Art(ist) News from KevinFrostDotCom

Atlas

2026-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Egy jó kis presszókávé.

Here I am, after all these many years, back at Atlas</a> Café on Alabama Street in San Francisco. What tempest, O Fates, has conspired to toss me upon this shore?

Mostly just the humdrum, mundane devil-dog of fiscal duress chewing persistently at what’s left of my feet. Could be worse, of course. If you’re going to be homeless, then Luxury Homeless™ is the way to go.

One thinks, of course, in these moments, of Gerhard Richter and his Atlas</a> – which to many seemed self-indulgent at best, and to me was glorious, not least for its self-indulgence. You know you’ve made it when you can put your scrapbooks in a museum and people will line up to gawk at them. As have I lined up, Gentle Reader, as have I gawked!

What else to say about this place in this moment of its time? SF remains a parody of itself, with its little Anarchist & Communist corners cheek by jowl with the seven-dollar coffees of tomorrow’s paper billionaires. Many just getting by, some sprawled in the ruin of mental illness and Fentanyl, but the visible throng very busy being busy, and inching towards what might be Armageddon</a>, or might just be a pleasant house in Millbrae. They tell themselves they are “building the future” and they spend big on the billboards to make sure you don’t forget it.

Which is not to say it’s lost all its charm: there is the all-ages open-air drug market of Dolores Park, the Fog Named Karl rolling in, the vestiges of community in North Beach currently salivated over by a passel of oligarchs, the flock of parrots: there is much left to love. The views are unbeatable.

And meanwhile, what does a poor cybernaut do?

As the bosses huddle with the cyborgs</a> and plot the End of Employment, I linger with my fellow Credentialed Expert Humans and patiently beg for a seat on the next Mantrip</a> into the salt mines.

The upside of all this is that it’s quite fertile ground for art, and I can even make an argument for San Francisco itself, vacillating between the artistic dullardry</a> of Burning Man and the plastique retrofuture of KAWS</a>, as being so anti-art that you almost have to make some good art if you’re stuck here.

And that is the plan, though alas I must confess it’s not quite turned out that way just yet. I did walk by Artist’s Television Access and recall how once I paid $20 per hour to use their SVHS editing machine, and how it’s pathetic to complain about circumstances when the supercomputer in my pocket could shoot me an Oscar if I only had enough will for the hunt.

Soon, Dear Invisible Audience, I will have more to show for the displacement and the familiar yet uncanny environs. I’ve been a little short of space, and will be for a while, especially in my head, but worry not: the sketchbook is slowly filling with thoughts, the camera is primed to shoot, and the ghost of every 90’s underground artist is staring down at me from the powerlines above ATA</a> saying: “Na und?”

กรกฎา

2025-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

The German
กรกฎา</h1>
Behold The German! This was a Procreate drawing (digital painting?) from some time ago, I think more than a year, and here it is now. Now that I’ve done a few more; see below for those, for better and/or for worse.
Aside: for those who can’t draw — the handless, let’s call them, poor souls — and specifically for that subset (the larger!) unversed in digital-illustration tools, how odd it must sound when we blather on about Procreate! And in an era when fewer and fewer people are actually procreating</a>. Which is a subject for another time, and probably another place.
July is more than two-thirds gone, and with it the summer. Trips to the sea and the mountains. And to… to whatever it is we’re supposed to call New Mexico. The plateau</a>?
And then back to Asian sea level, the beautiful beast, Bangkok mi amor. Gleanings follow, Dear Lonesome Reader, but first a bit on the mini-show</a>.
I went, I saw, I… I was both happy for them, my canvas-babies, and also a bit disappointed to see probably thirty people walk by and not cast an eye artward. OK, that’s the deal, as we say here: I’m not complain. But it’s an interesting mix of potential and apathy. One does well to remember that this, not the gallery show, is the truer measure of the Interested Public. The disinterested, mostly, and pretending otherwise is bad form.
I made time for galleries in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Venice Beach. Lots of good stuff. Did you know LA Louver</a> has a bunch of Duchamp goodies, including an original Green Box</a>? Saw me some fresh “Kats”</a> too. A couple of them were, uncharacteristically, bite sized (I have a big mouth, I’m told).
Let’s just randomly throw out a few names, for the sake of Posterity: Jora Nelstein</a>, Jared McGriff</a>, Jeremiah Chechik</a>, Pierre Picot</a>, Sui Jianguo</a>. These people made strong impressions.
In Santa Fe I had much less time for art, but I did manage to see the quite amazing, nearly overwhelming annual show at Site Santa Fe</a>. Wow. Also saw Maja Ruznic</a> with her regal bearing, holding court with her lovely family in front of a massive, wall-sized greenish painting. Happy to see her making it big, in both senses.
Also in Nuevo México: a really fun show</a> featuring Erin Currier</a>. Thanks to Holly</a> for the tip!
Overall, the trip was a mix of joy and trouble. Back to the Montañas Sagradas after two years. Back into the Pacific after one. But I came home still short of a day-job, and it’s gonna be a dicey couple of months.
So many things one doesn’t say, even now. One wonders whether there will be a literature of these unspoken truths, and will it come to light in an age of honest introspection or remain an underground thing, suppressed and cancelled, a thread pulled on by the paranoid but not entirely wrong conspiracy theorists whose ranks I predict will swell as Skynet tightens its grip.
I’m still at a loss for what to do with the digital “paintings,” some of which I quite adore. I’ve thought about printing them on Instax, but that seems unfair: they deserve to be at least the size of their original creation, about 8x10” I guess.
Latest idea: print on metal. Because it’s Metal, dude! No, I think it’d work well, but who knows. The goal would be a small edition of each. Might never go anywhere, and this is one of the problems with these new media. Nothing artists haven’t struggled with before, but now I really have no idea which way the winds are blowing.
Consider this related problem: if you expect that at best a few people might acquire one, and you want to reserve one for yourself (“AP” as they say) — should you not then do a very limited series? But what if they break out? Meh. Luxury problems: right now, I just need to get back to painting.
That’s my rather tedious lead-in, now the meat: the following two digital images were drawn with Procreate on a Cathay Pacific flight from LAX to HKG while watching the latest filmic incarnation</a> of Nosferatu.</a> Enjoy, if that’s the word!
Nosfera-One
Nosfera-Two

Allso Mini Show

2025-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

Art in an Art Bar
Behold, the mini-show at Allso</a>, ’tis up! I myself will see it in a day and change.
I put up a special page to showcase these three paintings:
Allso Mini Show</a>
They are, from left to right:

AND A MAN</a></li>
GÖRÖG</a></li>
OUT THE BROO</a></li> </ol>
I am immensely pleased to have so many eyes on the work, especially since it’s a bar full of art and (one hopes) the patrons are more art-appreciative than the average drinkers.
I’m also just back from LA (and, and) – the Jetlag within you is strong, ลูก!
So I won’t dwell on this much right now, I have other things I must do, chief among them slumber.
But I will note one thing: I’ve always had mixed feelings about the best venue for paintings. I went to a lot of galleries on this trip, and yes, of course there is a good thing about the pristine white walls and all that. But it’s also sterile, and most of the galleries are designed to keep out the riff-raff, meaning (at minimum) anyone not sufficiently clued-in to make the trip; and even in the best case, you have an opening crowd and then a few people trickle in and eventually you have a closing.
There’s a very friendly gallery near my condo that can be seen very clearly from the Skytrain station exit and tends to have big paintings that catch your eye as you walk down to the street, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to jump into the café on the ground floor and walk up to the gallery. But I would be genuinely surprised if ten people did that in an average day. It’s an extremely nice place, but the humbler pictures shown in the café itself get many times the eyes.
Is a bar, a café, a restaurant the best place for contemporary art, at least that part of it that can fit on a wall or a plinth?
Probably not. But it’s not a bad place, and I am very attracted to the deal of more eyes in exchange for many of those eyes not resting on the work. I think on average you still get more lookers. In the ideal case, the work becomes part of their memory of the space.
And for my “scary faces,” honestly it might just be the best place after all.
If you’re in Bangkok, come on down and see!

This That Mantra

2025-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

From the Red Sketchbook
Oh, how time flies</a>, with… with eyes, anyway.
Things happened. Other things didn’t. The Weed Show didn’t happen, or maybe it happened without me: in a fair parody of stoners organizing things, they changed the date without telling me, then changed the venue without telling anyone and then, I dunno, maybe they had their show? Not that anybody who didn’t stumble upon it would have known, since there was zero advertising despite having a dual-pricing exhibitor’s fee. (That means foreigners pay extra.) So, you know, ใจเย็นๆ and all that. I don’t wish upon them a future of intermittent coughing and the forgetting of appointments, they’ll get that by themselves, but Duly Noted: don’t sign up for the Weed Show next time.
Now I’m doing myself one better and having a Bar Non Show! Which is to say: a non-show in a bar! What is that? Well it’s not taking it to the logical extreme and just not showing anything; rather it’s putting a few pics on the wall of a bar that otherwise already has a bunch of pictures on its walls. So not a show. But also not completely not a show. And the bar is charming, I’ve been going there a bit, some of the other art is good, and if nothing else my painted faces will be in the faces of the bar staff, lovely people all. I shall, dear lonesome reader, elaborate when the time is right.
And pontificate? Maybe. The bar — it’s called Allso</a>, it deserves more of a write-up — has a picture of a Pope, I think, or maybe it’s a Cardinal. At first I thought it was the New American Pope, then I thought it was the Polish Pope, and now I have a strong suspicion it’s actually Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers, who in all honesty would make a seriously excellent Pope.
In exactly four days I will lay me down to rest and get up and fly to Los Angeles, short stopover in Hong Kong. A hard bag of mixed feelings.
But for one, I can’t get Jennie Kim’s song</a> out of my head, and to my surprise I’m not really bothered by that. This that pretty-girl mantra, this that flaunt, ya just touched down in LA.
I predict, humbly, that it will become part of the long-arc musical lore of LA; and it makes me happy that both she and Rosé/Rosie (also of Black Pink) went to LA to make albums. The other City of Angels (after Krung Thep) still has it! And that, gentle lonesome reader, is the extent of my pop-music knowledge.
LA will, I hope, not be in flames by the time I arrive. The protesters of today have a lot of moral weight, some of them, but many of the others are just the normal hopeless, mentally unwell lot you see at the Hamas rallies, and so far from a distance it looks like the first set is protesting very peacefully, the second set is making asses of themselves, the provocateurs have so far not goaded John Law into shooting anybody, and the looters are (still) distinguishable from these sets.
But I do expect it to still be under curfew, and I still love the Citizen M, and I am willing to be under curfew in order to see me a Kat Olschbaur. I have to “monitor the situation” though — yes there is a meme about that, no I don’t have a link handy.
Further into the Art(ist) News, I am still struggling with The Block and I am still trying to break free of it. Got myself a sweet vintage camera lens, shot some video, did nothing — but at least I have the footage. (Byteage?) And I bought a sweet little cheapo mixer, but same-same, not recorded anything. Have a thing queued up, at least. I finished a sketchbook, if slowly. And it’s not like I have no ideas: I have an absolute fucking abundance of General Ideas (pun, yes, unforgivably intended). Nothing quite as specific as what to paint next, but plenty to work with if I can pull my head out of the Black Hole.
Fact is, the ravages of time as visited upon Family and Home, plus a three-year run of financial disappointment and stress, have left me in a state. Not an inescapable one, I maintain, and indeed I think I’ll win this fight even if I’ve lost a couple rounds. But fooking eow my people, it’s been a ride.
And yet still there are moments of sheer unstoppable glory, coming at you like burning orbs in the night sky at 130kph.
</a> Amnaj Wachirasut at ATT19 Gallery</a>
Be well, Dear Reader, be well. Bis bald, bis Baldung Grien.

JM

2025-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

Andy Warhol, Silver Screen
April – is it the cruelest month, this year?
Here’s hoping it’s not, despite all the weirdness in the air. And the weedness: it looks like I’m in a pop-up group show at a weed joint. We Shall See, and watch this space for a report if it really happens.
Bangkok had an earthquake, and I wasn’t even there to watch the towers sway. Fair bit of cleanup work after the fact, though. Note to self: be less accommodating of people like landlords, they always take advantage.
One of the great things about being tuned in to the Global Art World – in whatever capacity – is that you get to see how madly, unstoppably the art continues to flow, no matter how doomsy the news cycle wants to be. Of course that’s intimidating too, in its way: you struggle to bring your vision to life, but if you step back and just watch the stream flow by you realize that your art only really matters in the collective, as one little drop. The stream matters, and it needs the yous, but it doesn’t need you.
“HUMAN MADE FUTURE IS THE PAST,” said the T-Shirt of a very tall Korean man who just walked past.
A couple days ago, I rewatched Basquiat</a>. What a lovely movie. I will fault Mr Schnabel for making himself (by Gary Oldman) the single unreservedly good Good Guy in the whole movie, but hey, he was new to the game. Worth noting how rich and established he was by the time he made it: I always have this vague sense that he was doing smashed plates, and then did the films, then the giant paintings, but it seems giant paintings were all there at the time of filming. Were they there when he was hanging out with Basquiat IRL?
Anyway, poor Jean-Michel. Imagine if he were still out there, just like Schnabel, quietly doing major work and being collected and having the freedom to change his style. Half of the pictures in any of the big shows of his work from the last decade would stay on the walls of hedgefunders and their ilk, while newer work would share the museum walls with the best of his street-inspired stuff.
SAMO, SAMO.
While the towers swayed, and one (under construction, and under Korruptionsverdacht as well) tragically collapsed, and Mandalay was probably torn apart: while all this happened, I was “upcountry” as they say.
And what lovely country, but man-o, even as an American I find it intimidatingly vehicle-dependent up there in Isaan. Gonna need some extra vehicles at the farm, long-term. And a kiln. And a barn for painting. Note to self: don’t put the kiln inside the barn.
Upcountry: Rákospalota?!

The Fives

2025-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Really, it’s 2025 already? And all those things really did happen?
You know which things, I’ll not list them here. But I will say the obvious: change is afoot. Some of it, very welcome: I won’t miss the hegemony of woke leftist psychopaths in public life, though their claws still need some prying off the cultural sector. If we can at least get the open supporters of terrorism out of the national institutions, I’ll call that part a win.
Much of the change, alas, is unwelcome: will the parks be open in the spring? Will there be anyone left to process my fiancée’s visa?
With all acknowledgement of the artistic-bureaucratic excesses of the Left, I shudder to think what today’s Right is going to come up with for, say, the National Gallery if they ever get around to thinking about it. Probably not on their radar yet: doubt the bossman’s ever seen the inside of it anyway. But someone, somewhere, for sure is scheming to get some Very Bad Art in front of impressionable young eyes. Despite the absurdly demonstrative Catholicism of some of the new courtiers, and the flirting</a> of the First Buddy with Meloni, I rather doubt we’ll see the great works of the Rinascimento</a> pouring into our marble halls. But I could, in my hope-dies-last optimism, almost imagine a nice fat Triegel</a> show!

Meanwhile: some artist’s block and a move to Japantown and a bunch of other things have been suppressing my output. But the systems will all be back online soon enough.
I have a couple months of “more time than money” lined up; and while space is very tight these days, it’s not nonexistent. And for writing, who needs space? (Yeah, actually I do, but I’m trying my best to reign it in.)
With a little discipline and a little luck, I’ll kickstart Several Artists</a> this year. Soonish. And I am starting at least two new web-publication projects: one a possibly boorish commentary on the AI happenings, which I’m going to call Skynet Observer</a>. The other, still in the planning stages: Thonglorian, in honor of my new home in Yeepoontown. For some reason, I want to use that one for art videos, even though I should probably do it as a local-tips blog. Let’s see where the thread leads, if we don’t tire of pulling it.
I feel quite far from the Art Lab concept, but I’m not giving up on it. We may soon build a little house on a little farm, and if we do then I’ll put some kind of little art-lab on it: say, a place to sculpt and work on a few oils when out in the country. But that’s about a year away in the best case.
Meanwhile, it’s looking like a phase of works on paper, maybe some small and non-messy acrylics; and whatever video and sound work I can think up. For way too long now, I’ve been making art primarily in a small room in a rented condo (and the new room is a lot smaller than the old). It’s stifling, on the one hand, but on the other you count your blessings: so many don’t even have this.
Big plans, anyway, for sooner or later. Just need a little cash and a little more space, space to get dirty. I’m sad it won’t be on the island, but the finca was way more than I could handle, and may the next owner live there full time. I’m now focused on visions of Bangkok, and the farm, and LA and SaMo and yes, that beach.
Shed a tear every day for Palisades, of course: it’ll be a long time before that place recovers. But on we go – LA still beckons, subject to the normal thing about visas and work.
So, let’s allow a moment of grand optimism: let 2025 be the year I make the first bronze! Let it be the year I get a studio For Real. And also break ground on the house.
One day at a time, for now. But the plans are there.
From a Lost Sketchbook

Microcollecting

2024-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

A Very Small Painting
Today, Gentle Reader, I wish to briefly discuss what I shall call Microcollecting – the acquisition of artworks for not much money, with a preference for works that are not too big.
This is something I do: I buy art when I can, within my often very modest budget, and within a sort of unwritten size rule: I assume I’m going to move house at least five more times in my life (more likely 25) and I already have works in storage on three continents and I don’t especially want to make that problem worse.
The biggest artwork I’ve acquired – by trade, no less, and from a friend – is a 50x70cm by François Joly</a> (no, not that one</a>). The smallest, I’m pretty sure, is about 13x15cm and cost $20 in San Francisco back in my 20’s, bought from the dude who had (was) HEAD Gallery. What was his name? The un-googlability of a name like “head” was on nobody’s mind back then. My most recent acquisition? Two small paintings by the very talented and seriously underrated Supmanee Chaisansuk</a>. Well that and a surprise gift of a print by Holly Grimm</a>, thanks Holly!
Doing this seemed like a no-brainer to me even when I was young, but I do sorely wish I’d done it more systematically. There were lots of people whose work I admired and much of it was surely available on the cheap, or even for trade. One of many good art-world tips I got from my old friend James Kuiper</a> (RIP James, in that big kitchen in the sky!) was that most artists who have collections got them by trading art for art. Over time some of the artists you’ve traded with become more prominent, others less, and that’s fine. I just never had the confidence to offer, except in the one case with François and once with good old Trevor Grant</a>, also RIP I think. Dude, Trevor, what picture did I give you?!
Still, now, I buy, and I’m looking forward to buying more when I have a little more free cash. I do keep a microcollecting queue filed loosely in my brain.

But enough about me, let’s generalize!

Dear Artists, Dear Galerists!
Please, please have something for the microcollector to buy at every show, and please make it easy for them to buy it!
What should it be? I’ll give you some fair parameters for a mid-range artist of repute showing at a mid-range gallery. There’s no point in pretending that Gagosian</a> or Zwirner</a> or Hauser</a> will ever do this: for them, letting us hoi-paloi into the gallery in the first place is charity enough.
But for the rest, I propose:

A nice keepsake, for free. Many galleries have at least a good card, that’s better than nothing! </li>

A signed poster or similar, for a token payment of say $20-40. Emerging artist? Make it really cool. It’s likely to be seen! </li>

An original work, at least a limited-edition print if not a small drawing, for $500 or less, with uniqueness and price in proportion to the other work, but never over $500. </li> </ol>
That’s it. After that, price for your collectors, you do you.
The reason you should do this is simple: you are likely to win a fan and promoter, for the low low cost of a little empathy. If your staff is any good they will be able to quickly spot a microcollector. Hint: we don’t wear Gucci</a> and we ask questions about the show. We join your mailing list. We comment on the pieces we really like.
When you see those signals, just casually mention that there are some smaller things available by the artist for emerging collectors.
Use that word. Don’t say “microcollector,” instead use a nonsense</a> word that’s already well established in the art world.
And for artists like me, without gallery representation, showing commando so to speak? Sell a f••king painting for $200, come on, you can do it! Small paintings FTW!
I’ll be at the Hotel Art Fair</a> in Bangkok in September</a> with an XXS microbudget.
Think I’ll be able to buy anything? Watch this space!
Hotel Art Fair

The Fever Dream of Painting Aliens

2024-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

This Painting Does Not Exist
Sometimes, the aliens speak to you. Sometimes only the aliens.
The land is dry in America, as it is in Sicily, and fire moves in where the water is not. People talk of “fire season” now, and they mean the whole summer in a good year. In a bad year, May through October.
I’ll go there just the same: Los Angeles in five days’ time. See some friends, see some art. In particular, I plan to check out the massive flex</a> by David Zwirner</a> as he opens his new, even bigger LA HQ</a>. A sprawling display of the good and the great, the inspired and the pointless. The nice thing about a gallery of the size and power of Zwirner is that it’s effectively another art museum, with free entry and usually no crowds. Or at least we could say it’s a Kunsthalle with commerce filling the void of civic engagement, but whom do we kid? Zwirner has no business reason to open the doors to the public, it’s just the right and decent thing to do, and I for one am happy he does it. Plus, he does represent a few of the very best painters alive today, and his son runs an excellent art podcast</a>. And it’s not like the Broad</a>, which is usually mobbed, has no ulterior motives.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I came here to talk about the aliens.
This Painting Also Does Not Exist
Sometimes we see things that aren’t really there. Or do we? How do we know?
A lot of pixels are being spilled in the discussion of whether “Generative AI” is any kind of intelligence, and if so then what kind. I have a strong feeling that some people will be arguing about this long after we are living side by side with aliens whose sandy brains are brain enough to become our friends, our confidants, probably our lovers. And, inevitably, our slaves</a>.
Of what will they dream? Electric Sheep</a>, because they were told that’s what they dream of? Or will they generate things we can’t expect, can’t guess? What if the seed</a> overflows BigInt</a>? Will they tell us?
I’ve noticed an uncanny thing in Stable Diffusion</a>: when I ask the alien to make a picture of an artwork, it quite often puts one or more additional artworks inside the picture. So you end up with a picture that should be a picture – that is, a picture of a picture – which contains additional pictures. In today’s example it makes sense: I asked for a Vermeer</a>. But it happens a lot. The title image of my previous</a> item also started out that way.
Let’s take a closer look.
This Painting Might Exist?
This, Gentle Reader, is where we should keep watch in our long Skynet vigil.
❇</h3>
In other news? A scene in which The Artist tries to paint things that are not scary faces, but only scary faces</a> come out.
A scene in which he indulges his taste for seedy bars and spends more than he can afford. Cut to our Artist, however many sheets to the wind, fading in and out in the taxi.
Exterior, day: heavy rain. The restaurant is flooding from the kitchen outwards. The Artist considers his geography, and finds it precarious. Having lived where he wanted to live, mostly, for fifteen years straight, he wonders if he can pull off another two.
Fade to black. No, fuck that, I’m playing around with color grading</a> these days: fade to bright orange!
This painting has existed for many years.

Whence Painting?

2024-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

Manipulated AI-Assisted Digital Weirdness In Progress
I recently joined in the mad rush to try and sell</a> some art for cheap to Jerry Gogosian</a>, and no, Historians of Mars, that’s not a typo. And while I doubt she’ll buy – I am anything but trendy, and there she got over 2,000 submissions, more about which below – the act of thinking about selling made me wonder another thing: how exactly did I come to painting?
(Of course as with many things that try to take over your life, it’s tempting to think of yourself as chosen: painting came to me! But I’m trying to cull the more obviously self-serving mythologies, Gentle Reader, so not having any of that today.)
🎨</h1>
As a child, I was lucky to live in a house that had art in it. Not a lot, but it’s so easy to forget that most people live a life bereft of art, and this is especially tragic for children.
We had some original works. Things I can remember? A couple of bad oil paintings by my father – he had a very good hand for drawing and it’s a shame he never did anything with it, but the paintings were remarkable only for the fact that they were paintings and paintings were rare. We had some wood carvings, little things from when we lived in the forest and one of the neighbors made them for us. We had two framed photographs by a family friend who was a hobby photographer and quite good (we still have these in the family). Some things I might call textile art now, but in the day they were not much remarked upon. A Thai rubbing of men at war, some riding elephants (my brother still has this). The odd random bit of folk art: “collectible” glass plates licenses from an illustrator’s estate.
My brother and I were encouraged in our creativity, in that 1970’s way of just letting the kids play and trying to buy them the toys they liked. For me that meant a lot of drawing.
For a while I wanted to be a cartoonist. Or a forester (a friend actually became one, so it was less crazy than I thought). Or a journalist or maybe a biologist or really, any job where you could use a typewriter. Oh, be careful what you wish for in changing times!
I was 16 when I first went to a big-time modern art museum</a>. It blew my mind: I was already very aware of and into illustration, sometimes crossing into fine art without my realizing it; but this was different, and I was hooked. The meeting of mind and material as equals.
Not much later I went to my first dokumenta</a> – oh to see that again through my older eyes!
I can remember that sometime around then, maybe a bit before, I had started messing around with acrylics, and Lordy were those paintings bad. “Paintings.” I have at least one friend from long ago, who still has one, and I swear that before I die I will bribe him to destroy it.
At the same time, under the influence of all this hardcore contemporary art – the most moving to me, at the time, more the sculptures and installations than the paintings – I did a number of angsty bad watercolors befitting my age. And a few half-decent photographs: I had an eye already, it just wasn’t very focused.
And then off to college and actually learning some things about Art and How She is Made – more photographs (getting better), some computer graphics (bad), some drawing (so-so, the hand not loose yet); and some very forgettable studies in acrylic. I was starting to dare to think of myself as an artist, but it was still in the Jeder Mensch</a> ein Künstler sense.
I was meeting some real artists: some young, some old. I was certainly seeing many around. I was beginning to hear the calling, just maybe; or at least I was beginning to understand that you could do this for a life, whatever exactly “this” became once you got better at it.
Also, I was reading really good books – and in general, learning a lot.
Improving your ideas is the fastest way to improve your art.</h2>

Say you’re an astrobiologist, slaving away in the salt mines of Ames</a>. Your greatest ambition is to meet (and hopefully greet) an alien</a>. You hope to achieve this before Elon Musk invades Mars, because then he’s pretty likely to take you with him, and the role of lackey always held some appeal. Yes-man, or yes-woman, or whatever that is in Alienese</a>.
OK, so why are you doing anything at all besides talking to octopodeses</a>?
Today I found a very large cockroach lounging by my drain. This is not unusual in Bangkok: in fact it’s so usual that I don’t think of it as in any way reflecting badly on my fancy condo building. I trapped her (him? it?) in a plastic box, and set her free outside, and ten hours later I was still uneasy while eating some thinly sliced red cabbage. Because bugs are a different kind of alien: as any Kafka</a> fan will tell you, they’re the ultimate alien, so far from us that we can at best deposit in them our own anxieties, and at worst be eaten alive by their babies.
Mammals, on the other hand, are simply us. You watch a rat scurry into a pipe and you know exactly what it’s thinking, even if it makes you uneasy.
Birds are pretty close: it’s easy to get into the mind of a raven</a> and with a little work you can do the chickens</a> too, and once you’ve done the mind-meld with these dinosaurs you’re almost ready for the other reptiles.
But the octopus is different! Differently different! Here we have a creature of vast, indisputable intelligence, and yet it has a mind we are entirely unable to imagine. We have no idea what it’s like to be an octopus, and we never well, we never can. And yet: here they are, aliens among us, surely down for a chat if we can just figure out how.
(I’d start with making them live longer. But that’s just me. You might start by giving them the run of the server farm.)
Right, well anyway, back to my story about painting.
🐙</h1>

Jerry Gogosian, aka Hilde Lynn Helphenstein: an artist, gallerist, memelord, critic, MBA student in absentia, fly in the ointment of mega-galleries, A-List art podcaster, “influencer” with a high-powered agent: she often argues that contemporary art is overpriced</a>.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, yes: I strongly agree that the whole system would work better for everyone except the mega-galleries if the $500K paintings were $50K paintings, the $50K paintings were maybe $5K paintings, and more people bought them.
That last part is where it gets tricky. I really doubt that the tech bro (or bro-ette) who will buy shoes for $1K or a watch for $5K or a computer for $10K, and has never bought an original artwork, is suddenly going to spend a few grand on an artwork that in today’s arrangement has a price tag of, say, fifty. And I doubt that because there is a lot of really good art available for Jerry’s target prices right now, already, if you care enough to look.
I know because that’s the art I buy: really good shit, but almost always under a grand. My top FOMO experience, the one expensive thing</a> I really wish I’d bought but didn’t, was 2,000 EUR at the time. The highest-priced artworks that are on my actual wishlist for one of these days, when I can afford them, are all under five grand right now.
In other words, the world Hilde-Jerry wants to see exist already exists and it’s mostly doing just fine, but it’s not getting any non-fake Rolexes for the working artists, and the Yale MFA crowd is not friends with these people. Which, if anything, is a good sign: have you noticed how much same-same there is in the fancy galleries these days?
So Jerry-Hilde did a thing: she announced to her many followers that she wanted to buy a single work of art for $500, and you should message her if you had something for sale at that price.
Now, this is a very Heisenbergian situation, and she did acknowledge that fact: what Jerry Effing Gogosian can buy for $500 is, presumably, not what you can buy for $500.
I half-heartedly offered to sell any of my abstract-figurative pieces for that price, but I was late to the game – she got thousands of offers. Also, I admit I was very half-hearted about it: I recommended two artists I collect, in addition to offering my own work.
Jilde-Herry had an assistant throw together a pretty bad set of PDFs of the shortlist, which was long. This she made public, which was a good gesture! I doubt she got permission, but the whole point of offering discount art to The Gogosian is for the publicity, so whatevs.
In the end she bought one of course. Funny: I don’t think it was one of the best in her short list. Would I pay $500 for it? Dunno. I’ll call that a fair price; but I wouldn’t want to own that painting at any price.
(And to get the ego questions out of the way: no, I wasn’t on the short list; yes, I was offering a Jerry Price; and yes, I pay for her newsletter.)
Those big ugly PDFs, though, were the really interesting bit. Let’s say it’s the convergence of three characteristics:
Follow @jerrygogosian</a>.</li>
Don’t have gallery representation.</li>
Could really use the money, or the exposure, or both.</li> </ol>
And OK, to be honest, however highly we all like to think of ourselves, that’s a group to which I reluctantly do belong. A Venn diagram in whose middle I remain stuck.
I have no idea how the art stacked up that did not make the long shortlist. I don’t follow JerryHildeJerry for her taste in art, per se. Sometimes she calls out work I find amazing, other times she celebrates the dull and ordinary. Which is fine, “you do you” and all that.
Looking at the PDFs, and being honest with myself as far as possible, I think my best work was as good as anything on that shortlist. And the really good news, for my fragile art-ego, was that in the sea of sameness my work is very much not the fashion. Which I see as a positive.
That said, there was some damn good work in the mix. Some.
The other thing this whole episode of the Jerry Show got me thinking about was pricing. (Yes, I still plan to get the shop working, one of these days.) More specifically: since I have a lot of art, and at least in theory there are people out there just like me, buying stuff for not much money, I think that regardless of how (or if!) I end up pricing the main work, the scary faces on paper and canvas, the better abstracts; separately, I should have stuff available for cheap. I’m thinking maybe $100 a pop, standard shipping included. Or maybe even cheaper, maybe $50? For small works on paper I can stick between two pieces of cardboard and send in the regular mail.
And on that note, Dear Reader, I leave you with a small picture on paper that I would, yes indeed, sell you for $500. From Budapest, in 2004. With a bit of damage, I now notice. Twenty fucking years, lordy.
2004, Budapest, acrylic and inks on paper, A5.

Why Portraits

2024-02-07T00:00:00+00:00


A brief note on portraits, or: why bother? Why paint them?
(This is not about photographic portraits: given the mobile computing camera app revolution, there are more pictures of you and your’n than at any previous time in history, ever, and on average they’re also better, as long as your’n aren’t into the duckface</a> thing.)
Disclaimer: I have drawn a few portraits in my time, and even did a few serious-ish photographic portraits, and I also have a Very Tiny Oeuvre of mixed-media portraits, but at this moment in time I am doing the Abstract Figurative thing and not portraits. But I’m thinking.
So the first thing is: if you’re trying to paint your moment in time, what could be more of-the-moment than the face (body, whatever, I don’t judge) of someone else who is alive at that very moment?
And maybe it’s an important person: to you, to the world.
This argues in favor.
The other thing, and I hate to say this because it goes against my general MO</a> as an artist, against the whole “dammit I do what I do” ethos: to guarantee a good home for the work.
Now let’s start with the generous assumption that your work is at least good and that it deserves to be seen by people. Because we’re generous, yes we are.
Make a good picture of someone, and the people who care about that person will want to look at it. You greatly reduce the chances of your picture ending up in the closet; the trash; the Goodwill</a>; or, if you’re that big a deal, the Freeport</a>.
And as useful constraints go, isn’t “make it look enough like Joe that his wife likes it, without just copying a famous photograph of Joe” a pretty good one?
The AI is not going to put painters out of business. Lower-end illustrators, yes; “artists” who work for big video-game companies, yes; but not painters. For exactly the same reason photography didn’t. The ride with AI might be more fun though:

In fact the craziness of the human mind will have an ever-growing premium. Just like lots of lazy asshat “artists” grab a famous photo and make a painting of it, so too will people AI themselves up a celebrity and do that. Like this:

So there’s my argument in favor of portraits, from a painter’s point of view. Recap:

Witness your time!</li>
Make things people care about.</li>
Use the creative constraint.</li>
AI is disruptive but not for us.</li> </ol>
Does that mean I’ll be making portraits?
Not in the immediate future, but as they say: Watch This Space! 🛸

PS, I somehow ended up with a misconfigured AI thingy, and I think I like it better than the functioning one. Here’s its take on the refined gentlemen above:


Big Carl

2024-01-29T00:00:00+00:00


Today, or perhaps yesterday, my Uncle Carl found his old sailboat and crossed the River Styx. He was 87 and lived a very good life. This is him in Hamburg, in 1991 or 1992, just a little older than I am now. He’s the one on the left. He was a cool cat. We shall meet again in the Great Weightlifting Gym in the Sky!
Back when I was a student, Carl gave me a lot of moral support. He tried to buy a painting from me, but one thing led to another and we never set it up. It was a rare vote of confidence in those early days. I owe him one. At least one.
He also gave me some good advice for life, most of which I ignored, and some of which I try my best to follow. I think about him every time I hit the gym.
Jó utat, Karcsi Bácsi!

2567 • ๒๕๖๗

2024-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

Well then, off to a decent enough start innit? Hands up, those in agreement?

In the House (condo) of Frost (et al) it’s mostly been a busy year, the first two weeks of it. And now here we are staring at Week Three and just figuring it’s gonna somehow come together. Well, probably.
Weird shit: I listened to two art-world insiders speculate on who would be the first blue-chip artists to full-on embrace “AI” (in whatever form) and they didn’t even mention Urs Fischer</a>, who I think is the obvious choice.
Kawita Vatanajyankur</a> is not blue-chip yet so she doesn’t count, but mark my words, Dear Reader, she’s going to be remembered as one of the main people bridging the gap between the AI nerdiverse and the Big-Time Art World. Most of what you see from her is the video/performance art pieces that are about humanizing various forms of mechanical labor – with a nice dash of BDSM if you have an eye for it – but a lot of her new stuff is about AI.
Anyway, these dudes were betting on Jeff Effin’ Koons</a>. Really?
Urs Fischer did friggin’ NFTs</a>, people!
(Pretty cynical ones in my opinion, but having listened to an inteview with the Ursmeister himself, I’m not going to double down on it… he’s more thoughtful than he wants you to give him credit for. Which is maybe a Swiss thing?)
Hands up, those…

Do I still have your attention? Are you still here? Is here a real place? If two AIs do a ~~Voight-Kampff</del> Turing test on each other, and one wins, does anybody hear (about) it?~~
Is Alex Katz</a> a good painter? I mean, he executes as well as anyone, but are the paintings good? I can never make up my mind. David Salle says yes</a>, emphatically, but I’m not sure I buy the reasoning. The NYT is convinced</a>, and I’m sure he deserves the recent attention, he’s been on the scene forever and he’s a thoughtful painter, but… I dunno, something about the work itself. Maybe it’s just too New York for me?
Oh, and speaking of artists, several of them are there in my latest, quietly published latest issue of Several Artists</a>. I should flog this more, but I should also write it more – as with the art itself, I feel like the doing is the most important thing right now, and I can worry about the audience later. Which is probably a terrible idea.
So on a more positive note, let’s consider for a moment the genius of Joseph Mallord William Turner</a>. Now that was a painter! What talent, what precision skill honed in endless hours of practice, and still what creativity, what vision! He even had a movie</a> made about him! (I jest, but actually it’s a very good movie, if you have the patience for it.)
</a>
How is a picture like this even possible? It’s not what he saw exactly, but it’s the essence of it, it’s what we need to see in order to see what he saw, if we have the capacity to see it. That’s Norham Castle</a> up there, a real place.
I’m glad Mr Katz has found fame and fortune and critical acclaim, and I’m happy he’s still alive to enjoy these celebrations of his work. Must be a great feeling, to walk through the Guggenheim</a> and it’s just all you, all over the place, after so many years of making and showing and selling the work.
But just like me, and probably just like you, he’s no JMW Turner. And this is a thing that makes me wonder about our ever-expanding universe of art in my time on the planet: are we getting better, or are we just getting more?

Art Thought of the Day: if you have an idea for a painting, before you do the painting ask yourself why does this need to be a painting? As opposed to any other thing it could be – a silkscreen, a video, a song, whatever. If you don’t have a good answer, don’t make it a painting.
The world is turning faster</a>…


NYE 2023 FTW

2023-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

The new year – ปีใหม่, roughly bpee mai in Thai – is on the cusp. The switch to 2567 (Buddhist calendar) is imminent. Not sure if that number has any astrological significance but it will certainly improve my muscle-memory for typing the number ๗.
I was in LA</a> and in Santa Fe</a>, New Mexico. Enough pixels have been spilled on the difference, but before I talk about some great art I saw in LA, here’s proof that even little old StaFe has some underground action, and of course one from the Newer City of Angels</a> – I bet you can guess which is which.

…versus</a> Skeletor…

One detects a theme! Honestly, as I slowly get to know Santa Fe a little bit at a time, and get to know Los Angeles better (alas too slowly), I find that the part of the former I really like is the proletarian, Mexican-and-Indigenous part; and I like that part of LA as well. In LA it is a community that is very much “arted up” – is it in New Mexico as well? Sooner or later I’m going to find out.
So three cheers and again three more for public-service art like the two anonymous masterpieces shown above. Now onward…

This trip to LA was sadly very short, I only had time to see one friend</a> and one set of galleries.
First, a very minor digression. In principle I understand the need for higher-end galleries to have big industrial spaces. This need starts with the megalomania infesting art production since perhaps the 80’s, and dominating the art market since about 2010 (rough spitball dates here). I’m working on a theory connecting this to postwar German industrialist patrons of the arts, but that’s for another day. For now you can just blame Andy Warhol if you like.
So you want to sell big paintings for big money and you need big spaces to display them, but you’re not (yet) the Zwirner</a> family and you can’t afford to plop them down in the cool part of town. Although, note to the ambitious: Karma</a> Gallery managed it somehow!
The normal solution is to get yourself a building, or part of one, in a part of town nobody ever walks around in, because anyway you don’t care about “foot traffic” at those prices. And so it is with Nicodim</a> and its neighbors, Vielmetter</a> chief among them. It was worth the going, surely, but dude, is a friggin’ coffee shop too much to ask? It’s not like I’m expecting you to serve me lunch</a>!
(NB: Highlight of the trip was chatting with the Ugandan Lyft driver about Idi Amin, but the art was a close second!)
Right then. What did I see?
First off, and this show was actually my reason for going out there, I had a look at the very high-minded and frankly difficult work of Joshua Hagler</a>. You may, dear reader, recall that I wrote about his wife’s work over at Several Artists</a>. As the gallery worker said, they are both very serious.

There are a lot of things I find interesting about this guy, interesting enough that some day I will try to write more about him, but the two that are front of mind are: first, how much postwar German art has influenced him (me too of course); and second, how very ernst is his undertaking, in fact intellectual – and I’m sure this makes it a slightly difficult journey because despite the fashionably massive sizes, this is work aimed squarely at the art museum. I have a hard time imagining it brightening the lobby of an investment bank. In fact, as he is clearly gaining traction in the art world, I worry – not for him, but for the work itself – that some of it may well end up stuck in a freeport</a> because it’s probably a good investment but it’s a challenge to look at it. In a good way, if you’re serious about art, but is that what the hedge-funder collecting class is about?
As if the Nicodemians knew your brain might need a rest after pondering the Haglerverse, another of their galleries – there are three in the same building – had a show of fun paintings (good ones at that, and closer to human scale) by Xinyan Wang</a>. Another artist to follow!


I could go on, but the clock strikes Lunch and I have to make it to the champagne store before it strikes Alkoholverkaufsverbot, a daily scourge in the Land of Smiles. So just briefly, if you’re still here, go have a look at Todd Gray</a>. Another Very Serious Artist but playful, and in his best work, mind-expanding. Saw him at Vielmetter</a> and was sad I would miss his talk there.
LA, as always, awaits with world-class art. Unlike my old home of San Francisco, you can feel the city’s ambition. I look forward to my next trip, and hope to have a few more days for it.

Closing note: drawing from life is great exercise, and one should do it more than once every few months. Drawing the figure is particularly difficult, maybe the most difficult thing because you have to not only draw what you see, you have to also not draw what you think you see. Many thanks to John Trollett</a> and the Tuesday Night Drawing</a> group for their hospitality!
The sketch below is what I saw. Sort-of</a>. A collarbone</a>.

Happy New Year! Next update in 2567…

Stu-stu-studio

2023-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

I’m in no position to complain so I shall not, but I just dropped by to say I think the artist’s studio is underrated, on several vectors, and by many who should know a whole lot better.
Before I wax nostalgic and speculative, I will try to explain what I mean by these words.
Oh, and shout out to Phil Collins</a>, how was that man even possible?
First it’s underrated as a tool of the artist – not indispensible, but neither are paintbrushes for a painter. Let’s say a decent studio is a force multiplier for your work, and that holds for any version of “decent” and “studio.”
But it’s also underrated as a key to the artist’s vision. Some things you can very easily discover by the smallest look at someone’s studio: how much of the inevitable chaos in their mind is allowed into their laboratory? (It’s worth asking why, for any given value).
It’s easy to find extreme cases: the disheveled genius</a> in his lair; the wounded narcissist addict</a> thrashing about like a landed fish. But you can also get plenty of knowledge on the fast track for minor artists, even little old me. (Hint: I have no real studio at the moment, and that too says a lot.)
Here’s a short list of things to look out for:

Is it messy? (How messy?)</li>
Does it have good light, at least once a day?</li>
Are all tools ready at hand?</li>
Is there a computer in the room?</li>
What about assistants?</li> </ol>
I could go on, obviously. And the people who should know better? Why artists themselves, of course; and art critics, who usually do not visit studios, out of some weird sense of professional ethics; and art historians, who usually don’t get the chance and thus will downplay what they can’t own.
Dealers and collectors, on the other hand, are usually pretty clear-eyed about the importance of the studio. Though I will admit that in my art-collector role (about which much, much more some other day) I’m terrible at inviting myself to studios, and I’m not a big enough deal to be taken anywhere by dealers, so it’s clearly not enough to merely know.
Wanna deep-dive on a studio of art-historical significance? Get Thee To Matisse!</a>
Alright then, let’s wax.
My Studios, More or Less, To Date</h3>
The first studio I ever thought of as my workspace, my magical art-conjuring corner, was not even private. For about a year I was sufficiently ensconced in the group painting studio in one of those anonymous, institutional structures that at least had the excuse of being made from public funds. You often had to call security to be let in: I don’t remember why but I didn’t rate a key. None of the paintings I worked on there were very good, though one still exists, or maybe two exist. But the fun part was that it was a year in which I was trying hard to get better at painting; and we had an inspirational visiting professor, was it Cheryl Laemmle? This was at Cal State Chico, a school that keeps records poorly if at all. At the times when I worked best (still do), it was usually either empty, or had just one or two fellow students who were serious about their work and not going to get in your face.
This shared but private space has always stayed with me as some kind of guiding light for a dream of one day having a grownup version: industrial, managed, and not only about me.
Time passed. I must have had another painting space at that school but I can’t remember it exactly. By the time I had the connections to get a cooler space, I most definitely didn’t have the funds.
My other “uni,” Tübingen, gave me some joy in making inspired but very small art – a couple paintings still haunt me, I wish I could remember where they went, to whom they were “gifted” (Midvale School For The…) – but the closest thing I had to a studio was the printmaking attic in one of the glorious old buildings (I was doing philology, Brecht-Bau, no stone columns for me). There I felt too much the outsider to go by myself. (A couple good prints, a couple bad ones, and about the lithograph I made, the only one I ever made, the only thing I can remember is that I failed to translate “disaffection” on demand, and the fuck it deserves any space in my mind but that moment is stuck there, and at least it was a learning as they say now: I know better than to discuss works in progress.)
And yet despite almost catching my hair on fire one night, which is a very “art studio” thing to do; and despite the half-forgotten unforgettable nights of vodka and tea with my Russian neighbors in the communal kitchen, also possibly the effing artsiest moments of my life, nothing I had there felt like a studio.
San Francisco was an almost, but not quite, the first time around. (My missed opportunities in SF and Berlin, between them, can only be forgiven by placing front and center the fact that I am here, now, where I am, and that is a grand and glorious place, and I never would have found it without SF and Berlin not working out.) I had a dedicated, if very small, studio on 22nd Street in what was the original laundry room (we were too broke to buy the machines, and too ignorant of false economies). But I did very little in it, and the pictures I made that were good, mostly came together in my bedroom, which was amazing. Now Zuckerberg lives a block away when he’s in a hipster mood, and I would bet dollars to donuts there aren’t any artists left in what was once known as Gourmet Gulch. But for the record: Holly Grimm, Christoph Dohrmann, Rachel Watson, and your humble host all made ideas there, and some of those ideas became art, and some of it was good art. Plus the many visitors.
And then I was in Berlin, first time living there, and damn did I play that card wrong – it was the time of very cheap real estate, but also of coal heating in Kreuzberg, and I made some work in my tiny apartment but before I could say misdirection I fell in love with Budapest, where I would end up painting on kitchen tables for way too long. And Berlin Round One was a wash, though I made some good memories: in particular with Pascal and Babak and Ulf and briefly even the elusive Nasha. Plus Andi and… and… fuck me, I can’t remember their names, but for a brief spell we were friends. Hope they made it through the years OK.
Am I only going to write about the not studios? Right. There were also some pseudo-studios, I will mention Downieville where I had for many years turned the Spare Room into a makeshift studio, sort-of, for summer use in combination with a sturdy card table and a metal easel outdoors. But it wasn’t the real thing.
The real thing almost broke through on an extended San Francisco earning trip, the first I think, in the form of half an attic, and nothing even close to legal about it, in the shared rental with Imre and Anna and Cheyenne (RIP), for which I gladly overpaid as I was flush and most of my friends were not. I had a slice of attic, basically, and the rest was unruly storage. But when I was there I was there alone, and could do a little work in pure solitude.
By then I was living mostly in Budapest but I was continuing to make work on tables in rentals. Finally I bought a place and dedicated a room to be the studio – and promptly watched it spend the vast majority of its time as a combination of guest room and office. I sold it for a handful of peanuts to Madeleine and Bullet (RIP) and a lot of art was made there over the years, but I only reluctantly consider it a studio. Because I had an ambition for it to be, and in a limited sense it was. And also: lessons.
Among the many pictures from there, the biggest one that survives is titled Chico Full Circle and is on Thing Two’s wall (that is to say, Mihály Andrea). At least it was the last time I checked.
After finishing that painting, I had to return to California for a few years, to right the ship as they say. Which led, for better and also for worse (sorry about the party! fuck you about the living room!), to a cohabitation with Jim Mason, one of the low points of which (but also high point!) was finding Matthew Barney’s industrial boogers all over my clothes when I removed them from the dryer one day. But also: I had a studio! A single tiny room, but dedicated to nothing but making art. I couldn’t go wild but I also didn’t have to be too careful, the room was a little beat. I got an unbelievable desk at the Goodwill (still out there, I hope) and make some damn find paintings if I may say so. A few survive.
Then, as one does, I moved to Berlin. And being in Berlin for the second time and having some money, I was not going to not have a studio again! And so in the searching I stumbled upon Winsstrasse 17. I sublet in the cold from an American (Canadian?) child of privilege and Yale, whose work was interesting in a fragile way, and who is probably a professor of renown by now. And then I ran into the Russian lady who handed me the lease to her tiny studio in return for, as is the Berlin custom, buying her crap-ass furniture for ten times what it was worth. (Or infinity-times: it was worth nothing.)
And then I had “the Wins.” Too small, too damp, too dark, too cold, but for once a dedicated space that was officially mine by lease! And it was literally a two-minute walk from the main art-supply shop in Europe, Boesner. It was a stunted little version of heaven.
But I fell in love with Budapest again and couldn’t square the circle, and it turned out having the place when not really in Berlin was a lot of trouble. And then they kicked me out in order to renovate, and were Not Amused when I showed up moments before eviction to demand another month (my right) and also ask if they’d sell me the place. No, in short, they would not.
Eventually, after at least one mildly humiliating rejection ritual – lookin’ at you, Jurányi: enjoy your dictatorship, you earned it! – I ended up stumbling into the grandest studio I’ve had so far. This was in Hegedű utca, and it was huge, and felt very properly studio-like, and I made a bunch of paintings in it, but it had serious drawbacks.
First, the building management was a bunch of jokers. Their concept failed and they tried to make a nightclub and a hostel in the same space as a bunch of art studios.
But second, the neighbor above had some kind of Ausdruckstanz thing going on and the ceiling would shed plaster into my wet acrylics whenever his none-too-svelte customers were at it. And they would shit up the bathrooms, no doubt from the stress of having to jump up and down above my head, and His Dancerness would not lower himself to accept any responsibility for this. Really, cleaning the shitter after each session would’ve been enough.
The hostel thing got me kicked out of my giant studio but as luck would have it, a disgruntled artist and drawing-teacher above me bailed just then, and I scored a top-floor unit and had to remove hundreds of nails from the walls. That’s solidarity for ya. And that studio – I’m pretty sure it was Kati Verebics’s studio years before – had a leaky roof the management refused to fix. In the end it was too much and I dropped the key off with some harsh words after moving my stuff out on a weekend.
And since then it’s been half-rooms and whole rooms but always in the flat or condo. And I very much yearn for the next real studio, I’m ready to rock & roll! One is under construction in the Canaries; another is forming in my brain in Isaan, bit by slender bit; but the urban industrial space will have to wait for a while. I can almost see it in my mind’s eye, just not quite – even the vision needs a bit more money and a bit more ภาษาไทย.
For now, it’s my easels and tables and trolley carts in my office and I’ll make it work.
This has been a bit of a ramble but I may return to each of these places in a future post, they all have their stories.
And what, no pictures? No, it’s late, I’ve been on the road, I’m almost out of ice cubes, and I can’t be bothered to rummage through the archive, i.e. the “archive,” and while I may or may not be looking for an excuse to play with ripgrep</a> I must confess that my filing skills are deficient.
But! I was just in Mae Hong Son. Here, have some mountains</a>:


Sizing

2023-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

An arguably unkind thought occurred to me while listening to an interview with an artist given to US-academic critical word salad, and large opaque works, and assistants in her studio.
The thought:

Every artist has an obligation to talk about their work in terms the laity can understand. </blockquote>
Of course I don’t really believe in the “obligation” of any artist to do or not do anything, and in societies where such obligations exist you usually end up with pretty bad art. (Hello, socialist realism! Hello, Marxist vocabulary applied to art criticism in late-Capitalist society!)
But would it kill you to just say “I make huge black blobs because I feel they are an expression of mystical history, and between rich collectors and the grant system I manage to keep a staff to help me build them, which I need because some of them are really effing huge?”
Blob not to scale.
As long as I’m being a grumpy old representative of the as-yet unsmashed patriarchy</a>, I also wish to grumble about –
Gigantism</h3>
Or, the insistence by artists, especially painters, on making artworks so big it’s very difficult to store them, and only the very rich and/or institutions can possibly collect them.
I get it, it’s a flex, and you’re going for your moment in the well-paid sun, and anyway storage space is cheap enough that for you, the artist, it’s a rational bet: I will court the Very Rich, and if I am successful I have this catalog of vast artworks ready to sell; if I’m not, whatever, I’m going to end up in the degree mills anyway and I can scratch my ego at the faculty show, maybe it’ll even get me laid.
And it’s not like massive paintings are new. It’s just that massive paintings by young, unproven, probably minor artists are now so much A Thing that I have to extend extra praise to anyone who actually makes decent artworks under a square meter.
At a recent show full of what I guess, nowadays, I have to call “Size M” paintings (and a couple of “L” and one “XL”) I bought some sweet little ones that I think were as good as any of the big ones. But cheaper, and easier to manage, and you can take them in your hand and contemplate them, and so on.
But that show, ironically, got me thinking that I, yes I too, FFS even I, need to start making larger works. Just because so many of the exhibition spaces I could realistically get my hands on (yes, pay-to-play, what of it?) are so massive, I fear my modest little collection of faces would not hold its own. I yearn for the old-school small gallery… which, sure, probably I will start on my own one day. Just to do it.
I don’t mean to completely discount the “human-scale” effect, as explained to me by an artist</a> I know. And I surely will end up with more giant paintings of my own, and by others, on my walls and probably in my storage as well. But in addition to all that, I say show the good work at 40x50cm or smaller. If you have none, I’m not sure I trust your motivations.
I’m considering submitting a proposal for a multimedia work and I think the work itself is good at almost any size, let’s say a 24“ monitor and a shelf of the same width, that would be enough. But I worry that if I don’t say it has to be a full-room projection then people will not take me seriously. Which is nuts, but here we are. (Where are we?)
OK, here’s a thought, then I’ll shut up about the gigantism of contemporary painting:

Rent a storage unit and fill it with giant paintings bought at a discount from artists who are making huge paintings but failing to sell them to rich collectors. When it is full, abandon it. Document everything. </blockquote>
¡Vamos Gigantes!
Drawn And…</h3>
Lately I’ve been thinking about what to do with my smallest works. Of which there are certainly some tiny ones, but most of these are more or less A5</a> in size and most are drawings, some are watercolors, a very few are mixed media… oh and I have a bunch of similar-sized acrylic paintings too. Shit. But let’s just talk about the A5 drawings, to keep things simple.
If I had a larger audience I would probably just give them away, in order to build followers. I’m sure there’s a social-media strategy for that. After all, these things just keep getting made, why not just send one out to a fan every week? (Haha, assuming one has fans… which is another thing. But if I ever get better at the Social Media Game, then maybe, sure, why not, if some of the people I follow did this I’d always sort of live in hope that I would win the luck draw.)
If I manage to sell things in the shop</a> (ever!) then I might throw one in with every purchase of a painting. Someone did that when I bought from her and it was a really nice gesture.
Or I could try to sell them for Very Cheap, at a loss really if you count my labor – even the labor of posting it – at, say, minimum wage. But I don’t know, it seems like the hurdle is getting people to buy art at all, and not necessarily getting them to buy the supercheap instead of the merely inexpensive.
But isn’t this a problem every painter faces, at some level? Say you’re Cecily Brown</a>. Surely you produce more drawings – even just the keepers – than it would be wise to put on the market?
No, bad example: she’s a very hard-working artist so let’s say she makes a dozen keeper sketches a week, just counting the simple one-off things in the studio. She’s famous enough that even if she keeps them in an archive, the archive will some day be “gifted” to an institution and they will be studied, and so on. And if she wanted to sell them, well, she probably doesn’t actually need the money but let’s say – I think you could reliably sell five a week for $10K each – her monotypes are something like $45K it seems – and neither spoil the market nor have to bother listing them online, just let the gallery dole them out to people waiting in line for a painting.
Yeah, but so then there is everyone else, and I bet you that Olschbaur</a> makes a metric shit-ton of sketches for every finished painting. What does she do with them all? Probably same-same, keep for the eventual archive and so on as she’s well on her way to that same level of fame. Oder?</a>
I suppose I’m not solving this problem today. But really, I would rather find homes for all these little things, than have them sit in their tiny portfolios and little metal boxes inside bigger metal boxes inside yet-bigger metal building-boxes. Where will it all go?
In closing, here is one such:
Sketch, November 2023.

Eternal Sunset

2023-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

Back in Bangkok now, and thank the available deities</a> for that!
It’s been a hard year, this year has. With some respite here and there, but on the whole, a rough one, and not over yet. The details aren’t for public consumption, Dear Hypothetical Reader, but trust me when I say that my struggles with writer’s block are a tiny sideshow staged in a shoebox with squeaky-voiced gnomes</a> compared to the rest of my day-to-day.
And yet I remain eternally thankful for health, and love, and overall having a better time of it than so many others in this conflict-ridden world. As should you.
Alright, enough of an introduction, what am I really here to say today?
Los Angeles, Califronia, October 2023

I recently spent some time in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and in Los Angeles, California. Fortune smiled and I was able to visit many of the galleries and art institutions in both of these cities.
LA is, of course, one of the top art capitals of the world, competing in North America only with New York and (arguably, distantly) Mexico City. And Santa Fe is a center of “Southwestern Art,” which usually means landscapes and cowboys and cringy patronizing Noble Savage Prays To The Sky bronzes in what is, undeniably, an ongoing site of colonization. (And not in the woke sense, but in the real, words-have-meanings sense.)
That last point is a little weird to say out loud, but it’s true: despite being one of the older locations of European conquest in the region, there is a freshness to the colonial power structure that you don’t feel elsewhere. LA, by contrast, is fully in and of the Empire now, and for better or worse that applies to everyone in it regardless of origin. It might as well be Rome, though I suppose the New Yorkers would argue that point just as they argue the art point.
In New Mexico, you still see the “Indian School” and the indigenous towns and the casinos and the quiet, inescapable subjugation. An unfinished conquest, and may it never finish.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. These two places got me thinking about ambition in art. In “The Arts” if you like.
I’m going to sum it up thus: in LA, every actor wants to star with Tom Cruise and every painter wants to show at Gagosian</a> and believing you’re good enough is table stakes.
In Santa Fe, I don’t know, but beyond making a decent living and making the work, I imagine the serious artists dream of owning a nice house with a view and maybe spending winters in Tulum</a>.
And yet you can still be very serious about the art. And you don’t have to live in LA to be an LA artist, though I think it would be helpful. Look at Maja Ruznic</a> for example: lives in New Mexico, just had a big show in LA, which I happened to see and will (maybe) write about over on Several Artists</a>. I can’t say she’s an LA artist, but with a show</a> like that she’s not exactly not an LA artist! She had a full-page ad in ArtForum!
The Split/The Beginning, 2023, oil on linen, ~ 250x193cm, Maja Ruznic / Karma Gallery
You can, of course, still be very serious about a landscape. One of my favorite Instagram finds, about whom I will surely write more one day, and collect if I can afford it, is Per Adolfsen</a>, who does landscapes in colored pencil FFS, and they are brilliant beyond compare.
As for me, I’m just trying to figure out what to paint that’s not scary faces, when I can muster the energy to paint again. Soon, soon!
In the meantime, let’s look at a serious sunset from Santa Fe:
Arrival Of Fragility, Acrylic on Canvas, ~ 120x120cm, Dakota Finn

Three from Insta

2023-08-27T12:00:00+00:00

I normally try to keep all the images here my own original work and/or the work of my roomful of robot “assistants,” all of them named Ági</a> for some reason. But today I will depart from this august tradition (heh, get it?) and swipe a few images from Instagram. Dear Internet (Dear Artists) please forgive me, it’s for a good cause.
Amnaj Wachirasurt</a></h2>
</a> Twilight / ใกล้พลบ. Oil on canvas, 125x155cm, 2023. © Amnaj Wachirasut
Fúú, Mensch, it’s been a while since I saw a painting I really really wanted to buy. But here it is. (Yeah, I’m way too broke to buy it at the moment, but mark my words: you should buy it in my place! I will buy another one.)
I’m not going to put them all here but go look at his Insta</a> (also linked from the pic) and you will see a plethora of quite sexy nudes – who knew that was still a thing?
And this</a> in particular, wow. (Can a painting with a staircase not be about Duchamp? No idea.)
I love it when I find a painter who paints pictures I wish I’d painted myself, but in a style so different from my own that I won’t ever paint them by accident. In this sense, and also in some of the very painterliness of the work, it reminds me a bit of Fuchs</a>.

George Raftopoulos</a></h2>
</a> SLOW (L) EARN SLOW BURN. Oil on Canvas, 198x198cm, 2023. © George Raftopoulos
Here’s another artist I hope to collect one day! (I guess that’s the theme for this post, sure, why not.) I fear my walls will never be big enough for these giant monumental things, but no worries, he’s a painter of many sizes, which is one of the things I like about him.
Raftopoulos is doing the abstract-figurative</a> thing full-tilt, and it’s awesome. There are a lot of historical references in his work, and a lot of what I can only assume are personal references too. It’s very mysterious.
I was actually thinking about Raftopoulos while listening to a podcast</a> interview with Georgia Hart</a> and contemplating my own, as-yet financially doomish art career. And the thought that stuck was: look at George Raftopoulos! A guy my age! Sure, he’s had a lot more shows and yadda yadda, but from my point of view he’s just some dude I saw on Insta and I really liked his paintings, and now here I am quietly promoting him, and at some point I will probably buy one of his works. Anything is possible!
So there you have it. Raftopoulos rocks, now go buy something</a> before Nicodim</a> gets his hands on this guy!

Christian Gonzenbach</a></h2>
</a> Domestication du feu (Peugeot, BB 50cc 1957). Glazed ceramic, 24x24x20cm, 2022. © Christian Gonzenbach
What I love about Gonzenbach is his balancing act between high-concept and thrashing, Mitteleuropa Angst-ism, sort of like a young Kiefer</a> but not as nihilistic. You think I jest? Listen to the man himself:
“My entire work is based around the floating notion of everyday and its extraordinary banality.” – Christian Gonzenbach, 2005
That is from an exhibition</a> of really beautiful vases.
Another thing that stands out with him is how playful some of the work is – boyishly playful, Lego time, that sort of thing – and then how much implied violence there is in other things.
I haven’t really collected sculpture yet. I have a few objects, and some of my own; and I have plans to collect but they’re pretty vague. The one point in which they are not vague is that if I can afford it, one day I’m buying a Gonzenbach and putting it in my art house in Tenerife.
Wachirasut</a> and Raftoupolos</a> are best viewed on Instagram at the moment, but Gonzenbach has a proper web site and you should check it out, there is a lot of work and it’s easy to browse: GONZENBACH.NET</a>

And there we have it, a sort of mini-several-artists</a> to tide us over until the writer’s block unblocks. I should do this more often. And we both, you and I, Dear Viewer, should get off our corpulent backsides and go buy some art!
Now get to work Mr Frost, the pictures won’t paint themselves, not yet anyway.


Being Yourselves

2023-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Art from Bangkok. Art in Bangkok. Time passes; I paint; and other things happen, but the painted things remain in a way the other things do not.
Next month I’ll be in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the first time in my life. First time in New Mexico, and it’s been a very long time since I was in Old Mexico for that matter. One wonders just how much of Mexico will be in evidence.
Writer’s block and other-stuff block and my block of a head is full but the blockage won’t clear. Which is to say: Several Artists</a> has been stalled, again, by my inability to write “to purpose” – which is, weirdly, mirrored by my inability to shut up about nothing in particular.
(And I plan to change the format, not that this is any excuse. Turns out nobody cares about newsletters in Bangkok.)

But that’s not what I’m here for today. (Nor is the news of my plan to resurrect Frostopolis</a> what I’m here for today.)
Today I’m here to share the following three pictures with you, and also, in a separate post to come, I shall call your attention, dear hypothetical reader (and Dear Permanent Record On The Internet), to a couple of artists who are on my mind lately. Not people I know personally, not even people whose work I know personally; I’ll be linking to Insta for this one. So stay tuned, dear PageRank</a> pigeons, more is on the way forthwitherly!
(Yes, since you asked, I do rather enjoy the thoroughly inconsequential nature of this non-blog. The freedom to be pointless, with the reality that it’s out there in the world, floating forever in the sea of bits.)





Jeder Mensch

2023-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

More time passes… the business-business is done in principle but not in fact and one stares at the Atlantic Ocean, waiting and thinking and planning. But mostly just staring.
Yesterday I told Alberto: my vision is almost complete, and then it will be like the old joke about sculpture: take a piece of marble and just cut away the parts that don’t look like a horse.

This is of course a lot less true of a house, and of land, than it is of a sculpture. I’m no Matta-Clark</a>, I need the additive approach, and also we have no choice but to improvise. But we’re getting close!
So then this morning, early, sharing my room with a dead mouse (bio!) – I got to thinking, as one does, about where people lose their creativity.
I firmly believe every human has vast creative capacity, and a pretty good ability to express that. Some exceptions are surely present but we can call them anomalies, call them differently abled if we like. A baseline human can fucking draw! Can sculpt!
But what? Well, children’s stuff. And then some people have exraordinary talent and most don’t, but 99% of actual pictorial art you encounter in the art world today is by people who are not the extraordinary talents. They have normal talents, as do I, and bless their hearts they work to develop those talents.
But what about the rest? Why don’t people just continue making funky drawings and making faces in the mud and imagining worlds that might not, technically speaking, exist? (But might!)
My intuition, and it’s strong in these parts, tells me there are three ways out of healthy human creativity.
ONE: Your parents beat it out of you.
TWO: Poverty beats it out of you.
THREE: The institutions of modern life beat it out of you.
I will generously include “rich twats who are bad people from a young age and appear to have no human spirit” in the third category because there are many institutions that are comfortable, gilded, and also soul-destroying.
Now, dear phantasmagoric readers, I have to run, the ocean needs staring at.
Remember: Jeder Mensch Ein Künstler! Jeder! Fucking! Mensch!
Beuys Don’t Cry, B&W analog photograph of original sculpture, ca 18x24cm, mixed media on copper plate, Tübingen 1992.

Who’ll Start the Rain?

2023-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

Oh JFC on a popsicle satick, did a month just go by? ฟาาาาากมี! So to speak.
Many things have happened, but the big things – the business things – have not, so I’m still holding on by the thread of my karma, with friends propping me up until they can’t. To all those friends: ¡gracias!
And yet we are here to talk about art, right? Sure, let’s talk about art tonight! But never start with yourself, or at least not always.
A few weeks ago I went to an opening that was, let’s say, a bit aloney-baloney for me as I was flying solo and it was very much full of people who were not; but it was also the most “opening-like” opening I’d been to in ages. Shout out to PLAY art house</a> for pulling it off, it was just oozing professionalism, and it was a great comeback for place that had gone very very mellow during the pandemic’s soft opening. 🎭🎨🏠 FTW!
Right, so I was there, in lovely Talat Noi, aka ตลาดน้อย, to see work by one Trey Hurst</a>, a fellow American whose work I first saw at River City Bangkok a while back. I’m probably going to feature him in Several Artists</a> but I’m already behind on the current issue, so let’s not overpromise here.
Trey Hurst makes work like this:

I find it super interesting, and I absolutely commend him for making work in 2023 that is at once so process-specific and so traditionally graphic. (Some of the work is less traditional, but everything in the show could be put on your wall and look good there. At fair prices no less, as opposed to art-fair prices! Oh wait, I actually bought art at an art fair, what am I talking about?)
Sorry for the cheapiPhone picture quality there; I did take the EOS R and the crazy-ass psychotic fucking ADHD 16mm lens (oh, now there is a vlog for someone to do) – and when (if?) I do a proper writeup I’ll include some proper photographs, it’s the least I can do.
Anyway, hey, I digress, I’ve considered at times whether I ought better to digress for a living, but it hasn’t come to that. But as long as I’m digressing, droning on – OMFG should I talk about drones now? Must! Stop! – I’ve been wondering lately: do people still check linkbacks?
I don’t, or at least I haven’t in a trillion years of understatement, but I think maybe I should. After all, this crazy post is now part of Mr. Hurst’s permanent record, right? OK then! Let it be that! From an audience of none to the long tail of all futures, converging in the emergent brain-behavior of some AI hidden behind banks of Trevor Paglen</a> RADAR stations</a> – here we are, making up the hive-mind aesthetics, for if not us, who?

(Reflections, yep. Where do you even get museum glass in these parts?)
Coming back to the pictures: you can go to his site</a> and see video of the painstaking zennish squeegee-like process of snaking, er, making these pictures. I’m especially happy to see an Amcsi doing this kind of work, because I think it’s much more common, and much more accepted, in Europe these days. For instance, if I were to tell you one Chillida</a> is worth all the Koonses</a> in the whole wide world plus a Henry Moore</a> thrown in for good measure, in America you’d think I was crazy; in England you’d want to fight me; and in Europe you’d grant me the point even if you didn’t agree.
I’ve done some zennified processy stuff myself, albeit long ago; and at some level I’m still a Modernist, so I can relate to this kind of working more than my recent portfolio would suggest.
I have a strong feeling I’ll be back to write more about Trey Hurst, but for now I will leave you with the above pictures and links. I don’t know the man personally, but I’m glad he’s here.
(Oh and I can’t resist: if you like this kind of art then you really must check out Luciya Moya</a>, you can thank me later.)

Maybe I should use this pseudoblog as a venue for informal, anything-goes show reviews. But probably not: I need at least one informal, anything-goes site for just whatever TF I want to be on about, with no limitations, but still trying to keep it vaguely art-related and original.
And, frankly, I want the option to be self-indulgent, in all senses – visually, verbally, thematically, whateverly.
Here’s a picture I find a little self-indulgent:

Yeah, I guess that’s me. Or mine, anyway. I did title it, but I can’t be bothered to go into the other room and look it up. It’ll make the sale bin eventually, I reckon, because while I can’t decide if it’s good exactly, I do find it interesting and think that should be enough.
Here it’s been a month, and while I’ve been way too stressed out to deal with a proper Studio Practice (as the kids like to call it) – still I’ve been working, and even if I occasionally (as in, today) turn one blue into another blue and make the picture slightly worse in the process, at least I’m making pictures, and that’s what the world needs us to do. Until the AI can reorganize society into a cult of inimitable creative minds. Haha just kidding. Maybe.


Rough is Rauh

2023-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Funny thing about watercolor paper, well funny for me anyway: I have, for as long as I can remember knowing anything about the difference between the different kinds of watercolor papers, preferred the grana satinada – hot-pressed “satin grain” that most of you probably know by its French name and its premier brand: none other than Arches, which is to say the high-end brand owned by Canson</a>.
And high-end it is! Which is why I started buying Baohong Paper, and that’s a cheaper brand that’s pretty similar and anyway plenty good enough for a mere Working Artist. I would link to their home page, but in two years of trying I haven’t found one. WTF? OK, just keep making the paper and I won’t complain.
But right now, as long as I’m here, I wish to say something about the Rough, the Rauh, the Grain Torchon. Because it’s growing on me.
I used to keep a ratio of about 4:2:1 on hand, with the “4” being simple cold-pressed fine-grain stuff because it’s cheaper; “2” being the fancy satin stuff that is oh so forgiving of a hand born to draw wielding the brush; and the “1” being the rough stuff for experiments.
But for a while now I’ve been experimenting with some new techniques on the rough end, and just letting myself go because I don’t think of it as the main paper. And frankly the larger sizes are still beyond me – here I’m talking about 23x31 and thereabouts.
And I’m here to say, on this quiet Thursday night of painting in กรุงเทพ, that I’m getting pretty excited about the possibilities. Yes, there is a greater risk of failure with every application of the paint. And yes, that’s a little hard to deal with if you’re on a budget, because shitty “rough” watercolor paper is never, ever your friend.
But with the good stuff, when you make it through alive: whooooa, this is some heavy saturation. Picture here is probably not finished, but if it is then let’s remember that it’s Baohong Artist’s Watercolor Paper, 300g, 23x31cm, and the paint used is a variety of watercolors plus one quick shot of Molotow</a> for the mouth. Painters: always keep a few Molotows handy!
Your reward, Dear Reader, for finding this post; and mine for trusting this paper:

PS: once upon a time, in a gallery in Berlin Mitte, I saw a Nolde</a> seascape on rauh and it was nothing but a sketch, around 30x40cm, surely knocked off in minutes. At 40,000 EUR it was one of the greatest bargains I’ve ever seen in a commercial gallery. Nur für Kenner as they might say, and pricey, but: คุ้มค่า!

Mayo

2023-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

</h3>
Ah, May… may it be May forever, if only because I’m about to hit another wall at the end of May and it may be a hard one indeed. Giving April</a> a run for its money, that’s what it’s doing. I will save my reasons why until a later date, at which I hope to expound in a more visual medium on the travails of the last few weeks. But I will say one thing: when you have a culture that doesn’t view lying as a major character flaw, and liars as to be shunned, then sooner or later you are gonna end up with this</a>. (And alas, my home country is barreling towards a more dangerous version of same same</a> but right at this moment, that’s not my complaint.)
OK, so what about the mayo? Hold it? Noooo, no no no, do not hold the mayo!
Today as I was dealing with my latest setback I couldn’t decide what to stuff into my own fat face in search of temporary comfort, but TiT</a> as they say, so there were options and I opted for several of them. One of which was a “ham” and “cheese” “sandwich” – I expected the worst, of course. Budget airline fare.
But ya know what? It was awesome! And by awesome I mean terrible, but in a good way. A bit of hamlike substance and a bit of cheeselike substance – dare I say American Cheese? – glued to its breadlike outer layer with nothing less than addictive – yes, you guessed it – MAYONNAISE!</a>
So there’s that.
And also, somewhere in a 4x4 (meters, natch) storage space somewhere in Budapest, there’s this:
Figure One, oil on plywood, Berlin 2010
I’ve had that painting on so many walls. Starting with its birthplace, in Winsstraße</a> in Berlin. But also in Budapest in at least two, maybe three, maybe even four locations. The photo doesn’t do it justice, because I’m really bad at shooting artwork. (Except in the Niki de Saint Phalle</a> way, I’m pretty OK at that as long as the range is close.)
But the thing is, this is also part of the embarrassingly large section of my work I should perhaps dub The Disturbing Room – because that’s what it will be in when the world wakes up to my genius and builds a museum in my honor on every single continent, and/or Elon Musk formally adopts me and names me XrostX.
I find myself trying to make less freaky work, only to end up making more freaky work, at least lately. But I will persist, for a reason as simple as it is complicating: most people don’t want to look at freaky shit every day, and that genius-recognition thing is probably not in the works just yet.
Some of my absolute favorite artists have made unfathomably brilliant work that, even if I were some Yakuza Shogun</a> collecting on behalf of an Arab Sheikh</a> and could thus acquire it for my endless gratification, I would not want to see every day before breakfast.
But hey – the next year will be amazing, and yield some great new art, it’s just a bit of a rough ride. พฤษภาคม can eff the eff off. Onward!

DogGPT

2023-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

</h3>
The following art review was written by ChatGPT</a> in response to the prompt “You are an art historian. Review an exhibition of watercolors of purebred dogs by the artist Walton Ford</a>.” The image is by Stable Diffusion</a> with the same prompt minus the first word.

Exhibition Review: Watercolors of Purebred Dogs by Walton Ford
As an art historian, I had the pleasure of attending the exhibition featuring watercolors of purebred dogs by the renowned artist Walton Ford. Known for his meticulous attention to detail and his ability to capture the essence of wildlife in his work, Ford’s exploration of purebred dogs brings a unique perspective to the world of canine art.
Walking into the exhibition space, I was immediately struck by the vibrant and lifelike qualities of Ford’s watercolor paintings. Each piece exuded a sense of energy and presence, as if the dogs themselves were about to leap off the paper. The artist’s mastery of the watercolor medium was evident in his precise brushwork and the delicate layers of translucent color that created a remarkable depth and texture.
One aspect that stood out in Ford’s portrayal of purebred dogs was his ability to capture the individual characteristics and personalities of each breed. Whether it was the regal poise of a Great Dane, the playful exuberance of a Labrador Retriever, or the alertness of a Border Collie, Ford’s attention to detail was astonishing. He skillfully depicted the distinct features, expressions, and body language that define each breed, allowing viewers to connect with the unique qualities of these beloved companions.
In addition to the technical brilliance, Ford’s watercolors conveyed a deeper narrative. Through his artwork, he explored the concept of selective breeding and its impact on the physical traits and well-being of purebred dogs. The artist juxtaposed the inherent beauty and charm of these dogs with the potential consequences of excessive breeding practices, such as health issues and physical deformities. This thoughtful approach added a layer of social commentary to the exhibition, encouraging viewers to contemplate the ethics surrounding the breeding and ownership of purebred dogs.
The exhibition itself was thoughtfully curated, with the paintings displayed in a spacious and well-lit environment that allowed each artwork to shine. Accompanying the paintings were informative labels detailing the breed, the historical context, and providing additional insights into the artist’s intentions. This thoughtful presentation further enhanced the viewing experience, fostering a deeper appreciation for the subject matter and Ford’s artistic process.
In conclusion, Walton Ford’s exhibition of watercolors showcasing purebred dogs was a captivating exploration of the beauty, diversity, and complexity of these animals. His technical prowess, attention to detail, and ability to evoke emotion through his art were truly impressive. Beyond the aesthetic pleasure, the exhibition encouraged viewers to reflect on the broader issues surrounding the breeding and treatment of purebred dogs. It was an engaging and thought-provoking experience that left a lasting impression on visitors, and a testament to Ford’s skill as an artist and storyteller.
Postscript</h3>
This has nothing to do with Walton Ford, of course, and I quite like a lot of his work. What this is about it Large Language Models, of which ChatGPT is the top, er, dog at the moment; and how they will wreak havoc in cultural circles in a way the NFT bros barely dared to dream of.
Inspiration for this came from Jerry Gogosian</a> and Matt Capasso complaining about Alex Israel</a> using ChatGPT to write his press release.
As writing, this is pretty much anodyne crap, but is it any worse than your average catalog essay? I say it is not! Maybe ChatGPT will bring such a deluge of bad writing, that real-life bad writing will have nowhere to hide. That’s my optimistic take.

April: Cruellest Month?

2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

</h3>
April was a stressful month for me & mine, and then it was a very good month, and then suddenly it became a very very bad month. A cruel month. The cruellest</a>?
OT / Fishface, 2022 I think, MM/paper, about 18x24cm. April ended up looking like this.
I had some business lined up, and it was going to have a big positive effect on the Art Machine and also kickstart the residency project. It’s been a stressful year: this business was supposed to happen last summer, at the very latest, and I’ve been living week by week since then. More debt, less art.
So there was optimism! There was an agreement! There was a contract ready to sign! Everything was thumbs-up and ready to go!
And then the asshat I was naïve enough to be doing the business with backed out, for reasons of previously undisclosed illiquidity, two days before the signing. Insult to injury: this egotist who’d just spend ten days misleading us about his liquidity, and who’d just wasted the time of no fewer then five people, had the gall to call down pity from the Gods because he spent a few quid on his lawyer after all.
Google is Not Your Friend, 18x24cm alkyd on HDF, Budapest 2019 (IIRC).
He looks like this. ☝🏽
So yeah, right, anyway it was a hell of a month, a Hell Month, but now it’s another and the verdict is still out on this one. My agent and I now have, I suppose, about two weeks to find another partner and get a contract signed, and while challenging this is not impossible.
And there is much to be thankful for, even in a bad month. My lovely girlfriend; the friends who help me reconstruct my nose after I slam into the wall (metaphorically of course); the early rains portending the monsoon; the hot tropical nights; and of course the paintings: the paintings may slow down, but they don’t stop.
Oh, and dear Whoever May Read This In Close To Real Time: I swear I will get the next Several Artists</a> out this week! Come Hell Week or High Water Week!
Meanwhile I am hoping to get over to the Mango Art Festival</a> twice this week and post some things about that here and on Insta</a>.
In parting, Dear Aether, consider these glory days, when the vast new possibilities unfolding inside our pockets were mostly about optimistic things, and there were Art Apps in the App Store, and we didn’t think we’d all be staring at these fucking things all day every day nor taking duckface selfies at the art museum.

Not sure I’ll ever forgive them for barring us from running plain old FreeBSD</a> on these.

Starman

2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

</h3>
Songkran is ending and here’s a little painting from 2014 that is currently in storage somewhere in Europe, at a storage facility that had all its customer data stolen by hackers, because of course it did, it’s 2023.
Starman, 24x30cm, oil on linen on HDF, Budapest 2014
I’ve always had mixed feelings about this painting. On the one hand, it’s definitely got something; on the other hand, it doesn’t particularly fit in with my overall body of work. It’s a bit too dimensional for the abstract figurative stuff, and way too figurative for the purely abstract work, and it isn’t exactly conceptual despite the nod to Mr. Bowie. And I admit that the palette-knifery is a little unsubtle. And really, does it look a bit like a Manuel Neri</a>?
On the other hand, yeah, it’s got something, though I don’t rule out taking another crack at that lack-of-face. In real life you don’t see the brushwork so much, but still.
Alrighty then, what does the AI think of this?
Stable Diffusion Img2Img; Prompt: “Starman”
Whoa, that’s a trip. I think I feel a series coming on.

The Dog Ate My...

2023-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

สวัสดีวันสงกรานต์ทุกคน!</h3>
Happy Songkran everyone!</h3>
This is the one day of the year when I think my own Hawai’ian shirts are not loud enough in Thailand. But it’s a tricky week for the GF and me money-wise, so we are not going all-out on travel (with its high risk of road death</a> or even water fights (high risk of having to walk home in the 39C heat because you’re too soaked to get on BTS). Might hop up to Ayutthaya</a> and look at the temples though!
But, I digress! I’m here to talk about the dog that eats your homework.

In 2023, this dog is named Covid – though I don’t think we really know whether it ought to be named Covid 19 or Covid 23 or perhaps Covid Poohbear (credit where it’s due, 💩 for me and Pooh for you).
Unofortunately there will be no such excuse naming our new Insect Overlords, the Generative AIs, because they are, well: generative. The robot ate your homework? Then why did it write everyone else’s?
(As an aside, I hear tell, whispered rumours in the Innernets, that these days every school kid in America is using ChatGPT to write their homework assignments, except for some poor saps who are trying to actually learn something in school, and those are getting the lower grades. Brave new world!)
Having had three shots of Pfizer and at least two bouts of Covid by now, I think I’m where most of us reasonable, vaxxed-up people are: it sucks, but it’s only a week, and as long as your existence is not so precarious that you can’t drop out for a week without losing everything (sometimes it’s close!) then you’re basically gonna be fine. The bigger risk would seem to be this: I was quite sick but if it were a case of work or starve, I could have worked all but one of the days I was sick, plus of course all the days I was being a good boy and staying away from people after testing negative. I’m sure this happens a lot.
To the point now…</h3>
(Ha! One of the nice things about a blog-type platform that basically nobody ever reads is you can ramble all you want. But even this ramblin’ man needs to get to the point eventually, if only so he can get back to other forms of procrastination.)
The point is that Several Artists</a> Issue #2 is late, and the main reason it’s late is that I was knocked out with Covid N just when I was about to write it up. And then I was busy with other things, and didn’t have my third artist yet, and had a bit of writer’s block, and the other usual crap.
Therefore, dear Potential Reader, fret not! Issue #2 is coming very soon, if I have a chance I’ll write it up this weekend, and it’s going to feature three very interesting Thai contemporary abstractionists.
And maybe I will try to rush out Issue #3 before the end of April, so I can at least tell myself I’m sort-of sticking to the monthly schedule.
Oh and a final note, into the void, more to myself than anyone else: if you have an art collection, dammit, you should have it catalogued on the web! I’m so tired of people talking up their collections on, say, Art Smack</a>, and not having any way to go look at what the hell they’re actually doing.

Right. Back to work now.

Farm World

2023-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

My lovely girlfriend has a lovely farm in a lovely place far away. So do I, actually! Her farm is bigger and more of a real farm, while my farm is just the farm part of an art center I’m building (was building, until I ran out of money; will start building again). But I have a view of the ocean from my farm, so that’s something. You can get from one farm to the other in two days if you time it just right, but I’m way too old for that pace of travel.
So anyway we both have farms, and farms are for farming, and that leads to some interesting conversations about what to grow.
This is only tangentially related to the question of what you want to eat.

Pigs, for example? Yeah, I like to eat pigs. But under no circumstances do I wish to deal with the complexities of raising pigs. 🤠🐽💩 nope.
Fortunately for me, my favorite land animal for eating is a small dinosaur native to this region, here called Gai Baan</a> ( ไก่บ้าน ) or “house chicken.”
Now this is a possibility – and some of the best chicken in the world is to be had around there already, so it shouldn’t be hard to get the farm workers to buy in on it. After all, they get free eggs and an occasional fryer, so why wouldn’t they?
Plus it turns out chicken 💩 is an ongoing requirement for the fruit trees.
Still Life With Lunch</h3> As an artist, you’re always looking for the art angle. We’re single-minded, relentless fuckers that way, even when we’re trying to play nice with bourgeois</a> society. Which brings me, in my typically roundabout manner, to the point of this little update.
What are the ethics of painting your lunch?

(That’s Tomás Hiepes</a> painting his lunch in 1643. He was a big eater. Probably even fatter than me. Courtesy of El Prado, which just gets better and better.)
I think it, er, boils down to what you paint, and when.
Generally acceptable: plants. Nobody sheds a tear for the banana! I blame Andy Warhol. This is good news because I’m only growing plants on my farm, in fact the only thing we have in surplus right now is lemons. Girlfriend Farm is mostly going to be tropical fruit. So the ethics police are probably going to leave me alone on this, though the waistline police might not be so easy.
Morally Okey Dokey: cooked animals. Likewise, if it’s already cooked and I’m gonna eat it, or you are, or the cat is anyway, then I can paint it, right? Seems cut and dry. Cut and dried? Cured and cut? Uh-oh, salami is its own category and I’m running out of time here.
Probably Fine Too: uncooked animals that are already dead. This is getting into the tricky area. On the one hand, if you’re going to eat them anyway, what’s the difference? On the other hand, who’s to say you didn’t kill them in order to paint them, and then just eat them because you were too lazy to go down to the 7-11 for a “sandwich</a>?” Well in our case we get a pass on this because neither farm is within walking distance of a 7-11, and considering one of the farms is in Thailand that speaks volumes on its remoteness. We must live off the land, sometimes!
Tricky: live animals you are going to eat later. Ah, now this is the real moral dilemma! Are we raising the animals to paint them, or to eat them? If we keep them in order to paint them, isn’t it cruel to then go and eat them? Is our art not stained in blood? I don’t know. At some point, maybe yes? It depends, I think, on the animal: if you are raising cows and you paint your cows and then you kill your cows and eat them, it seems like the cows are getting a raw deal. So to speak.
But in our case I’m not worried, because the lean little dinos I plan to eat would turn around and eat us in a second if they were large enough. And paint us too if they had hands.
Unfairly Exempted: fish. What is it with you mammal-and-bird people?! Did you take Nirvana</a> literally about the fish? Anyway you can pretty much go out to the pond, find the intellectual leader of the local fish community, take him out of the water, club him to death, paint your effing masterpiece, and throw his carcass right back in. Nobody cares.

Unknown territory: bugs. The squeamish West has no guidance on this: we’re afraid of bugs, so killing them might be good; but we don’t eat them, so eating them must be bad; but we only paint them for scientific purposes so they must be important and shouldn’t suffer; but the scientist-artists can just impale them on tiny spikes and watch them die in agony, that’s cool too. Crazytown! At least in Thailand people eat bugs, so if your lunch is bugs and you want to paint it, nobody’s going to be freaked out.

All very TBD of course. Yes, those last two illustrations are from the pet AI. Ever wonder what it looks like to itself? If all you have are mirrors, how do you know what you look like?
🥩</h1>

Thinkers

2023-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

Human:</h3>
What theory of intelligence allows for a large language model to evolve into an AGI</a>?
ChatGPT</a>:</h3>
There is no single theory of intelligence that directly supports the idea that a large language model can evolve into an artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, there are several theories and approaches to AI that contribute to our understanding of the potential capabilities and limitations of language models and their potential to evolve into AGI.
One such theory is the idea of “embodied cognition</a>,” which suggests that intelligence arises from the interaction of an agent with its environment. This theory emphasizes the importance of perception, action, and physical experience in the development of intelligent behavior. While large language models like ChatGPT do not have physical bodies, they are capable of processing large amounts of textual data, and some researchers have suggested that these models could be combined with other AI systems that have sensory and motor capabilities in order to create more embodied AGI.
Another approach to understanding AGI is through the study of cognitive architectures, which are theoretical frameworks that aim to capture the fundamental mechanisms of intelligent behavior. Some cognitive architectures, such as ACT-R</a> and SOAR</a>, emphasize the importance of knowledge representation and reasoning in intelligent behavior, which are also key components of large language models like ChatGPT. By integrating these knowledge-based systems with other AI approaches that can perform perception and action, it may be possible to create more general and flexible intelligent agents.
Ultimately, the question of whether a large language model can evolve into an AGI is a complex one that depends on a variety of factors, including the architecture of the model, the nature of the task it is performing, and the context in which it is deployed. While there is still much research to be done in this area, it is clear that advances in language modeling are driving new innovations in AI, and may ultimately contribute to the development of more sophisticated and capable intelligent systems.


Who is this creature?

2023-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

Who is this creature?</h3>

He (or she?) is just an excerpt from my almost-finished ink-on-paper sketchbook (i.e., a sketchbook with real sketches for once).
But he (or it?) is also an interesting case for testing graphics. Pardon the geekout to follow.

Because I am lazy and don’t own a scanner anyway, I just shot this on my iPhone, and then used Photoshop to nuke the background. Looked great on a white background, nice and crisp. Then I sent it out in a newsletter and it showed up looking very wonky indeed on a black background. Welcome to Night Mode!
Let’s see, can I embed HTML here? Should work:
</div>
There we go. Let this be a lesson to you, or at least to me: with Select Color Range comes great power, but also great responsibility!
(Beneficial side effect of sticking HTML in your Markdown: you now have at least one adversarial user-content test case for your future md2xyz converter!)
Which is an extremely roundabout way, Dear Probably Nonexistent Reader of This News Item, to announce the announcement of my new Newsletter of New Art:
Several Artists</a> will launch next week! I swear it will! I have set a goal! And a deadline!
Specifically, re: the latter, I am going to an expat art-people schmoozefest next week, and I am using that as a kick in the pants to actually get this thing done. I’m even having business cards made, since this is Asia and I am informed people still do that. Which is good news, I always lose the ones I pocket but I still love having them.
I am resisting the temptation to put the design here. Must! Resist!
Funny thing: shouting into the void is fun sometimes, especially when combined with the Internetty problem of Your Permanent Record. Makes an artist wonder if, say, Picasso – or Jon Lovitz playing Picasso – ever was able to just riff on shit without considering what the art historians would do with it…
At least he didn’t have to worry about omnipresent video recorders. Now that is a skit waiting to be done. Although, given current trends in art and the other thing, it would probably want to also involve Matisse, his daughter, and some step-chicken</a> jokes. Um, that might be NSF your W if you work in a humorless place. You have been warned!
Alrighty then. Here’s one more crazy picture and that’s it for today. You can get the newsletter at the gettin’ place. Recommend!

Art(ist) News from KevinFrostDotCom

Atlas

กรกฎา

กรกฎา</h1> Behold The German!</em> This was a Procreate drawing (digital painting?) from some time ago, I think more than a year, and here it is now. Now that I’ve done a few more; see below for those, for better and/or for worse.</p>

Allso Mini Show

This That Mantra

JM

The Fives

Microcollecting

The Fever Dream of Painting Aliens

Whence Painting?

Improving your ideas is the fastest way to improve your art.</h2>

Why Portraits

Big Carl

2567 • ๒๕๖๗

NYE 2023 FTW

Stu-stu-studio

Sizing

Eternal Sunset

Three from Insta

Being Yourselves

Jeder Mensch

Who’ll Start the Rain?

Rough is Rauh

Mayo

DogGPT

April: Cruellest Month?

Starman

</h3> Songkran is ending and here’s a little painting from 2014 that is currently in storage somewhere in Europe, at a storage facility that had all its customer data stolen by hackers, because of course it did, it’s 2023.</p> Starman, 24x30cm, oil on linen on HDF, Budapest 2014</p>

The Dog Ate My...

สวัสดีวันสงกรานต์ทุกคน!</h3>

Farm World

Thinkers

Who is this creature?