Winston Chmielinski

Reactions

2010-08-18T14:00:00.000-07:00

There are lives lived less than the life of a single painting, I suppose

I have received some emails about my latest work, Soft I, that read like frenzied prayers for exorcisms. I guess I've brought forth a ghost; I guess it's the risk of painting people, and in the Internet age, these winst ghost people travel at the speed of light.

First and foremost, thank you. Sometimes I forget the perceived miracle of my medium, I only play with puppet strings while you watch a story unfold. But behind the stage I improvise to your guiding rhythm, and it keeps going, and it keeps going... and I would be incurably paralyzed without it.

There is so much magic –

I want to show you where I live

2010-08-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

If you look carefully you may catch a glimpse of me...

It's easier to understand me if you don't take me seriously

:)

Soft

2010-08-16T04:14:00.000-07:00

Soft I 30" x 40" acrylic on canvas

It's an elementary observation that I desperately needed to make:
To preface, there are things about me that make things about others enviable:
I fetishize the communicative abilities of others
I round off their corners, I sand down my own, I lose almost the whole of myself
And fade into a sculpted landscape of white pebbles, mowed lawns, sidewalk-stunted trees

The worst is, I resist even in painting, I've been depicting the round-about;

time to expose myself.

It took an hour and two months to get here: an hour to trace back two months of navigating the overgrowth. I'm very happy to come upon a clearing, these are new thorns in my side, I've got a compass now, I'll cover new ground, I won't redouble.

As banal as rainbow after rain

2010-08-14T05:33:00.000-07:00

I'm imagining a neurosis, under my breath "[point] nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine..." waiting for an unconscious .000001 to interject and bring me to the next second-of-rest plateau. Two months of holed-up experimentation, overwhelmed by doubt, enshrouded in a week of Berlin rain. It's dark in here!

Sita Sings the Blues livened me up a bit today, I laughed out loud five times and I never laugh out loud, and then and then she sang, "If you want the rainbow, you must have the rain," with those big lashy eyes and I Almost doubled over 'cause the cliche hit me so hard (I think I've witnessed true alchemy, from ennui to poésie)

Clutter clutter clutter, it's hard to identify what is and what isn't, so I'm haphazardly shredding it all, including what I paint, how I paint it, and what I'm painting it on.

Funny, I'm compensating with way over-eating [foodstuffs], so here I am in front of my computer setting up Google reader, feasting my eyes instead on an all you can eat buffet of information. I'm trusting that it's a shared stomach - the one for food and the one for information, cause satiation just by the former is foul.

Clutter clutter clutter and I've been eating it too, when you eat it you poop it when you see it you paint it, I'm like a clutter robot with redundant coding, I'm like a human with hope.

Hold in there, I'm starting almost anew, I can't be too focused on sorting and eating and trashing and amassing but I definitely needed to pump the stomach and clean out the eyes, so that from this point on I can differentiate between intuition and compulsion, maybe ask a few more rhetoric Why's.

I live by a teacup prophecy

2010-08-12T03:25:00.000-07:00

I give most others the benefit of the doubt, you are wonderful you know so much how do you do it oh will I ever catch up, and the somethings I glance in hot pursuit seem to mock me, "Panting face jiggle cheek stomp stomp boy you aren't enough!"

I think it hurts, even though I laughpant it off.

They're right, through the telephone chain of ear to brain I hear to myself: I've always sought the easy way out, there is no way out, the answer, instead, to the way in, work work work; the question, why; the product, fuck, mostly lame!

See, though, I do strive for perfection, which makes me a lazy perfectionist, because I expect a lot from relatively little and end up quite angry with myself and enamored with the rest of the productive world. There are times… when my logic lines up with my intuition and for a brief moment I think in completed (!!! bad sign already) images, i.e. I fantasize about my place in the world. These moments are beautiful rare and absurd, even more rare as I become even more aware of my irresolvable ignorance, and the author inside me loses another hair, chips a tooth, stubs his toe on a toilet bowl.

Little absurd dictator inside me, hi, I give you full authority because you look funny and by the way you hobwalk I can tell your mind leaps and bounds, I'm a good shell, tug me by the ears and I'll comb my hair, I don't know a damned thing so let's work together like double-team-trouble, two crazy heads who never alone claim to fame can, subversively, absurdly, change the world

where I'm where I am

2010-08-06T15:20:00.000-07:00

I took command again of my super veiny hands and grabbed and go, and what came was just for fun, for me, and I'm digging it

broken spoken

2010-08-06T15:11:00.001-07:00

I don't care what words, sometimes I just want to be a man of many

In a new city (in new cities) I am new conversing every night, I don't have that much to say, I feel cliche, I feel stupid often, I am mesmerized by people and how much they know

Tomorrow I will shut up shut down and read

Bedsurfing Berlin

2010-07-30T06:21:00.000-07:00

My sleeps here, because I’ve been next to a man (last week a stranger, this week an acquaintance) is sporadic, like I wake up and feel his hair brushing against my elbow and I shift closer to the edge of the bed because I know, it's like an essential truth, this isn’t my bed (it's the half-sleep of a watcher or squatter). As soon as he gets up and out my body sighs of relief, it actually curves into an S, Something relaxed not Sensual, my head falls deeper into the pillow, my arm wrap tighter around whatever and eight hours of tension melts away with the help of a rising sun.

(To my generous couchsurfing host, R---, to whom I owe, if not good rest, then everything else that shouldn't be taken for granted)

Love,
Winston

slow

2010-07-27T02:52:00.000-07:00

I should want a second to be slower than a decade so to say I've tasted a century, a millennium... and then in that second to forget and forgo time entirely.

This is a wish of mine.

(flohmarkt am mauerpark, Berlin, July 2010)

how now my why Berlin

2010-07-22T12:00:00.000-07:00

You won’t get a real answer if you ask me why I’m in Berlin. The only true, albeit shortened, response is long, in which you’d have to let me trace behavioral patterns to demonstrate that my going to Berlin is really no different than spending a day’s allowance on a jar of muscadet honey, a take-away curry wurst and an assortment of German gummy bears (notice, all these things I have never tasted until today)…

It is Berlin, and it is not just Berlin that brought me here. It without a doubt is the compulsion to up and leave that pushed and continues to push me away from comfort, routine, friends and family. Berlin is secondary to the compulsion, whose kinetic force will drive me from here, soon, too.

One thing though has changed since Paris at seventeen – I no longer expect to discover something altogether better. Newness, I’ve come to realize (what with all of the money I’ve blown on “new” foods in foreign supermarkets, for example) teases me with the promise of something tantalizing, beyond imagination, something ideal, something—and here’s the clutch—inhuman. The actual result and the old usurper of my unconscious anticipation, named confusion or just bland banality, prompts the opposite of disappointment. Yes, two negatives make a positive, and I find my senses opened, my mouth ajar with a dropped jaw a sideways smile and a chuckle.

Time to get to work, I can’t wait to get to work, when I settle into my studio next week.

NIGHT SWEATS 2

2010-07-21T08:26:00.001-07:00

Part two, I bonding-breakfasted with L---- who slept opposite me these past three nights in Aloha Hostel’s 8-bed dorm room, and maybe within our first thirty minutes of conversation we opened up the lid on sleep, engaged with the ghost, shiver-shiver-freaked a little about our shared “sleep paralysis” afflictions. Ah! For each of us, two nights of severed consciousness and psychical intestinal ruptures!

The question superseded the conflict of answers—chemical imbalance, spiritual sensitivity—and settled on, “What could have happened in this building?” This is Berlin, built upon people over people upon people, dead and now alive. Who, what, where, when, why, and how at 60 Torstrasse, Berlin, Germany?...

NIGHT SWEATS

2010-07-19T04:32:00.000-07:00

If you believe in ghosts, take this at face value | If you don't believe in ghosts, decipher the metaphor for me (please)

Aloha Hostel, Berlin, deserves a positive review on hostelbookers.com save for the debatably German debatably female ghost that's kept me awake for two nights straight -- I think she has long hair, and I think she died by stomach trauma because she won't stop churning mine.

Sleep paralysis is my family's affliction, we are a sensitive bunch.

This is when I wish the ol' garlic trick were true, or maybe a cross on the headboard and a silver chain 'round the neck. But only superstitions can be dispelled with more superstitions, and my night sweats tormenter is very real, and very annoying.

Welcome to Berlin, besides her I love it.

continuums

2010-07-12T05:17:00.000-07:00

The moment after I'm here (here is Paris, is lunch in my temp apartment, is a window wracked with rain), then I'm there, and there's nothing to hold onto except maybe the ghost of an image. I think this all started ten days ago when I turned 22.

(Photo from weekend at La Baule, Brittany, France)

Good night, Boston, Good bye

2010-07-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

My youth art projects in skyward sparks: Tiger, he burned up through and through, I believe, I mean four years of waiting does expedite release

Thanks, dad, for helping me set him free; and tonight, when I, too, ascend, the glistening of steel wings in the clouds -- that's both of us waving goodbye.

Good Morning, New York, Good Bye

2010-06-30T20:06:00.000-07:00

6 AM in Greenpoint a walk good bye

Interrupting the flesh

2010-06-25T06:39:00.000-07:00

I've reached a point, I think, where I've mastered painterly "tricks" (how specific they are to my five-year-old-and-counting brushes remains to be seen, when I purchase myself a new set this summer...) and with that has returned a sort of amateurish phobia: that a signature style has developed into a stylistic dependence.

I drafted a manifesto once that outlined vague "rules" in painting, such as: do not use white pigment until the final layer (--I've since X'd out this one--); when blending turns to unconscious muddy-ing, hit it strike it and drip it (the gung-ho enthusiasm can take a back seat but I'll still share a ride with it); etc.

The manifesto served its purpose, but has become historical -- because I've moved on from essential rules, and believe more in a dynamic system: if I do this, then I need to do that (for example, if I use bright colors, then I should thin them out). And in a moment when you take your circulating system and drive a dagger right into its flesh, it hopefully can adapt, first by absorbing the shock, then assimilating it into a new web of functions. The hardest part is thrusting the dagger, and the second hardest part is sticking out the recovery.

vegan seepage

2010-06-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

A silk-thin-skinned man sporting a sugary ensemble of peachy pinks and baby blues (fanny pack, visor, socks) assumes the role of MTA poetic missionary on slow Sunday afternoons, and last week as my train car approached 1st avenue he let out a, "Ladies and Gentlemen! We are approaching 1st avenue, enjoy your vegan blueberry cheesecake because your loved ones secretly hate the stench of meat that -- well, for some of you, anyway -- seeps out of those enlarged pores USE-SPF-AND-SAVE-YOUR-SKIN-LADIES-AND-GENTLEMEN!"

And for a second there, as the train steadied itself into a slow stop, were smiles and giggles and dead eyes that came alive.

I'm an uptown boy! Wednesday 6/16 opening

2010-06-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

Just two of us this time (me + Leah Dixon) popping up for a night in a high rise apartment on the Upper East Side. Come join us for art, absinthe I mean champagne I mean wine yeah (no, I didn't say a thing, shhh) and secure a few positive points for your very own quality of life index.

Details for those who are blind to all but text:

THROUGH AND THROUGH

Winston Chmielinski and Leah Dixon

Cocktails: June 16 6-9

220 E. 72nd Street
Suite 14A

low-budget Narnia for little wasp children

2010-06-05T16:28:00.000-07:00

I decided to scatter my trinkets in a public place frequented by little wasp children because I know how exciting "the discovery" can be as a kid... And I like to imagine stretched-face mothers scanning the hills and triangulating trees for kidnappers, 'cause only freaks leave frogs and conch shells and pewter people and troglodytes on the ground, right?

(... all the while avoiding poison ivy 'cause that shit's bad news)

car crash coincidence

2010-06-05T07:33:00.000-07:00

Coincidence, a search for meaning, I'll tell you what I found.

Yesterday morning at breakfast I explained to my parents why I was throwing away grade school art projects (a fiery orange paper-mâché tiger, a Harry Potter puppet): "If I rid myself of personal ephemera, then when (if) I die you won't feel compelled to contain the memory of me in things, like a shrine."

They were confused, me talking about death over scrambled eggs, though I often speak detachedly and they're starting to take it upon themselves to infuse my words post-dialogue with emotion. They paint me pretty.

Anyway, I left a couple hours later on a kid's size bike (I'm 6'2"), redoubled immediately to switch from a handbag to a backpack, then glided down Pond St. to the rotary crossing, saw an opening in the traffic, crossed, wrongly gauged my speed (bike was in a high gear), didn't look to the left, went went straight straight rolling sluggishly and BEEP and BRAKE and FLIP head over handlebars right where the silver car going about 40 MPH had just barely brushed by my front tire. Hip knee ankle hit hard on the pavement, but I sprung up grabbed my bike and jumped onto the grassy knoll in between two opposite lanes of traffic; a few cars stopped rolled down windows and asked if I was OK, my seizing ankle shook "No" but I smiled "Yes" and off the world went.

Consider the post on Thursday (Boston, wipeout whiteout), the picture from that post, the next-morning conversation, the upcoming month of life changes (I'm done with school, I'm archiving the strewn around tangled past into bullet-point lists in Helvetica partitioned to the E: drive, I'm moving to Berlin, etc.) and any shock at the unexpected will quickly be absorbed by the plush padding of expectation.

It all fits; in retrospect I could've predicted it; I'm shaken humbled razed to the ground when I think how everything would've changed had I been hit -- and I was so fucking close to being hit. Another definition of Coincidence: justification for being stupid... I should steer clear of that ... And instead see myself sitting in front of my computer, typing this, with just a faint throbbing in my hip and a kink in my ankle, as pure luck, another chance to make the most of what I have, now, and to wait for the walk sign and look both ways the next time I try to cut my journey-time by a few minutes.

Fuck. I'm alive.

Boston, wipeout whiteout

2010-06-03T11:17:00.001-07:00

My friend Jordan asked me whether it's better to lose everything in a fire or throw it away. I said I don't know, but that what I'm doing now -- purging my cream-carpeted doll-filled room of its lingering adolescence -- feels good. I'm lucky to be able to say good-bye, actually to make a week of saying good-bye, before I fly away on another six-month transplantation.

Dusty room, dusty paintings, dusty mind. I'd like to rip out the carpeting, throw away the furniture, and paint it all white; but I'll probably just donate books dolls and clothing and then buy some coconut ice cream and vegan cookies and play Wii for the rest of my time here. I hear Super Mario Galaxy 2 is mind blowing fun.

documentation, that's all

2010-05-27T08:17:00.000-07:00

Drawing out, sinking in process

Four Days Photo Forays

2010-05-25T20:08:00.000-07:00

Two Iphone photos abutted

evokes a day's proceedings

Imagine a little Winston in the Invisible Inbetween!

MEN!

2010-05-24T06:47:00.000-07:00

JD Samson and the rest of the MEN crew (Michael O'Neill, Ginger Brooks Takahashi + Emily Roysdon) were in my living room I mean at PS122 performing "Who Am I to Feel So Free" roped to one another like leashed Afterschool Program children.
I took a video, and because I took a video I didn't get up and dance -- though I found my movement doppelganger in that girl whose arms flail straight up into somekindaawesome routine at 2:04.

pink beads of sweat at Pretty Young Things

2010-05-22T19:37:00.000-07:00

Body heat makes a hot sticky mess out of cotton candy.

I also noticed the setting of the sun because the space at 833 Broadway is naturally so well-lit; that and the room cooled down a bit, and the whites in my painting turned to yellows and blues.

They [the crowd] went through so much rosé -- I stuck to my Perrier, because my head's been hurting lately and I have pine-nut-mouth (everything tastes bitter for ten days after consuming a certain type of pine-nut, google it).

Skipping the after party because I need to decompress, and these bondage straps on my new Yohji pants are at risk of catching on drunken feet and chair legs.

Check it out tomorrow (10 AM - 6 PM), it'll be much more conducive to the viewing of art.

Love!

Vaginal Davis Speaks from the Diaphragm

2010-05-20T13:41:00.000-07:00

Vaginal Davis takes us to a heaven or to a hell or to some place in-between (a living room under the sea?) where boys and girls in undies sit on faces and get whipped and licked (whipped as in whipped cream) while she, all smiles, talks freely with her friends -- the creative elite -- in person and over Skype.

Now that the exterior of PS122 has shed its scaffolding, which in some ways served to justify the melange of performance art and heart-to-heart within, the intersection of East 9th Street and 1st Avenue has become possibly the greatest site (at least for the remaining week of Speaking from the Diaphragm) of generational, sexual, emotional, racial, artistic, etc. etc. crossroads.

I feel like the luckiest kid alive that I've been able to help Vaginal with preparations for the show; she is hands down the most positive, loving being in this hemisphere, a veritable fountain of youth from where energy (of the natural kind, though of a magnitude that seems wholly supernatural) flows endlessly and indiscriminately.

I'm riding the Vaginal wave!

And tomorrow I'll be performing as one of the Chat Roulette boys, so please find yourself a ticket and strut along over here. I promise it will be a night to remember, not because I'm back in tightie-whities but because Vaginal only doles out the unforgettable.

To distract me from the still

2010-05-17T21:21:00.002-07:00

[Movies and a rapid succession of images as source]

My newest painting acted upon a leap of intellectual faith (an emphasis on working the source before moving to canvas), whereupon I saw all of my old habits resurface (over-blending, simple geometric shapes, hidden brushwork, nude pastel colors, under-paint omission, etc.) because I felt uncertain.

But I'm pleased with the result.

Re-organization of the same variables (--I'm a slightly more confident but in no way more talented technician at 21 than I was at 16--) when left to the unconscious function can compose something as good as new, the test of which is how immediately people can still see me, and my past, in it, without the correspondence being formulaic or predicated.

I am distracting myself from the still to move past constancy; my relationship with visual expectation is narcissistic, a search for solace in my mirror; reassurance of my abilities won't come from a head beyond the glass...

Push away!

I know I will be frustrated but I will be free

the state of my love

2010-05-17T21:21:00.001-07:00

I want to see you before I leave New York
I want to leave you before I see Berlin

May 22-23 | Pretty Young Things | NYC

2010-05-16T12:34:00.000-07:00

A two-day exhibition/party saved from the depths of debauchery by the godly talents of twenty pretty young things, this upcoming Saturday and Sunday, May 22+23, downtown.

Official press prose below:

NEW YORK, May 2010 – Anne Huntington and Diana Campbell present PYT (Pretty Young
Thing), a temporary salon-style art show to open, and close, just before Memorial Day. PYT is predicated on the idea that artworks from emerging contemporary artists have an important place both in personal collections and personal spaces. With this domestic ethos in mind, co-curators Huntington and Campbell have invited over 20 contemporary artists to exhibit their work at a spacious renovated downtown loft for a temporary weekend exhibition.

The show’s name references the youth of its curators, the artists featured and the budding collectors that it will target as guests. PYT seeks to forge relationships between collector and artist in this casual, unintimidating environment. PYT will open on Saturday, May 22 with an intimate brunch in the exhibition space, further underscoring the livability of the mixed-media works being shown. The reception will be from 6 – 8pm. The show will close Sunday.

Huntington and Campbell decided that their inaugural curated show would work best by
fusing their closely connected professional facets: collection advising, art management and event organizing.

Jacob Abramson and Suzette Guy, Todd Bienvenu, Winston Chimielinski, Annika
Connor, Anna Coroneo, Alex da Corte, Benedict Dos Remedios, David Foote, Amit
Greenberg, Nir Hod, Benjamin Hollingsworth, Alexis MacDonald, Ben Olson,
Meredith Ostrom, Anita Ragusa, Alexandra Richards, Jason Shelowitz, Mary Nelson
Sinclair, Grant Singer, Carlo Van De Roer , Virginia Vergara, Martynka Wawrzyniak

Debut art exhibition project connects young collectors with emerging contemporary artists in intimate salon-style domestic space.

Come and let's have some fun

simple with force

2010-05-13T08:37:00.000-07:00

I start on a new painting and I go, "This is it!" But I should (and think I finally do) know by now I can't push the technique. The mind can soar on leaps of faith, the body just goes splat.

Maybe you know this about me, I rely heavily on my source materials, which most of the time I out of laziness don't play around with enough -- and that's when I end up with half-assed paintings that seem retrogressive instead of pro-.

(Actually, they're quite fully-assed paintings, they usually take more effort than the ones that are in line with ideological progressions, because I work work work on them without ever reaching a point of satisfaction.)

Pushing the ideas, letting the technique carry itself, finishing a painting for my May 22nd show and it better be good.

obvious suggestion

2010-05-04T16:41:00.000-07:00

Someone successfully perverted my perception in the most subtly unsubtle of ways: by contouring Justin Timberlake's face with a thick black sharpie, this vandal was able to disfigure Mr. Sexy Back to a point of non-recognition.

Manipulation of the actual image (photoshopping) is a painstaking process, a definite skill; but to be able to achieve the same, or arguably an even greater, transformation without touching the image itself (working solely on a superficial layer) affects us on an unconscious level because we, or at least I, never suspect that something so vulgar and obvious could still trick our most relied upon sense. Someone, that vandal, is a masterful trickster, and I want to learn from him!

(This is an idea to incorporate into future works, guiding the viewer's visual sense with additions rather than working from within; in the least, I'll be utilizing a new layer, the top-most, and may even venture into that ever-evasive negative space. My intentions are to raise the intensity of the work, and since I haven't a clue what the actual effect will be then there is no malice in this, just a want of impact).

upcoming show, disco roller skating

2010-05-02T04:50:00.000-07:00

I'm infiltrating the Upper East Side! Official announcement to come, but mark your calendars for May 27, and make sure to eat a bit before coming 'cause you wouldn't want to over-booze and trip-up on delicate painted things.

Spent the day brainstorming titles and massaging the tired out of the back of my head, then mosh-pit-sun-bathed on Central Park's Sheep's Meadow. So many frat boy bodies, inadvertent pec-flexing, cute but burning babies and girls with oversized sunglasses and not much else.

Pictures of people I liked, both in the park and the adjoining MAKESHIFT DISCO ROLLER SKATE RINK:

Today's wise words of advice from OK Go's Damian Kulash : "Just keep making awesome shit."

one and one and an other

2010-04-30T04:28:00.000-07:00

Tongue-stick-out-head-cocked-sideways-duck-footed-teetering epiphany! To be seen, tall, ugly, bent, soft, catching the light around my own emaciated shadow: raw sensations, like a tingling up and over, an opening down and out, like wafting into sprinkler mist on hot humid days...

Recall the reason for closing my eyes on the subway: to feel unwatched, to smile unabashedly. Now consider this walk a subway ride but with eyes wide open, smiling unconditionally (without bearing teeth -- I do believe that teeth, especially ones as big as mine, are actively threatening rather than passively inviting--) and notice the difference: the former, feigning unseenness; the latter, being seen detachedly.

I was on my way to a screening of I Am Love at the MoMA, and I meandered up Sixth Avenue as one among the crowd… For once outside of my own bedroom I didn’t put forth; I just took in. This, in the moment, was a culmination of my body practice: I love you obsessively and I don’t care a bit, see me through and through and don’t you dare look at me, we are completely inseparable and just one and one and an other.
I Am Love was genius, director Luca Guadagnino’s got a beautiful mind, and Tilda Swinton’s a goddess.

The art of undoing

2010-04-29T04:58:00.000-07:00

I'm painting over more of my old canvases now, and no one need know which ones: I'm easily influenced by outside stimuli when destructively tranced-out.

"It is until it isn't,"

and my own:

"Effort goes into it and comes unto me."

Which is to say that the time and energy spent on a painting is valuable in of itself, metamorphosing into future works; I need not preserve each stage of development like a collector of shells and skins.

experimentation in pure pigments

2010-04-24T17:25:00.000-07:00

Experiments with clayboard: my incredibly old and tired bristle brushes apply paint so unevenly that, on clayboard, every stroke of color contains an equal or greater amount of white. No need to use white pigment with these. Changes everything -- it's just a test -- I quite like the color purity and the overall compositional simplification (white pigment you alien boi).

Of course, every painting contains its own problems and solutions... So the tube of titanium white will remain within arm's reach.

Two paintings today, plus images of my palette (used for both) and my lovely shoe/sock combination. Then I got ramen.

Blank again

2010-04-23T05:13:00.000-07:00

It became historical when I couldn't complete it; it and I mutually agreed to stop; we can now move along.

Hello again anew!

External thoughts

2010-04-22T12:46:00.000-07:00

I am finding home, and this is a pursuit of the impossible. The ecstasy of a split-second encounter with it (the impossible) is so good, it is too much, but I grab at it and go go go; that feeling of restfulness, yes, is weightlessness before a drop, comfort is just (—where just is everything—) cushioning before a blow. The sequencing glues it all together, and when I grab at it and go go go I trace my motions in pigment so that I don’t repeat. Wash and repeat.

Painting for me is the glue that binds me to others; it is where I do my pursuing, and surprisingly, masochistically, people watch and applaud. (I guess I am highly relatable when I exist as a painting.) I continue for the mini-completions, the arrivals that are immediately beset by departures, the finishing and the restarting that, when layered one on top of the other, up up up and out and back under, take the form of a process unending. It is (just) that, and I make my home in it, and once in a while it corners and I’m reoriented by a lurch and a brake.

Translated to what you see before you: there are breaks and freefalls and encounters and dismissals. I have no qualms about calling [a painting] done because I am just starting. I spread myself thinner and thinner with water to increase my want of reconstitution; and then plops down a confident glob to scatter the weak, and then flies forth a bristle brush to disrupt the geography. Arbitrary intentionality! Impassioned randomness! Take note: I’m clearly confident in something because I admittedly haven’t a clue what I’m doing. In a close to perfect moment I don’t paint I just do and things happen, and if it looks like shit then I smile at its brownness and get some sleep, and if it works… Then I revel for a second in its presence and steady myself for the fall.

THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART + me

2010-04-21T05:47:00.000-07:00

Kick ass music makers The Pains of Being Pure at Heart decided to use "Ribbons" to front their latest single! Check out the band + their sounds here and see below for the official cover.

Thanks guys!

coloring in A Shaded View on Fashion

2010-04-21T05:19:00.000-07:00

A tribute to a real person who felt deeply, "Daul Kim Rainbow Warrior" exists as much a celebration of an impassioned-and-foreshortened life as a reassurance that everything contained therein--the suffering, the success, the pictures and the voice, the words and the silence--is beautiful.

In the moment I related through and through and through.

My painting has accompanied Daniel Wakahisa's post yesterday on one of my favorite blogs, Diane Pernet's A Shaded View on Fashion which, for a pensive moment, has in loving memory returned Daul to us. Thank you.

sat down with HOT CHIP a little while back...

2010-04-17T17:51:00.001-07:00

and talked about, uh, music and t-shirts

(opportunity thanks to VMAN Magazine; photographer was sick, so I tried to videotape the band with an iPhone in my left hand... Needless to say I now can sympathize with that naked girl/boy on the bicycle seat who has to hold his/her arms out perpendicularly at Marina Abramovic's MoMA show, except I wasn't naked thank GOD or they would've seen me blushing in more than just the face-area.)

<3

Pictures from IONA

2010-04-17T17:49:00.001-07:00

Cold & rainy outside, warm & fuzzy inside. Thanks to all who came, here are some pictures shot by Mr. Udo Mahlmeister (what a German!)

SOLO SHOW @ IONA BROOKLYN, Sunday 3/14

2010-03-08T19:52:00.000-08:00

Come see me and my painted peeps this Sunday, March 14, at IONA Brooklyn where the beer's cheap and the bartenders have awww the cutest accents.

Right off the Bedford stop on L train, at Grand St. and Bedford Ave. (180 Grand St.)

I WANT TO SEE YOU BECAUSE I LOVE YOU. But in case that isn't enough I've convinced the staff to drastically reduce prices on beer and wine.

Starts at 3 PM, and if you come early then you'll catch me before the agoraphobia sets in and I run away. So come sooner rather than later. :)

Bring / invite as many friends as you can. The more the merrier.

Show runs until the end of the month.

NOW: Solo Show @ Iona Brooklyn

2010-02-25T13:55:00.000-08:00

Covering Iona's intentionally bumpy walls with my paintings. On display now until the end of March, so take a look and down a pint while you're there.

View Iona Brooklyn in a larger map

March 4 -- Chelsea Hotel

2010-02-25T13:49:00.001-08:00

The Hotel Chelsea and 2|ONE|TWO|PROJECTS have created an immersive experience in one of the most exotic rooms of the hotel. The paintings of various artists will be hung salon style on the wall and creep up and over the ceiling. The audience will view the works seated or lounging on cushions. The idea is to show all the possibilities of painting and show this through a transition from representational through to abstract and minimalist paintings.

Opening Thurs March 4th
6 - 9pm
Gallery Suite 1019
Hotel Chelsea, 222 W 23rd St, NYC

also
Open Thursday evenings 6 - 8pm March 11th and 25th,
April 8th and 22, May 6th and 20th , or by appointment

Featuring Artists
Gillian Bostock | Winston Chmielinski | Tara de la Garza
Marissa DeMarco | Felicity Faulkner | Meghan Keane
Ayca Koseogullari | Susan Olmetti | Kenneth Park
Sirikul Pattachote | Kate Shaw | Koji Shimizu | Darren Wardle

Alexander McQueen

2010-02-14T10:09:00.001-08:00

My mind can't comprehend the death of a legend, Lee Alexander McQueen, but my body understands... I keep breaking down, and it's a strange sensation--that of heaving and crying over a complete absence of thought.

iphone

2010-01-01T09:05:00.000-08:00

Images

2009-12-02T09:39:00.000-08:00

Have you ever taken a photo of yourself with the sheer intent of tearing it apart? Not ripping it down the center - no, allowing it to live its life fully as a photograph, the uncensored reproduction of you and your wholeness. But that's just when the 'tearing' begins: you blow it up to highlight your uneven skin, you draw lines and circles over your entire face to reveal asymmetries; then you begin to wonder if this 'wholeness' is just a haphazard assemblage of incompatible parts.

Stare at your portrait for two minutes and you'll start to recognize yourself again. Stare at it for five and you can consider yourself vain. But to reassert your power over this forced image - the 'you' that (apparently) everyone else sees (except you) - is all but impossible without certain sacrifice: destroy the mirror, keep the photograph, or keep the mirror, destroy the photograph. Either way, to-be-whole-again-ness is borne from the destruction of a surface, and I promise you they're both inhumanly difficult to break.

you, painted

2009-11-22T14:53:00.001-08:00

Be my subject. You must have access to a camera with video functionality.

If you're interested please send me an e-mail: corked@gmail.com

I can't guarantee that everyone who participates will be painted. Compensation will be a print of the finished work, whatever size you want, credit (of course!), and coffee on me whenever you're in NYC :)

Any paintings titled "icon" belong to the series, and a few are already posted on the site. Enjoy!

You just can't

2009-11-21T18:49:00.000-08:00

take part in the city without paying your part in the city.