Obviously you're not a golfer.

For Halloween my girlfriend Carmen and I dressed up as The Dude and Maude Lebowski from the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski. Depending on the situation people often mistakened me for Jesus or Moses but I'm The Dude!  They had the wrong guy.

Through out the evening of the 31st at the Yonder Mountain String Band show at the LC we ran into a few of the other charactors from the movie.  First we found The Jesus. "Nobody Fucks with The Jesus."

Then after the show we ran into Walter. "Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax..."

Unfortunatly Donny couldn't make it...

Halloween concerts are the best.  Henhouse Prolwers opened the night around 8:00 as the Blues Grass Brothers Band followed by Yonder Mountain String Band as the Yonder Mountain Punk Band.  Here are the photos I caprtured from the evenings festivities.  Henhouse Prowlers and Yonder Mountain String Band.

Pacellfier turned Hammerpede Xenomorph

So Digital Culture has been an adventure in 3 dimensions the last couple of weeks and I never would have imagined the learning curve in this digital realm to be so intense.  My original goal was to create a sculpture that was a dimensional representation of my paintings.  This turned quickly into a commentary on modern screen based parenting.  I have seen terrible uses of touchscreen devices used to pacify children in situations that would otherwise exist for bonding and building relationships.  The best example I have seen of this was at a Clippers baseball game where I saw a kid with his parents not watch a single pitch of the game.  He must have been around 7 or 8 but I never saw that kid look up or speak to his parents unless he needed something from concessions.  Thus the Pacellfier™ was born. A device that cradles your phone and sucks the living soul right out of your child with the use of a patented pacellfier energy leeching mouthpiece that transfers energy directly to the device for extended battery life that last as long as your child has the energy to live.  Never be distracted by the obvious opportunities to bond with your child again.  Is your kid making too much noise all the time?!?  Is your kid constantly stomping around driving you crazy?!?  Think there is no answer?  There is! Pacellfier™!!!

First I started by creating a physical model out of high density foam.  That was the easy part.  Next I attempted to create a 3D render with the use of an application on my phone called 123D Catch which takes thirty or so images and puts them together in 3D space based on content.  This took about 5 trials with comedic results before I figured out how to get the software to work correctly.  There was cleaning to do.  My digital render had extra artifacts present that needed to be chopped off of the intended object.  So I toyed around with that in 3DS Max 2016.  I had a really hard time figuring out how to rotate the object let alone chopping pieces off and shaping my object.  I am pretty advanced in programs like photoshop but this is a whole other beast.  Beyond that it would have taken something like 30+ hours for a 3D printer to make my creation so for the sake of time John and I decided that it would be best to create an object with the use of the laser cutter.

The goal was to use 123D Make to map a cutting pattern of horizontal slices that together would make my Pacellfier™.  So I gave 3DS Max another go and figured out how to clean up my render but when I attempted to open the edited object in 123D Make it was rejected because of file format.  3DS Max cannot save files as Standard Tessellation Language (stl) so I was left with my original file.  I ran it through 123D Make and created a PDF that I later converted into an Adobe Illustrator (ai) file that would be printed on quarter inch plywood.  

I was running around campus and everything is going nicely until I get to Battele to find my scrap of quarter inch plywood. There was none, so I had to improvise.  The next best thing was half inch plywood but I really needed it to be quarter inch.  To make it work I ran my half inch ply through the door sander about ten times sanding away the layers until it was the thickness that I needed.  Then about 40 minutes before work I ran the piece of wood over to Kinny and got the print underway.  The first second and third attempts at cutting my pattern failed to go all the way through the wood sheet but after the third pass I decided that the parts could be punched out of the wood.  After I freed the 105 parts from the board I organized them on the table and started gluing the stack together.  What I created was something more out of Riddly Scott’s Prometheus then I initially intended but the form is there.  The idea of it being a facehugger type creature from Alien is along the same line of thought though.  Thus the Pacellfier™ Xenomorph was born.

Dye In Water: Delta S

For the last few weeks I have been making an attempt to get out of comfort in order to find a more pointed understanding for my current direction and reasoning for why I paint what I paint.  Tuesday morning I had an adventurous conversation with Gordon Lee, my current mentor,  which has tied together a lot of the concepts and ideas I have been exploring.  Recently I have been spending a lot of time contemplating degenerative brain issues like strokes and Alzheimer's.  There have been a few personal experiences that have led me this way.  My grandfather experienced a minor stroke that caused him to lose all of the nouns in his vocabulary for around 45 minutes a few weeks ago.  For that time everything was fine except for his ability to pull from his library of nouns in conversation.  Most recently the father of a good friend of mine suffered a stroke due to bleeding in the brain or hemorrhaging  that caused him to lose the ability to read and write correctly but not entirely.  Words like down and town illuded his writing ability while words like dermatology are spelled without error.  He can write things like his name, wife's name, his hometown, and other details, but when confronted with reading a copy of the writing he is unable to complete the task.  My aunt is 101 and can tell you stories about 1920 like it happened yesterday but cannot identify who is in the room conversing with her.

For a while I was thinking about what losing libraries of information must be like. How this happens? What it meant? I was getting nowhere really. And found myself toying with the idea of changing the rules of my paintings or negating them entirely.  Rather I chose to explore new routes of creation. For many of the last 8 weeks I have been exploring different mediums like silkscreening and canvas, raw and gessoed, stretch and not stretch.  The canvas work has been frustrating but has taught me a few things with relationship to my recent understanding from Tuesday morning. Along with exploring new mediums and attempting to get out of my comfort zone I discovered that I was working with groups of marks that were being grouped together in quantities that happen to add up to be prime numbers, 1 3 5 7 11 13 17… The number 2, while prime, never really shows up and this may be because it divides with 2 without leaving that extra “one” in the remainder. It is too symmetrical.  To follow up this prime number discovery I did a few explorations of line and prime numbers where I created different groupings of lines based on rules, like whether the lines were allowed to intersect or not, along with combinations of these rules based on how I paint.  Anyways, I showed the drawing to Sam and she suggested that I explore primitive language roots and directed me to cuneiforms because of the basic language structures and logic that I was creating. This exploration made sense to me because I was dedicated to neurological issues and language is a large part of what is lost from the brain in many cases that I have encountered.

So time travel to this Tuesday morning.  After showing my recent explorations, Gordon Lee brings up this article he has recently read about entropy and its relationship to the universe and we get going down this great conversation.  I am relatively familiar with the term with respect to thermodynamics (and cats) because of my work towards double majoring in art and biology in undergrad but this is something special with respect to my work.  Entropy for those who do not know can be defined as a lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.  In chemistry entropy is a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.

Entropy is a natural occurrence that happens all of the time in many if not all facets of the universe.  What are examples of entropic processes? Colored dye in a glass of water is a great example of the entropic process.  The drop of dye hits the water and begins to swirl and mix until the glass of water arrives at an end point of balanced distribution of color or to a point of homogeneous mixture.  The natural world is full of these entropic events. The way the temperature of the air around us changes with the rising and setting of the sun is an example.  Leaves falling from the trees and decaying in the fall is another, while being absorbed by trees and turned into new leaves on a tree is the reverse reverse.  These processes can take an millenia like that of the creation of a sun from a mass of gas in a galaxy or they can be something so simple and quick as that of a cup of brushes a cat knocks to the floor from the edge of the table.  People leaving a stadium and finding their homes is a form of entropy.

After understanding these examples how is this relevant to the concepts of language and cognitive function I have been exploring?  A stroke is an entropic event of the brain that at times can be an event that causes the almost instantaneous loss of language or writing.  Alzheimer's is the same only much slower as a brain gradually loses it’s ability to recognize that which it has been trained.  Chicken is no longer chicken or it can’t be recognized as chicken even if it is sitting right in front of the subject.  I view this as entropy of the brain.  A degradation or transition of structural understanding into another form of existence or nonexistence.  Now that I have laid out these examples of cognitive entropy, I can give you the real point to what is happening in my paintings.  It isn’t exclusively entropy I am exploring but the control that can be placed on that entropy through basic structure.   As language is a semiotic structure for defining and sorting the chaotic universe in which we exist graphic mark making is the structure that controls static entropic states that I allow to exist through pooring paint and allowing it to run.

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Did everything just taste purple for a second?

Here are a few new prints.  This time I made an effort to play with color a little more thoughtfully.

And an attempt at Phillip J Fry.  Still needs color.