The Norton Itch

I put up a new painting, Fortean Norton. And by "new" I mean I started it 2006, had it in a storage tub for two and half years, showed it in an unfinished too-green state at the Gallery 1988 show this summer, and now after a bit more tinkering it's maybe possibly completed (there's another painting from that show I have yet to put online; it's also being reworked). The inspiration is a tremendous drawing of Edward Norton my brother Darrin did many years ago:


I wanted to see if I could give that sketch dimensionality, and also get out of 'gluing celebrity heads onto funny bodies' mode and try out an outsider art/horrible-drippy-people style. Parts of it were really fun to paint but I'm not sure if those parts ever came together into a confident and resolved painting.


The fox mask is something my friend Alexa made in real life, and the little gremlin faces--representing trophies from Norton's globe-spanning travels--are knickknacks from her parents' house. The picture of Mothman, well, that's just a picture of Mothman.

Norton the Hero

An authentic marine biologist I know corrected me about something inane I wrote a few posts back:

"From your Blog: "No one (I'm pretty sure) will ever live or die by anything Edward Norton says or does."
Well if by "no one" you are referring to people, your comment may be true. But if you generalize to marine life, Ed Norton has done a lot for our scaled and slimy friends. He narrated a documentary called Strange Days that was produced for one person. It was shown to Arnold Schwarzenegger the week before Fish and Game voted on the marine protected areas. It worked, the appropriate back door shenanigans were pulled to set up the preserves. Hooray!"

Is there anything he can't do?

Politics

I've been asked a couple times in the past week whether I'd be making any Obama/McCain art (okay, two people have asked me). I guess if I started now I could totally have some kickin' election paintings ready by mid-November, early December. Which is exactly why I think politics is a pretty bad subject for art--it's too of-the-moment and easily dated, and yet, completely weighty and consequential. One of those guys is going to end up improving life for certain people while making things worse for some other amount of people, and any image of that person will carry whatever reverence or hatred or love a viewer brings in his or her heart. I'd rather paint people of absolutely no consequence; it makes it a lot easier to create content around the subject, rather than have the subject dictate the content. No one (I'm pretty sure) will ever live or die by anything Edward Norton says or does.

Somewhere, at some point, I read a really good description of what makes art bad or good (at least I think I did, since I can no longer place the source; I want to say it was Joseph Campbell quoting someone else). It concerned 'fast' and 'slow' art (I might even be wrong about these terms, since I don't get anything Googling fast+art+Campbell). Fast art moves you towards something, it wants you to make a judgment on its subject matter, to take action, to want or need or possess something. It's advertising, it's pornography, it's the art you made when you were in high school and angry. Slow art exists for the aesthetic experience. There can be content and meaning and message, but while you're looking at/hearing/watching it, that should be the only thing you ever want to do. I guess what I'm saying is, that slow art is the kind I'd like to make.