In Search of Fantasie

Every few years, I simply must fly someplace where no one speaks any English and I am safe from my fellow Americans.  Some of you just might understand.  I love them, just sometimes more from half a world away.  Plus, I really just needed a reason to check out the Luzzati Museum in Genova Italy. I had been trying to reach them by email to get a list of books they had in their bookstore, but no luck.  I realize that when people go to Europe to see a museum it is usually the Louvre in Paris, or maybe the Guggenheim in Venice.  My trip began at this very small museum and bookstore, but it did not end there.   After a few hours I left with a single book written in both English and Italian about the man.

 

Then I was off to Antibes to see the Picasso Museum.  Due to very creative travel contacts, I was able to rent a room over looking the Grimaldi Catstle for just 220 Euros for the week.  I climbed four flights of spiral stairs made of old marble. Now that is really French. 

Antibes is a very small ocean fortress town just West of Nice.  Biot is a craftsmanship village just outside of Antibes.   If you like modern cubism then go to the National Museum for Fernand Leger.   

And don’t pass up down the road the famous La Verrerie glass factory and pick up a bowl of this wonderful bubbled colored glasswork for a few Euros.

  

On the way back, why not stop off in a cafe for some snails.  You know I did!

And be sure to check out Jaume Plensa giant "Nomade" when you get back to Antibes. 

I never quite got Chagall, until I was standing in front of one of his gigantic paintings.  In books you never get the scope or size of a painting.  In person however, the Chagall Museum in Nice is overwhelming.

Not because of the number of images, but due to the power of Chagall’s work.  In the theater there is a set of his famous stain glass windows. 

The Matisse museum is just up the hill and is a great walk.  Don’t worry if it is a little warm because sorbet stations are everywhere in France and Italy. 

Photography is a hit and miss game in European Museums.  I could take pictures at the Luzatti, Chagall, Leger and Modern art museums but not at the Picasso or Matisse Museums

The collection is a tad eclectic at the Nice Museum of Modern art but the building is a great space.   If you get to the top you can get a view of Nice on these outdoor walkways.   The people watching was more entertaining than the art in this museum.  I will never forget the man who walked slowly from painting to painting, wearing cowboy boots, and a white mechanics jumpsuit.  

France is best at night.  I spent a lot of time walking after a late dinner, snapping photographs of the doorways and passageways of the old streets.

If you wish to find the best view of Nice, just East of the bay, there is a small hill with a water tower on it, and you can climb a pathway that takes you up to the top of this hill that overlooks the city and the bay.  It is the Parc de la Colline du Chateau.  There is a sorbet hut at the top and incredible view of the city and sea.

If you want a really nice Cote d’azure beach get on the train and just East is Villefranche sur Mer.  But don’t’ tell anyone because it is a secret.

Eventually, I had to be an adult and to return to California.  This was a difficult vacation, because the weather was ideal, the art I had seen fantastic, and those sorbet stations were a burden.  I checked into my flight, dreading speaking English again, with a copy of Luzzati in my hands the entire way home.

Because I am going to be honest with you about this trip, I just wanted the book.  All that other stuff I did and those pictures, well, I took those for you.  

And inside the  pages of that book,  I discovered an amazing artist of fantasy virtually unknown when compared to Picasso, Chagall, and Leger, but evert bit as rich. 

To be continued. 

p.s. if you have never been to the Cote-d-azure, go.  This trip I did completely on my own without a tour company.  I am a little brave because I can speak French, read Greek, bluff Spanish, smile through German, and was just curious about Italian. But have a plan because there is a lot to be seen in this area of Europe and I only covered a fraction of what I was able to see and do in two weeks here in this blog. 

 

The Art of the Story.

“And the Queen of the Night set down her staff, and the stars flowed to her children who gathered them in bowls.  The Moon watched with a smile, waiting for the stars to be spread out into the night sky by her little ones.” 

 Pure fantasy!  We know there is no Queen of the Night.  We know that stars are actually distant suns like our own.  We know the moon has no face and is not a person.  And that is why we love the story so much and are hooked before we even finish the sentence.  It is fantasy and that is a doorway promising escape which few of us have the power to resist. 

RA said, “I want a computer that is small like a book, lightweight like papyrus and is easy to use.  The gods were stunned and worried.  They turned to Thoth and asked, “can you do this for us?”

Who am I fooling?  RA never had a computer in the first place.  Actually, RA is purely a mythical Birdman god of Ancient Egyptians.  It is totally absurd.  This is just a stupid story.  Yes, umm, I wonder how Thoth will pull this off?  I guess it will not hurt to read a little more.  Yes.  Just a few more pages, because you know my friend, it is a story, and the bigger the story the less we can put it down. 

The artist has been dedicated to bringing to life the story for most of our history.  When we lived in tribes, we told the story on the walls of caves using pigments from the earth and plants.  The ancient civilizations told the story carved in stone on temple walls.  Today, we continue to tell the story through art on canvas, computer screens, and movie screens.  We love story and we love even more story told to use through images.   Nothing has really changed about this love we have from the time of drawing on the walls of caves. 

Check out this story of Alexander the Great fighting the Lion that I painted in 2010.  

   

It is a story of courage, and bravery, and friendship as well, for one of his generals comes to his aid. 

Here is another painting of mine of the God Helios in his Chariot of horses riding across the sky, telling us the story of the travels of the Sun. 

And when I was standing before this story I could see details which I never noticed before that gave it so much life.

If you wish to see the full story, check out http://midshipcentury.com/artpaintingsluzzatichariots.shtml

This massive mural is a battle scene between the forces of the sea, and the forces of the land.   The mural graced the dinning room of an ocean liner until the ship was scraped.  Ah, but again, it is a story.  You cannot throw that away.  It was pulled out of the ship, and then sold to Peter Knego, who brought it back to California.  Recently the story was sold to another collector, but before that happened I had to see the story in person. 

Even the sea monsters look beautiful.  

So, I drove back home with my snap shots and memories.  I started playing around with some techniques in the studio.  I started dreaming of ways I could tell stories through murals like this Italian artist Luzzati.  Oh, I was hooked and did not even know it.  Not only did I want to tell stories through art like Luzzati had in Chariots, eventually that was not enough.  I wanted to know more of who is this artist named Luzzati.  What other stories did he tell?  But to seek out more of this hero artist  that meant another trip but this time to not to Los Angeles, but to Genova Italy.

To be continued.

I will no lie.  I am addicted to story and my art reflects that truth.  I could go on all day with example after example of stories that I have come to love by artist who have become my hero's. 

Back in 2009, I decided I needed to see a story.  I could never afford to buy the story because it was over $100,000.00.  Besides, I had no place to put this story, because it is 8.5 feet high by 26 feet wide.  But I could see the story in person when a small store was open in Los Angeles so I braved Southern California traffic for a few days to make my pilgrimage.

To Blog or Not to Blog?

So, back to blogging.  It is a love hate relationship.  See, facebook really is not a great place to blog about stuff.  I know my friends love my art work, and the daily abstracts were something of a small hit, but still, I feel like I am terrorizing my friends with my daily artistic adventures.  And Twitter, well, it is great to let people know, but it really about connecting with friends.  So, this seems at this moment to be the best choice, because I really do not want to maintain a website yet on a daily basis.

Over the weekend I completed nearly all of the photographic plates for the book I have been working on.  This has been the largest artistic project I have ever taken on personally.  In the past I have done photographic portfolios and produced shows, but that is very different than 15 illustrations to a book for children.

The steps involved with producing an illustrated picture book make the days of printing and framing photographs seem really simple.

But the story behind this book did not start five months ago.  It did not even start a year ago when I completed this painting below, which inspired the Lord of the Scribes story in the first place.

This painting was just one of my design class projects at POP art.  I took the Iphone, a device that has completely changed our culture, and brought it to Ancient Egypt.  It is amusing to fantasize about how the ancient ones would consider something we take for granted everyday as a magical box from the gods.  If your are interested in seeing how it was developed, I believe it is posted still below from last year.

Actually, the story began three years ago and only now feels like the journey is coming to completion.   My good friend and teacher Tesia Blackburn of the Golden Paints working artist program has been there the entire way, guiding my way through studies, experiments and adventures.  

Next entry I will start at the beginning of this journey and tell the full circle story of this adventure in art that I have so enjoyed.

Lord of the Scribes

I have been hard at work drafting out all the designs for my new book for children called "Lord of the Scribes.  Soon, more postings with images will follow.  This is plate one.   It is the start of the story when the Children in the boat beg their teacher to tell them the story of when RA the sun God of Eygpt called his Son Horus to him and requested he bring him something to write on.  

Before my Vacation

Here is the set of images before my two week vacation in Italy and France.  

The two image above are small drawings.  I am using a repeat of the triangle, square and circle in each, with various horse images, at least in the image on the right side.  

The image on the left I choose to just repeat the head of the horse, and weld it to various legs.  There is nothing automatically correct however in how the images are composed.  The study on the right side is rough, but important because I incorporated some of this style in later drawings. 

The study on the left side is very much like what I did last week.  The study on the right I started to take a new direction.  In this study I have started to change up the scale of the horses from smaller and full body, to just the full head which you can see in the upper right hand side.  The repeat element here are the arcs through out the image.  

The last two studies I did are above.  The first is a simple study placing the abstracted horses on the right hand side of the paper, and again changing the scale of the images.  The last study I considered the most important study of all the drawings of the week.   On the left I have stacked three horses, with one clock.  The middle horse has an angry eye, which has its origination from the clock.  The upper horse is also tied and originates from one of the hands of time.  That image weighs against FIVE horses, three clocks, a triangle all set upon a massive square.  This highly structured design represents set time.  The horses and single clock coming from the left to the right represents rouge time, or a "black swan" like event.  

It is a complex composition that uses many elements from all of my studies.  This is simply not something I would have been able to compose even six months ago.  

Out of everything I have done over the past year, this image really makes a huge leap in composition, design and depth.   It feels like it is miles ahead of my earlier work called the Ascension of Time.  It has numbers ( 3, 5 ) shapes ( triangle, square, circle), and life ( the horses ) and meaning ( I am showing the viewer a philosophical concept of time and rouge events). 

So, I have taken this final study a step further into a study painting.  

This is the painting, but in photoshop I have removed the color and just done it in Sepia for a very different effect.  But the painting is in color as see below.  

I added the ball of gold in the upper left hand corner for force.  It is composed in spirals which pass through the eye of the middle horse and into the formation of fixed time.  This painting is done with gold leaf on canvas, and phaleo blue paint.  I also used iron mica for shading in the main images.  

It is no mistake that the painting is lighter on the left hand side than the right.  I am using the darker colors of the right to draw the eye.  Plus, the images on the left side are meant to be less solid in color than the set time images on the right hand side.  

Here is an antiqued image of the same painting.  

So, this week I did several studies on repeated elements, and developed one of these studies into a full painting taking the concept the next step in evolution.  My fascination with the nature of time, which shows up in many of my pieces, has returned with a force.  

As please as I am with this study, it is still a study and I believe there is room for improvement upon this composition, and its execution as a painting.  

Now, two weeks in Europe checking out Picasso, Luzatti, Matisse, Chagall, and many others.  

Iphone and the Gods

Here is the process I took to get to this image.  It is a relatively small study, and not as "clean" as I would like to see in a final production.

First, I laid down a layer of copper and gold leaf, applied a drawing ground, and then proceeded to apply  the writings. 

This is my base layer. 

Here is the end result of that first process that took about 3 hrs of work, using a bamboo pen, and black ink. 

I applied two layers of transparent glazes.  One layer was a transparent gold, and the second was a turquoise blue.  

I sketched in the drawing, started to apply layers of paint, slowly.  As you can tell the Iphone at first was transparent.  I kept the man worshiping or honoring the Iphone transparent as a way of subtle contrast of importance.  I am saying that the Iphone is actually more real that the man to the left. 

Here is the final version of the study.  I used zinc white, but heavy, applied on the man to give more contrast, but tried to keep him just transparent enough to allow the writings on the base layer to still be seen in the image. 

 

And this is a small study.  The image size is 16x20, and the first time I have used canvas to create on of these gold leaf paintings.  A larger study, or final piece would allow far more detail.