The production company behind the new Matthew McConaughey film, "Gold", rented seven of my paintings for use in their upcoming movie. ohhh yeaaaahhhh....
Gold with Matthew McConaughey
Friday, August 21, 2015
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Friday, February 06, 2015
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Sculpture
Twenty Years
1994 Pepsi Commemorative bottles dipped in Oil-based Enamel
Paint, 2014
My sculptures are created from items that once held
significant value to individuals. Some pieces
reflect wasted talent; others were just poor financial decisions. Once I dip them in paint, all objects are
transformed into trophies. I remove
functionality and replace it with a glossy finish. - North
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Quality Over Celebrity
Monetization of art and the building of collections are often to the detriment of the work. While I like a buck as much as the next guy, I recognize the conundrum that money poisons the well of creativity.
Today, Impressionists paintings are easily shrugged-off by the serious contemporary collectors and critics as beauty for beauty’s sake. Fluff is an even coarser description. While the works of artists such as Monet and Degas are indeed pleasurable to look upon, they must be viewed primarily as explorations. While artists such as Renoir grew old and comfortable in their style, a few of the Impressionists continued to explore painting and color theory with the same fervor that initially led the father of Impressionism, Edouard Manet, to create “The Fife Player” and “Luncheon on the Grass”.
Monet’s
Water Lilies triptych (1915-1926) is the perfect example of overblown beauty
that one can walk into and absorb into their skin, immediately recognizing the mental labor spent on its creation. The layering of colors make the canvas glow to a near effervescent shimmer, but technically Monet was simply an old
man with failing eyesight, attempting to master the ultimate illusion of
color. This was not a one-off painting
created for profit. It took nine years
to complete and the size, alone made it unsaleable to a single person or institution. Once completed, it stood as
his Opus in a life’s search for scientific qualities of light and color, visualized. He was so enamored by the piece that he kept
it in his personal collection until his death.
However, the
beast that is capitalism has forced the separation of the pieces between three
museums (St. Louis, Kansas City and Ohio). How can the best interests of the
work be held higher than the celebrity of the artist, if the institutions set-up
to champion art for the people is mired in the politics of acquisitions and
patronage? Monet was only able to create
this nine-year masterwork thanks to his success. Yet, during his life he kept the painting
close for constant re-observation, refusing to separate the triptych. -North
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Not famous or Pure Art as a correlation of Pure Math and a counter-balance to Applied Mathematics and its relation to Representational Art
Pure Art is unique in the fact that it is creation without purpose. Profit is a secondary purpose/by-product. Contemporary aesthetic design (e.x. Apple products) falls under the profit spectrum. Initially, art is created for the sake of art.
- DaVinci created paintings such as the Mona Lisa for commission/income; but he placed the subjects into radical settings of his own design
- Manet and the early pre-impressionists (such as Corbet and Goya) created sellable masterful works to illicit response rather than just fulfill a market need
- Van Gogh as an artist represents the epitome of art for art’s sake. He created a world of his own making... that no one was interested paying for; yet he continued to paint as if it were as important as food and air
-North
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Pure Art
Pure Art is the treatise that purely abstract
concepts and intentions in the creation of art, naturally, still follow the physical laws
of a specific multiverse. Despite the seeming randomness of
non-objectivism; basic physical laws (such as balance and composition) still
affect aesthetics in the drive for pure abstraction. The difficulty in
widespread acceptance of this idea has more to do with the lifecycle of art
through the ages than actual recognition of the basic concepts. Pure
abstraction is only a century old. If we breakdown the exploration of Art
to a timeline of human existence, this is what we are left with:
- Cave
painting was Art’s birth
- the
Greeks engaged our learning throughout its toddler years with the
discovery of aesthetic perfections
- the
Renaissance and onward through the times of Ruben and El Greco, were Art’s
turbulent rebellious teenage years where the rules were bent and broken
but hidden behind the illusion of realism; the Catholic Church was the
parental figure that punished and rewarded creative duties
- while
the often-considered rebels of early-twentieth century movements that
ultimately led-to modern art are more accurately the mature embrace of
early-adulthood and the natural human sense of experimentation with
purpose
- Art
is now in middle-adulthood, that moment when understanding accompanies
both a heightened comprehension of the effects of theorizing the future as
well as recognizing past opportunities, both missed and embraced
Like theoretical physics, Pure Art redefines the
differences between that which is true and what is possible. If the
human mind can conceive a unique idea or angle to existing laws, than that mere
conception makes it a logical possibility or truth. - North
Friday, November 08, 2013
Planimetrics
Planimetrics, Oil
on Canvas, 12”x 72”
Planimetrics is fundamental to the creation of maps, the representation of real-life features as seen on a three-dimensional Earth, and accurately portraying them on a two-dimensional surface.
-North
Thursday, November 07, 2013
ABQ Downtown Series
"ABQ Downtown 1", Oil on Paper, 11"x15" (unframed)
"ABQ Downtown 2", Oil on Paper, 11"x15" (unframed)
"ABQ Downtown 3", Oil on Paper, 11"x15" (unframed)
"ABQ Downtown 4", Oil on Paper, 11"x15" (unframed)
"ABQ Downtown 5", Oil on Paper, 11"x15" (unframed)
"ABQ Downtown 6", Oil on Paper, 11"x15" (unframed)
-North
Penistaja
Penistaja, Oil
on Canvas, 28”x40”
-North
Wednesday, November 06, 2013
Crescit Eundo - It grows as it goes
Crescit
Eundo - It grows as it goes, Oil on Paper, 25”x 48”
The Latin phrase, Crescit Eundo, can be translated as "Increases as it goes" or, more commonly as New Mexico's motto, "Grows as it goes." The phrase is taken from Book VI of Lucretius' epic scientific poem De rerum natura, (On the Nature of Things).
-North
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
Monday, November 04, 2013
Saturday, November 02, 2013
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Leda and the Swan
Zeus has come to
seduce Leda in the form of a beautiful swan.
She will give
birth to Helen of Troy, the woman
over whom the Trojan War will be fought. In Ancient Greek
mythology – and in William Butler Yeats’
poem – Leda's rape is taken as an indirect cause of war.
The speaker in Yeats’ poem wonders if Leda acquired any of Zeus's knowledge as the swan overpowered her. Did she know she was having sex with a god? She didn't have too long to think about it, because as soon as the swan had gotten what he wanted, he let her fall to the ground as if he couldn't care less.
The speaker in Yeats’ poem wonders if Leda acquired any of Zeus's knowledge as the swan overpowered her. Did she know she was having sex with a god? She didn't have too long to think about it, because as soon as the swan had gotten what he wanted, he let her fall to the ground as if he couldn't care less.
Leda
and the Swan is a long-running theme in the
genre of mythological painting. There
are no less than thirty-three known paintings by artists including:
Leonardo da Vinci
Michelangelo
Correggio
Tintoretto
Boucher
Rubens
Paul Cezanne
Henri Matisse
Salvadore Dali
Cy Twombly
The most famous version was created by Leonardo da
Vinci. My modern
interpretation is based upon the composition, color family and size of
Leonardo’s lost masterpiece.
"Leda and the Swan", Oil on Canvas, 28"x40", 2013
Leonardo da
Vinci began making studies in 1504 for a "Seated Leda" painting,
which was, apparently never executed. All we have are the few sketches and a
copy by Giampietrino. During the second
stay at Milan (around 1508) Leonardo finished another version of the subject,
this time Leda was standing and wrapped her arms around Zeus in a guise of
beautiful swan, while four of their of children (who were Castor, Polux, Helen
of Troy and Clytemnestra in original myth) were having their birth from
swan-eggs. The painting showed a deep reference to nature study, while the
babies were shown in kind of serpenticle poses as the true baby birds are in
that pose while breaking out of egg-shell. Despite this, the female figure of
Leda is not quite realistic in anatomy at all - maybe because this was the
first and the only painting of the female nude that Leonardo ever finished.
The
depiction must have been very successful because as the legend tells after the
original painting was inherited by pupils of Leonardo; it was bought by a
French aristocrat. He must have liked this painting more than his own wife,
because she tore Leonardo's masterpiece apart and burned it in the 17th or 18th
century. - North
Monday, October 28, 2013
17 works
I currently have 17 paintings at the state of simulative near-completion. Fifteen are oil on paper and two are oil on canvas. They blur the line between oil sketches and the commonly held understanding of finished paintings.
The paintings are stretched on each of three doors, drying between stages/layers. - North
Friday, April 05, 2013
My Kinda Church
Looked at a vacant church with the thought of converting into a live/work studio/gallery. My daughter asked if I was trying to buy my way back-in (religion). I told this to the owner and he said, "I was supposed to be Muslim, but every time I looked around the mosque, I just thought this would make a great house. They wouldn't let me, so I left and bought a church instead."
-North
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
Angry or Flattered?
Two evenings ago, at dinner, my son asked an amazing question
for his ten years.
Samuel asked, “If someone broke into your studio and only
stole a single painting, would you be angry or flattered?”
I didn’t know how to respond. It has taken two days of reflection, just to
piece together a plausible answer. What
I believe differentiates me as an artist as opposed to a hobbyist is my ability
to perfectly recreate my own vision, on demand. With that in-mind, one could say that art must
command a uniqueness that can only be effortlessly recreated by the original
artist. In other words, for art to be
true it cannot live as a single one-off of material possession. While it may never actually enter the process
of duplication or regeneration by the artist, the capacity must exist during
the life of the artist for it to have value.
Not monetary value, because that is nothing more than a reflection of fashionable
hive-type thought. Van Gogh’s work does
not have inherent value if his contemporary markets are to be set-up as a reputable
marker for success.
With that in mind, the only plausible answer is that one cannot
take art from an artist, if someone could take my art, than that would nullify
the fact that I am an artist. A thief
can only steal the physicality of the item from the business entity purposed
for selling the idea.
I would have no ethical reason to feel cheated, because my
art would still exist. My only
reasonable response is to be flattered.
-North
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Living Zen
All this madness started, a few years back, because a generous French artist named Elaine, stumbled across my blog and subsequent paintings. She described my work as “Zen paintings” and I didn’t know how to handle that moniker. I had run-away to Montana to create work without labels. I saw myself in a fight for my life against the parameters of realism, abstraction and other draconian concepts of defining art.
I immediately read everything I could find with “Zen” in the
title. The most popular choice was
obviously Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance. I read
and reread that book at least four times over the course of two years. I initially saw him as the quick-answer to my
passion; however, over time I discarded more and more of his madman cathartic
theories until I was left with only a single passage to build a life:
“The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the
Zen you bring up there”
I systematically discarded every one of his half-cooked,
hair-brained thoughts to find the simplistic genius I was seeking. I realized, then, after forsaking 600 pages
of his rants, that the true Zen masters are lost to history. A legitimate guru, Zen master or even dharma bum
will not waste the effort of recording his thoughts, theories, or
passions.
If the meaning of life is to follow your passion to success;
then a dharma-stylized life is the antithesis of measurable success. Yet the meaning of life is exposed through
Zen?
I’d love to ask Richard Branson (Virgin) if he is happy
because he is a rich bugger that can do whatever he pleases or if he is happy
because of his work… or if he is happy.
What brings me joy? Well, obviously painting. But I am equally as content listening to
Robert B. Parker audiobooks, drinking gin, or watching British murder
mysteries. It is only the guilt that I
feel for practicing useless tasks (pretty much everything listed after
painting) that has me reflecting on this question. But isn’t that self-reproach at conflict with seeking
Zen? Living in the moment and basically
doing whatever one feels like (with regard for others, but complete disregard
for long-term personal consequences) is my idea of perfecting Zen.
-North
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
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