?

with coalesce and converge and some other yahoos in the lovely rose city. well uh, i said i would post videos of the bands but i never did. sorry. heres the gaza video from that night. jon doesn't care that i posted this i'm sure. best quote ever from him "every time a church is burned a society gets it's wings"

don't burn churches kids, thats for black metal peoples like burzum. i love you!

the first of the seven seals

acrylic and watercolor on found metal

yay! pestilence is done! (sorta maybe?) i've been screwing around with this concept of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse idea for a while.. alot of people bring up that i only paint women, which is not true (most the figures in my sketchbooks are men or at the very least asexual) but it's true, alot of my large symbolic pieces are female-centric. woman have played a huge role in my life, so it's a dominant theme. but for good ol' death and destruction i had to bring out the boys. it makes sense to me somehow? i play with gender roles alot, switching jesus's supposed gender to that of a woman happens in my work, but for this part of my evil series i went with the boys. thanks to kim for the pic (again.. man i owe you!)

bad photos of good art / insomnia is not glamorous

sorry i haven't posted in forever. i've no camera so getting pics of art i do is a pain. this door was owned at one point by a guy named steve, but it's huge and heavy so he couldn't take it. i sold it last year for 50 dollars. every time i see a small, bad painting with a "$500/sold" i just want to set myself on fire. i wonder if you know this feeling. it's a pretty low place, emotionally. i cut myself making this painting. thats my blood on it (underneath the left hand, your right..)

anyways, on top of this seemingly insurmountable depression, this brutal insomnia (real insomnia is not cool, it's hell) these bad photo's of this nice door i painted, the fact that my total income this year has been 120 dollars (that's not a typo) and my knee being infected from a bike accident i had the other day... on top of all this, blogger is being a pesky bastard and has made actually posting this lame rant so annoyingly difficult that i'm this close to just walking into oncoming traffic. the screen printing place i had an interview at didn't call back "either way" like they said they would.. gah i'm at my wits end. so for all you people maybe feeling a bit down about life, hey, at least you're not me, right? none-the-less, i'm still here, fighting the good fight. never give up on your dreams, even if they kill you, if you do, you might as well be dead anyways.

i worship graphite

i've often thought deeply on the subject of gender role in religion, why "god" and by extention moses jesus mohamed ect are all males... the first abrahamic mythological female character people around here recall is the virgin mary for some reason? sometimes, in my brain, i reverse the gender roles, pretend jesus or mohamed  was a woman... i'll stop boring you..


gah


here's a painting of mary. magdalene or the virgin. you pick. 

conte, acyrlic, pressed particle board..
and OF COURSE graphite.


pain to take pics of.. SHINEY

                                                                                                                          

depression vs romance

i'm really depressed. this sort of thing happens, typically for no reason. well, thats not entirely true. my life is depressing. somehow i can happily ignore this fact 99% of the time, but as i lay in the dark of the garage where i'm squatting last night i couldn't stop thinking about how tired i feel, how hopeless my situation is and how i will probably die homeless and penniless. but life isn't all that bad right? after all, i am in love... i think if i could trade my love for a normal life i wouldn't. in other news i've been offered a spot at iyollo, a gallery in houston texas. now just how i'm getting my work down there in such sort notice will be a miracle. anyways, here's an old sketch for your viewing displeasure.

stabbed through the chest!

so here is another door painting (it's totally up for grabs) and possibly the last i'm doing for a while. the fact is, i'm too broke and these things are unsellable in terms of transporting them. my friend justin aerni says i should sell them for like $600 with free shipping i.e. $100 goes to shipping.. my paypal isn't dialed in just yet though so money would just sit in the account.. and six hundred dollars is way more than i'd expect anyone to pay. i'm terrible at selling my art. i like this piece, it's very emotional.. i was going through a hard time (when am i not?) and felt betrayed by people that i thought were my friends. meh, shit happens. have a great day!

warning: my art induces epilepsy

so here's some pics of the door painting i finished recently... funny story, the owner of this piece came to look at it after i finished it, and he brought along his girlfriend.. after a few minutes of us all looking at it the girlfriend fell face first in front of the door, nearly nailing her face with the antlers on the ground. so uh, my painting either induced a seizure or cause her to faint... either way that was the best compliment i think i have ever gotten. interesting note to this: the door came from a ukrainian church. true story.

please steal from me

i ride the fence of copyright law. i don't like the idea of owning ideas. you'd think this has to do with art, that being what i do, and it does, sure.. but my concern is over seeds. because a gmo seed is intellectual property, the owner, if so inclined, can sue a person for using the seed without permission. so lets say you are a small yield farmer growing organic corn... a few miles away is a farmer who's crop is gmo corn... if the gmo corn's pollen get's in the air and pollenates the organic corn, not only is the organic farmer screwed out of his crop next year (unknowingly until testing) he can also be sued for his plants being contaminated with the gmo's. the gmo farmer isn't doing the sueing either.. he's just a sad victim of the corporate giants who control the seed industry.

this is how farmers get screwed. because of intellectual property. i'm no expert and i'm lacking in my info, so watch the documentaries "king corn" & "food inc". here's some reading, which i appropriated like a good anarchist.
http://www.tangledwilderness.org/pdfs/copyright-web.pdf

while the portland operation spins it's wheels

so, lemme just start by saying that never in a million years did i even think any of this would happen. kinda surreal for me.. yesterday, i totally rode around portland with sean ingram of coalesce, one of my all time favorite bands. here he is fixing a flat he got in seattle.

so here is us starting the bike ride in earnest, not really eventful, but boy did we tear the ass out of pdx's asphalt

and here we are chilling, about to witness an epic handstand on a skateboard 

after our epic ride to the polo house (which we never really found but we run into medic mike), sean, nate ( from converge) and i ate lunch and talked old school skateboards. that was sweet. then of course the show. fuck goddamn. lemme just say that sean is the shit. not only did he get me into the show, he introduced me to so many awesome people... i'm really indebted to him. i gave jon (from gaza) a painting and he hooked me up with a shirt, and some random dude gave me a converge shirt (wretched world..) so i kinda made out like a bandit? got to talk with john pettibone for a bit and with jacob bannon about art technique. so uh, yeah? frigging awesome. i'll post some a bit of each bands set (gaza, coalesce, converge) later on today.

such awesome times, don't even mind too much that i had nowhere to go and slept (barely?)on the sidewalk last night, or that i broke the heck out of my glasses.. no big deal.

portland is weird

well the trip to portland was fun, if not a little confusing; i got lost so many times! i got pulled over by a cop for not having a light on my way to roscoe's house, watched a bumfight and rode the hell out of my bike everywhere. heres a video of my trip to portland from vancouver on my fixie. click on the links for the rest of the bike riding videos.

part 2 part 3 part 4

after a while of being lost and feeling a bit lonely, i finally found my way to where my friend roscoe has been staying, with his friends the manholes. heres a video of the cat at the house... so epic!

and this is a fight i saw downtown and thought it was too awesome to NOT post. keep portland weird!

so far not doing too bad, a bit broke but whats new. tomorrow: converge, coalesce, gaza!

olympia! bikes! portland? stuck?

so i got a rideshare @ 6:45 this morning to oly.. i didn't sleep so i could be awake for it... i think i've been up more than 24 hrs. pretty much all just to see coalesce, a band i've been listening to for like 11 or so years but have never seen live. i biked from vancouver to portland (not as short as i thought but still awesome) and now i'm stuck as hell. it's cold and i'm sleeping in the streets tonight probably but it's totally worth it. thinking about going to roxy and get some food.

space money be praised

i got approved for food stamps;

terriaki marinated mushroom, tiny green olives filled with anchovie, quatered artichoke hearts, roasted garlic cloves, feta cheese, mozzerella, colbey jack, champane pasturized chedder cheese, avacado, salt pepper, cayenne pepper, olive oil. ate it out in spokane valley with my RPG friend ben. afterwards we went to the midnight showing of ironman 2, which was excactly as i expected it to be, mindless fun. best part: free ticket and ice cream cones we smuggled in. spoiler alert! one word: Mjöllnir

best pizza you'll ever ever have. thanks to mary for the gif.

book cover

a while back i did a cover with my friend  justin aerni for a cool flip book called  my hands were clean/Dr. Gonzo  by authors tom bradley  and deb hoag. check it out. tom bradley is awesome.

005, 006, 007

 the five rite live six crowns seven left handed

ink, acrylic, blood, sharpie, burned & collaged "The Interpretation of Dreams" , spit on cardboard.

i think that about sums it up.

thanks to mary for the great scan.

bike porn?

ok, maybe she's not a cinelli with an aerospoke wheelset but she's mine and she's classy. word up.

so the other day levi took some pics of my bike elza.. i'm sorry, but i really love my bike. at one point a tiny bird landed on the handlebars, but we missed that shot. dang!

002

ink, acrylic, sharpie, typed and collaged paper on cardboard

so i started a project a while back (who knows if i'll ever finish) where i was going to paint 666 works of various sizes, with the obvious theme being sin and despair and, well, evil. there's 002. ideally, after i'm done with them i'd like to have a show where only the owners of the works can go, and have a masquerade party and people will be like "hi i'm #234! who are you?" eh? it cost me 7 bucks to scan this thing.. i'm officially broke. totally worth it.

can't forget now..

so i've forgotten my friend isabelle's birthday like twice, i'm a bad friend that way i guess. to make up for it i decided to tattoo her bday on my ankle. i hope it evens things out maybe? terrible idea to do it at 5 in the morning but whatever... i gotta stay up so i can go to dshs this morning to try and get some help with my whole homeless/jobless/foodless shtick. wish me luck? btw writing upside down is not my forte, cut me some slack? damn do i hope i got the date right.

garden!

"Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders." -- Henry David Thoreau

my favorite food is probably the potato.

so in this years garden, i tried this trick, where you stack up a few tires and plant potatoes in them. come harvest, kick over the stack of tires. no digging! my potatoes are kicking ass. i have garlic and butter lettuce and other random plants with wildflowers everywhere too. it's a mess but i'm ok with that. i like letting nature do it's thing. who's down for some french fries later on this year?

the birds have taken over my ex-house along with dead peoples stuff

found a bird in my old house, flying around all crazy.. caught it with my cat-like reflexes.

isn't she cute? i didn't eat her though.. set her free like a good animal lover.

uh so yeah, the ol' 1414 residence is now a thrift store? come on by if you'd like to check it out, there is some cool shit to be scored... though i suspect that some of the items to be found are that of the dead.. i am not to be held responsible for any cursed/haunted goods. some my paintings are available too, though they look spooky i promise no evil spells have been cast on them (as far as i know..) proceeds go to the polly judd park fund (known to some as hobo mountain or the wasteland)

yes that is mr hankey and a vhs copy of dr. strangelove and aladin and the lion king. and a dream catcher and a beer stein from gonzaga (!?) and a tiny mandolin. this place is filled with neat crap so come on over and take a look. bbq this weekend! woo!

mural-tastic?

so, as promised, heres some pics of the mural i did.. i think i may still need to do a little work on it..last year someone messed up the original anatomical heart i did and replaced it with a symbolic one? so yeah i had to go back fix that... it's located somewhere in peaceful valley in spokane washinton.

also tonight i made a cozy for SAL, so i can keep her safe and, well, cozy. i guess thats why it's named a cozy huh?

i'm stoked for yarn type things lately.. i blame Judith Scott.

graphiti fix and julia child

yes it's been a while.. sorry.. my housing situation is crazy.. uh yeah, squatting with permission? while you're working that out in your heads, i'll tell you about about whats up with my art world.. yesterday i worked a bit on a mural i did last year that was tagged and marked up. i'll post pics soon. damn damage control.. i'm not big enough to let go of my art being violated yet... also i may be doing a comic for a local publication called "chaotique", which is printed via offset printing press... very old tech and super neato. that deadline is june so i got a bit of time to think over what i want to do. any ideas?

i felt a bit bad about not posting lately, because, and i admit this with trepidation, i'm watching "julie & julia" and really enjoying it, and it reminded me of my lonely little blog here.. pics of mural soon i promise.

he doesn't need any help with exposure but check out my friend justin aerni's art anyways.

http://www.justinaerni.com/

and if you still feel like surfing check out my friend brian's art community, heck, join if you'd like.

http://www.darkruins.com/