My work cannot be limited by cavalier academia, which inquires about such elusive ideas as, “What is art?” Nor will my imagination be limited by mass culture and its trends, here today, gone tomorrow, back next season, so last season. My art spans the world of the intellect, the soul, the mystical, and the shopping mall. Whatever I feel, wherever I find wonder, whatever I wonder, I create.

I concede that these creations are clever, born of a caustic wit and a need, never outgrown, to play, to play tricks, to play with toys. They aren’t ideas formed in art school, with serious labour applied to anatomical attention or to space and light. They have a certain unschooled feeling about them, yet my imagination is not uneducated. To the contrary, I devour voraciously every aspect of as many cultures as I can digest. My education began early; looking at dead insects, raising my hand fifty times in Sunday School to ask questions no one could then or can now answer. It continued in the Niagara Falls library, reading about fish and poetry, about Michael Jackson, the occult, Indian tribes, and other anthropologies. I am formally schooled in journalism, but prefer the Enquirer to the Globe: it tells far more about human nature.

Hence, celebrity finds its way into my wonder. The academics might push away the importance of pop culture, striving for the higher mind, yet I know what guerilla scholar Camille Paglia knows: that academia has little place in ancient or modern anthropology, that the clues and the cues for who and what we are begin with the commonplace. Celebrity and shopping fills in a void where we have become spiritually hollow. We seek to consume, in a desperate and almost ritualistic manner, the fantasy that fame and wealth create. Celebrity fails us, as religion did, but failing pantheons are all we have ever had. We must question the failure of our gods, or our God, and of ourselves, as they reflect too poignantly our own shortcomings. If we have the ability to analyze, we can grow. If we lack this ability, we can depend on artists and reporters and teachers to show us the variety of signs, but there is no place where we can find complete truth.

Andy Warhol was an artist who changed the face of art completely and permanently. Whether we love or hate his excessively simple works, and his often distasteful archeology, we must see that his contribution to the changing of the imagination was incredibly important. Andy didn’t live by any rules but those of his own neuroses- the same rules by which we live our own lives! He pushed the boundaries of what is art, because he didn’t care about the answer. He bridged what we refused to link: mad with mundane, sacred with ordinary, massive manufacturing with elitist craft. He was a creepy pervert who loved speed and feet; he loved to observe the madness of freaks and film it, with zero form applied. He believed in shopping and barely felt the suicides of his friends; he wore sloppy shoes and spoke so quietly no one could hear him. Much of his work was actually made by others: without Photoshop, he couldn’t manufacture his ideas fast enough. He had to manufacture, as if he were a company. He couldn’t spend weeks on a piece when there were a thousand pieces to be made, so he printed hundreds of replicas of his works in hundreds of different shades. Repetition was the hallmark of his work, yet the things he captured weren’t mundane. Monroe, electric chairs, dollar signs are far more reflective of Western religion than the exquisite and carefully rendered works of the Renaissance.

Inspired by the things I love and the things I loathe about Andy Warhol meant using some of the cues from my own imagination. Unlike Andy’s work, mine might contain a commentary. My take on the electric chair comes in the form of Canadian psycho Karla Homolka. She occupies a special place in my personal archeology because I went to high school with her, attended the memorial for her sister, whom none of us knew then that she had killed. Using digital tools to colour my portrait of her, I call the piece, “I Shop Therefore I Kill”, demonstrating my belief that too much reverence for objects leads to a narcissism special to the 21st century- the inability to differentiate between object and human. Traditional religions, both monotheistic and pagan, did not lose the way we have lost, the sacredness of the thing: objects were ritualized in ways we have lost touch with and seek to recover by buying more of them.

The desire to fill an emptiness created in part by our culture extends to all sorts of addictions. The ancient shamanistic act of vision questing is also a hunger in these times, but we use magical substances to escape reality rather than to transcend the ordinary and recover the real.

When we lose our sense of wonder, we cannot glean the satisfactions that we require from our objects and from our consumption. We have removed all of the spiritual and literal nutrients from our excavations. We can recover the nourishment that our soul demands simply by stopping to look into the madness of our creation, to see the way a star glitters on the Cartier in the window, to chew the hell out of boring old poets to get at the heart of what they were trying to say. The classroom and the supermarket forget that this is how to edify the masses, but there is no way around it. We must open our souls to the life and decay around us, to play with portents as if this world were a playground, to twist back the ideals sold to us into their original, or into new shapes. We must go back to the way we discovered things as children, and ask millions of questions, to tease the living daylights out of our authorities, to revel and reveal, to laugh and to sob and to wonder.

I might go shopping
Just to buy those things that are eluding me
Just to buy something from the mall
I feel so empty, so I might go shopping
Just to buy those things that will make me feel
Just to buy those things from the mall

-from Go to the Bank by James

manifesto from Wonder Bred, by Lorette C. Luzajic, www.thegirlcanwrite.net

 

This is a photo manipulation using texture and stock photos. The first thing is to be inspired. I listened Disturbed when I realized this image J. The concept came to me immediately. Once you have an idea, you need images to use in your photo manipulation. I used photos from Stock.xchng : http:/ www.sxc.hu. and Cgtextures http://www.cgtextures.com for textures .

Step 1

To get started,  open the man photo in Photoshop.  Press CTRL + J to duplicate it. Click the icon eye in front of the original layer to mask it.   

Fig 1

Step 2

Next, select this face and isolate it from the background. Choose the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L) and draw a selection around the face.

Press the Add Layer Mask button to remove it from the background.

Step 3

Next, select the Burn Tool (O). Set the Range to Shadows and Exposure to 100%. Black out under the eyes and on the lips.  You can add a Levels adjustment layer.

Step 4

After you finish, place two textures behind the "Man" layer. To combine them, use blending modes. Change the Blending mode to Color burn for the “First texture” layer.

Set the blending mode for the second texture to multiply.The modes that work the best for a composition are "Multiply", "Color Burn" and "Overlay". You can test out all the others to see the results.

Fig 2

Step 5

Make a new layer named "black". Place it on top of the "Man" layer. Select a black soft brush. Make a few clicks on some areas to black out them.

Step 6

Drag and drop two textures onto your composition on top of the "black" layer. Change the blending mode for the first texture to Color Burn and Soft Light for the second texture. Use a layer mask if you only want to show some areas of an image. Click on a soft black Airbrush and paint over the areas that you don’t' want visible. 

Step 7

The next step is to import a cat eyes photo. Press Ctrl/Cmd + U to colorize them. Set the Hue to 0, Saturation to 76 and Lightness -53 to have a red color.

Step 8

Below, the front use a cracked surface texture.

Fig 3

Step 9

To continue the "grungy" effect, add some textures. Use the same technique (step 6) to hide some areas. With this technique, you create soft edges around your image.  

Step 10

Finally, add a solid color layer (#844910). I also added a tree photo.

Self portrait with eyes closed & vertical lines

In order to liberate his drawing  from representational marks, Cy Twombly began drawing in the dark shortly after he left art school. I love Twombly's work, it is so enigmatic and I feel, if I study it for long enough, I might be able to decipher his personal code. His huge, mysterious canvases really draw me in and move me - they seem to be strange communications from his soul directly to mine. He is the only abstract expressionist  I really relate to and I think it's because his work is as much about drawing as painting,

I thought that I would try drawing in the dark - but I'm usually asleep, so I did  the next best thing and drew with my eyes closed. It was liberating and fun - definitely something else I want to explore further.

Shame on you, GWB!

I don't know. Yesterday there was a documentary on German artist Jonathan Meese. He's a friend of Daniel Richter and some of his work is really beautiful. But there's also the well curated old skool art genious aspect to his work, full of old skool shock tactics etc.. I'm curious about your opinion.