Speed of Life

My second solo show at Bromfield opens on Wednesday. It runs May 1 through June 2, 2024. The title of the show is Speed of Life. There will be a reception on Friday, May 3 from 6-8pm.

Speed of Life is the name of the first track on Low, my favorite David Bowie album. Probably just my favorite album. It’s also an album that I’ve exposed my kids to a lot under the guise of being something that would calm the baby down and over the past year and the older one now frequently asked me to “play Speed of Life” when the baby is upset.

It seems like an appropriate name for a show at this point in my life. Two kids; one just turned one and the other just turned four. As the saying goes, the days are long but the years are short. I started an MFA program right before T. was born in early 2020 and have now had my degree for longer than I was in the program.

I bought Low along with a bunch of other David Bowie CDs at Tower Records on Newbury St. in Boston when I was a student at MIT. They were preparing for a re-release or he’d switched labels or something so they were all in the bargain bin. It seems absurd now, but back in the late 90’s a new CD at a record store would cost $16-$20, and I recall these were all about $8 each. Still much more than a digital album on the iTunes Store in 2024, if you adjust for inflation, but I have no regrets. My copy of Speed of Life in my iTunes Music Library, which I ripped from that CD from Tower Records, has a play count of 298. One of the tracks in the album, another favorite, Always Crashing in the Same Car has a typo in the track name (“In The Same Ca”) because in those days you had to enter the track information by typing it in from the CD label. Or maybe Sound Jam had a character limit.

Anyway, this show feels personal. I’ve been working hard, and I hope it shows. One of the goals I set for myself was to include work that incorporated, for lack of a better term, “robotics stuff.” I’ve been employed as a robotics engineer for nearly two decades now. I started working at Boston Dynamics in 2003 but took a couple years off 2008 - 2010 to bootstrap my studio practice. Since going back the company has been very receptive to allowing me to work non-standard hours to accommodate a studio practice. I typically work three ten hour days per week. So, I’ve picked up some skills and have been stewing on how I can use those skills in my studio practice.

It’s tough. One thing that my experience as an engineer has taught me is that doing robotics stuff right is hard and expensive. I’ve been reluctant to do something half-assed or that’s a bunch of blinking lights with wires going everywhere. Plus, I just really like painting and I’m good at it.

In 2022 I finished a big 40 foot long painting on a series of wood panels for a big tech company with offices in Cambridge. It was on ten panels and I mostly painted it in my basement, three panels at a time, because of pandemic lock-down. I was worried about the 10 panels feeling like a cohesive composition and so I cut a bunch of weird shapes out of plywood and painted them. These painted wood shapes got mounted to the front of the mural panels, so some crosse the boundaries between panels and some broke out of the rectanglular boundary of the panel sequence. I liked how they functioned as painted layer physically raised above the normal painted surface and it got me thinking, what if they moved?

So that’s what I’ve done. Last year I set a goal, whithout knowing how I would achieve it technically, of having finished six paintings that incorporated moving panels in them by the time this show was happening. Well, I’ve finished three and I’ve got two that are not too far from being done. Two of those will be in this show. I’m pretty happy and excited about how they’ve turned out, and I can’t wait to share. I won’t give too much away here—though I have been posting spoilers on my Instagram (@electroblake), which I’m on again—but I will say they do involve moving painted wood and they respond to being looked at.

Artists Using AI (but not like that)

First off, new paintings are rolling off the line. I’d like to Highlight:

More are on the way. I have a pretty decent backlog of good photos of good paintings that just need to be cleaned up and posted.

I’m getting ready for my solo show in May, on track I hope to have at least a few motorized pieces done. I have a few with junk mounted on the back of them now and a small army of Raspberry Pi’s outfitted with the right software installs for face detection and motor control etc. Very exciting! But also most the show will probably be paintings like these three, which I am quite proud of! My problem has always been that I always want to do both things and that doesn’t seem like it’s going to end any time soon.

In the meantime, one of the things you have to constantly do as an artist if you want to get anywhere is apply to things. One of the things I am applying to tonight is for an opportunity to have a solo show at The Painting Center in NYC. They ask for a tailored artist statement explaining the work and what I would do with the opportunity. An artist statement is a tricky thing. If you are an artist, you probably know that writing an artist statement sucks. I’ve heard a museum professional liken asking painters to write about their work to be like asking writers to dance about their writing. Anyway, I have a blanket statement, but it didn’t apply here because it wouldn’t address the specifics. So, call in the AI! I fed this prompt into chat GPT:

I'm an artist. I'm submitting an application for a solo show at the Painting Center in NYC. The paintings I want to show are abstract paintings with lots of layers in acrylic, marker, and collage. There are layers of pattern interwoven with layers of more chaotic poured paint. I incorporated collage elements like pictures cut out of Richard Scarry storybooks for children, old Star Trek trading cards I bought when I was a kid, and random receipts and bits of mail I find in the studio. My current statement is this: "When I make a painting, I try to capture that sense of a memory or a new understanding being just out of reach. I use elements like bits of text that are obscured and made un-readable, little doodles, and regular repeating patterns to engage the brain’s recognition systems but leave out just enough to so that the recognition does not quite resolve. In this way my work creates propositional spaces that interact with the imagination.

I think of these pieces as abstract mind-scapes. They incorporate different elements of the conscious experience such as raw emotion as colors smeared and poured in fields and streaks or ordered thought as systems of patterns that follow recognizable rules. Bits of text and cartoon imagery represent the fleeting qualia of the unquiet modern mind.

My work is an exploration of the physical and spiritual nature of life expressed in color and movement.  I believe the purpose of art is to help one find their place in the universe, and I consider a painting a success if it has the power to draw people into a state of meditative contemplation. " The prompt from the entry form is: "Please submit a clearly written artist statement, and explain the plans for your potential exhibition in the Project Room space at The Painting Center." and the length limit is 4000 characters. Please write a response to that prompt.

And this is what I got back:

In my artistic practice, I strive to capture the elusive essence of memory and understanding, creating abstract mindscapes that engage with the viewer's imagination. My work is a synthesis of various elements of conscious experience, from raw emotion expressed through vibrant colors and dynamic gestures, to ordered thought manifested in intricate patterns and structures.

Each painting is a journey into the depths of the psyche, inviting viewers to explore propositional spaces where recognition and interpretation interplay. Through layers of acrylic, marker, and collage, I weave together fragments of text, cartoon imagery, and personal ephemera, such as pages from Richard Scarry storybooks and vintage Star Trek trading cards. These elements serve as windows into the fleeting qualia of the modern mind, evoking a sense of nostalgia and curiosity.

The exhibition I envision for the Project Room space at The Painting Center will be a curated exploration of these abstract mindscapes. Each painting will be carefully selected to create a cohesive narrative that guides viewers through a multisensory experience. From intimate moments of introspection to expansive vistas of color and movement, the exhibition will offer a journey into the physical and spiritual nature of life.

Through the power of color, texture, and composition, I aim to create a contemplative atmosphere that encourages viewers to reflect on their place in the universe. My ultimate goal as an artist is to evoke a sense of meditative stillness, inviting viewers to pause, breathe, and connect with the deeper layers of their own consciousness.

By showcasing my work in the Project Room space, I hope to create an immersive environment where viewers can immerse themselves in the rich tapestry of abstraction and discovery. Each painting will serve as a portal to the unknown, inviting viewers to explore the hidden corners of their imagination and find solace in the beauty of the unknown.

In conclusion, my exhibition at The Painting Center will be a testament to the transformative power of art, offering viewers a sanctuary for reflection, introspection, and discovery. Through the interplay of color, texture, and symbolism, I invite viewers to embark on a journey of self-discovery and find moments of transcendence amidst the chaos of modern life.

Not bad! It’s a bit pompous at the end, but I don’t know maybe it’s not super great to be really modest with these things? Anyway, I thought I was just going to get some garbage back that I’d use as a starting point for the statement, but I just copy-pasted it right into the application.

What do you think? Is this statement any good? Would you do this if you were an artist? Have you done this?

Also, any artist know of any tools out there you can feed an image of a painting and have it generate text about the painting, and then have a chat GPT style conversation about the generated text to help form it into the piece of writing that you want?

Love to hear your thought in the comments. By the way I’m back on Instagram. @electroblake. I asked a philosopher and he said it was ok.

Studio Update 20240211

Hello!

Quick announcement up top: I’m in two shows. One is Plus One at Bromfield, which actually started last week and runs through the end of the month. The idea for this show is that each participating Bromfield artist has invited one guest artist to participate in the show and I’m very happy to have Cicely Carew as my +1. The second is the Members Prize Show at Cambridge Art Association, where I’m pleased to be showing my 2023 painting Directions for Making Birthday Party Invitations, which took me like three attempts to get satisfactory photos of, but that effort seems to have paid off. I’ve had stretch of what seems like four or five years getting rejected from the Members Prize Show at CAA, so it’s nice to get back in one.

Directions for Making Birthday Party Invitations

60 x 48

Acrylic, collage, and marker on canvas

2023

Been a while since I did a studio update. Lot’s of stuff in the works or freshly complete.

I did finish this painting, which I had in my mind as the last one that I would finish before moving on to paintings with motors in them. It’s called “The Things We Wish We’d Made Time For” or something like that. I’ve got the title on a sticky note next to it hanging on my studio wall, but I’m not in my studio at the moment:

The Things We Wish We’d Made Time For

40 x 30 inches acrylic, marker, and collage on wood panel

So how’s the motor project going? Good! My goal for this has been to have a set of paintings which “incorporate movement” ready to show for my solo show at Bromfield coming up in May. Working with Cicely for the Plus One show at Bromfield, she wanted to show a piece that incorporated digital collage and light-boxing and I was like, I’ve got this weird techno-adjacent project I’m working on too, so she encouraged me to put my “prototype” painting into the show and I did!

The Busy Day

16 x 12 inches

acrylic, marker, collage, and electronics on wood panel

2024

This little painting starts moving when someone is looking at it. When no one is looking the little arm goes back to its starting position. If you watch it long enough the little arm swings all the way up past the top of its arc and then all the way back down, then it goes the other way a little bit, then starts climbing again. It has a Raspberry Pi 4 computer mounted on the back, with a camera, stepper motor driver, and a stepper motor. The Pi is doing face detection (not face recognition) to tell if there is anyone there. When there is no face present motor power is cut, keeping the thing from consuming too much power and heating up. It also provides the “zeroing” functionality. The weight of the arm is enough that it will always generally point down when motor power is cut, so every time power is cut the program resets the step count.

All the junk on the back of the painting. The Raspberry Pi 4 is up top in a High Pi enclosure. The camera is the thing attached to the grey ribbon cable coming out the bottom of the Pi. The stepper motor is to the right, the square with the silver and blue circle in the middle of it. The little green PCB in the lower middle is a Tic stepper motor controller from Pololu, a great stepper controller with a great interface that works well in Python. The tiny blue PCB is a USB-C power delivery dummy that tells a USB C power supply to output 15V (if available). The two black blocks connected to the extension cord on the bottom are Amazon Basics USB-C 30W power supplies.

The reception has been good! I actually took Tally to the opening (he loved the current exhibit up at the Mass Art gallery, go check that out if you’ve ever wondered what Meow Wolf would be like if it were farm themed) and got some good impressions of how people were taking in the work and have heard good reports since then. The piece actually needed an intervention after it was first installed. It overheated on the first day, so I put in better rubber feet on the back of the painting to provide more of an air gap and I took the top off the High Pi enclosure.

I’m very happy because this setup is very Lego-like in its implementation. I can sort of arbitrarily add motors and control them individually, and I’ve successfully duplicated the software setup on other Raspberry Pis. The face detection only works from about eight feet back, but that’s kind of works. I need to fiddle with it a bit to see if I can get that to go to maybe 12 feet. I think it would be nice if these things could grab your attention from across the room.

Finally, here’s a quick set of paintings in the queue. Some of these will get motors put on them. Some will not. Some seem pretty done as they are. It’s actually proving to be a little difficult to not “finish” them. I just still like making straight pairings, you know? Nothing wrong with that.

Let me know what you think! I’m getting excited for the show in May!

Holiday Recap (WIR 20240101)

Happy New Year!

I’m happy to be moving out of the Holiday Season. It’s been nice to spend some extra time with Liv and the kids, but I’m ready to get back to work! I’ll put up a studio update soon. Exciting stuff is happening with computers and motors and things. I also even managed to finish a regular painting.

Holiday Recap

We had a very Covid Christmas and a Covid New Year. We had planned on going to NYC to visit Liv’s family for Christmas, and I had a $1.3k Air BnB travel credit we were originally going to use to get a place near the boy’s grandparents apartment. The credit was set to expire at the end of the year. We found a nice looking place, but the host canceled the reservation on us a week before the holiday and there wasn’t anything else suitable available, so we booked a hotel instead and used the travel credit to book a nice place for a friends get together for New Years Eve. We got a great deal on the hotel with Hotwire and we were pretty excited.

Then the boys both got Covid a few days before Christmas. I had to stay home with them on what would have been my last shopping day, and we canceled our trip to New York. We couldn’t get a cash refund for the hotel, but Hotwire was kind enough to give us “Hot Bucks” to use on our next trip.

So we had a quiet Christmas just the four of us. We opened presents and went out to the Scoot Zone (a big parking lot complex for an abandoned industrial campus near our house) so T could try out his new (to him) Kettcar and we could all stay away from other humans.

Then I got Covid too the day before we were planning to leave for New Years. Some of the friends we were splitting the Air BnB with canceled too, and through what I will blame on miscommunication and Covid Brain, I canceled and then re-booked our NYE Air BnB, but due to the intricacies of the re-booking process, we were not able to use that travel credit. We were planning on having Covid positive members of our family stay behind, so the Covid negative members could still go hang out with friends on NYE, but those friends canceled anyway and so our whole family drove down to Little Compton, RI and the four of us slept two nights in a big old house near the beach with room for three families. We called it the Ship House. It was still nice. We walked to the beach and looked at rocks and things. It was F’s first time seeing the ocean, and only T’s second or third. We only stayed two nights and left a day early, spending the NYE at home like it was any other Sunday.

What a baby on his daddy’s shoulders on a rocky Rhode Island beach might look like

In Conclusion

We ended up doing a lot less for New Years and Christmas this year than we had planned and paying a lot more than we expected. (I also just found out a travel credit I had with Delta expired yesterday . . . aargh.) I’m grateful the three of us who had covid have had pretty mild cases. I’m happy to have gotten to spend some good quality time with Liv and the boys. T has even said both nights that we’ve been back, without prompting, when we say our good-nights after story-time, that he liked staying at the Ship House. We really haven’t traveled much with these kids. Hopefully we can find a way to travel more in 2024.

hello (WIR 20231217)

Hi. This is the fourth time I’ve started this blog post. Squarespace keeps finding new and exciting ways to tell me I’m not logged in. Anyway, sorry about last week. T. had pink eye and it all became very apparent right after dinner last week so I was driving him around to see doctors and find pharmacies that would fill his prescription.

I’ve got motors moving! This is a chunk of fancy plywood I cut into a funky shape with a jigsaw spinning on the shaft of a 1A NEMA 17 stepper controlled via a Polulu Tic 36v4 stepper controller via a Raspberry Pi 0W.

The hardest part of all of this was probably finding the word “flange” which is the time of thing you want to connect a thing like the spinning piece of wood here to the stick that pokes out of a motor.


Also I did get into the studio and I made some progress on the painting.

Horse Draw

Liv’s mom and dad are visiting this week for Thanksgiving and for some reason this afternoon we were all drawing horses from memory on post-it notes. Here is the resulting set of rules for the new drinking game we came up with called “Horse Draw.”

  • Horse Draw requires 4 - 10 players.

  • For each round of Horse Draw each player must draw a horse from memory (no visual aids) on a post it note as quickly as they can.

  • The slowest drawer gets one strike.

  • After all horse drawings are complete, the group of players vote on whether each drawing is actually a horse or not. All non-eliminated players must vote on each drawing, and eliminated players continue to vote. Players whose drawings receive less than 50% horse-positive votes get one strike.

  • Players are eliminated after they receive three strikes and no longer participate in making drawings

  • When all but two players have been eliminated, one of the players must make a drawing of a horse faster than the other player that also receive at least 50% horse positive votes to win. The final round is repeated until this condition is met.

  • (optional) All non-eliminated players take a shot between rounds

A Motor that Turns but Not All the Way (WIR 11/19/2023)

I know you are all wondering, did I buy the André 3000 flute album? Yes I did. And I would link to it too, but I bought it on Bandcamp and apparently it’s not on Bandcamp anymore.

an image pulled from the confirmation email I got from Bandcamp when I bought New Blue Sun

Very strange. That “Download your purchase” link doesn’t go anywhere anymore. I’m kind of upset, actually, because I always thought of buying music on Bandcamp as having a built in backup, that you could always download your media again. Oh well. I hope it’s been removed from Bandcamp for good reasons. I also listened to the NPR Music interview with André 3000 and was surprised to learn he’s only a few years older than me, but also he’s done a lot of soul searching and also psychedelic drugs. I’m 100% here for it, and the album is good too. It is a little bit more background music that no one will complain about, but it rewards repeated listening.

I was a big fan of Big Boi’s 2010 album, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty, but I never really got into Outkast. As I was thinking about this someone on Bluesky posted about how great Outkast’s album Aquemini was. Well you can get that on CD on Amazon for $8, so I did, and it is great. I played it in the car with the three year old in the back seat and he said to not play that music and to instead play Rock and Roll. It’s odd because that’s probably what I would have said too, 20-30 years ago.

There was a nice moment on NPR’s All Songs Considered podcast a few eps back where Robin Hilton said something like that he never liked rap music as a kid and another host jumped in and said, you were told you didn’t like rap music as a kid. I definitely got that message growing up, that rap and hip hop weren’t “real” music, that if I wanted to be cool I shouldn’t listen to that I should listen to e.g. Nirvana and Led Zeppelin instead. It’s the long tail of effects of the racist foundation of our society. As for the three year old: he’s three, and he loves electric guitar. This kid thinks pizza is bad. His opinions don’t really count for much.

No new paintings updated or anything this week. I put in some extra time at the robot job, getting shit done, and I made some progress on something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time: I made some stepper motors move back and forth!

So for thirty hours a week I hold the position of Senior Staff Electrical Design Engineer at Boston Dynamics. Making a stepper spin is not really a big deal, except it is when I’m doing it here in my home office with basically hobby stuff. I got a couple steppers from Adafruit as well as a Raspberry Pi stepper controller hat. I also told my final semester academic advisor from the MFA program I finished last year that I was committed to having at least one artwork in my May 2024 solo show that incorporates movement in it. So, that’s happening.

Look. I don’t have good ideas, but I do have ideas. I’ve been working on these wooden panels, and I think these things are robust enough to drill holes into and mount things too. I did a big 40 foot commission in 2021 where I did mount plywood cut-outs onto wooden panels. That worked just fine. My ideas so far?

  • make a thing spin in front

  • drill holes in the surface and make a thing spin behind the holes

  • make a thing move back and forth

  • etc

Well the nice thing is that now I can make a stepper go with a Raspberry Pi and a python library and if I just zip-tie this to a painting that’s probably halfway there.

Week in Review 10/22/2023

Believe it or not, I’m keeping this up for at least two weeks in a row! I just checked my site analytics and four people visited the blog since last week, and I’m pretty sure I was at least one of those people. That’s kind of what I want at first, let me get some content in here before anyone starts paying attention.

I signed a contract with iCanvas last week to let them license some of my work. It could be interesting; it might lead to some passive income, it might lead to some positive exposure. It could also lead to some negative exposure, I’m not sure. If this results in cheap canvas prints of my work showing up at Target does that hurt or help my reputation as an artist? I really don’t know, but what I do know is that I love to make money off of my art, because that makes it so I can spend more money on my art, and that means I can make more and better art. So if people want to poo poo the idea of “selling out” by signing a contract with a big print retailer, I kind of feel like those people are gatekeeping a world I never had a chance of getting access to anyway.

Anyway, that passive income bit is still a ways away. When I signed the contract I promised to deliver high resolution images of 35 of my paintings. So far I’ve uploaded ten. The issue? Most the images I had on file were not good enough. I talked about a lot of this last week, I know, but I also know nobody read that. So I’ve got a real camera now, and I’m slowly getting new images for paintings I originally documented with my trusty iPhone XS (or, in some cases, my old iPhone 7+). I’ve gotten back into doing things with real cameras, and am pretty good at setting up speed lights now too. The new pictures are coming out great, with very little glare and terrific resolution on the fine details. Lines that look chunky and thick in some old photos are showing up as delicate in the new photos. Colors are not blown out. Part of this is probably the better sensor in the Canon 90D, part of it is probably all the computational photography tricks the iPhone was doing behind the scenes.

For each new photo I have to find the painting, put it up on the one stretch of wall that isn’t covered by painting storage or windows, get the camera set up, and take the pictures. I’ve got to import the photos into Lightroom. I’ve got to make notes on which paintings I’m working with in my task manager so I don’t just import into Lightroom and never see them again. In Lightroom I need to organize and find the best exposures. I edit the best full image picture in Photoshop to fix perspective and optimize the histogram. I band-aid tool any obvious nail-holes in the wall. I save a copy with a bit of wall showing behind the painting, and a copy cropped to the picture frame. Back in Lightroom I adjust exposure on all the detail images before exporting them to jpeg. Then I upload everything to Artwork Archive, which integrates with Squarespace to produce the Portfolio and Archive views here. Then I upload the cropped full image to iCanvas’s CMS. In my task manager I optimistically also have check boxes for “update Saatchi” and “update Singulart” for each piece, but I’m ignoring those for now. So anyway, it takes a while.

On a good night, after the kids are asleep and I’ve cleaned the kitchen, folded any laundry, done my 15 minute language lessons, and set up the coffeemaker for the next morning, I can usually get through editing and uploading images for one painting before I need to go to bed. That’s assuming they’ve already made it to Lightroom and are organized correctly.

This week, I’ve gotten imaged updated for:

In this studio this week, all I did was take pictures. I’ve got images for ten more paintings that are going into iCanvas, and six more that I just want to update. The plan is to slowly update everything, but these things can take a while and I need to get back to actually painting while I’m in the studio.

In other art news, I had high hopes for getting into a show called “Illumination” at Gallery Twist in Lexington, but none of the pieces I submitted made it in.

Ok. Hope to have more to report next week and not just moaning about how much work it is to edit photos. Thanks for reading.

Week in Review 10/15/2023

Oh hello there. I’m trying something new. A weekly update on what’s new and what’s going on. Just an informal thing.

There’s actually kind of a lot of stuff happening. Most excitingly, I closed the sale of a couple of paintings this week, That Question is Funny Because it has Changed and History With the Continuum. Shoutout to Artisan Shipping Company for excellent shipping service, if you need to move large paintings up or down the Eastern Seaboard they are a great option. History With the Continuum is a 52 x 56” paining and it would have required building a wooden crate and using Less than TruckLoad (LTL) service from a regular shipping company.

Additionally, I signed a contract with iCanvas to license some of my work. I’m pretty interested to see if this goes anywhere. At the very least, they are inspiring me to actually get better photos of a lot of my older work because for years I was just using my iPhone to take pictures of the paintings and the resolution wasn’t high enough for iCanvas’s purposes. I got a fancy Canon 90D a couple years ago and I’ve got a bunch of lenses and speed lights etc and I actually know how to use all this shit, it’s just time intensive. The results have been really great so far though. When I look at my original iPhone 7+ or iPhone XS images next to the 90D images with proper studio lighting, it’s really pretty striking. The iPhone blasts out the saturation and really doesn’t do a good job with fine detail.

I’ve been updating Artwork Archive as I get new photos, which is what my website draws from, so you can see some of the results. I’ve recently updated these pieces:

Here are some samples of the differences:

So Actually That Is Cool, image taken with my iPhone XS

So Actually That Is Cool, image taken with my Canon 90D

Entanglement 70 (king of the dust bunnies), image on the left taken in 2013 with a Canon Rebel T4i, image on the right taken in 2023 with a Canon 90D. I’m actually pretty impressed with the T4i image, and I think I should have kept using the Rebel instead of switching to the iPhone. To be honest, Apple got me with their marketing when the iPhone 7 came out. Now I’m much more interested in keeping my iPhone for four or five years and spending the money on real camera gear instead of a phone upgrade. I got the 90D because we have a bunch of EF lenses and the 90D, already a few years old when I bought it, seems like it’s going to be the last mid-level camera that will support that lens system without adapters.

I got rejected from Cambridge Art Association’s “Blue” show. The juror was Abigail Ogilvy of Abigail Ogilvy Gallery. They just moved in next door to Bromfield after several years in the basement across the courtyard in the Boston Gallery Zone aka SoWa. They are one of my favorite galleries, but the affection is 100% unidirectional, I don’t think they have any interest at all in me or my work, so I’m not surprised at the rejection. It’s been a while now since I’ve gotten into a CAA show.

I’m planing on entering some work this week in a show at a sort of pop-up gallery called Gallery Twist in Lexington. I’ve been rejected by them before, so I know they at least have some standards.

I’m finding myself a bit lonely here on the internet as of late. I stopped using Facebook probably a decade ago and Instagram a few years ago. Facebook I never really liked but Instagram was tough to give up because I did have a good following and it’s nice to get those likes, but I just can’t get behind the idea of giving free content to Meta, a company that I think has really done a lot to spread misinformation in the name of profit, undermine democracy, and has even enabled genocide on at least one occasion. I was on Twitter for a bit there, and I was even starting to like it, but that’s all gone now. Mastodon is fine, and you can follow me there (I think) @blayk@mastodon.social. You could be my third or fourth follower! Been thinking about getting back into Pinterest. Anyone still use Pinterest?

The major thing that happened in my personal life this week is that I have basically recovered from pneumonia. The kids brought COVID and Flu home from daycare this last month or so and I got both and then my respiratory system was like, hey, everyone, come on in! It’s not fun being really sick and also still having to get up in the middle of the night to jog a fussy infant back to sleep or wake up and get the kids ready for daycare and out the door while sucking down cough drops. I was sick for four weeks, not counting COVID, which wasn’t very bad. Flu sucked, and then it just got worse until finally L. made me go get checked out at one of those urgent care facilities. Got a chest x-ray, they said, “definitely pneumonia” and gave me a couple prescriptions for antibiotics. I started feeling better the next day. It’s good to feel healthy.

Ok! This has gone longer than I expected. I’m going to try to do this again next week. In the comments below, tell me what camera you like to use, where you get your social media fix, the name of a gallery you think is cool, or just an honest reaction to this post. Thanks for reading.

A Butterfly that Lives Forever

It’s been a minute. I got busy. I had a big commission that really took a lot of my time straight after graduating from my MFA program (I graduated!), and after that I had to focus on moving back into my studio in Lowell and out of our basement (my pandemic studio) so we can make room for a family room and a place for the kids to play and watch tv and stuff.

I’m not quite back up and running in my Lowell studio, but I am making good progress. The space had kind of turned into a bit of a storage space during the pandemic, but I've got it nicely organized now and have removed a bunch of junk. The main setback recently has been that my workbench, the thing I actually put paintings on while I am putting paint on them has for the last several years been made up of three Ikea desks pushed up against each other, the kind with the metal legs that screw into a sort of pressed wood fiber desk surface. Those were all desks I got used in the first place and they’ve been with me through the pandemic basement studio, three different spaces in the Lowell studio building, Miller St. studios in Somerville, Lophouse Studio in Brighton, and Brambleberry Studio in Cambridge. So, they finally gave it up. The screws that hold the surfaces to the metal legs no longer had any grip. The tops of the surfaces were also coated in so much paint that it was actually starting to cause a problem with making my painting surfaces uneven.

So, I tossed them out instead of moving them back. That meant I didn’t have anything to paint on! I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but last week I hit upon a pretty good solution and I bought a couple of 80” x 36” hollow wooden doors from Lowe’s. I think I can mount the old legs from the desks to these and end up with a nice 80” x 72” work surface that will still fit over the flat-files that hold my big works on Yupo. So! New work coming soon! I am still on daddy duty a lot of the time and mostly usually only have one day a week to get to the studio, but I think I can actually make that a productive day now.

a small abstract painting in acrylic, marker, pencil, and collage on wooden panel. The primary colors are pink, blue, and orange.

A Butterfly that Lives Forever

In the meantime, I’ve got a bunch of work that I collected in my studio while I was re-organizing stuff that I hadn’t previously cataloged, mostly from 2019 and 2022. I just got pictures of these pieces, and here is the first new piece. It’s called “A Butterfly that Lives Forever”. Let me know what you think in the comments.

This little painting is a swirling vortex of paint and collage material with pencil and marker drawing in the background. Structured pattern is stacked against chaotic poured paint with cartoon doodles, hand-written text, and machine printed elements all layered one on top of another resulting in a system that feels somehow balanced but like it might fly apart at any moment.

This is a little abstract painting on wooden panel.

The painting is available for purchase on Singulart.