Basically they are giving eight artists a large amount of supplies.  They’ve picked the first artist, Wendell Gladstone, and they’ve got 7 more to go.  It would be really great if B/D gets a strong response to the program, because then they could get the program extended.

 Please click through to the Beautiful/Decay article – click here.  Then do some of these things: 1. click the word Canson and “like” Canson on facebook;  2. click the link for Royal Talens; 3. leave your mark – write a comment, tweet, or post the link to your facebook.  Tweeting and posting to facebook are easy if you have accounts, you just have to click the little buttons at the foot of the article.

  If you missed it, I did a studio visit with Melissa Brown for Beautiful/Decay Magazine’s website, which was republished on the Huffington Post.  Here’s the original, and the HP link too.  Melissa is one of those amazing people who makes inexplicably good art, she doesn’t need my help, but I tried to get her to talk about her inspirations.  There’s a ton of pictures of the interior of her studio, which was set up partially for collage and drawing, and partially for printmaking.  In addition, Melissa just came out a week or two ago with a new silk screen which I like a lot; for a meager $100 you can get a print that could end up holding a place in art history, you can see that here.

 It was my good luck to land an interview in the upcoming print Beautiful/Decay, Book 6 “Future Perfect,” with Corey Thompson.  Out of hundreds of amazing submissions Corey won B/D’s contest based around the theme of “Future Perfect.”  I got to grill him on his inspirations, work habits, utopian/dystopian ideals, and also his REALLY GREAT ART.   Great, for me, means something has both extremes of good and bad, and those coalesce to form a bigger meaning: the greater picture.  If you want to see what I mean, sorry, you can’t see the interview online, because it’s in the print mag.  You have to get a copy, and B/D sells out fast – so it’s better to subscribe.  (I have an article/interview in the current Beautiful/Decay, Book 5 Psychonauts, about Saul Chernick and his a m a z i n g ink drawings, but, illustrating my point, it has saddled its horse and rode into the sunset, having already sold out.)

 Also, I’m very psyched to announce I’m in a group show: Bitches Brew – New Art from New York Part II, opening June 17th, at Gallery Poulsen in Copenhagen.  There’s some amazing artists in the show, to name a few that I look up too: Tom Sanford, Aaron Johnson, and Michael Anderson.  In reality I’m in over my head with this crowd of art-world-giants, but that’s the best way to grow. I like situations that make me push myself further, to paint/draw/write more eloquently, and this is one of them.  I revamped my website last week, that’s here, there’s links to my artwork, but also all the studio visits I’ve done for B/D which I am very proud of.

I was so psyched to get to draw with Taylor McKimens and Ted Gahl a couple of months ago. That’s sort of the drawing equivalent of getting to shoot free throws with Michael Jordan.

This is the garage I work in.  Straight Sexy, haha.

What can I say?

I like art a lot. I guess that’s obvious.  This has high-gloss acrylic on it, so its too shiny to photograph well.  If you like my photos, then you like it raw anyways.

I like seeing what other people are up to, but it feels uncomfortable to expose myself. The way I’m going bald looks like a double mohawk, you can’t take the punk out of the boy.  I did have a mohawk once, as a dare, I gave it myself on the last day of highschool with a pair of scissors.

I’ve always liked to draw Laur. She’s my dream girl.  When I was in college I made about 50 paintings of her, and they were how I got into the painting program at the University of Iowa.  When I was 21 I won a $600 fellowship from paintings of Laur, that was a lot to me back then.

Ok, so this drawing is a little weird. I made it as a way to explain why I draw old cartoons, to give it a backstory. So I drew (copied) all these old portraits, along with a couple from a J Crew catalog, and was thinking of them as the founders of a cult that worships my strange cartoons. That way my irrational predilection for drawing early Americana cartoons would be explained, but in retrospect I just made it weirder. That’s where my natural talent lies anyways.

Just finished a new Wes Lang Studio Visit, will be available in the next day on Beautiful/Decay. Only place to see his new work, it’s bound for Europe on Wedsnesday.

UNCOVERED chapter 1: Wes Lang from sacha cesana on Vimeo.

If you don’t like to read, but are interested in philosophy, this is as good as you’ll get.

Three patron saints of sensitivity: Henry Darger, Martin Ramirez and Adolf Wolfli have become hugely influential; and except for Darger, paradoxically unknown. All three were questionably schizophrenic, each psyche crushed under the weight of change as their 19th century childhoods were ground to dust in the cogs of the industrial age. They all escaped a normal life, probably as a result of manipulation as much as mental illness, and spent their days toiling in bizarre expressions of self, what did it amount to? Why are they more popular then ever? Is their alienation and fantasy OUR alienation and fantasy?

We’re now making 3rd or 4th generation mental illness art, it’s taught in college. Previously I floated the idea that intentionally producing “crazy” art is a way to slip the system, or at least be functionally irrational in a world that increasingly demands more rational productivity.  Pretending to be crazy is one of the best strategies to let other people know you wish to continue acting on your impulses, even if you are completely sane.

Rational productivity is no fun, and not really a good reason for a society to exist either; it only makes sense if there is something we all agree on apriori, which we do not. Rational productivity should be the means, not the end, but we’re in a bad spot because for us its the ends, and the means is a sort of high pressure grind that feels like a nightmare version of Monopoly. No g’damned wonder we’re all feverishly fantasizing about the apocalypse in the form of allegorical xombies, aka an object taking the place of our hyper-alienation and aggression.

Wolfli and Ramirez spent most of their adult lives in mental asylums. Bartering for colored pencils and scraps of paper, their compositions have a peculiar presence that borders on numinous as though they saw through reality right past the normal world and into some magical other place. After examining their work it’s obvious they had more powerful inner lives then outer lives. (Al Columbia did a wonderful satire of a guy wanting to live in a mental hospital in his comic books Pogo1 and 2.)

Henry Darger was institutionalized on several occasions in Illinois. As an adult he worked as a janitor and dishwasher in Catholic hospitals in Chicago. Darger matches Wolfli and Ramirez in weirdness, but being on the outside he had much more access to art supplies, and employed sophisticated artistic techniques by using carbon paper to trace newspaper photos, photo enlargements to create scale shifts, and wonderfully sensitive watercolor. He created complicated, fantastical masterpieces that recall the intricacy of a Poussin frieze.

The contemporary artists picking up on the spaces, formal choices, and themes of the Mentalists aren’t the bottom of the barrel either, many are at the top of the heap. Abject perversity is sometimes confused as more relevant than normalcy, real normalcy is intricate and hard to pin down, is it just easier to be stupid and disgusting?  What would Abraham Maslow say?  Or Fritz Perls? We need a new crop of 60′s style psychological leaders to emerge, and the closest thing we’ve got, Slavoj Zizek, is funny and interesting but he isn’t doing any heavy lifting of our collective psyche. However, Slavoj Zizek has written some extremely interesting books, and gives one hell of an interview, talk about showmanship:  (if you’re reading this in a RSS feed and can’t see the video, here’s the link)

How aware are we, that by using Darger, Ramirez and Wolfli as models, we’re picking up on the most articulate of the people who failed to adapt to a new world?  How alienated are we? Without any believable myths what’s the point of anything? There’s no reason or context, there is only persistence.

Maybe we identify with Darger, Wolfli and Ramirez because they had the integrity to achieve a literally alienated life.

Where’s the silver lining in this? More artists are making more work, and more interesting work then ever before in the history of humanity. More people are dealing with self-actualization, the highest set of values on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  As the information age dawns maybe we just have to be ready to change rapidly. I hope Nietzsche was wrong about the abyss staring back, that is sort of a glass is half-empty sort of thing to say, he was probably a dick.

People milling around at the opening. From the left to right the paintings are by Michael Williams, (part of) Eddie Martinez, and Liz Markus’s painting of Picasso.

Wes Lang’s triptych

Tom Sanford, one of the artists behind this amazing show.

There’s a post about Big Picture on Beautiful/Decay.

Dan Attoe’s interview on Beautiful/Decay, fresh off the presses.  He’s one of the most articulate artists of our generation.  Here’s the link:  Dan Attoe on Beautiful/Decay!

When Allen Ginsberg’s wrote in his long poem, Howl, that “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”  He reminds us that in the sixties the smartest creative people became self-destructive.  Why would they do that?  It must have been a hard time to maintain integrity between thinking, speaking and action. 

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. ~ Ghandi 

It makes me aware that we’ve come a long way, because things are changing so quickly now.  We probably have more societal and technological change in one year than than the sixties changed in the entire decade.  Maybe we’re used to changing, and they were shaken by the sudden splitting.  We’re solid.  I’ve seen the best minds of my generation, and they’re put together out of the stable molecules.  They’re carbon, they’re cut diamonds, they’re unusual philosophers,* and that takes integrity.

While I was posting this a couple of quotes were rolling around, one from H.P. Lovecraft, and one from Martin Heidegger.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.  We live in a placid island of ignorance in a sea of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.  The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. ~ H. P. Lovecraft

We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time. ~ Heidegger

Bill’s other posts on Beautiful/Decay.  

* lovers of wisdom