Chinese Landscape with Water Flow Research Institute, oil on ready-to-use “Stylex” canvas w/ stretcher, 30×40 cm
The ancient art of Chinese Landscape Painting aims for universal completeness and peace, just as the Chinese Empire was supposed to reign for eternity. A painting is not complete if it does not bring together the hard, the fluid, the gaseous, which means rock (the mineral world), water, sky (air, fog). Living organisms are either part of the solid world (trees), or transient, animal or human, which are few and far between. Water is the element that flows through the image, from top to bottom, uniting all, making all into one living organism. Never is there harsh light coming from one point, creating light and shadow. Perspective is mostly of the aerial type, which means things in the distance are lighter in tone, as they reach you through fog, fine mists waft between them and the onlooker.
While this type of painting is originally done with ink and a soft brush on paper, here a westernized technique is employed, using oil paints, but heavily diluted, pig bristled flat brush, on cheap, pre-primed canvas with an interesting rectangular grid. The colour scape is muted, the mood not sombre, but peaceful, fresh, cool and gentle. The family of ducks in the lower left corner find their way undisturbed into the pool at the foot of the rocks, fed by cold spring water from the heights. The institute is nestled in the middle ground, free space to the front, a rock wall in the back, top stories and penthouse reaching out for the great emptiness above.
This oil portrait of a country house named by its owner “Judge Dee” is a bit sketchy in areas, but left so by the artist deliberately, as they wanted to free themselves from the shackles that the demon of perfectionism imposes on so many struggling artists. Since the client in this case was fictitious and identical with the contractor, it was easy to reach mutual satisfaction and declare the painting an artistic, if not commercial, success.
Low Density Dwelling Unit “Judge Dee”, 47 x 34 cm, Oil on canvas-mounted wood panel in the tradition of Dix on OSSA
Note that this painting is the result of a process of emigration to the essentially free and unbound realms of Poe’s Nothingness, even though it assumes topicality by incorporating and putting forward climate-saving technology. It deals with the problems with climate unfriendly methane plaguing our wasteful society. Methane here takes the form of “clean”, renewable cooking gas produced by the bacterial decomposition of (fictitious) human waste, mixed with the stool of an assortment of hypothetical pets. This gas is not really “clean”, merely repurposed and relabeled, and great investments in absolutely airtight tanks are crucial to prevent that odourless gas from escaping into the atmosphere and further heat up this planet’s already antediluvian climate. Climate spies equipped with very expensive special cameras will regularly inspect these tanks, and record all escaping methane in beautiful false colour images and films.
If cooking is not practiced and heating in general superfluous, there are further uses:
CH4 Uses (Methane)
It is used in automobiles, ovens and water heater as a fuel.
It is used in the generation of electricity.
It is used as rocket fuel in its refined liquid form.
It is used as an antifreeze ingredient in industries.
Vize 4: Tajná raketová sila / Vision 4: Das geheime Raketensilo / Vision 4: The Secret Missile Silo, 2020 Öl auf Holz / oil on wood 70,2 x 60 cm / 27.6 x 23.6 inches
This 2020 painting harks back to several versions of the same motive, a 2006 drawing, another smaller 2009 drawing, a comparatively large painting from the same year and a later, 2012 re- or overpainting of that painting. It is based on a Heljan plastic model, the Heljan #673 N Scale Meat Packing Plant kit. While painting this iteration of the structure, one of the artist’s roughly four favorite and therefore recurring real world or model-type architectural structures, the artist was grappling with ocular clouding (encroaching blindness) and also with a newly developed (or degenerated) technique of mixing organic substances with oil paint and acrylics, applying the resulting mixture, uneven because of different solubility of its constituents, often in half dried states or different phases of coagulation, onto the canvas with brushes in varying states of distress, interspersing the emerging image with highlights of synthetic luminescent powders and pastes. In this painting the artist perhaps reached a pinnacle in the materialization of a certain style he envisioned – a style where the constant fight between the youthful wish for perfect execution and the cosmic truth of decay leads to its own results, where human mind control and the freedom of molecular motion and chemical interaction coexist, where the Jungian amateur pursuing personal narcissistic goals of alchemical omnipotency finds respite in the struggle between time-bound limitations of the human flesh with the desires of the mind and the phantasy of timelessness.*
*Timelessness of art, which Oskar Kokoschka found perfectly represented in Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait at the Age of 63” at the National Gallery in London. While bemoaning the bombing of Dresden, visiting the National Gallery at the suggestion of his wife, he found back his inner peace at the contemplation of old skin, “like the skin of a dead chicken”, in the way in which Rembrandt understood to apply his own virtuosity in an inimitably masterful loose yet perfectly controlled application of paint, where molecular structure of the medium and chemical changes taking place in the process of drying and hardening, together with said virtuosity and sheer dexterity of application lead to a lasting and static depiction of a particular stage in a process which in the natural universe leads through life to death and complete disintegration in a matter of only a few years. **
**This anecdote is repeated here not to glorify the artist’s own desires of creating such an effect, but to humble it, as the above painting is not only a very serious effort, but also a typical example of Schlawinertum, as a surrogate to virtuosity and diligence, in contemporary art. It might be even that some hypothetical onlooker would only see the jejune and the would-be where in the eyes of the creator there is at least a glimmer or echo of the inner truth they sought, approached in baby steps which are much too short to reach their goal even within the whole lifetime of a person so encumbered by their own deviant desire for a sorrow-free life, which so often leads in truth to an inordinate accumulation of inner sorrows, often seen and belittled as minor by others, as they are sorrows of the imagination. While someone like Dostojewski, who knew exactly the interaction of sorrows of the imagination and the true sorrow of, for example, hemorrhoids, which so often result from sins of the mind, was so perfectly cognisant of the fact that nobody is entitled to define or judge the difference between imaginary or true sorrow, as their is none in degrees of pain they inflict.
Optimista bez otce / Der vaterlose Optimist / The Fatherless Optimist (2020) Oil on canvas on wood, 43,2 x 30,2 cm / 17 x 11.9 inches
From the Czech-titled exhibition: Nové trendy v územním plánování (New Directions in Space Planning) – – – Please note: functionality of presentation assembly on this blog has changed. The author has stopped going with the times. If this painting is a self portrait, it depicts the author much younger and richer and happier than he ever was. Colors are not well reproduced, also, the details of how the paint was applied (loosely, rather thin, on canvas primed with the addition of lots of chalk, thick enough for the canvas structure to be neutralized) are not easily discernible. A detail view of just the face will show how much more interesting it would be to look at that painting in nature, and getting as close to it as no museum would allow for.
The Fatherless Optimist, detail
Note how lips look like either result of a bodged lip job, or as if befallen by herpes simplex and badly swollen. It means that what appears light hearted and almost cartoonish in character is actually realist, or rather, naturalist in nature, trying hard to depict the nature and the rot of actual human flesh. At the same time you find touches of graphics art or the art of illustration, like the hair, scratched in with the end tip of the brush’s handle. Is this painterly?
The Unexamined Brutality (of the male Libido), 70 x 50 cm, Oil on Canvas
This painting seems to hark back to times when the male libido was seemingly more unabashed and comparative innocence (or unabashed guilt) reigned the abusive intercourse between the sexes. The aesthetics are reminiscent of surrealist inspired propaganda imagery. Phallic forms abound. One sea shell stands, or lies, in lieu of the womb. One could argue that the central phallic form of the outer shell of the engine’s boiler is actually esemplastic in not only being the threatening phallus, but also the tubular receptacle hollowness, awaiting the phallic thrust of another longish form entering (see the old chuckle arousing locomotive/tunnel imagery). The ?-voiced Commentator “ex”plains: seeming nostalgia for simpler times does not thinly veil, but starkly outline the fact that we today live in the age where all old violence and abuse bears fruit. The true objectification of the woman takes place in the immediate future which is our presence. Groping will soon be replaced by more sophisticated (and cowardly) methods of abuse. Think about artificial intelligence being furnished with female faces, names, voices. Some are discussing whether these undead freaks should be taught to give more assertive responses to weather queries mixed with risqué innuendo and sexual abuse. Few discuss who decided that “virtual” assistants need female voices and whether it is not a very small step for the brutality of the male libido to then confuse the (universal) assistance offered with the liberties allowed by sex-slavedom.
Woman’s Medical Centre with 1886 Benz Patent Motorcar (Oils on canvas on wood, 50,3 x 62,8cm)
Photographic reproduction of a painting which is positioned somewhere on the borderline demarcating the difference between the entirely satisfactory with added interest, and one of the lesser efforts in the field of true painting. Due to experiments with the preparation and priming of the canvas, the behavior of the paint was unexpected. Thus the execution lacks fluency. The technically inferior quality of the photographic reproduction adds to the impression of a very strange atmosphere permeating the picture, ambiguously oscillating between moodiness and objectivism. The symbolism; moon, spiral, car, and brick, is rather balanced, but with the addition of some sea shells, it is clearly shifted into the realm of female reproduction. (Of course, this is based on highly untrustworthy assessments of gender-classification of objects. Ed.)
The building does, or at least did, actually exist, somewhere on the British Islands. The photocopy of a photograph of the building from a book on Brutalist architecture garnered at the Düsseldorf Central Library some 25 years ago exists, yet, due to negligence, lacks any inscription for further contextual elucidation of the source. So neither information on the architect nor the actual location of this interestingly proportioned edifice can be provided, much to this author’s disgust.
Waukescha Natural Gas Generator for the Eastern European Region and Asia (45x34cm, oil, spirulina, and glitter pigments on canvas mounted on wood)
This painting, as subtly alluring in its pallette as in the choice of special and unusual pigments, cannot be adequately represented in photography (even when captured with a sensor especially suited to register finest colour nuances without sacrificing exactitude and focus). In fact, even the human eye is a sensor too coarse and surface-bound to understand that painting in this case is not only the coating or covering of a surface with paints of appropriate consistency and opacitiy in a way which concentrates too much on the where and too little on the when, but the loving and time consuming application of a multitude of layers of different degrees of opaqueness or transparency. The ultimate goal is not recognizable or symbolic representation, but the creation of an image with depth, in which even the first insecure tracings and irregular activities of a tentative and searching brush are still detectable under a potentially limitless number of successively applied layers, each adding its own share of happy accidents. The resulting depth is never a strictly two-dimensional and optical phenomenon. The true painting of value always has unique and custom made surface characteristics. The author of this painting is indebted to the teachings of the late Bob Ross, but chose to go the way of stretching production time instead of compressing it. By doing so, he could circumvent the adverse effects of a rushed production, namely that the perceived overall quality of the product suffers under a glance more scrutinizing and resting than fleeting and cursory. This painting is intended to satisfy on the happy accident level as well as on the level of more method-result based western observation systems striving for overall recognizability, structure, and order.
La Machine femelle / The Female Machine (Oil on canvas mounted on wood, 50×27 cm, 2013)
Note that the positioning of these two paintings in one textual context created certain problems for the author, which are reflected in the result.
The clever kind of autoportrait below is a sort of companion piece to the inter-dependent partner painting above, but sold separately…
Le Reste parfait / The Perfect Rest (Oil on canvas mounted on wood, 43×30 cm, 2013)
In actuality, the top painting is wider, but not as high as the other painting. The second billed painting was painted first. The Female Machine was painted second. The titles are fairly sexist. The phallic machine is resting, exhausted from phallic magic-making, the female machine seems more sturdy and busy, which overall has much to do with world wide reality. Both paintings are fairly small. They are currently, nicely framed, on display at an undisclosed third-party-location in a city by a lake.
House “Djibi” for the Friend of all Animals. (Oil on canvas-covered panel w/ aluminium coated ornamental frame, 40×53 cm)
House “Djibi” is named after the cat-novel by Felix Salten. Some cats, a dog, and other animals are living and dying and killing each other in the house of an elderly school teacher and his wife. The teacher is grappling with a mild identity crisis, being undecided whether he is too soft of heart, and wishing himself to be stern and unrelenting, before deciding that he is, indeed, a soft sort of man.
Before being assigned its final title, the painting had a working title referring to August Derleth’s house-centered novel “The Lurker at the Threshold”.
The painting tries to look rather encrusted as opposed to smooth. The clouds are trying to look like clouds painted by Walter Leistikow. Flake White Hue and Transparent White were heavily used. Some areas do look like details from Cuthbert Hamilton Ellis’ paintings: rough and unfinished impasto effects prevail in an otherwhise naturalistic but unacademic style.
This is the photographic reproduction authorized by the painter. There exists another photograph of this painting, discernible by ghastly colours and flat lighting, made by a careless professional with a good camera. True appreciation for a given subject in many cases is much better than indifferent technique and superior technology.
See also these verses from “Sophia Trenton: A Moral Poem” (Phi Beta Cappa Poem at Stanford University, June 19, 1920) by Leonard Bacon, as quoted in Donald Knuth’s “The TeXBook”:
Technique! The very word is like the shriek Of outraged Art. It is the idiot name Given to eff ort by those who are too weak, Too weary, or too dull to play the game.
GPTU - 33 / IPP World Wide 