January 30, 2006
Hotel California
Today, I'm delivering a painting to a show Dan Hug and Roger Dickes have put together at Glendale's Community College, "Hotel California":
THE GLENDALE COLLEGE ART GALLERY PRESENTS:
?HOTEL CALIFORNIA?
organized by Daniel Hug and Roger Dickes?HOTEL CALIFORNIA?, the upcoming exhibition at The Glendale College Art Gallery, takes a casual snapshot of Los Angeles painting in the early millennium. The intention of this show, which consists of twenty-one small paintings under 24? x 36?, is to, with a relaxed hand, strike a chord that sounds like painting in this city.
The selection of artists and works in the show is diverse enough whereby one would see what might be similar or dissimilar, harmonious or dissonant, within the range of material presented. Otherwise, ?HOTEL CALIFORNIA? celebrates the bringing together of an impressive array of artists, satisfying the curiosity of the organizers with regard to how such a show might look.
The list of participating artists is as follows: Alicia Beach, Linda Besemer, Amy Bessone, Kristin Calabrese, Ingrid Calame, Lecia Dole-Recio, Mari Eastman, Anoka Faruqee, Kim Fisher, Will Fowler, Monique Van Genderen, Violet Hopkins, Dennis Hollingsworth, Karen Lofgren, Jodie Mohr, Rebecca Morris, JP Munro, Monique Prieto, Laura Owens, and Mary Weatherford.
?HOTEL CALIFORNIA? is the fourth exhibition of the 2005-2006 season for the Glendale College Art Gallery. The show is on view from February 4th ? March 18th, 2006 and a reception for the artists will be held on Saturday, February 4th, from 4-7 pm.
Eagle's lyrics play in my head and Ed Ruscha's spirit hovers aloft... and Ed's not dead yet. It's as if the 60's and the 70's were invoked with an imaginary line summoned to draw a connection thru the nineties and into this first decade of our vaunted 21st century. The second paragraph is a crack up. It might also read: "We're throwing an intutited selection of small art works up on the wall to see what sticks enough to call it Californian." Fair enough... honorable and honest, even. At least there is a sense of exploration and discovery instead of some didactic statement wagging a curatorial finger in our face. Although, I would like to ask Dan and Roger if there isn't a second intention with the show. I mean, seventeen women and three men? (I wonder what a painter's census in California might reveal? I don't mean to count, but somebody probably did somewhere along the lline. Or is there really gender weight in the story of painting here in SoCal?) Not that there is anything wrong with that. I'm just sayin'.
No doubt, there were many versions of the curatorial intent as the show developed, vestigal, floating in the airbrushed-spattered ether behind the big Eddie R. An attempt to grapple with the identity of California is a tough task, there are so many facets that can leave us dazzled to blindness. Trying to compose a comprehensive (wagging?) statement would overwhelm any curator: California north and south; California through the decades (including the 80's, which I wonder if that one is represented here); California-the-Dark as in "Day of the Locust" or "Ask the Dust" and Schimmel's famous "Helter Skelter"; California's gestation of media/film culture; California-the-Light as in "Finish Fetish"; California hispa?ola as in the deep Latino legacy; California and Asia; California of the expats, immigrants and refugees; California's hippy history and the rich prehistory of utopian metaphysical nirvana seeking movements... Such a show would take several museums up and down the state and several years to pull off.
Hey! That's not a bad idea!
January 29, 2006
January 28, 2006
Admin/MailCall/Alberto
Alberto sent an email to say hello:
he intentado poner un comentario en tu web y no he podido o no he sabido hacerlo, asi que te lo digo por mail,?Alberto!
me encantan las pinturas nuevas, y tengo que decirte que hace unos dias que me miro la de color verde, me la miro y me la vuelvo a mirar y cada vez me gusta mas, es realmente increible.
queria decirtelo porque realmente esa pintura me ha enamorado.
espero que stephanie este mejor, saludos de vuestro amigo
alberto.
Perdoname, pero mi comentarios es roto ahora. Nececito un specialista de red y ordenadors para reparar mi blog en la proxima oportunidad. Hasta luego, tengo este "Admin" (administrador) substituir la func?ona do los comentoarios.
Muchicimos gracias para su observac?ones generosa. Pesar mi realizaciones, tengo ganas para alcansar nivels nuevas. Ultimamente, satisfac?on es fugitivo siemre.
El salud de Stefani esta en salud mejor cada dia. El dolor de therapia fisico es una buena cosa en este situac?on. Ella digas hola con afecto.
?Hasta el verano proximo!
When Alberto came along with us to LA as Stephanie and I settled back into our lives here, Alberto and I were hard at work on the studio. I really put the lad thru the paces, hoping all the while that the experience of the ChinaTown artworld would be uniquely educational for him as a young artist. It was hard, dirty, sometimes brutally rough work. As we built, we usually played music and one of Alberto's CD's was L?grimas Negras. "La Bien Paga" is my favorite song in the album. How wonderful it is.
When I like a song, I play it repeatedly, an immersion that borders the neurotic. It's easy for me to spend days to weeks looped into the depths of a tune. Lucky for me that Alberto didn't mind. He often sang along, in his Castelano, his accent sounding great to my ears. Alberto told me that La Bien Paga was created in one fell swoop, that at the end of the song, Bebo pronounced the first take was to be the last. From the BBC:
Some might say Bebo's loosely wandering solo on "La Bien Pag?" loses the plot a little. Others would say that's the whole point - this is music to get absolutely lost in.
The core of the album was recorded in the space of a few days, which is the way most great records seem to be made.
Alberto felt compelled to tell me of the incindiery nature of the lyrics. The song concerns a man who, after having had perhaps a deep (love?) relationship with a prostitute, tries to recover anonymity by telling her that she was "...well paid...":
LA BIEN PAGA
(R. Perell? / J. Mostazo)
Raphael (Spain)
NA TE DEBO
NA TE PIDO
ME VOY DE TU VERA, OLVIDAME YA
QUE HE PAGAO CON ORO TUS CARNES MORENAS
NO MALDIGAS, PAYA, QUE ESTAMOS EN PAZNO TE QUIERO
NO ME QUIERAS
SI TO ME LO DISTE, YO NA TE PEDI
NO ME ECHES EN CARA QUE TO LO PERDISTE
TAMBIEN A TU VERA YO TO LO PERDIBIEN PAGA
SI TU EREES LA BIEN PAGA
PORQUE TUS BESOS COMPRE
Y A MI TE SUPISTE DAR
POR UN PU?AO DE PARNE
BIEN PAGA, BIEN PAGA
BIEN PAGA FUISTE, MUJERNO TE ENGA?O
NA TE PIDO
QUIERO A OTRA
NO CREAS POR ESO QUE TE TRAICIONE
NO CAYO EN MIS BRAZOS
ME DIO SOLO UN BESO
EL UNICO BESO QUE YO NO PAGUE
NA ME LLEVO
ENTRE ESAS PAREDES DEJO SEPULTAS
PENAS Y ALEGRIAS, QUE TE DOY Y ME DISTE
Y ESAS JOYAS QUE AHORA PA' OTRO LUCIRAS
Beautiful music with brutal content. Alberto would say, shaking his head: "Muy machista.". Yes, our P.C. (albeit thought controlled) world is a million miles away from the times that produced that song. Cigala's Flamenco voice rasps the pain while Bebe's fingers ruminate on the piano keys with the weight of his years.
***
The other day, I visited X (he's not ready for full exposure yet) in his secret studio as he was approaching his twentieth painting. He is now in the process of regenerating a painter's muscle, a first love in the artworld. He had been achieving many feats and deeds since grad school and now it was time to paint. X was having a hard time with that night's work, a small canvas that was nothing but trouble. After floating on the grace that comes at the honeymoon beginning of a new endevour -this period lasting several canvases- he finally began to sputter.
He was not a happy guy that night.
We talked about it over drinks at Hop Louie. X tried to find a name for his pain: "I don't want to struggle over a painting. It's not right to feel this way. Every touch is wrong, every act misses the mark. All my other paitings were smooth. They flowed. But today is different. This isn't right. I don't want to paint this way."
It might be worth noting that he was going through a tough break up at the time. No doubt this colored his experience in the studio. The woman he had recently proposed to had changed her mind as if inexplicably flipping a switch. One moment, they were furnishing a new house and the next, they were separating their possessions. For him, this came out of nowhere and no appeal was possible, talking wouldn't work. It was almost as if she had told him: "You were well paid."
Terse.
Brutal.
I listened to him as we drained our beers but I had reservations. Sure, it would be nice if every session in the studio was pure flow. I want that. I paint for that. But there are different qualities of flow. And sometimes one particular quality seems like no-flow, un-smooth, a damnable struggle. In my studio, I have to stay there until the flow resumes. If I walk away, it's as if you start all over again, back to square one. It's like I have to generate a charge in my head like a electrical capacitor... relent and and the charge dissapates into the ether. So I stay in place and bear down. I look for that break that might open the dam. Persist. My old friend Troy once said that it was like fishing. You have to be there, lines wet. Go home and you return with no fish for dinner.
I guess my folks were right when they said I was stubborn.
Moreover, the singularity of focus on the 24/7 masterwork is important but ultimately illusory. Yes, we should be trying to hit home runs with every canvas... but we are human after all. We reach for the stars because we are made in G-d's image. But are feet are planted in the dust that we will ultimately return to. This is because --well, (I guess I have to spell it out, a small fact that we tend to forget)-- we are mortal. Each painting fits into a corpus of work that describes an arc and a kind of holographic-like property of fragment-to-image whole:
...if a hologram is broken in half each half can still be used, on its own, to reproduce the whole image. And if each half is broken into quarters, all four quarters can still be used, on their own, to reproduce the whole image. And so on with practically no theoretical limit. All that happens is that every fragmentation simply reduces the clarity of the image.
Every piece of work created by an artist is a holographic fragment of an oeuvre. This thought came to me as I once considered the early work of artists like Rothko or Pollock or Lasker. Their early works looked nasty to me. Jejune. Not so good... like most artists' work do when they are young. And then a funny thing happens: once their "signature work" is produced, all of their previous work is seen in a different light, back-validated. You can see a glimmer of their future greatness in their early work. What once was weakness were really seeds of a future strength, an immanent original voice.
Another kind of grace, that is.
So, shoot for the moon. Push yourself hard. Look for grace, for the state of flow and the redemption that comes with creative fulfillment. Someday, may we all create that one-session masterpiece when all the planets align and we find ourselves in the company of greatness, with our creative powers dilated and oozing from synapse and pore. And should you be so lucky, all of your previous work might be reconsidered in the new light of the breakthrough master work. A special kind of redemption, artist style.
Until then, don't beat yourself up too hard for those off days in the studio. You're probably doing better than you feel you are doing... if you keep it up for the rest of your life.
January 27, 2006
Steve and Rudy
Painter, blogger, old friend and school mate Steve LaRose was kind to think of my work as he visited the Seattle Aquarium recently. And what is additionally wonderful is Steve's link to the work of Rudy Rucker, a mathematician, transrealist scifi writer and an achingly amateur painter who teaches at San Jose State University. The connections from science to everyday life to writing to art uses a thread of beauty that has my rapt attention.
The last time this thread was woven was Antoni Gaudi's Modernisme, a Catalan variant of the spirit of Art Nouveau. There, the earthy Catalan sensibility influenced by Viollet-le-Duc focused on structures found grown in nature as models for form in art. As the precursor of Modernism, this spirit as driven by Viollet-le-duc's imperative of honesty in design eventually became ditchedregularized or systematized into what we know as the language of High Modernism (by this I mean -more or less- something along the lines of Euclidean geometry). As evidence, I submit the work of Francis D.K. Ching, whose work provides the intellectual armature that all architecture students first build in their mental universe. There, x-y-z geometry abounds.
What Rudy's work represents for me is a possible continuation of a project interrupted, a deeper investigation into structures (paintings?) that are grown, not assembled.
Thanks, Steve!
Update:
Steve writes in:
In your most recent Ahora, it looks like the paint is running away from the vignetted spot-light on each painting.Maybe, in the middle piece, the swarm is over-taking the light in a mob.
From this mezzanine view I begin to see it either way.
Either way, leaving the center of the square empty.
Empty for us to fill.
Or not.
Yea, I like that other Francis guy, Sam and his ""Blue Balls" too.
?Brazos, amigo!
January 25, 2006
The Best Fit
I've just returned to the studio after a lunch with an old friend, Troy. He wanted to see what was on Chung King Road (a short pedestrian street, anomoly in LA), how it had changed since last he visited years ago. ChinaTown has grown quite a bit and in an interesting way: measured, with a lot of original Chinese-American stakeholders (business and landlords) keeping the place real.
We bumped into Black Dragon Society where we encounter Bettina Hubby. Introductions were made and I described Troy as a childhood friend. And then my intro had to be finessed: "We met in College, but we were kids then." College was the school of archtitecture at CalPoly S.L.O., back when San Luis Obispo was just shaking off the seventies (that was the early eighties, Madonna, MTV and Sting). Troy became an art director and I'm.... painting.
Babies.
We then ate dim sum after we toured the galleries. He found a couple of festive Chinese dresses for his daughters. Daddy comes home with gifts for the girls. I should have taken pictures.
So here I'm back in the studio. Here I sits with dreams afloat and a storm of thngs to do and projects in the making and lists and calendars and promises to be kept... spinning, the room is starting to spin ...real slow at first.
Solution: flip on the iTunes playlist titled "Shake Booty", click on "The Popcorn", James Brown, Soul Pride 1960-1969 (Disc 2), turn the Bose powered speakers voume up real high and...
...move on to the first-things-first:
It's time to title the paintings.
SO what's the deal with titles in my work, you might ask? (C'mon, you just might.) I have been... growing... my titles... in this blog.
Sometimes, words will occur to me as I paint and these are natural titles. This is rare, though. I usually avoid predetermining a subject and title and content before an artmaking experience. I won't rule it out, it's just not my way. I don't like the reduction of art to communication. This definition forgets the imaginative element, which is the heart of art. I like the discovery thing.
I remember reading about Michaelangelo's sculpture when I was a kid. He would look into the quarried stone and see a figure inside the pattern of vein and grain. Sculpture was a task of freeing the figure within. Painting might be thought of in the same way, but with the "stone's grain" changing with every touch of the canvas.
I want to find the subject of an artwork along the way. And I believe in titles. At the very least, they are conceptual handles so we can deal with them. At the most, they are road signs indicating the direction of content: "...subject matter that-a-way...". I've titled paintings in many different ways, but siince I've kept a weblog, I've adopted the practice of finding my titles within the period of time I was painting them. So today, I'm harvesting a few of the best for my recent work.
Here is a list of three painttings bound for New York:
"The Long View"
ww#243
oil on canvas over wood panel
160 x 180 cm / 63?x71?
The blogpost from the time I had just finished the painting ended with these words. There was an image of a flood of green monochrome that started the whole thing, a boundless green.
"Tussle Over Chocolate Mountain"
ww#244
oil on canvas over wood panel
160 x 180 cm / 63?x71?
I felt verbose and spilled the beans in that blogpost. This title was easy and fun.
Update: When it came to scribing the title onto the back of the painting, I omitted the first two words, leaving "Chocolate Mountain" as the official monniker. I know that with this, I'll hazard the question: "Where's the chocolate? Where's the mountain?" I guess I'll have to refer these people to the blog. Maybe I should title it "http://www.dennishollingsworth.us/archives/000883.html".
"One or the Other"
ww#245
oil on canvas over wood panel
160 x 180 cm / 63?x71?
Unlike "Kind of Red", I wanted the color red to be something that takes us to something else. A centralizing geometry seemed to fortify the singularity of color the red delivered, and a kind of one-ness seemed to be the target of my curiosity. So, finding the words "When one is the numerator, the other has to be a denominator. One or the other pays a price." in this blogpost feels like the best fit.
January 19, 2006
Ahora
Succulent.
Our great oak.
It's time to scoot into ChinaTown.
January 18, 2006
Ulrich Lamsfuss at Dan Hug
From the press release:
Daniel Hug is pleased to premier the work of Berlin-based Ulrich Lamsfuss in Los Angeles. For his Exhibition ?Pet Sounds (West Coast)?, Lamsfuss has created a new series of paintings and drawings continuing his interest in the aesthetics of the banal. A monochrome still-life of a BMW engine, a close up of a bunch of tomatoes rendered in saturated colors, and a nude woman holding a bottle of perfume culled from an advertising campaign are just a few of the disjointed images he has chosen to render. Further complicating the matter, Lamsfuss will present an exhibition of identical paintings at Lombard Fried in New york opening December 9th, 2005 until January 17th, 2006. Depending on the image, Lamsfuss has made up to six ?copies? of the same work at times in a conscious process of eliminating the idea of a subject matter. His work is as much about the act of painting as it is about the process of stoic routine.
Dan explained that the "aesthetics of the banal" means that Ulrich believes that there is nothing new imagistically in our media saturated age. Therefore, he chooses more or less randomly from the sea of images in which we are adrift.
Check out the notes. A documentarian. Here is another drawing. And another here.
Since he painted double the paintings for two simultaneous shows, I wonder if he painted this image (looks like it was culled from a magazine ad) four times?
Double and double again, the banality of our times.
Damn our eyes!
Maybe he considers our world to be a rip tide sweeping us into the future? Struggling against such a surge is a fool's game. So, if he is going to lay back and float away imagistically, where is the play?
Between the far and near of painting, there seems to an alignment of:
banal image= the far view...
and the near view= the non banal,
...passionate view (and notably abstract like a nugget of a Chuch Close painting) .
If G-d is in the details, maybe Ilrich Lamsfuss is devout?
Witness, the closeups:
Closer.
Closer still.
Closer still.
These pictures don't really do much justice to Ulrich's paintings. Maybe that is a positive indicator? If the camera can't capture a painting, maybe the painting has something bigger than the flattening and... banalizing... effects of photo based media?
Let's look at the rest of the show:
The great artists of the king's court used to paint the figures of power. A courtier paints the court. Perhaps this painting is doing the same job? ArtForum is the sun king of the artworld after all.
And who among us can deny that our court is secular, progressive and multicultural?
An icon of our church of materialism, the mechanistic branch.
It reads like a deposition from the cross. I can look at the BMW engine and feel the sigmata sting in my palms.
Wow. (or doubleplusreverseungood!) This could come out of any domestic magazine.
Banal? Of course.
This is banal, surely.
But what I'm suggesting here is that something quite different is going on.
Ulrich Lamsfuss is not painting banally. He is not really painting banal things.
He is passionately painting subjects which happen to be besotted with banality. Because all subjects are banal (by his account), totalization of blah.
Admin/MailCall/USS Tommy T
Again, the boilerplate:
The Comments are still out of commission for the meantime, that's alright by me. I don't miss the insidiously neccessary despamming chores. People chime in via email (the address is to your left in the margin), and that's been working out fine.
The comment function will be restored soon enough, reliant as I am for the help of a good friend for this fix. I told him no worries, to do it as his own pace, and I meant it.Tranquilo, hombre. No pasa nada.
In terms of blogging, this is an ideal blogger's summer vacation -not having to clean spam drek every day.
It might be that the years are reeling our nostalgia a bit, but a few old friends from my old Navy days started a back and forth with a few pics from our time serving together on the USS Truxtun.
In this Admn/MailCall, a stroll down memory lane:
That would be the USS Truxtun, CG(N)-35.
It all started when Bob Burnidge wrote in with a surprise attachment:
Dennis,I dimly remember a slow midnight watch when I thought I could anticipate what Bob would look like when he got out of the service. He was "short" then, under a hundred days. I, however had thousands of days to go. I would recieve taunts: "Rocks don't live that long!" .
I was going thru some old pictures to send to Steve Strassman and found that drawing you did of me while on the
Truxtun. Scanned it and will share with you. Hope your wife heals OK, bummer about her fall. I can imagine one of your next 'Honey Do' items will be to fix the floor.
Yea, yea.
Then, Tom Lawson penned a note:
Merry Christmas to you to Dennis, I haven't heard from Harold D. since he mustered out. I can't remember if I told you about my job but I am a field service engineer working on photolithographic equipment in the semiconductor industry. If you have time you can check out the company @ asml.com. My home time is spent raising my 12 year old son Andy, fly fishing and working on an old Jeep that will probably end up killing me. You can check the old girl out at www.gotwillys.com.Then the topic gets personal, so I edit for discretion's sake.
A subsequent line is right on:
It looks like you've had quite a ride. Funny how all of us seem to trying to reconnect now that we've discovered our mortality, hey?Yes, indeed.
Then Steve Strassman caught fire:
Dennis..........yes it's me. Was looking for some old Truxtun photo's andThe topic got a little personal, but I thought that Steve's voice in this email was so characteristic of him that I had to include the whole thing. Steve is a great story teller. I've asked him to write a few of tehm for this blog... I hope he does someday.
sent out an email to everyone I had an email for.....including Tom. I did
finally find some......will attach a couple to this email.
Christmas starting out well......just told my sister & brother to go screw
themselves and not come over for dinner. They said they would get back to
me........another Walton's family Christmas.
Gonna jump in the shower and get ready to face the wrath of the family.
Steve
He attached a few pics:
Steve, in our berthing compartment. It was located in the fantail of the ship, directly above the ships' screws. When we were underway, the room would thunder. My bunk is above to Strassman's left.
That's me alright. I think that I was eighteen, maybe nineteen at the time. We were sailors once, and young. What is it with me and hanging out on the foxhole of ships?
Time to read Ecclesiastes, I guess...
9 Be happy, young man, while you are young,
and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth.
Follow the ways of your heart
and whatever your eyes see,
but know that for all these things
God will bring you to judgment. 10 So then, banish anxiety from your heart
and cast off the troubles of your body,
for youth and vigor are meaningless.
(Ahem)... and Amen.
Then Bob Burnidge wrote back:Dennis Hollingsworth, aka Hollywood...
Your 1976 artisty on the USS Truxtun was well done, and perhaps psychic.
I hope you agree when you see your handy work compared to the FAA ID picture of 1979.
Yes, that's right. They nicknamed me "Hollywood".
Dennis Cimino wrote in:
yeah, Hollywood always had a knack for maybe seeing some of the futureAlright then.
back then, eh?I remember back in aftermath of the PATCO strike, when I was up in St.
Paul in 1987, I took the controller's test. About 350 or more of us
started it, and when those of us who finished 'completed' it, we had
been whittled down to about 50 or so. The abstract shit in that test
blew most of those pea brain's out...little did those F.A.A. test
fuckers realize that sitting on grey metal "Life in Dark Water" fun for
Truxtun boys who sat in C.I.C. for hour on end, is about as abstract as
you can get without getting ridiculous. :)anyway, Merry 'Belated' X-mas' to you guys, I had a pretty decent
christmas here, albeit different for sure. Ate a pretty darned good
turkey dinner over at Strassman's house down in Lacey last night.dennis c.
The jig is up.
Now the world knows....
I am psychic.
Then, Steve got crazy and emailed a flurrry of photos to all the fellas. Here's a sampling:
Of course, Steve sent a bunch of the pics from the crossing the line ceremonies. I opted out, dissident that I was am. I cna get a little cantankerous sometimes. "Stubborn" is what my folks used to way.
Hanging out in the berthing compartment. Rapier wit gonna cut you 24/7.
Then, Steve sent a bunch of shots of the crew at a local bar in Subic Bay. General debauchery a nightly condition there. I wasn't in this shot, I don't remember why.
"Hutch" was from Philidelphia. A real unique character, he once smuggled an Australian friend onboard as we cruised for the Philippines from a port of call at Melbourne. Captain Billy Talley could have thrown him in the brig forever but instead gave him a lenient sentence. That's our Captain, a good man he was.
I don't know why Hutch did it. I'm sure he didn't either.
Then, Pat Costello got into the act, sending more pics:
Steve Easley was/is from Texas. Here, he sits watch in C.I.C., Combat Information Center. I like to think of it as the cerebellum of the ship.
Yes, that's me.
Back in the day.
On that day, a group of us went to the far side of this recreational island in Subic Bay for an afternoon of scuba diving. I remember a very nice tropical day, but since Olongapo's river dumped out into the bay, I shouldn't have been surprised to encounter condoms at 100 feet (or thereabouts, I don't remember the depth but we did get down to a hundred that day.). I guess that's why they called it "Sh-t River".
And if this all isn't enough, I flipped open the WestPac cruise book:
Pete Groen standing bridge watch.
Steve Easly again. He would chew tobacco and spit in a cup by the scope. Some of the saltier guys would like to smoke cigars, especially as the seas got rough.
More handiwork.
I usually kept a sketchbook by my side.
There it is.
A small blast from my past.
January 17, 2006
Admin/MailCall/Season's Greetings & Condolences
The boilerplate:
The Comments are still out of commission for the meantime, that's alright by me. I don't miss the insidiously neccessary despamming chores. People chime in via email (the address is to your left in the margin), and that's been working out fine.The comment function will be restored soon enough, reliant as I am for the help of a good friend for this fix. I told him no worries, to do it as his own pace, and I meant it.
Tranquilo, hombre. No pasa nada.
In terms of blogging, this is an ideal blogger's summer vacation -not having to clean spam drek every day.
***
Let's start with a look at the mail from the turn of the new year:
John from Tossa sends us this pic which is either a photoshop, or some sharp photographer had his gear ready once back twenty five years or so ago. Tossa is much balmier than this, but temps last year were the coldest in twenty five years and the thermometer dropped below freezing once or twice.
However, this is a good evocation of how Tossa felt for us last Winter. Our next project: califac?on (a heating system).
Thanks, John! John is from Utrecht and he has made annual treks to Tossa for over twenty years now. Enterprising, he has a web design business. He also keeps a site which functions as a love letter for his second home.
***
Piet and Monique send good wishes:
We are very sorry to read about the bad luck of Stephanie.They too are from the Maastricht, taking a long break between projects in Tossa. Monique, a beautician, has family in town. Piet used to produce/direct programs for the BBC. An engaging and probing personality, I enjoyed (and enjoy) our talks a great deal. His house there reminded me of California architecture with its' broad window walls facing the sea, blurring the interior and exterior of patios and pools and gardens, very Case Study. Dinners at his place always made me a little homesick for Cali.Hope that things will not turn out too serious.
Cheers to you guys! All the best in '06!
***
A new reader tuned in:
Dear Dennis HollingsworthJust to say I came across your weblog via Brent Hallard?s site.
Just to say that it is a fascinating blog,a great insight into your artistic working process, life and the evolution of your paintings.
Best wishes and good luck for 2006
Mick Finch
Very nice to make your acquanitance, sir!
It's nice to know that people are taking notice. It's much appreciated to be sure.
...ok. I couldn't help myself. I googled for Mick's stuff. I usually feel funny when I find out that people whom I 've first met have googled my name immediately after our handshake. Is "creepy" he right word? No, it's too strong, but you might get my point.
Anyways.
Nice stuff, Mick!
***
Robert Sweedler sent a bear hug:Hi Dennis,
Read your blog this morning. Woe, poor Stephanie. Wish her my best. Ou, ouch. Sometimes it's better to wait a while for surgery. There's so much inflammation right after the original trauma that it can make a good surgical procedure more difficult. This of course requires me to issue my standard disclaimer that I am not actually a surgeon or even an M.D. for that matter.
- Paintings look beautiful. Would like to come see them
Rob and his partner Howard own the best art store in Los Angeles, Roark. A longtime merchant located in the center of the inner city core, the increasing number of homeless folk in the neighborhood have forced them to move to the edge of the downetown core, closer to USC (another powerful future blogpost, I promise). Pics of their new store to come soon!
***
Bill Gusky sends a recipie/remedy to the rescue:
2 things:Yes, thanks so much for that. We soldiered through in good shape (Stephanie has a bit to undergo yet). It was humbling, though. Normal sentience is a prized possession.
-- Egg Drop Soup from any Chinese restaurant will take the edge off. Get a pint.-- go to your nearest vegetable juice joint and get a 12 or 16-oz of this:
wheat grass
green apple
spinach
cucumber
garlic
ginger
broccoliKeep some water nearby to chase it down - it's disgusting. But it will help you feel better, sooner.
Hope everyone's feeling better soonest -
B
***
Doug Henders says hello:
Hello DennisThen the topic gets personal, so I edit for discretion's sake.Poking around the net a few weeks back, I peeked into your blog when you
so eloquently painted the picture of the artistes bellied up to the bar in
Chinatown. You laid out each character in such a novelistic fashion that I
was beginning to feel thirsty for such comradery, then the 911 phone call
came in with the broken wrist and all the drama. Good show, your blog.
(Godspeed to your wife).And you have an exhibition at Nicole's this spring. I finally get to see the
alchemists confabs in the real.
Resuming:
I enclosed a pic of recent paintings (and my wife) from Art Cologne.I'm looking forward to meeting him and seeing more paintings in the flesh. Thanks, Doug!All the best,
Doug Henders
***
Mick Finch wrote that he found this blog from Brent Hallard's site (link in the soup to the left colophon). Thanks, Brent!
Brent says hello;
Hey Dennis Happy New Year. Right it's a bit late. Happy new day!Again, the topic gets personal, so I edit for discretion's sake.
Been offline for a while (still am but cruising the harmonic spheres at the pay-job--seeing what folks are up to on blog). It's great your planning a show here. Tomio's new place is cavernous. I mean cavern, really-!! I'm sure you seen it via jpg.Anyway, best for 2006.
Resuming:
:)I'm a bit late, too! Happy New Year to you too. I'm looking forward to meeting up once I get to Tokyo again!
b
***
Steve LaRose, an old friend and school mate at grad school, sends his best:
dThanks, Steve. Good stuff in your blog, great work there!
If it isn't one thing its another.
I keep checkin' in and hearing about these barriers/hurdles/ and curve balls in your life.
I hope you're rollin' with everything, re-directing the flow.
b/t/w thanks for putting me in your link soup. I average a couple hits a day from your link.
s
***
Chris Ashley sends some consumer intelligence over inthe wake of my broke back iBook adventure:
Dennis,You wrote today, " I wanted to wait a bit before
replacing my aged iBook with the yet to be unveiled
new powerbook G5 line that might come out this year. I
guess it wasn't meant to be."I've pulled the following from a weblog that was
following Job's presentation
(http://engadget.com/2006/01/10/steve-jobs-keynote-live-from-macworld-2006/),
and it looks to me, unless you're talking about
something else, that your wish could some true quite
soon:1:28 PM - "You know, there's been this pesky little
problem with PowerBooks..."1:29 PM - "We've been trying to shoehorn a G5 into a
PowerBook. We've tried everything. We've consulted
every [slide of the pope, huge laughs] ..." Steve's
going to explain the enigmatic Performance per Watt
metric.1:30 PM - PowerPC: 0.23 rating for performance per
watt. Core Duo: 1.05, more than four times better.
"Today we are introducing ... the MacBook Pro"1:31 PM - "It's a new name because we're kinda done
with power, and we want the Mac name in our products."
The same dual-processor as the (new) iMac in every
model. "This is hard to believe: 4-5x faster than the
PowerBook G5. These things are screamers."1:38 PM - $1999 1.67 Code Duo, 512 MB RAM, 80GB, 4x
superdrive, Aiprort Extreme. $2499 for the fully
loaded model.1:38 PM - Shipping in February. "If you want one I
suggest you get your order in early."Good luck with your data.
Chris
This, characteristic analytical depth from the great Mr. Ashley. Thanks so much for that. It seems that my machine busted down on the very week the prospective replacements were unveiled. The consolation: at least I won't be the early adopter Beta Tester for the new MacBookPro. I'll have to wait for the subcutaneously injected nanoMac G10, the first Apple computer ever to break the blood-brain barrier! I'll beta test that puppy, no problem!
***
Steve sent a postscript:
dThanks, Steve! But I don't care what anyone says, Sean Connery is the man and if Sean nodded to Boorman's flight of fancy (admittedly a coughing bong hit of an idea -yet no less visionary), then it's alright by me.
Oh yeah, I also forgot to point you towards a brief zardoz riff at Third Factory Notebook, a poetry blog. (from Jan 7).
s
Zardoz! Zardoz!
"Zed! Where are you?"
***
And now, an inspired note from Jimmy from Hog Heaven:
(Warning: If you can't dance, you might have trouble reading this.)
Robert Penn WarrenYes, music, of course. Closer to the category of light, music can aggregate opinions into communities of appreciation. Less elemental, there are more modalities to connect with in the music sphere.happ??b-lated Christmas...and new ?ear..
sorr??!!2 hear about ur wifes calamity!..pains a touchahell..healing a
touchaheaven.. Hope shes doing betterIf snakes were blue, it was the kind of day
That would uncoil in a luxurious ease
As each mica-bright scale exposed a flange of gold,
And slowly, slowly, the golden eyes blinked.[reall??liked ur response @ color last time I blipped u..like music..or
specificall??interpretting jazz standards..musical perfection is
mathamatical..but musical inspiration is divine.....not 2 diss the dead but
it is like the difference of ole joe albers yahhh das is un
complementar??colores....??hh....ok blu and orange alwa?s do this....but
look at his wifes exquisite throw rugs with all the openhearted chips of
fragmentar??colors whipping a gu?s retina into an emotional , delightful
swirl..which takes the chords of standard color and enriches them...]It was the kind of day that takes forever?
As though minutes, minutes, could never be counted?to slide
Among the clouds like pink lily-pads floating
In a crystal liquid pure enough to drink.[it seems that to scientifically reduce the potential of color to
poettalk 2 ones eyes , reduces painting to {oftentimes } geometrics....not
that some of carl benjamines..or early al held..or novaros 70s stuff or
majical ms martins grids...(I can feel the rich sexy?scudging across the
canvas at coentiss slip on a gre??winter da?....)....but let color have some
potential to delight in its naked chords descriptions...like a sharp
fiorentine window of the late clothes designer enrico coveri..sweet palletes
that get messed up by the wearing...]And there was no distinction now between
Light and shadow except the mystic and faint
Sense of adaptation of the iris,
As light diminished and the first star shone,[glad u got to michigan for winter colors...i thought the photoes of the
cartiledge exrays reminded me of some of ur "clusters"..]And the last very, hidden in a thicket of alder,
Thought it would break its heart perhaps?or yours.
Let it be yours, then. For such gentle breaking
In that ambiguous moment could not be[ annie albers throw rugs..make me recollect walking the streets in
turke??and seeing the women run those ragrug looms , each woodenrackety
heave-pull making a row of chromatic congruity willed or other..then again,
then again...all rightly AND mostly?"going together"..colors for the
foot---priced by the centimeter HA]Less than a blessing, or the king of promise
We give ourselves in childhood when first dawn
Makes curtains go gold, and all night's dreams flood back.
They had guaranteed our happiness forever.['spose one can sort of learn the facts....then 4get em and paint
or some.getting it "by ear"..OR "by eye"..never read the music ..but can
reall??pla?]And in such a way promises come true
In spite of all our evil days and ways.
True, few fulfillments?but look! In the distance lift peaks
Of glittering white above the wrath-torn land.been busy..im grading right now..for me big job..btw..3 of
my?kids got awards at the count??contest..and one , inna klimenchuk had hers
sent to state...whoooo ahh go kids go...love those kids artworks...thats
good cuz yo?co?ld make more mone??panhandling in a walmart parking lot than
u can teaching iniowa HA>.(@ 26 g's a year)..
keep u pthe great stuff...talk to u later..owner of my farmhouse
sent me a notice that he is gonna doze the buildings so I gotta bolt before
march yikes my wife is in a flurr? ...me too I guess..seems like im always
moving in winter with short notice..pilgrims and sojo?rners I am remindedur friend in hog heaven....jimm??murray
I like reading is prosepoetry swordwordplay.
A postscript:
Something like this..(one of m??favorite experiments HA!And then a postpostscript:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nist_stone_test_wall.jpg
Absurd ..but in terms...of..frail human curiosity..kinda kool
Like bentley and his thousands of phots of snowflakes...perhaps
One of my fav architects said..(dig the museum for glaciers)(Unfortunately, I don't know yet how to cut and paste while maintaining the tabs and indentations of the original. So thi sreproduction mauls Jimmy's concrete poetry a lot. Sorry Jimmy.)Fehn said, Anytime you write a poem, you need to find the balance
between your thoughts and your language. Whoever cannot put his poetic
ideas into a built structure has no architecture basics. Structure is the
core of architecture, and it cannot be expressed in numbers. It is the
original part of the story an architect can tell about life and people.
Good stuff.
All the best to you!
January 16, 2006
Liquid Steps
My previous Ahora post sounded a little apologetic, rueful confessions of being monomainiacal, with slips from the net and ending with promises to do better. Shortly after I made that "wee hours of the morning" post, I discovered a Christopher Knight review of a show that I should have seen already...
I should have made it to the opening.
Bad!
Bad Dennis.
Very, very BAD Dennis.
(Self flagellation feels sooooo good sometimes. This must come from that Catholic baptism thingy that happened so long ago.)
It looks like a good show. A few friends are in it. Dave Hickey curated it, and I like Dave's work very much. The general curatorial topic is in a zone that is a favorite of mine. Dang.
I'll have to scoot over one day before the show ends at the end of this month.
In the meantime, let's check out what Knight wrote:
ART REVIEW
Just going with the flow.
The fluid form of abstract painting is celebrated in the 'Step Into Liquid' exhibit at the Ben Maltz Gallery.
By Christopher Knight, Times Staff WriterThumbs up! Great review, no matter what is written next.One sign that a group exhibition is significant is that it changes the way you perceive works of art that you thought you knew. At the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, "Step Into Liquid" is a significant show.
A nice laurel for all my pals.
I've been looking at (and enjoying) James Hayward's paintings for more than 20 years, but I've never quite considered them in the way they appear here. Otis' guest curator-in-residence, Dave Hickey, has assembled paintings by five artists ? Jane Callister, Pia Fries, Michael Reafsnyder and David Reed are the others ? whose work reanimates a major American postwar tradition. In the 1950s and 1960s, fluid forms of abstract painting, from the drips of Jackson Pollock and the sponged puddles of color by Helen Frankenthaler to the pours of Morris Louis, had asserted a continuity between nature and art.The aside regarding James' painting at the beginning of this paragraph is interesting. Good for Jimmy that he's finally getting recognition... but man, over twenty years and so little rain! I guess that's why Jimmy is as tough as a SouthWest cactus.
And Knight's characterization of reanimation... of fluid forms... and continuities between nature and art. Muy bien, I like that kind of talk.
The paintings in "Step Into Liquid" pick up the thread while severing the continuity. Hayward's paintings have the authoritative power and hypnotic grace of the surface of the sea, the sheer face of a mountain cliff or the sweep of a plain of grass ? yet without any recourse to illusion, metaphor or representation. Think of them as cultural equivalents rather than natural embodiments.Big strokes for Jimmy.
(What follows is a couple of paragraphs of physical description. Here's the link to the article if you want to check it out. Better yet, go see the show. I will, for sure.)
They carve out a physical space of contemplation, from which these gorgeous paintings feel vast, unfathomable and in perpetual flux.Perhaps the reason why this kind of recognition for Jimmy's work is late is because Jimmy was super early, having jumped from his school daze of 60's UCLA happening/anything goes, past and over the 80's continental theory (and the pre and post phases -conceptual and multicultural theory) and therefore straight into the project of taking painting seriously... on painting's terms. This, an approach based on affirmation and not the required negation demanded by doctrinaire PostModernism.They're oceanic without the ocean.
Hayward, 62, and Reed, 59, are the show's elder statesmen. Fries, who was born in Switzerland and works in D?sseldorf, adds an international element. Callister and Reafsnyder, both born in the 1960s, are two of the most engaging younger painters working in Southern California right now. The show packs a lot into a modest space.Good for you guys!
In the fall of 2004, on the 40th anniversary of the landmark survey exhibition "California Hard Edge Painting," Hickey organized an Otis show of geometric abstraction. "Step Into Liquid" is its complement, focusing on wet, fluid abstraction rather than crisp geometries. Reed's luxurious paintings are the pivot between the two shows: He mixes oil and resin to crash Baroque waves of translucent paint against hard-edged rectangles, like flowing electrons moving through the windows of a computer program.Evocation stopping short of mere description. I like that zone too. It is nice that Knight connects Callister's implied subject -shifitng shorelines, beaches- with a description of her approach to painting.Callister's exceptional recent paintings represent a slight shift in her work. All three miraculously evoke the conjunction of land and sea, the space of a primordial shoreline where timeless stability and constant vacillation continuously trade places. Yet none is in the least descriptive, in the manner of a traditional landscape painting. A warm, fleshy pink ground is interrupted by pours, puddles, splashes and clumps of abstract color-shapes, which appeal to a sense of visual tactility.
I haven't met Ms. Callister yet, I look forward to the day.
Reafsnyder continues to update the signature motifs of modern alienation to the monumental scale of mass culture. For example, "Slippy" is a large, dark painting in which indigo acrylic has been swiped with a squeegee as a background. Then, great swaths of glossy color are smeared, splashed and dripped across the surface, while a bright orange smiley face grins out at you. Signs of pleasure come in a variety of guises, and here a visual overload of paint does the talking. Following Reafsnyder's marvelous one-man survey that closed recently at the Las Vegas Art Museum, the Otis show gives rich context to his quirky work.Good for Michael! And nice too, that his Las Vegas show is plugged as well.
Fries' paintings are the exhibition's weak link. Each is an inventory of paint application methods, from thick wedges and troweled-on oil to skinny squiggles squeezed straight from the tube (it looks like silly string), often in pastel hues and always on pure white panels. Disconcertingly, embedded within the paint are silk-screened prints that appear to be tangled piles of crepe-paper ribbon.Ouch. A hit, a palpable hit.
...but it's one that won't "leave a mark" since Pia's career is rock-solid.
Knight lays on a few more licks:
The point seems to be that printing fits with the other techniques because, in a world characterized by reproduction, our assumptions that direct application of paint embodies uniqueness and reveals authentic feeling are false.True enough, perhaps. But allowances have to be made for an artist who is folding a preceeding PoMo era into the project of reanimation mentioned earlier in the review. Such a fold seems to be required if we are to be truely Modern (my definition: to reconcile the things we make with the times we live in... namely, these Post-PoMo times). One could also say that she is reaching back into the Picasso/Braque painting-into-collage times, when the Modern was so young that the PostModern turn was latent within it. Add to this, how the story of art in Europe is different from art in the States in ways that are small yet decisively significant.True enough, but the idea is long-established (not least by Fries' teacher, Gerhard Richter), and these paintings don't have adequate visual appeal to sustain them.
"Step Into Liquid" features just 17 paintings yet accomplishes more than most exhibitions twice its size. Come on in; the liquidity is fine.There it is.
Cheers and a toast hoisted high.
`Step Into Liquid'Where: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College, 9045 Lincoln Blvd., Los Angeles
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursdays; closed Mondays
Ends: Jan. 28
Price: Free
Contact: (310) 665-6905, www.otis.edu
January 14, 2006
Ahora
I love the wee hours.
Driving between our house in Echo Park and my studio in ChinaTown, that's the wavelength of my life here in Los Angeles. The frequency of this particular life/wave form is punctuated by the painting experience. Pushing out bodies of work gets me a little crazy, so life gets a little narrow. I compensate in the intervals between, time to get expansive, to pick up the pieces.
Driving to ChinaTown 'round midnight (the scooter is parked in the studio while I drive Stephanie to work for a while) is nice because all of LA is asleep and the streets are yours. There seems to be extra space for your thoughts to float free. It's a wonderful time to get a lot of work done, even if I do tend to get a little monomaniacal when I'm painting.
Art and Life seem to have an unfortunate reciprocal relationship in my life. When one is the numerator, the other has to be a denomenator. One or the other pays a price.
With this and a scattering of life's obstacles lessons in our way, the blogging becomes more neglected than I would like. I really enjoy blogging and I like working out my writing practice (it can get pretty tough sometimes) and I am very aware of the expresive potential of this medium, there is so much more to say, so much blogging that can be done... so much that can be done/said through blogging. And yet a lot of life slips through the editorial net.
I can promise you all one thing: I will keep on blogging, trying to polish a shine out of these... stones.
January 13, 2006
Color, Pain and Light.
(Image Source)
Pain is a common topic in our household as Stephanie is recuperating from the fall/surgery. The faces scale of pain guide is as good a device as any we've come across. I usually ask: "How do you feel now?" She usually says: "...ok...", verbally corresponding to face scale number two- while her face says number four.
One day, Stephanie described how difficult pain is to gauge: "The pain as I remember it is different from the pain I feel now. I know I felt it worse than it does now but I can't... keep the vividness of that memory. It feels worse now than I remember it did in the beginning." Add to this, the difference between the pain at the initial moment of the accident when the body was scrambling in emergency mode (shock, adrenaline, etc.)... or the differences in well being as day turns to night... or the differences between the pain resulting from a chaos of injuries unleased in the accident (scattered) or the intentionally precise injuries inflicted in the surgery afterward (focused)... the aspects multiply like a hall of mirrors.
I realised that pain was like color. In art, we talk about color theory, but color resists systematizing theory very easily. As a matter of fact, it's more precise to speak of color theories because it is best to consider color wheels and spectrums and any other format we can imagine. For this, I let out a little hurrah. I grew up in the generation where art theory was pretty overbearing. Totalizing. Closed. Bossy. Bad, bad bad, especially for the sake of being able to talk about art, for the sake of theory itself.
Yesterday, stephanie told me that the production people at her workplace are administering a color test to identify people who are at the least color blind, or at the most, finding people who see color differently than most people do. Teh second category seemed funny to her. She said: "Everyone will see a different color, even those with good color sense. Different positions in a room will present a different aspect of color to each person. Each person's perspective will show a different color sense, at least for those wo can see subtle differences in colors in the world."
Slippery stuff, color is.
So color is free and therefore color is cool.
And pain is like color. Pain is slippery.
Can pain be cool too?
(In a benign, constructive, life giving... theoretical way?)
So... what about light?
The other day, we were invited to our neighbor's place for dinner. Paul and Margosha Vangelisti are wonderful neighbors. (Click the link, Paul and Margosha have a rich history and I intend to describe it to you all in another blogpost. Promise.). A fellow dinner guest that night was a gentleman who teaches theater lighting at CalArts (a nice guy, but his name escapes me now). I mentioned my thoughts about pain and color and this gentleman suggested that lighting could be a third category.
Yes of course! Another force unbridled, lighting.
I know nothing about theater lighting design, but I know a little about architecture. I thought of Louis Kahn, one of my favorite architects. Kahn would swoon over the architectural implications of light. "Silence and Light", he called it:
Silence to Light
Light to Silence
The threshold of their crossing
is the Singularity
is Inspiration
(Where the desire to express meets the possible)
is the Sanctuary of Art
is the Treasury of the Shadows
(Material casts shadows shadows belong to light)
My mind reaches for a possible (and admittedly homespun) axiom:
Art exists in places that are hard to pin down.
How about that?
Ahora
This pic isn't as good as the real thing, being there. Neither is this one.
January 12, 2006
Fried Logic
My laptop has a bad logic board, according to the geniuses at the local Apple Store. I wanted to wait a bit before replacing my aged iBook with the yet to be unveiled new powerbook G5 line that might come out this year. I guess it wasn't meant to be.
I've got my fingers crossed for the data trasfer from the old hard drive into the new laptop to go without a hitch.
In the meantime, I'm wrangling another painting, finally on a good track after a scrape off. Pics and mas hablaba to come soon.
January 9, 2006
January 8, 2006
Jim Shaw's Army at Rental gallery
Rental Gallery (next door to my studio) is having an opening in about an hour.
The show: "Jim Shaw's Army", a show consisting of the people who have worked in Jim Shaw's studio.
An army of them.
(The night before.)
The press release, so Reagan era:
RENTAL GALLERY
is pleased to present JSA a group showArtists include:
Jim Shaw
Pentti Monkkonen
Julian Hober
Jennifer West
Daniel Mendel Black
Claude Collins Stracensky
Ethan Ayer
Sarah Cromarty
Scott Cassidy
Jill SpectorOpening Saturday January 7th, 2006 7PM till late
RENTAL GALLERY
936 Mei Ling Way
Chinatown
Los Angeles, CA 90012 USA
Tel. 213-617-0145
We'd like to thank you uncle ron
cuz you went out and dropped the bomb
it's too bad that you still aren't alive
cuz now it's a war where the fittest survive
no more fashion conspiracies
no more football games with stupid preppies
topsiders melted credit cards burned
this is reagan's world now you've learned
bands of skaters in roving packs
we had the adaptability that you lacked
anarchy prevails you can rule us no more
you try and stop us we kick your lies out the door
we'd like to thank you uncle ron
you went out and dropped the bomb
we'd like to thank you uncle ron
cuz now you're dead and society is gone
Dear Jodie:
There is definitely a possibility that I will be killed in my attempt
to get Reagan. It is for this very reason that I am writing you this
letter now.
As you well know by now I love you very much. Over the past seven
months I've left you dozens of poems, letters and love messages in the
faint hope that you could develop an interest in me. Although we
talked on the phone a couple of times I never had the nerve to simply
approach you and introduce myself. Besides my shyness, I honestly did
not wish to bother you with my constant presence. I know the many
messages left at your door and in your mailbox were a nuisance, but I
felt that it was the most painless way for me to express my love for
you.
I feel very good about the fact that you at least know my name and how
I feel about you. And by hanging around your dormitory, I've come to
realize that I'm the topic of more than a little conversation, however
full of ridicule it may be. At least you know that I'll always love
you. Jodie, I would abandon the idea of getting Reagan in a second if
I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you,
whether it be in total obscurity or whatever.
I will admit to you that the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt
now is because I cannot wait any longer to impress you. I've got to do
something now to make you understand, in no uncertain terms, that I'm
doing all of this for your sake! By sacrificing my freedom and
possibly my life, I hope to change your mind about me. This letter is
being written only an hour before I leave for the Hilton Hotel. Jodie,
I'm asking you to please look into your heart and at least give the
chance, with this historical deed, to gain your love and respect.
I love you forever,
John W. Hinckley
It's hard to nail a period better than that.
January 6, 2006
Here we Go, Yo. Here we Go, Yo.
Yes.
I am now surfing broadband in my studio for the first time.
Wierd in a good way.
Muy bien.
Fantastico.
Stupendo.
Venga.
So, where am I?
I'm starting a new year.
Where was I?
I -Stephanie and I have been on one of those celestially mandated life lessons in coping with and learning from her recent shoulder injury. It feels like aeons since she took her spill back on December 17th. Of the four hands we had between us in our family, now we have three to negotiate our lives with. As a result, I have been privileged to become an initiate into subtler levels of the secret world of women.
Now, I know how to draw the bath, what all those bottles of creams and lotions and soaps in the cabinet are for and in what order are they deployed. I know about pony tails. I know how to shampoo hair, how to apply the detangler and that one must comb the locks out from the ends to the roots and how to blow dry from the roots to the ends in such a way as to impart maximun body to the coif. I now know about bras (well not all that much I guess... there's so much more to learn), when to use cotton tees versus synthetic blends and which shoes with what jeans. All of this is, a small sample of the rich trove of secrets shimmering before my neophyte eyes.
Where am I going?
I have a good feeling for 2006.
Here's my rough calendar:
*The show at Nicole's place is set for next May. January, February, March, April and ship. My three month planning metric for shows is good to go with a small sliver of time to spare for unexpected stuff like providing Tomio some work for the Armory Show. I will have just enough time to take a hard look at what I have been doing and in artspeak parlance, "interrogate" my general project and fine tune my approach to the coming Spring show.
*I have planned a show at Miguel Marcos' place in Barcelona for next October. I'm planning to paint the show at our place in Tossa, a great opportunity to see Kiko, Ramon and Alberto and friends in our little town. I'll need to stage my supplies there beforehand, as well as coordinate with Ramon to build out my panels for me so I can hit the ground running. I'm going to have to buy bolts of canvas here and haul it over with me in luggage. I'm sure I will need other stuff too.
*Tomio and I are talking about a show at his new space in Tokyo close to the early part of 2007. It's going to great to see Japan again, it's been a long time. I'd like to get over there sooner, maybe for a quick visit to get a feel for Tokyo... although any reason to visit will do.
Alrighty then.
(Cracking knuckles, stretching muscles.)
January 4, 2006
Ahora
The rains have passed. Stephanie is getting better but she's still in a lot of pain after overexerting herself yesterday at work. The lads at the Rental Gallery next door to my studio are busy preparing for the next show ("Jim Shaw's Army", more on that later) and I should be able to get on this last of a suite of four paintings I originally intended to finish last week.
Meanwhile, my DSL provider has promised broadband at the studio by January 10, so all y'all can expect full service Hollingsworth very soon. I've got a blogsac that's fat and fetid.
January 1, 2006
Wuh. Happy Frickin' New Year.
Well, it's not the first time we have camped out the New Year esconced in bed. It's just that this time, we're not downing pints of Haagen-Das and watching DVD's with the phone switched off.
We're recuperating for the first hours of 2006.
Stephanie came out of the surgery today just fine, although she feels like she has been hit with a baseball bat. Reinjured to fix a broken shoulder as the good doctor sutured her bones together, it's back to square one of pain. She'll be alright, she's tough.
I, however am waylaid by a cold (by contrast, I'm a wus, hear my whine) caught in Michigan over Christmas. Like a hurricane that spins at a shoreline for too long, this spinning contaigen doesn't seem to lose its energy. It's an upper respiratory type that works its dirty deed at night and keeps my body locked in a low feaver, zapping my laryx for days. Nasty.
And the news is all about a California Flu Virus or somesuch (knocking on wood, I don't want to add that immunity to my lymph system library)... but what about this Novi Michigan Cold Germ?
And if you would like to know, here's a pic of the surreptitious innoculator of pathogens himself. Dr. Germ I presume?
Happy New Year, everyone!