Titus Andronicus / Art Gallery

I saw Titus Andronicus at Bard on the Beach this weekend. it was pretty fab, probably the best executed of the plays in terms of visual spectacle - The Tempest had some sweet strobe lights and bubbles but Titus had guts, neck stabs, and slit throats, and it all looked pretty dang good. If it's not sold out, perhaps go see it if you like revenge and some good old fashioned gore. Both Titus and Tamora were beautifully acted! Tamora is pretty hot for a villian. Actually, her lewd sons are pretty fine too, and don't wear their shirts very often. You just have to put up with rape and murder if you want to check out their abs, but it was worth it.

Also, if you're a full time student, it's only $35 for an annual Vancouver Art Gallery membership. If you're not a student, it's $60, which still isn't bad because if you go three times a year then you've gotten your money's worth... but totally a steal for students. I just bought mine online, so if you think this is as fantastic as I do, the Art Gallery link is in that little favorites menu on my right toolbar/menu-ish thing.

Besides that, life is completely opposite of the summer. The summer was poo. I worked with stupid people and I disliked that very much. But now it's Autumn (almost) and it's sort of nice to be back in pants and scarves, even though I haven't gotten used to wearing shoes instead of sandals yet. I'm taking pre-1945 film and it's a pretty sweet class so far. I'll probably gab about it another time.


Oh, also, this winter at the Carousel Theatre, they're putting on "Seussical the Musical" which is a Dr Suess musical. I'm all over this one like jam on toast.

Sucker

So I know I've talked about him before, but I really dislike Banksy for several reasons, and I find him hugely overrated. However, the only aspect of him that wasn't overrated, in my opinion, was that for years he's managed to put up street art in some hardcore locations without getting caught or even photographed - nobody knew who he was. Well sir, now that's down the drain too.

Banksy's identity in Time magazine

Take that, Banksy!

Dali on concrete

I have a lot of strange life goals, and one of them is to paint a massive mural on the concrete field in Burns Bog. I don't remember what used to be on the concrete (some sort of building) back in the day, but it hasn't been there in ages and a big, fat field of concrete is just chillin' real lonely in the Bog now. It's right around the 72nd Avenue overpass in Delta (the one you drive over to get to Highway 91) and it's home to a lot of havoc (ie. highschool kids wanting to party). Under the overpass is a pretty major spray spot, but everyone paints over it all the time and I want to leave my mark in a more memorable way.

I've brainstormed endlessly (mostly because when I wanted to do it last year I didn't get around to it, and the weather needs to be nice because it takes awhile) and I've decided to paint Salvador Dali's face - the photo is pretty much the most famous one taken of him. I want this to be MASSIVE - I'm going to have to grid it out with sidewalk chalk and roll it on before I get the detailing done. I figure Dali is a good choice because he's my main man as far as twentieth century art goes, and his mustache is just plain old dang awesome. I want to do it alone, but I guess I'll need a spotter because the Delta Police will probably have a beef with me - but the way I see it, the field is uglier than most ugly things in life, and it could use some cheering up. Plus, it'll be visible by Google Earth. How cool is that?

Answer: so cool we'll have to measure it in Kelvins.


Here's the photo I'm going to use.

Fauxreel/Vespa and Banksy horrors

Montreal is known for its amazing street art, so I wasn't suprised when a friend of mine showed me a photo of a beautifully done wheatpaste on a city wall. However, I soon learned that the piece of art wasn't really original or independent: a well-known street artist was commisioned by Vespa to do these wheatpastes around town (they've appeared elsewhere across the country as well) as an alternative-style advertising campaign. You can read an article about the whole thing here.

Now, while I commend Vespa for being pretty suave and creative about their marketing, I have a problem with the artist himself. This artist, Fauxreel, is riding on the waves of another "street" artist that I don't have much respect for.

If you know anything about street art, you've probably heard the name Banksy before - but if you haven't, he's pretty much the most famous street artist around. While some of his stuff is pretty interesting and can be creative, on the whole I find him a little boring and hugely overrated. But that's not really the reason I don't respect him. Anybody who's actually out there trying to make art has my respect as long as they aren't being destructive. What bothers me about Bansky is that he sold out. Last year, one of his paintings sold for £102,000. I know most artists would kill for something like that, but Banksy is a street artist, which means that the art he makes is a cultural thing - it's meant to influence others or get people thinking... at the very least, entertain the masses with wordless wit. One of the things I like best about making street art is knowing that people get to enjoy the stuff I've been working on without the glory and without a price tag. So needless to say, I'm sure you can understand why Banksy selling the art which should never have had a price bothers me.

This Fauxreel/Vespa ad thing bothers me for the same reason. It's an awesome idea in theory, but paying an established artist is a little lame, as is accepting the paycheque. I know I change my mind about a lot of stuff, but I would never sell out my art for commercial gain. One of the major mindsets of the street art and culture jamming movement is that pop media or "the man" have a lot of say over the way the general public thinks, and art doesn't need to do the same thing. it's pretty sad when someone involved in this sort of underground culture turns around and becomes the propagandist.

Something to think about, I guess.

Toni Onley

Graffiti boy is on a role, he sent me another great artist to check out: Toni Onley was a BC artist who painted watercolor landscapes of our coasts and mountains. Watercolor is almost never my medium of choice, but his work is really serene and lovely and when you look at it you feel like sighing the way he probably would have when he finished the last stroke of color.

C-c-check him out here.

Mark Jenkins

I have a friend, we'll call him Graffiti Boy, because he does street art and I do street art so we talk about street art a lot. He showed me this super awesome artist online the other day, but he's super awesome because his art isn't spray or stencilling or wheatpasting or anything like that. Instead, he makes people out of clear packing tape! They're life sized and he dresses them up sometimes and they look like real people on the street, except that sometimes they look like dead bodies on the road or crying children against a wall. He even did a fire hydrant in the woods, which I thought was ridiculously cool. Anyways, he has a website that you should DEFINATLY check out! My favorite section is the 'Storker Project' because people all over the world make tape babies and stick them to public places. Even if you aren't into street art and think it's destructive, blah blah blah.... check him out anyways. He's hilarous. I couldn't focus on my work yesterday because I kept browsing his site.

Happy Friday!

Mark Jenkins website

Jason Sho Green

I have a very short attention span; when I'm at work I forget what I'm supposed to be doing every twenty minutes and turn to the Internet for entertainment. I'm not actually that much of a slacker because when I work, I'm like a speed racer, so I figure it's alright. This has been a good morning though because I've been in the office for an hour and a half and I'm only now minimizing the windows that are important and opening the Internet tabs that aren't.

Today's interesting person of the day is Jason Sho Green - he's a really great artist and if you liked Kurt Halsey (I posted about him a little while ago) you might like Green. They're really not the same at all, but they're both cartoony and a little obscure and I like that. Green reminds me of my friend Scott because they have the same style of drawing, lots of funky little pen things and interesting paintings.

Here are some of my favorite pieces:

Building a Bitter Tomorrow
Bicorn
Pooh Break at Euro Disney
Enjoy Cocholat

Also:
Jason Sho Green website
Jason Sho Green on flickr.com

Adulthood is poo

I don't have anything witty to say, I don't have anything to recommend, I haven't come up with any life-illuminating ideas to share, and I don't like to talk about very personal things online.

So much for posting, I guess.

What I really want to do though is up and move to Victoria. I want to pull an Emily Carr and I want to pull a Tyler Durden all in one. Pretty much what I mean is I want to move away for a month or two with no television, car, phone, internet, etc. I want to live in a studio apartment and make just enough money for food, rent, and art supplies. I want to work minimally somewhere interesting and spend the rest of my time writing and painting. I don't want to be distracted by others or by things; I want to sleep simply and eat simply and be simple.

I think this is a pretty good thing to do once I finish my B.A. You know, spend years working for a grade point average, and then reject everything. After that I want to work at camp because camp was pretty badass this weekend. Then I want to dilly dally, THEN I want to go back to PDP.

So much for being normal and getting on the whole carreer thing. But then, normal doesn't exist, so... whatevz.



ps. buy Death Cab's Narrow Stairs, just trust me on this one.

Love filtered through grade school Art class

I know it sounds silly, but crawl inside my head for a minute and imagine that the people you love are layers of paper mache pressed against your heart. When you have them, they're tons of fun to work with as you make shapes and mold the paper and create things inside of yourself. When you lose them, the mache hardens - but it isn't a bad thing. The hardened layers make a foundation that's stable and tough, kind of like the bones keeping you together. And when the person who lasts forever comes along, they get to have a stable, strong heart to use as their foundation because when it's their turn, paper mache isn't the only option. They can paint or draw or collage or glitter or use whatever their heart desires for your heart. And they create a work of art inside of you and while all of this is going on, you're doing the same thing to them.

Kurt Halsey

I haven't talked very much about art yet, which is sort of strange because art is the only thing I've stuck with since I discovered I loved it. I've tried everything from ballet to skating to bass lessons to waterskiing and eventually I throw everything I temporarily obsess over into the metaphorical waste basket and move onto the next exciting endeavor. But art is something which is incredibly close to my heart, which I guess you could have noticed because I think film is art and books are a kind of art, etc etc. But ART itself is so precious and beautiful and it's very difficult to come across a kind of artist which grabs onto the valves of your heart and squeezes them until the blood rushes to your head enough to feel a kind of lust for canvas, paint, paper, pens... whatever kind of media gets you going.

The artist I wanted to share today is Kurt Halsey. When I was a lot younger and listened to a lot of 'punk' and ska, I would flip though album art and Google search featured artists who I really liked. One of them was Halsey, who I discovered inside a Less Than Jake CD booklet (LTJ, by the way, is one of the few bands I still enjoy from my 'let's act punk rock phase' back in high school. I will probably write about my current distaste for modern pop punk music eventually) and immediatly fell in love with. What made him stay on my Internet Explorer Favorites menu was the way his work looks so simple and honest but isn't simple at all. It's very difficult for an artist to finally find their niche in the style of art they eventually pursue (this is something I still struggle with; my paintings are split between wild oils and acrylic realism, while my sketches are more focused, albiet raw and amateur), and Halsey has a wonderfully definitive style that he features in his work. His characters are simple but are lively and real and remind me of the kind of people who drink coffee at night and lay on the grass at the beach after the parking lots are closed and drive at unholy speeds on the highway at unholy hours of the morning when nobody is around. In a way, I feel like I'm one of his characters and so it's easy for me to get lost in his work.

Another great thing about Halsey is the way he features simple lines of text across many of his sketches and paintings. Although the lines aren't full of literary devices or are exceptionally clever works of penmanship, they perfectly reflect on how the characters feel. And yes, I mean feel. There is something about his art that makes me believe his faces feel more than most people do, especially when he adds a cute line, such as "my heart beats too big" next to a melancholy looking girl (you can find that piece in the "work" section of his website, and I recommend you do). I remember an old painting he once had posted years ago which featured only crude stars over a navy backdrop with text that said "all the stars in my sky were for you." How beautiful is that? Answer: pretty super beautiful.

When it really comes down to it, what I'm trying to say about Halsey and the reason I shared him with you is because he is one of the most influential artists in my own life, and if any of you have ever seen sketches I've done (ask to see my commuter cup, for example) then you'll see how he's become a part of my life in terms of art. Needless to say, check him out - I can't see anyone not loving his warmth.

http://www.kurthalsey.com/