An Age of Celebration
("The Wedding Dance," by Pieter Brueghel The Younger) I am not one who personally celebrates holidays. However, as an artist, I find that celebration events provide a most flourishing profile of a people, a region, a community, a belief. As such, themes of celebration provide fodder for anyone who's interests lay in capturing the intensity of our human spirit. 
("Musicians with Giant Lyre," Artist unknown / Reign of Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten, 1351-1348 B.C / Sandstone) Artists were once relegated to depicting holy moments and observed periods that reflected belief systems controlled by religious institutions, theocracies, and other kingdoms. As modern times came about - holidays became more inclusive of everyday people. In the present, all countries around the world celebrate numerous festivals, celebrations, and anniversaries. Some are common to others, and others are unique to the region where they are distinguished. These observances are opportunities for people to set time aside for mostly beneficial purposes. They gather with friends, neighbors, and even complete strangers to revel, commune, and personally express their spirits with the souls and remembrances tied to their belief systems or the occasion.
Brad Michael Moore on 11.30.05 @ 08:59 AM EST [more..]
I have always found it interesting that science fiction seems to forecast certain scientific discoveries. When Mary Shelley invented Frankenstein she, and to this day a lot of others, believe she was writing a gothic horror… a ghost story. In fact she'd written perhaps the first true science fiction novel that explored the beginnings of new advances in technology predicting as it were what we accept today as common place…that is, bringing people back to life with the aid of electrical charges. “Clear” is such a common command that we know exactly what is happening even if we only hear it shouted from the TV while in the kitchen making sandwiches during a segment of “ER”. She also made some pretty serious comments on the consequences of the Romantic Movement, the ethical foundations of medical and technological research and the dilemmas of the human spirit with commentary on man‘s relation to God, much of which we still grapple with today.
Get the answers to last month’s contest and try to identify images from my recent trip out west! 
In the first part of this Blog I touched the thoughts and problems of this man who is a painter, now we can follow the artist’s work and better understand his choices and uncertainties, desires, and the restlessness that accompanies him. Now I believe we can follow the artist with greater clarity. As I am talking about my own experience as a painter, I will return to a more personal account. I have always felt a particular excitement in front of a large canvas; as if the wide space offers all those possibilities for my imagination that have been denied in smaller formats. For this reason, I prepare a large canvas.
I stumbled upon my first studio away from the house on one of my regular hikes in the Sintra hills outside of Lisbon. Of course at the time I didn’t even know that it would become my studio and I like to think that the conditions in which it slowly did become ‘mine’ are rather mysterious, almost magical. 
It is no fun being in a hurricane I can tell you that. After traveling to Monterey to participate in the Mobile Imaging Summit, I treated myself to a drive down through Carmel into Big Sur and into Santa Barbara. I passed the Hearst Castle in San Simeon through Malibu Canyon into magnificent Malibu, and then to Los Angeles. This was one of the most gorgeous and spirited trips I had ever taken alone. (This was two weeks ago.)
We speak of originality, the new, thinking out of the box, the progression of art or the Avant Garde quite a bit on these blogs and in the responses. But what is new? Da Vinci, at the peak of the Renaissance and the in early morning of scientific method, talked about how no man has seen anything not of this temporal reality and therefore cannot imagine anything not based in that reality... He was speaking about how to create a monster out of the parts of other animals...That is to say that one cannot imagine something that does not exist in whole or in pieces that he has not seen on this planet, under the light of this sun in this temporality. All he can do is reassemble what already exists in a way that hints at something that has not or cannot be seen. Any progress we make depends on how we see the world around us. We often speak of life as we know it. That pretty much sums it up. When someone does or discovers something that seems to shatter that reality for a moment it changes our world view. 
I want to paint a man talking. So you can see all his teeth. I want it to be the portrait of someone who feels satisfied because he knows how to choose his words. Typical of a class that I don't like much, who talks of territories, districts, of exploiting and profit-sharing. But really he’s a cynic. He doesn't believe. 
Buenos Aires, Argentina
