Lennie Lives

People have asked me what I'm going to do now that "Law & Order" has been cancelled.

How about another group art show?

"Isn't there music within you?"

If you need me I'll be on Holodeck Four.

Earlier this week I contributed a guest Riker to the best website ever, which I would have posted about in a timelier manner if I wasn't swamped manning the Nicolas Cage Colorform apparatus. It's actually a ten year old acrylic painting I had completely forgotten I ever did.

Also in news I should have mentioned a good long while ago, I have some prints for sale in the Giant Robot print show in San Francisco this weekend.

In One Week

I'll be at table 258 at San Francisco's Alternative Press Expo next weekend. APE is just like a comic book convention, but with lots of new art & comics to sample and no cosplayers or movie studios. So I guess it's nothing like a comic book convention. It runs Saturday October 17th from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm, and Sunday the 18th from 11:00 to 6:00. Admission is ten bucks or something, or completely free if you have your pass from this year's San Diego comic-con.

I'll have a bunch of T-shirts, posters, prints, and cards for sale at reduced prices (I've got to make room for new Christmas products), and I'll be around to sign stuff the whole time. Just a few tables down will be a bunch of bros from Topatoco as well (see map above).

It sure is fun to meet people!

Twisted, Mutated Freaks

Against the Brotherhood of Mutants! This was the first concept I had for the Stan Lee show, before deciding to go with a duck-laden Magneto. Maybe not my most brilliantest concept, but after having it rattle around for a year it was sort of like, "Yeah... this still amuses me for some reason. I guess I'll have to paint it."

I also wanted to do a trial run for this style, in preparation for another, larger thing I'm working on. It's basically one of the horrible pop-art paintings I made in high school but done using oil instead of acrylics: instead of having the colors be flat and static, there can be subtle wet-into-wet effects, and instead of having all the lines be solid black they can vary in weight and translucency. The downside is having to wait a million hours for each layer to dry.

Everything Lost and Wonderful and Sad

It's 3:00 a.m. and I've spent the last few hours flipping through a collection of pictures of Risley, the arts dorm at Cornell where my artist-in-residence adventure took place. I don't even recognize half the people in the photos, and Lord was that place covered in nerd (the SCA practiced on our lawn!), but right now, sitting in my hermetic LA loft with the windows clamped shut to keep out toxic flame ash, I somehow smell autumn and rainstorms, and I feel in my belly a bit of that manic excitement you have when everything in your world is still new and unfolding.

Here would be a great place to write something about the effect of other people's nostalgia and make a clever segue to this:



Years ago I had the idea of making dozens of plein air Sears paintings. Searses of all shapes and sizes, showing the differences in landscape and architecture. I tried a few experiments that didn't quite feel right, before realizing, No: It shouldn't be about capturing the realness of Sears, it should be about creating that one perfect Sears, the Sears you see in your mind, the Sears that's more Sears than Sears ever was. So here is A Perfect Moment Braced in Time, Like Falling in Love. Click through to see all seven feet of awesome beigeness.

It's one of my paintings from the "Monsters of Pop" show, which is still up at Gallery 1988 through this weekend. I'll roll out the others over the next week or so as I finish scanning and cleaning them up, and I've got some other drawings and such waiting in the wings as well. It's time to breathe some life back into the ol' brandonbird.com.

I Love Art

http://badpaintingsofbarackobama.com/

My Soul-Thought Twin

"In today’s world, in today’s media climate designed to foster the fear our leaders like us to feel because it makes us easier to push around; in a world where limp, wimpy men are forced to talk tough and act ‘badass’ even though we all know they’re shitting it inside; in a world where the measure of our moral strength has come to lie in the extremity of the images we’re able to look at and stomach; in a world, I’m reliably told, that’s going to the dogs, the real mischief, the real punk rock rebellion, is a snarling, ‘fuck you’ positivity and optimism."

I appreciate the writings of Grant Morrison, if I have not already made that clear.

Danger!

"The arts are more dangerous [than other professions] because they require sensitivity to a large extent," he said. "If you go too far you can pay a price -- you can be too sensitive to live in this world."

Not to belittle his point which he belittled through hyperbole, but the illustration should be a bunch of artists leaving earth on a spaceship. Punch it, Jasper Johns!

November 7th, Philadelphia

One of the gallery founders is Jon Halperin, friend, generous benefactor to contemporary art, and owner of an enormous John Tesh. Delivering the painting to his home was like stepping into the tomb of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh who'd chosen to be buried in an issue of Juxtapoz.

So I'm betting it'll be a lasting space with a lot of strong shows. I think for this first one I'll be sending them Spidey.

Go Slugs!

My friend and fellow alum of the prestigious UCSC painting school John Olsen has a show of paintings in downtown Los Angeles right now. Here is his painting blog and here is the show info.

He also co-updates with our co-friend Jeff a blog about good art that they like. I figure you'll double-appreciate that link if you're anything like me--a surly and isolated artist who likes other art but doesn't follow anything that's going on.

I am the Night

Over here at my real website is my newest painting, "I am the Night." It debuted in the real world last Friday at Crazy 4 Cult in Los Angeles. I suppose I should have blogged beforehand to tell people about the opening, but I was pretty crushingly exhausted from trying to get it done in time, and also I'd just be telling you, "Hey, go wait in a huge-ass line for two hours." Here's a good recap of the opening, and the show is up till September 12th, so you still have a chance to check it out if you're in the area.

The inspiration behind the painting was Halloween 1986 when I went as Metroplex. You could tell who I was because the costume had a picture of Metroplex on the chest and said, "Metroplex." My first impulse was to paint a child's Lennie Briscoe costume, but I've played the Lennie card perhaps too often. Who, I asked my soul, is the grossest and least appropriate subject for a mass-produced child's Ben Cooper costume? And Soul replied, "Philip Seymour Hoffman."

I started by looking through old family photos for shots like these to use as reference:






While sketching it out, I considered adding other kids too:



I decided against that because 1) I did not want to look at that crayon kid's face all the time, and 2) I decided I wanted more of a lonely/creepy vibe, and the extra kids cluttered it up and made it more of a "Which of these things is not like the other" piece.

I hope you enjoyed this peek behind the making of this important masterwork. I also hope you will take a look at my other updates, which include some wacky new shirts.

Art

Steve Schofield, photographer.

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.