rollertrain

School Dance by Megan M. Sullivan

(the muted colors and the tilted perspective give you the sensation of leaning into space. the stars from the disco ball and whatever’s going on with those robotic appendages add to that lost, empty nostalgia of a school dance. i want to know what’s behind the silhouetted curtain.)

Yarnageddon’s love story about insects and moth tattoos made me smile. Bugs, lizards, snakes, maggots, ticks and spidery critters show up in my doodling all the time, probably because they’re everywhere in the american south. Once May hits, you can’t move an inch without getting bitten by a mosquito or running into a stream of ants. That’s the thing most southerners love about this climate. There is life bursting through the walls, and you can smell its thickness in the air (i’ve sputtered on about this before).

Alabama taught me two important biology lessons I’ve carried with me ever since. These things had a huge impact on how I dealt with the god questions (what the fuck are we doing here, is this a lab experiment, does our planetary isolation induce psychosis, why do we need religious fairy tales), and still inform decisions I make today. The first lesson was the lizard, and the second was the strawberry.

I was smoking a lot of pot back then. I’ve never been a very sober person. Regular sobriety gives me a headache, probably because I’ve never been regularly sober. Unless a substance causes a lot of trouble, like what happens to my judgement capacities when I’ve had too much wine, I see no reason to avoid it entirely. Moderation blah blah blah, yea yea yea - everyone’s different, and one person’s pot is another’s bad acid trip. You find something that improves, enhances or alters your brain waves, and hopefully you don’t fuck up too bad. 

So the anole lizards happened because of a cat named Curie. She used to live with me at Ford Court, where anoles congregated in large communities. Curie would catch one or two of them a week, bring them inside and play with them until she killed them. There was one anole who escaped over and over again. I’m inclined to think it was a male.

After his third or fourth capture, he decided to live in the bathroom. I’d talk to him and after a while, he became pretty tame. He’d crawl up my arms and hang out on my shoulder, looking at things from a new elevation as I walked around, smoked cigarettes or scribbled down bad poetry. I spent a lot of time looking at him eye to eye, and realized we were on the same level. Then, one sad afternoon, he got his guts ripped out after another bout with Curie.

He was still alive when I got home, and he died in my hand. An overwhelming wave of grief knocked me down, and I was scream-sobbing when my old boyfriend came over. He thought a family member had been killed, the way I was going on. It must’ve been a little ridiculous; what did I expect? But the eye to eye thing had a huge impact on how I interacted with life forces other than my own, and to be given that lesson - that any berry on any bush is just as valuable as you are - is a gift I still deeply cherish, and maybe sometimes take too seriously. Unless you fuck with my home or my loved ones, I won’t kill you. I’ll do my best to get you off my property or out of harm’s way, but I won’t kill you. This applies to humans as well (with the exception of traffic, where we’re all out for blood). 

The strawberry thing only reinforced this conviction, and it was too small and quick an instance to sound interesting in words. I was really high, and there were strawberries in the kitchen (I think I had a vegan roommate at the time, and vegans and vegetarians are like democrats and republicans when it comes to how easily they can annoy me). I put a strawberry in my mouth, and it felt like a cold piece of beef. 

As neurons connected in my brain, the moment registered: This thing used to be alive, and now it’s dead. Anyone who thinks cutting the throat of a cow is any less a killing act than yanking a tomato plant up by the roots is an idiot. Mammals are messier and fattier to kill for our food. I think it’s just as fucked up to see warehouses jammed with stacks of clinically wrapped slabs of meat as it is to have strawberries available for purchase when there’s snow on the ground.

That’s why vegetarians and vegans make me laugh sometimes. Not the food - the food is typically very tasty, because veggie chefs are creative with spices and sauces and cool combinations - but the moral side. And the side that suffers from protein deficiency. There I am, watching the yoga-tuned white people order their vegan cupcakes and lemon edamame, giggling to myself with globs of pork and barbecue smeared on my lips, and then I remember the lizards and the strawberries, and I pick up the pipe. 

The Letter - 22x28” oil on canvas (mostly violet)

More process photos to annoy flickrtographers and track every mistake.

Candle field by Dan Witz

The Morning News interviews Witz (coolest last name of the year) about his night paintings, which are an interesting contrast to his fantastic street art.

(taking a step away from tumblr, i thought that maybe i should explain why certain images of different works by random artists catch my eye. i don’t have the skills or the interest for formal critiques, and the more i read current art criticism, the more it seems made up. people who have no artsy background beyond a clever set of eyes seem to get at the heart of an artist’s work in much fewer words.

learning how to paint is a lot like learning how to speak a new language. you start off with a tourist’s vocabulary, adding simple phrases like “excuse me, ma’am, could you tell me where to find the nearest discotheque” and “could we please have the check now” every day. the trick to getting them to stick is to use them over and over again. but even as your vocabulary grows, you botch these phrases. “the more close business selling wine is how to get there, pardon mine.” and “boy, here.”

the biggest and most difficult subset of the painting language is learning how to speak light. light made from paint, light that you are creating from mixing different colors and are therefore responsible for. if this mixing and experimenting doesn’t pull off the light, it’s your fault. and anyone with an ounce of color theory can see where you went wrong before you can, and knows how much paint you’ve wasted.

paint’s expensive. the cost of art supplies in general is totally skewed when compared to the final product’s reality price tag.

and then there’s the purpose of the light. a year ago, this would have sounded a little too highbrow for my tastes. but now, it’s this big puzzle - it’s so much bigger than a puzzle that my brain can only begin to fathom it as a puzzle - with sharp edges and a million pieces made from tiny variations on the same gray or beige or brown. the puzzle is more about these subtle tones and shades than the dazzling colors on the wheel. every single one of them has to serve the overall picture, even if they’re just hanging out and pretending they’re random.

i’ve been practicing with lots of violets lately. the violets keep showing up because i’m mixing two of the color pallets i’ve used before, but i didn’t realize this until tonight. one of the things i’ve put off painting (again) is windows. i was looking for tips on how to paint shrubbery through paned glass, and that’s how i found dan witz’ night paintings.

in terms of technique and purpose, i think his candle field is pretty amazing. i like the shapes i see in the negative space. the dark reds and blues in the candle votives give the wax and light that tangible glow you can only get from oil paint and someone who knows how to really work light. and i really love what the painting is telling me. this is more than a well-painted still life. i imagine it’s something he saw while maneuvering through the shell-shocked maze of manhattan at the end of 2001.)

History’s Drunks & Junkies

Winston Churchill was a big, fat drunk. So were Joseph Stalin and Alexander the Great. Adolf Hitler was a meth head. Napoleon Bonaparte was brain-fucked on opium on the day of the Battle of Waterloo. And swollen-faced John F. Kennedy had so many drugs pumping through his system, he could barely function. 

Of course, there’s no way to prove any of this. But it sure does make sense. Dan Carlin’s latest episode of Hardcore History (“History Under the Influence”) takes an Occam’s Razor approach to some of the most bizarre and unexplainable actions by ancient and recent history’s biggest players.

Aside from the short, awkward format (this isn’t Carlin’s best history show), the subject is pretty fascinating, because very few historians have delved into the arena of how alcohol and narcotics might have affected the way world leaders behaved. Check it out.