24” x 18”, oil on canvas.
Very rough. Free association on previous two panels.
We have brawny Thicc! Jesus, a flying knee drop from heaven, John Lurie as Mil Mascaras in a gi holding a scythe alongside Mike Patton in a burlap sack as Falstaff clutching a staff despite a broken wrist. Notice two detached fingers fly from his right hand of their own accord whilst he tries to catch the digits with the left. Improbably, he doth so by watching the reflection in the blade of Mil’s scythe like a boss.
For randos, a hypersonic aircraft, and the broccoli-shaped head of a dinosaur. Something is impaled on the staff.
The three pieces will feature info about phonons, and feature a pinhole camera for building data models from viewer count and features. The device is mounted in panel two’s frame and is detachable for modification with low intensity lights, speakers, or what have you. I wanted to have the viewers able to see the image of themselves in bounded boxes with quizzical annotations, streamed to a low res monitor.
I have a month to finish this.
EDIT: Got the cameras working.
That’s the best any of us could make of this. We used the longest division you ever saw.
Foregrounding. Smoothing some surface tones. The eyeball sprouting from Mil Mascaras’s head will be tricky.
I had to go to work on John Lurie’s face before I could conceal it with a leather luchador mask. I started throwing cryptic stuff into the background: a mutant feline humanoid on the left sharing space with a small child holding his own open-mouthed detached head in his hands. In this image, the child represents industry, and the hot dog represents the status quo. Drat.
b’olo b’olo is an interesting book. I’ve also put a taco in there, not to change the subject or anything. And, behold, an unknown object shape (gonna Lucasfilms it and encrust it with spaceship Rococo) that looks like it fell off the ear of my 3rd grade librarian. Like an ancient Greek shield
Realistic green from permanent, azo yellow, burnt sienna, raw umber, permanent rose. The weird alien eye is going to be reworked.
Lucasfilmificated hypersonic vehicle le, blending background.
The third panel is tiled to the first panel on either side. I have to develop the image from the opposite vertical extremaziti and such.
Going absolutely bananas on this today. All-consuming.
Lurie’s shoulders. Trouble. I can obscure the rocks with foamy moss soon. Azo yellow, baby. Works like a charm.
Bit of a glare from the wet paint. Whole lot of disappointment, really. And then there’s Thicc Jesus’s mouth. I worked on that for a half hour before I got it right.
I gave Falstaff a 40 W lightbulb to carry around. He sometimes haunts the M Train with it.
It needs a gentle push in the absurd direction.
Name, quest, favorite color, please.
Going for explosions of color.
I decided to place a large pile of hot dogs on top of the waterfall as well. The magenta at in the upper left will be lightened. Falstaff’s face is a wreck. I will draw some talons on the owl. The lightning seems to help.
The mutated owl-knee is coming along. We’ve achieved stage separation. The owl drifts from the atomic knee drop. The lad holding his own detached head gets a hoodie.
So, let’s look at the picture’s four quadrants. Think of foils and cycles.
Upper Left: going clockwise from upper left we have a figure representative of “Jesus seen some s***” looking at a coliseum where the unitive cry of “thicc!” is rising. There’s a banner sans motto. Upper left is a bird that is foregrounding the troubled messiah/ignorant public dynamic, The bird head is also a dolphin. Who knew? The background is flat magentas. It’s flat magenta all the way down.
Upper Right: Another bird, but this one is gliding straight at the viewer. It’s an owl with it’s legs down. I will fix the eyes before I varnishas disembodied thigh and a lower leg. A fur cuff encircles the thigh. It’s actually one of the legs from the character in the first panel. There’s a mutant lion-faced person’s profile. I didn’t want it to look human or feline, but something older than both. It is looking right/ East. A tiny complete male figure is drawn wearing a hoodie and jeans. This is protocreature’s foil. He holds his pale, bleeding disconnected head in his hands and faces left/ West. This figure is purposefully disquieting to provide a contrast to the serene and dim expression on its foil’s face. This is a Janus experiencing naqoyqatsi, which means life as war or life as killing each other. So the upper half is a depiction of the old contrivance of psychomachia, creation, destruction, with no defining design, just birds, and an atomic knee drop from the skies.
Lower Right: The figure lower right is Falstaff, my favorite fool, my favorite mentor. I can sympathize with his roughish proclivities, but not his belly for crime and excess. All the chaos, none of the gluttony? And to that, I imagine him offering me a world of harmony, of forests, mountains, and flowing water…hot dog water, from the hot dog waterfalls in the background. I put Falstaff in a robe, as though he were playing in an ancient Greek theater, busting through an Elizabethan 4th wall. instead of Hal’s march through Medeival manhood. This is my anthropomorphizing of AI technology in the hands of sociopathic techbro spawn. Falstaff carries a staff that is empowered by an object of mystery and mystical design, a blown lightbulb. He is holding the staff upright with a painfully contorted grip. His wrist might be broken. His index and middle finger have explosively detached from his right hand in lower center. He is attempting to catch them with his left hand at far lower right. He is trying to catch his flying severed fingers so hard his hand has burst through this world into a new dimension, one where day becomes night, and the banana and the moon are one.
The darkness of the majority of the moon. The missing bananas of the bunch. It only takes a little light to provide balance. The dude with the severed head is ‘lightheaded’. As he looks West across some flying Falstaff digits with a sense of detachment, the protocreature is zoned in on something no one can see, enigmatic, but lost in time. Sphynx is gonna sphynx.
Falstaff, unkempt, hot mess. Falstaff in a large, shapeless robe. Double chin, shaggy hair, sunken eyes suddenly wide open. He looks like he needs some self-care pointers, maybe a bath. Plato’s Cave. We see him looking at his fingers, but not directly. He sees with alarm the fingers in the reflection of the hammer scythe held by his protégée, the incomparable John Lurie trapped in a zombified state with black eye makeup. The makeup was made from coocnut oil and enchanted graveyard dust mixed with a goofer foot, That’s powerful. I couldn’t find Lurie’s wrestling mask. It would have given me a clue whose bidding he did. Zombie problems. He has an eyeball sprouted from his cranium, and you’d think he wouldn’t hide that. That eye is as big as his whole face. Name a job where you can bank wearing a full head mask anywhere. H.A.L. Henry All-Seeing
Lower Left: Spilling into the lower left from above is a grey hypersonic drone. It is tearing through sky while John Lurie deals with this crappy moonlighting job as Death, harvester of souls. Only on Tuesday nights. It’s slow, and the experience has given him some reasons to pull [his go-to session artists] into a studio. Because he understood what they were doing, Being dead can give you a big-picture perspective. Rather than selfishly hoard that, he made the faustian bargain to take the show on the road. Misadventures follow. The telepathic feeling that music seems to create when improvising is the opposite of tension, I would imagine. The last time I jammed with someone was in 2001. It feels like an intensification of one’s being. It’s a truth or sustainability of a complex form that is in that moment of musical production.
Henry Avenge Lycanthrop 9000.
The battle against pseudohistory and general bullshizing is the mission of the rishi Piruhu of western philosophy, which is a bit much. Imagine waking up to that yoke every morning. And for what? Honestly, it’s not easy. Hero’s work can be hard. Heroes’ tales are oft of labor, by billions of people who’s names in history are forever lost. Each one has a soul. This figure asks me to consider the peace that comes with obscurity. The legacy preserved in amber grease, y’all. Epic hero people who are likely to get a beat down but miraculously survive or even avoid said beatdowns through amazing deeds make headlines. Only through struggle, and dramas that convey the value of reflection, especially in a public forum, do we move towards harmony. Doing the right thing is its own reward. Interpretation of the reward, the struggle, the reason, the logic, is plastic. In the background, in the middle of a clearing in a remote forest, a concert shell in the shape of an open pyramid is blazing with stage lights that flood the crowds gathered. The roar of the crowd. Perform and exit.
At least on canvas I can let these ideas rollick around and guide my work. Each painting can take weeks, and each one is a sail. This particular one split into quadrants is abaft a sailing ship with three masts. The other two are the fore and main of this floating bark called [redacted].
Fifty State Banana 