O Tannenbaum

On this past Sunday, I helped my family choose and retrieve a Christmas Tree. For as long as I can remember, we have selected red firs, otherwise known as silvertips, for our holiday trees, as their spaciously separated branches lend themselves easily to the hanging of massive quantities of homemade, antique, and otherwise sentimental ornaments. Usually we use both colored and white lights (because we can never quite decide on one over the other, or because we don't have enough of one kind to sufficiently cover the tree), which only adds to the chaotic decorative scheme of the tree as a whole. This year, however, my family broke from our usual mold. Not the mold of chaos in terms of adornment, but the kind of tree itself. Per my suggestion, we selected a cedar, my very favourite evergreen. We also trucked it back to our house in an unusual way:
That's me in the foreground of the bed of the 1927 Model T truck (which my dad rebuilt this summer), equipped with chains, tree hanging out the back. My sister Emily was the photographer, her fiance Gabe looking like a member of Al-Qaeda and giving a thumbs-up, and my dad, donned in his cowboy hat (i.e. not-so-gay apparel (à la"falalala")), in the cab. It was a good time, although it got rather cold riding in the back.

Taking the life of any living thing is a spiritual experience. I wish that we could have inflicted less damage on the tree which is now doomed in our living room, covered in bells and whistles (now sheltering a pile of gifts, the overwhelming minority of which are designated "from" my dad, my mom, and myself). Nonetheless, the rest of the beautiful cedar whose top we claimed from the forest will live on, though severely stunted: we left a good four feet of growth, branches and all.

I will truly miss my proximity to such natural beauty. All stages of life are seen in just a few minutes spent walking through a forest; the correlation to human life is unmistakable. From shoots to snags, the beings of the forest fight gravity as we, cradle to grave, fight time. These noblest of souls breathe in what we breathe out, and conversely.

Do forgive my tangents. It is Christmas time. And while I may rarely see the benefit of the Christianization of the West (nor, for that matter, evangelism or intent-to-convert of any kind religious or political), Christmas has always been a positive time for my family, and the appreciation of simple things like warm beverages, the crackling of firewood, dressing warmly, and hearing the crunch snow underfoot. May you all appreciate these things, and may you all have a happy holiday.

new music, new art

As you can hear, I've posted some music which I find to suit my mood about 95 percent of the time. I appreciate many different genres of music, and many different sub-genres, and many different musics which defy genrification, but I find myself most consistently drawn to "abstract" music that can evoke as much feeling as it can thought. This may seem to be a blanket statement which doesn't at all narrow the music field down to what I may find agreeable, but if you are open, as I am, to listening to "experimental" music, or "sound art," or "musical collages," or "modern classical" (descendant of John Cage and Steve Reich, etc.), or, say, music that you'd find on experimedia.com (you should visit if you've not already), you may find that more time is spent thinking about the musics' complexities (sometimes minimally so, but nonetheless complex intellectually), rather than finding that space deep within yourself that reminds you of sitting amongst daffodils when you were one. The song(s) you are listening to right now, I believe, achieve something like the latter, a beautiful melancholia, a longing for what can almost but will never be, an all-consuming synthesis of peace and chaos.

This is the kind of music that is playing when I make art. I hope someday that I'll be able to capture visually the immediacy of emotion that music like this evokes. Not that this exactly pulls off said hopes, here is a photo of the last painting I did, the last project for my painting class. As of now, it is untitled. Approximate dimensions: 24x36.

I've completed my classes at Feather River College, my second home since the fall of last year. I've had the honor of being under the tutelage of, primarily, Dianne Lipscomb, a Fulbright scholar, a former student of Wayne Thiebaud, and ultimately a good artist, a wonderful colorist, and a peaceful individual with a thick Mississippian accent. Also, I've taken classes from Bill Peters, an incorrigible wildlife illustrator and sculptor, whose constant, well-intended, sarcastic jabs will be missed.

Another individual I will miss here is one Wendy Wayman, an English instructor at FRC, alumni of the famed Ohio State writing program, an intellectually-anti-patriot with dreams of becoming an expatriate to a northern European country, viz. Iceland. I've had the pleasure of becoming Wendy's friend through the course of sharing drawing and painting courses together. She is one of the few people in the Quincy area who I've found who has views similar to mine in terms of culture, religion, and aesthetics (she loves rusty things!).

I'll save more sentimental "I'll miss you"s for later, closer to when I'll actually be leaving Quincy (roughly two and a half weeks from now). For now I must focus on things in front of me, not behind: I have much to sort and pack, my sister and her fiance will be arriving tomorrow for the holidays, and an airedale terrier puppy will be arriving on Saturday (pictures to follow shortly thereafter).

Until my next post, I hope you'll enjoy the music (more to follow, I promise).

My Life, My Art

I suppose the meaning behind title of my blog would be a good starting point. To get there requires a bit of history, though...

In the fall of 2007 I was living in Portland, Oregon, attending Reed College, studying philosophy. I transferred to Reed from Portland State University after transferring to Portland State from the University of Nevada, Reno (where I became a philosophy major in 2005 (I had by then studied mathematics for a year), after taking a wonderful course entitled The Philosophy of Art). I was altogether unprepared for life at Reed (a small, private, infamously liberal liberal arts college): living off-campus, entering at junior-standing, generally soft-spoken and not out-going. Add a deteriorating relationship with my girlfriend at the time, Sarah, and bad things were destined to follow. I took a psychological leave of absence from Reed in October of 2007, following continual thoughts of suicide.

I continued to live in Portland through February of 2008. For the first time in the past three and a half years I was not writing philosophy papers, which were always more personally interesting than they were meaningful. Suddenly I had time to write whatever I wanted to, so I began a project which I had wanted to do for years and will likely take me decades to finish. I began a multimedia artwork, consisting of semi-fictional literature, visual art, music, and stop-motion animation. This work is titled On Clocks and Transience, a meditation on the interactions between time, the natural, the artificial, and cultural space, as inhabited and oft-inhibited by mankind.

This project gave me a good distraction and outlet for my energy, but I remained deeply troubled psychologically. As the fates would have it, I was at the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) trade show in Anaheim on 19 January 2008, and met one of the tens of thousands of people there, one Juli Anna Janis, a poet from Modesto, who has since become my life's great love. I moved back to my home town of Quincy, California and into my family's house, and with my family's and Juli Anna's emotional support, I daresay I've made a fairly good recovery. I'm still emotionally sensitive and introspective, but now I see these traits to be strengths, not weaknesses.

Looking back two years now to the last of my time in Portland, I am grateful for everything that transpired, suicidal depression included. My dark days led me to my passion, which in turn has led me to where I am now: on the brink of a new, grand adventure, surely to be full of inspiration, challenges, and tears, of both sadness and joy. I've been accepted into the fine arts program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and will begin my studies there in January. I will be living closer to Juli Anna than ever before in our nearly-two years together: a mere 25 minute train ride north to Sarah Lawrence College.

Following is a number of artworks I've completed in the past year and a half (the majority of which were completed since this summer):



On Clocks and Transience, No. 2
55x74x6 (dimensions here and to follow are in inches)
acrylic, encaustic, and oil on fabric, wood, cardboard, string, and fiberglass. 2008

This was the first (of many) visual components of the multimedia art project mentioned above. The visual success of this piece is what caused me to explore visual art making to the extent that I have and shall continue to do, eclipsing writing and music as forms of personal artistic output for the time being...



Metempsychotic Window
36x44x6
acrylic on wood, tarry cloth, and rope, poetry on transparent plastic, glass; oil and encaustic on masonite, woven plastic, and tin. 2008



Metempsychosis (removable detail of above)
15x32x3
oil and encaustic on masonite, woven plastic, and tin. 2009



Ideal Soldier
37x54x10
found objects, wire, wood, acrylic on paper and fabric. 2009



Luna Over Portland
32x32x4
acrylic and encaustic on burlap and woven plastic. 2009



L'Arborescence 'Pataphysique
55x74x24
acrylic, modeling paste, and hair on wire and apple limb armature; acrylic and paper on glass. 2009



Transposition No. 1
28x50
acrylic, encaustic, collaged newsprint and toner ink on canvas. 2009



Transposition No. 2
48x60
Acrylic and collaged newsprint and paper on canvas. 2009



Transposed Cityscape
47x48
acrylic and monotype collage on newsprint and fabric. 2009



Unified Divide
26x47x3
acrylic on canvas, burlap, woven plastic, corkboard, and twine. 2009



Vacillation
33x41x4
acrylic and encaustic on burlap, woven plastic, and wood. 2009



Everlasting Decomposition
26x65x9
acrylic and encaustic on collaged canvas and paper, original photography, collaged newsprint, and found object on panel. 2009



American Dream
40x48x6
acrylic on found objects, canvas, paper. 2009

An Unceremonious Beginning

I have a salad and half of an Alley Cat Cafe veggie panini sitting next to me. The salad is colourfully topped with grilled-pepper-droppings of the other half of the sandwich, which is now in the process of becoming me.


The Alley Cat has become my primary connection to the internet, as my family home in Meadow Valley, CA, my residence for the past one and three-quarter years, has no internet, dial-up or otherwise. There is no AT&T wireless service there, and only spotty Verizon service (when the wind shifts). We don't even have caller ID on our land-line phone there. Technology has been superseded by the peace of rurality.


I have no facebook*, I don't tweet, nor do I have a myspace, and I do not plan on using said social networking sites anytime soon (*: actually, I do have a facebook profile, created in 2004or5, when I was at the University of Nevada, Reno; but I haven't logged on in years, and I don't remember the password I used, so I can't delete it...).

Hence this blog: I have reconciled my desire to not be tied to technology with the need of contemporary human communication. Its purpose shall be to keep those who know me up to date with my life and my art, and for those whom I shall meet to become acquainted with my life and my art.

There will be much more to come, but now I must run to my last painting class I will likely ever take at Feather River College.