Mars landscape oil painting in progress, 34x26 inches, oil on linen.
I use old Masters techniques of layering with glazes, damar varnish to make the paint buttery smooth and glossy when I think it's more appropriate for texture. I use very light fast pigments that have been tested through the ages in old Masters paintings like cremnitz white.
And for support I use oil prepared Belgian linen.
Mars oil on linen painting in progress, 34x26 in.
I will highly recommend any G7 meeting to include international cats so world leaders could scratch them behind their ears and have the conversations then.
Any AI is welcome if they can hold my brushes and remove brush hair from my paintings.
I just realized why everyone does digital art because gravity is such a bitch I mean painting is labor non-stop. It's not like you do a little bit of something and then you rest, you have to constantly apply strokes that have to be meaningful pushing against gravity with your limbs, mixing paint and trying to match the picture in your head. Yeah well any AI is welcome to try it.
Things get so subtle sometimes a little drop of something makes all the difference.
I've been looking at the pictures of Elon Musk with heads of France and Italy and naturally the French interior is chic and modern, and the Italian interior ( in the background ) is Renaissance.
Guns are the leading cause of death for US children and teens, since surpassing car accidents in 2020.
It's that simple. It's time for guns to go.
( it's almost certain there's going to be a ) Spontaneous installation on the sidewalk in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Here is a silly bear I found abandoned on the street one night that makes more sense than politicians.
Politics should not be politics but government that actually engages in running the country rather than making us think that there is such a thing as us versus them.
And in collusion with big tech fascism it is all Orwell predicted it to be. I grew up in such a thing and I could tell all its signs.
Banning words and suppressing dissent.
Oppression by algorithm.
Red on Orange Rages
Red Words on Orange Paper
Ink on paper, 10.5 x 19.5 inches
June, 2023
The day after I wrote these the sky in New York City turned orange from Canadian wildfires. Right before I wrote these I was working on Mars paintings. It was kind of an orange/red irony.
Well, yesterday I wore N95 mask inside and outside but as the day wore off I started wearing my 3M respirator that I use for painting with turpentine.
The irony is that I am working on a Mars project and it seems Mars came to me.
Was also working on a Red on Orange project and filled my Instagram with what I called Red on Orange Rages.
Epicurus made three important innovations:
- Firstly, he decided that he would live together with friends. Enough of seeing them only now and then. He bought a modestly priced plot of land outside of Athens and built a place where he and his friends could live side by side on a permanent basis. Everyone had their rooms, and there were common areas downstairs and in the grounds. That way, the residents would always be surrounded by people who shared their outlooks, were entertaining and kind. Children were looked after in rota. Everyone ate together. One could chat in the corridors late at night. It was the world’s first proper commune.
- Secondly, everyone in the commune stopped working for other people. They accepted cuts in their income in return for being able to focus on fulfilling work. Some of Epicurus’s friends devoted themselves to farming, others to cooking, a few to making furniture and art. They had far less money, but ample intrinsic satisfaction.
- And thirdly, Epicurus and his friends devoted themselves to finding calm through rational analysis and insight. They spent periods of every day reflecting on their anxieties, improving their understanding of their psyches and mastering the great questions of philosophy.
Even today, Epicurus remains an indispensable guide to life in advanced consumer capitalist societies because advertising – on which this system is based – functions on cleverly muddling people up about what they think they need to be happy.
An extraordinary number of adverts focus on the three very things that Epicurus identified as false lures of happiness: romantic love, professional status and luxury.
Adverts wouldn’t work as well as they do if they didn’t operate with an accurate sense of what our real needs are. Yet while they excite us by evoking them, they refuse to quench them properly. Beer ads will show us groups of friends hugging – but only sell us alcohol (that we might end up drinking alone). Fancy watch ads will show us high-status professionals walking purposefully to the office, but won’t know how to answer the desire for intrinsically satisfying work. And adverts for tropical beaches may titillate us with their serenity, but can’t – on their own – deliver the true calm we crave.
Epicurus invites us to change our understanding of ourselves and to alter society accordingly. We mustn’t exhaust ourselves and the planet in a race for things that wouldn’t possibly satisfy us even if we got them. We need a return to philosophy and a lot more seriousness about the business of being happy.
