Rice Field Art

Check this out.

Very cool.

New Direction in My Painting

Vegas is great! Inspired by the place, my art has taken on a new direction:

Another great thing from England

Go check out this video:

Cutting Up My Friends, which sounds awful, but really is about editing video of the author's friends (various creative experimenters in the Bristol area) improvising in various setttings. It is quite brilliant.

This fellow also has a computer that plays music, which is equally brilliant.

Upcoming Lecture: John Ruskin, The German Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Next week, on Thursday May 10, I will be lecturing on John Ruskin, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the German Nazarene painters. The fun starts at 7:30 at St. Margaret Mary's in Oakland. There is no admission fee, but the St. Anthony of Padua Institute will suggest that you subscribe (for more information on the institute and what subscription is all about go here.

The lecture will be approx. 45-50 minutes, with a question and feeble attempts at answer session afterwards. We will try, as usual, to keep it all fun and informative.

There is a betting pool as to whether or not I will have time to get a proper haircut for the event, or whether I will do it myself, or will talk Melanie into cutting it, or whether I will simply not get around to it. The smart money goes for A, but the others are distinct possibilities as well. All I know is that I am mightily shaggy right now.

If you are coming from out of town, get in touch, so we can plan on at least a coffee or drink afterwards.

Cathedral Rising

I drove by the skeleton of the new Oakland Cathedral this morning. It is looking pretty much like what I am expecting, although it is still in its very early stages. While I don't think the building is remotely suitable for liturgy, they could probably sell it to the Chabot Space and Science Center, who could turn it into a fantastic annex for the display of aircraft. Then the diocese could use the money to build a real cathedral.

I do like how the structure is rising out of the site. I am skeptical that it will still look so cool when it is finished.

I will say that I would rather have this thing than some Duncan Stroik pastiche.

Harry Partch on being seduced by carpentry...

Harry Partch once notably remarked that he was a "composer seduced into carpentry," refering to his need to invent and build the instruments he needed to realize his musical vision. It is rare in music to find composers of note who also built their instruments (although there is a good Elipsis Arts CD on the subject). In the twentieth century the advent of electronics increased the amount of people who were working this way.

The interesting thing is that in visual arts, it has been the opposite: until the mid-19th century, artists often had to make many of their own materials. Today I know very few people who grind their own paint. I have been thinking about this, because I have become the artist seduced into chemistry.

As I mentioned earlier, I am using a beeswax and synthetic resin medium, and I am finding it hard to resist the temptation to fiddle with the formula, working to increase this or that aspect of the stuff.

I was talking to a friend about what I was doing and he mentioned the problems that honeybees are having. Perhaps I had best go hoard some beeswax. Then again, if it turns out to be a temporary thing, I will then have to take up encaustic, which looks like a lot of trouble (although it looks like the sort of "a lot of trouble" that could be quite fun).

The Artist and the Taxman

If a collector were to donate a painting to a museum, he could deduct the fair market value of that painting on his taxes. If the artist donated the same painting, he could only deduct the cost basis of the work: essentially his materials. This is not how it has always been. In 1969 this law went into effect with disastrous results for museums, especially the Library of Congress. Now, there is a bipartisan movement to go back to the pre-1969 law.

You can read about it here.

Fine Art Friday postponed in these parts.

Due to this silly cold, and having to take care of Amalia all day yesterday, and editing tasks this morning, I have not finished the painting I had hoped to post today. Hopefully tomorrow. We'll see.

Speaking of Art...

It is an odd numbered year.

Going to Venice this summer/fall?

I can't help it...next thing you know, I will be invading Poland

It is a German thing. Wax. Synthetic Resin. Earthtones. No felt or fat, so far, but I can't say that I can hold out too much longer.

It started with a little bit of beeswax medium in my latest abstract canvas. And, boy (Beuy?) did I like the luminosity of it. Well, that led to a little more. And a little more. And now there is a thick impasto, with many layers of earthtones coming through a honey-cream fog.

I am now letting the surface harden (!) before I can add another layer. I have never had to think about a surface hardening. Becoming touch-dry, yes, but this is a totally different reality.

And it is a reality I like. A lot. Even though, yes, it makes me a bit of a stereotype (and as a conservative, it fits that I would be falling into a German stereotype of forty years ago. In twenty years look out for the series of large, color photographs). I have always liked this stuff, but never really thought about doing it, until recently.

I am hoping to have this canvas done in time to post it on Friday, although I am not sure how well it will photograph, with all those semi-transparent layers.

Punch And Judy

It should come as no surprise that I am a huge Punch and Judy fan (as well as of the Commedia del'Arte, Three Stooges, and other slapstick). So, I was pleased to see this entry on the Lion and the Cardinal. Who knew that Yale had a collection of Punch and Judy puppets?

Puppetry is an interesting art, and I have been thinking a lot about it recently, mostly because of a variety of serendipitous encounters with puppetry, like finding this entry (or talking about a film with John Malkovich and that calling to mind Being John Malkovich, which I really enjoyed).

Two Views of Lake Tahoe Area

Here are a couple of photos I took last summer of the Lake Tahoe area. I think you will get an idea of why I am so smitten with my home state.

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Art, art, art.

I went to the DeYoung Museum yesterday, just in time to see two exhibits on their last day. I won't tell you how wonderful they were, or that you have to go, since that would be cruel. But I will tell you, that the more I spend time in that museum, the more I like it as a museum. I liked the outside (except the tower), since they put the copper cladding on it. I really love the garden spaces. But the inside struck me as a little weird at first. Not the individual galleries, which are fine, but the overall layout. It seemed a little haphazard, and it still does. What is different is how that haphazardness has grown on me. I like the fact that the whole thing feels a little bit like a demented labyrinth, with strange ways to get from one gallery to the next, and some odd ways of veering from the chronological.

I do have to wonder, however, how much longer it will still make sense to have the art from Oceania and Africa? I realize that there is not enough to make a separate museum, like they did with the Asian, but the DeYoung is supposed to be a museum of American Art, or at least that is the focus on the Western stuff. The European art is at the Legion. So, what is with the orphaned of the non-Western world that have (I dare say, beautiful) homes at the de Young?

Erik Keilholtz: A Midwinter Survey of Paintings

Welcome to the Erik's Rants and Recipes Art Gallery.

Tonight is the opening reception of Erik's latest show, a survey of paintings. Since this is our first virtual opening, we thank you for your understanding for our numerous glitches.

However, the wine isn't one of them. Normally, galleries like to serve white wine, thinking that it is safer around the art. Hogwash, and cheap red is almost always more drinkable than cheap white (especially if it is a chardo-boring-ney). Since this is a virtual exhibit, we are serving excellent red wine.

You have our permission to sip your excellent red wine, too.

Now, we do need to get the dimensions and (gulp) titles and prices up. By Friday night. And we keep asking Erik for an artist's statement. "No problem," says he. "And keep it short," says We. "Uh-oh," says he.

What we do have to offer for the opening reception is a virtual tour with the artist, who will offer comments and will answer questions. Enjoy!

The first painting is an older one, from 1997. I consider it a breakthrough painting. Before it I was trying to do what I did here (dance on the edge between landscape and total abstraction, a la Ed Corbett or 1955 Richard Diebenkorn (Berkeley series)) in a way that was close, but not getting it. Sometime in 1995 (I think, although it may have been 1996) I picked up Susan Landauer's The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism and was blown away. Here was a link between all of these painters, many of whom I had admired, and many of them were achieving what I had been trying to do for the prior two years!

I read the text of that book three times in a row. When we got married and moved to the Bay Area, we were lucky that SFMOMA had the exhibition that the book came out of, so I got to study many of the paintings repeatedly.

This painting originally started with much more conventional landscape colors, but it was moribund, with far too much stasis. I wanted it to seethe and push around the viewer a bit, but not in a hysterical way, like many of Clyfford Still's works. I was going for tension: between abstraction and landscape, between regions on the canvas, etc. So, one day, under the influence of John Saccaro, I drastically altered the palette. I liked what was happening, and finished the thing in a week or two (after I had been laboring for months on it). While I wanted much of the surface and force of abstract expressionism, I definitely wanted a hyper-controlled painting, very deliberate and carefully corrected. I was very happy with how this came out, and, eleven years later, I still like it. It is based (loosely) on a real place, one that I sketched and studied and painted (more representationally) for years: the little town of Davenport on California's Highway One, about 26 miles north of Santa Cruz.

Copyright 1996 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, I have had a recurring dream for many years (for as long as I can remember) of monster waves crashing into Golden Gate Park accross Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The park was always a bit exhilarating and scary, especially on the ocean edge. The broken windmill was an image that burned itself strongly into my brain. Often in my dream I am watching the waves from the safety (often just barely) of a hillside. The dreamscape is rather loosely based on the area, but it always has that high, chalky light that we get around here (in fact, it is that light that I am quite smitten with in terms of landscape painting. I prefer to go hiking on those crystal clear blue days, when I can see for miles, but when I want to paint, I like to try to capture the mood of the whitish sky). I had to paint this, but also wanted to continue the work from the previous painting and the one after it (not shown). So, from 1997 is this oil on canvas painting called "San Francisco Ocean Beach"

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, in my obsession with abstracting landscape, as well as my continued explorations of the history of Bay Area painting, it was inevitable that I would run up against the Society of Six. I had read little bits about them here and there (Thomas Albright's survey of Bay Area art as well as in the show and the book of Facing Eden: 150 Years of Landscape Painting in the Bay Area), and picked up Nancy Boas's outstanding book on the group. Naturally, I was doing a lot of plein air work at this time, as well as getting up half an hour before dawn, driving down to my friend's apartment, and taking off with him for a morning drawing session at least three times a week. We would sketch Lake Merritt, the wholesale produce market, anything that seemed interesting. At one point I attended a workshop with Terry St. John, who was connected to Lundy Siegriest, the son of Society of Six member Louis Siegriest. St. John clearly felt that this was a tradition and not just an isolated group in the 1920's. I agreed, and still do. There is an approach to light and line in Northern California, that pops up in painters as diverse as Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn and even in Robert Bechtle.

One of my favorite places to draw, and later to paint, was the Sibley Volcanic Preserve in the Berkeley Hills. Here is an oil painting I did of one of my favorite locations in that park (this photo is not too good, but I wanted to include the painting. I will try to get a better one tomorrow and to replace it):

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

Did I just mention Thiebaud? Why yes, I did. I grew up in Sacramento, and Wayne Thiebaud cast a long shadow on all of us in that area who aspired to paint. A long shadow carved in thick pastes of paint, made cool by ultramarine, no doubt. Everyone knows Wayne Thiebaud, but you have to be either an art geek or a Sacramentan to know the equally talented Gregory Kondos. Anyway, I was studying a lot of his work at the time (thanks, in part, to an excellent show of his that we saw at the Monterey Art Museum). This odd landscape was inspired by Kondos' approach to paint, as well as the various canals that deliver water to the various agricultural regions of the Central Valley. It might seem like this is a retreat from more thorough abstraction, but it isn't. I was simply exploring another mode of creating tension in a landscape:

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

And here is a little watercolor in a similar mode:

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, you are probably noticing that there is a bit of a gap, from about 1998 to 2004, and there was a gap. For one thing, I designed some software (for scheduling production in a commercial print shop) and took some time to market it, ended up getting involved in a consulting business and a high tech start up (which, thank God, fell apart due to problems between some of the partners. If it hadn't, we would have hit the market just at the same time as about three well-funded, well-established companies released a similar product).

Getting fed up with the consulting business, I became the Marketing Director for Arhoolie Records (escaping the dot-com bust by going to the record business has got to be one of the stupidest career moves on earth, along with being an artist and having a day job of being a writer), had a baby (well, I didn't, Melanie did, but I cook for it. I have to watch out. It can read now. "Babbo, why did you call me 'it?'" Fortunately it is very cute, still. Now kindly quit demonstrating the benefits of being in the 95th percentile of height by leveraging your 95th percentile of weight into tremendous Italo-Portuguese wallops. Five years old and four feet tall. Some baby), somewhere in the middle of that started writing music reviews and, later food writing, and it was in all that, that the blog started.

So, I was not painting as much as I should have been. I was working on a couple of big paintings, one of which I should probably photograph for your amusement, but will probably hold off on, because of its size. Let me get the photography down on the smaller ones first.

Also taking my creative energies was the world of sound sculpture. My friend who I used to draw with had moved to San Diego, and focused his energies on sound sculpture. Since we had met in the electronic music program at UC Santa Cruz, we obviously shared this interest. So, we did some sound sculptures (we had worked together on sculpture for a joint show back in college) for a show in a really cool gallery down there (alas, it is no longer, but when it was, it was really cool), and did some models for outdoor sculptures (and finally realized that we probably need to be in the same town to work on anything more sustained than a single show).

So, when my friend (and designer of Erik's Rants and Recipes) commissioned me to do a painting a couple of years back, it was a real wake-up call. Oh yeah. Painting. The thing I do. Or did. So, I jumped back in, head first. And, as I mentioned in a post below, as the writing gigs are less frequent, I have been cranking up the painting, and here we are.

I hinted that I am working on very traditional religious paintings (St. Francis receiving the stigmata, for instance). I am not going to show those right now, because I want to show them with drawings, and I want to wait until the big one I am currently working on is done.

But as I went in this direction, I still wanted to keep working in the direction I had been, and, I felt, this required a resourcement at the waters of Richard Diebenkorn, so I did several homages to him, developing some ideas to take me from his late work into something else. Here are a couple of watercolors from that series:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

And, a particularly gripping visit on the same day to the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers and the new De Young Museum, got me to think about combining disparate textures and structures for some interesting (hopefully) results. There is a whole series, which I will show some other time. The last one, which led to The System, was this one, a watercolor that seems a bit like Douanier Rousseau meets Diebenkorn:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

I realized that, like the early atonal composers, I needed some sort of rigorous system to combine these elements, lest I end up getting into some unfortunate ruts.

Many years ago, in order to solve some similar problems in highly abstract electronic music I was composing, I took Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Four Criteria for Electronic Music" and developed a structural system. I was very pleased with it, and used it even for modal and quasi-tonal works for harpsichord. It made for a great replacement structure for sonata allegro form, which really has to have functional harmony to make any sense whatsoever.

Now, confronting a different problem, yet one that shared some similarities, I went back to the Stockhausen-influenced system, as well as to hyper-rationalism, and came up with a system of rules for combining these various elements of color, line, form, structure, and texture. I think I am only at the beginning of this series. Here, first is the one I posted earlier, but with a better photo:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

And here is a little canvas that I did right after the one above:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

And, since both the religious works, as well as these highly abstract ones are based in careful observation of nature, I continue to draw and paint nature. Here is a retake of the photo of the Yosemite Nocturne. It is a very difficult painting to photograph, but this gives an idea:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

That is it for this week's gallery opening. I imagine that the next opening will be next week, hopefully and exhibit of drawings. Thank you for coming.

Update on Photography of Art.

Today has almost slipped away, because soon Amalia will be home, and we have an errand to run, and then... bye bye Wednesday. So, tomorrow, with the exception of an eye doctor appointment (nothing serious, just the routine check to see if my glasses are the right ones still), I am going to tackle the art photography again. A friend of mine made a very good suggestion on improvised lighting improvements, and I am going to try them. We will see.

Also, I have a comment from someone who surfs at work, and cannot view any of the photos, because his or her employer blocks Photobucket. Why the employer would think that people are reading blogs on company time baffles me. I look at my site records. I know that the real reason that my readership mainly happens between 8am and 5pm is because of time differences. And the drop at official holidays? It's because families go out of town.

So, anyway, I would like to know if this is a problem for anyone else. I am happy to consider other solutions, but will probably wait until the official art website is happening, just because my computer project time budget will be mostly taxed by that.

Street Date! Paintings!

I am not at all happy with the photographs. No, let's go further: these photos stink. The colors are a little washed out, the lighting is wrong, the vertical lines are not quite vertical, and the horizontal lines are, well, you guessed it. I need to work on my setup and to practice. It will probably take about a week of work.

So, I could delay on these, but there have been enough delays. Expect new photos of these (and many more) later.

Are you ready?

Good. Let's Begin.

I have decided to open the show with a little oil on canvas that took me decades to do. Decades? Yes. I did a little still life years ago and hated the thing. When it dried, I tried to scrape it off the canvas. No luck. I had neglected it too long. The paint and the canvas were one (I told you, there is rarely a risk of my paint leaving the canvas). It was a thick impasto, and would require drastic means to remove the paint. Well, I found the thing again in a corner of the studio, while looking for an unused canvas. "Oh, that," I thought. What if I tried to rework the painting? Keep the thick impasto, but to add a couple of citrus fruits, add layers of paint, change the colors, etc.? I did that, and a few days later I had a painting that I was happy with:

Image copyright 1986 and 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, keeping in the mode of older paintings of vegetation, here is a little watercolor sketch I did of Melanie's garden in Santa Cruz, from before we were married. I still like this one:

Copyright 1995 by Erik Keilholtz

And, after we got married we moved to Oakland, where we lived among the pine trees up in the hills. I did this watercolor in about 1997 of a tree in our back yard. It is framed under glass, which is why you see the irritating glare. Like I said, I am working on this art photography stuff. Sorry.

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

Around the same time I was also having fun exploring the sweeping vistas and exciting landscapes, but doing it in these small watercolors. Here is a (from memory, so don't go holding a photo up to see if it is accurate: it ain't) view of the Bay and everybody's favorite Federal Penitentiary:

Now, I was starting to come up with the approach to landscape and abstraction that would fuel me strongly for the next decade. The breakthrough works (completed in 1996 and 1997), did not come out well in the photos, so they will have to wait. But I can live with the photo of this oil on canvas abstraction based on a view of North Beach in San Francisco:

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

And, yes, my style remains heavily influenced by Richard Diebenkorn, as you can plainly see in this little watercolor I did last year:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

What came between these paintings? Lots of things, like this oil on canvas imaginary landscape:

Copyright 2001 by Erik Keilholtz

And, even as I am working on different material now, I still take a dip into these waters, as you can see from this watercolor from last year:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Or in this nocturne, loosely based on my street in East Oakland:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Ah, nocturnes. Difficult to draw (because if you are drawing the observed world, you are doing it at night, usually under very bad light), difficult to paint (all those subtle variations of dark), and nearly impossible to photograph. This is an almost tolerable photo of a nocturne I did of Yosemite. I did the drawing almost completely in the dark, and had some horrid glare problems. I will consider a good photo of this one my triumph. I am not even close yet:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

And, I mentioned the matrix for exploring the physical world in an abstract expressionist mode, did I not? It is a complex thing derived from the musical theories of Stockhausen and serialism. This is one of the recent small oil paintings from it:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Well, that is all for now. One, I need to hone my skills photographing these things, and, two, that is a lot of art to digest for the time being.

At the opening on Thursday (remember the cyber-opening!) I will, hopefully, replace the photos with better ones, and will provide the gallery sheet, with title, dimensions, price, etc.

Thank you for visiting the Erik's Rants and Recipes cyber gallery.

Street Date: Tuesday

In the record business, records are released on one day a week, called the "Street Date." Record stores get the records before street date, but they are not supposed to sell them before that date. If they are caught selling before street date, the distributor is supposed to not allow them to have records before street date again. In theory. Some distributors don't care, so long as other record stores don't squack.

Bishops seem to be in a similar boat, where new bishops are announced by Rome on Thursdays, is it?

So, I have decided to adopt a similar approach to posting art on the website: a street date. Now, it really is for me, because it will force me to think "uh oh, Tuesday is tomorrow, I better take some pictures and get them ready."

Also, I might cheat, and put stuff up between street dates. We'll see. That would be better than missing a street date.

In the record business, most distributors have two street dates a month. I like that, and thinking in terms of second and fourth is good, because the second and fourth Tuesdays are also dreaded street sweeping days, so the more I make those days special, the better chance I have of not forgetting to not park on one side of the street.

Now, in the art business, one generally has an opening, which I will try to figure out how to do. A cyberopening, in which you can come and sip some cyber crappy wine and eat some cyber waxy cheese and look at the cyber hipsters making sure they are seen on the cyber gallery circuit. Of course you can also run into some cyber friends, and then after the opening, you can all go out to a cyber bar and drink cyber Scotch. Sounds fun? You betchee.

No, a cyber opening will have to be something different. Something completely different. I am not sure what, but we will have a cyber opening. And not on street date, but on the Thursday after street date, so you can come in, get an early view of the art, then come back for the opening on Thursday.

You don't even have to wear black, although I have no problem with people wearing black. Sometimes I wear black. Not all that often, but sometimes.

Anyway, that is what is up.

The show that is tentatively scheduled to open tomorrow (well, actually Thursday, but the art will be posted tomorrow) is going to be sort of eclectic, if the photography goes well today. So far, we are still in the experimental stage of this stuff.

So, the tests are successful, which means...

The next step is to get some more of my photos up here. The focus will be twofold, art and food, but you know me. I still am working on getting an art website up, complete with snazzy artist notes, bio, etc. I am, however, working on it in the "thinking and planning stage" so perhaps having a way of at least getting photos of the art up there will be the spark that makes me go further in this direction.

The long and short of it is this: newspaper writing, which is like the grocery business in that it is all about volume, is drying up. The papers I have been writing for have merged with another newspaper group, and I went from being the only food critic for a nine-paper chain of dailies with a range covering the whole Bay Area, to one of three. Add to the fact that the editors I have been working with are now gone, and that the other reviewers are staff people, who do not require extra money (beyond the expense of the dinner, which our management is notoriously niggardly about - a stupid thing in a food-obsessed region such as ours, but that is a different rant), and that the paper shut down the two most lucrative (for me, although they were good revenue generators for the company, too, so go figure) publications, the net result is fewer and fewer assignments, all in the outlying areas of the region (which is not bad, food wise, as Fremont has a rich concentration of interesting south Asian food, but to drive all that distance for the same fee is not all that exciting to me).

Since I do not advertise or market myself in my corporate writing (when times were good, I didn't have to), and am about done with that stuff anyway (although if a gig turns up, I take it), I have to think about a different income stream.

As a result, I have gone back to a pretty rigorous painting schedule. However, without a gallery this means the Internet, which many artists have had good success with.

So, the fast track to getting a website going is the inevitable conclusion.

Now, I am guessing that most of my readership here is more interested in my realist paintings, particularly my religious paintings, so that will probably be the principle focus of the images on this site. I have not, and do not intend to ever stop painting in the high modernist key as well, so those sorts of works will pop up from time to time, too.

There is a risk in being two painters in one: partisans of either style will assume that the work in the other is nothing but sell-out work, pandering to some ideological base or another. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. I like Giotto, I like Diebenkorn. I like a lot of stuff in between.

In the 1950's, the Bay Area Figurative painters faced similar accusations. Diebenkorn, that always level-headed master, pointed out that he saw no more contradiction in painting abstract paintings at the same time as figurative works as he would in painting a landscape one day and a still life the next.

Post-modernism is probably a silly term in its use, but there is an underlying truth to what it originally meant: there is no more artistic mainstream. There may be one in the future, but there isn't one now. Artists should draw from whatever sources and inspirations they need, without regard for fitting into some label.

Easier said than done, as a quick tour of most contemporary galleries will demonstrate: many in the arts world will proclaim the end of the avant garde, althewhile desperately trying to find a place within it. The result is a lot of ideologically heavy work that often falls apart when analyzed for form and structure.

Anyone who has read my writings on art, or attended one of my lectures, will know that I strive after a theory of art that can be applied to a late Diebenkorn as well as to a Fra Angelico, and will make sense of both. The key to that is Music. A musical/structural analysis of any good painting will show that underlying the "rhetoric of images" (my term), all painting works by means of proportion, rhythm, counterpoint, and all of the terms that come to us from the study of music.

So it is in what I strive for in painting, whether it is a realistic painting of St. Francis or one of my recent "Stockhausen structure" paintings, in which the forms are taken from nature and combined, manipulated, and edited to make a highly abstract result.

So, there you have it. In the spirit of twentieth century art, I give you too many words and not enough images. Hopefully that will be corrected in the next few days.

A note on the commercial aspect of the postings: Unless otherwise noted, all posted works are available for sale. And, until I am in a gallery structure, I will be offering these direct to the buyer at wholesale price. So, if something strikes your fancy now, realize that the price will increase (by as much as double) when I get into a gallery representation situation, because the gallery owner has to pay rent, too. I will charge for shipping and handling on a simple formula: my time packaging and delivering to the shipper (on a $15 an hour rate, which is substantially less than what I charge to write, paint, or to cook), plus cost (packaging material, shipping costs, insurance, etc.). I will not skimp on the packaging, as that is silly. I will sell works on paper unframed, if they are not already framed, but the quoted prices will generally include framing (I used to work in a high end frame shop, so I follow sound archival practices in framing my work). If you want unframed, ask, and I will give you an unframed quote.

So, if you see a work that you would like to buy (and I can hold the price on a layaway sort of deal - I am very flexible), let me know immediately. I will email you (or snail mail) a contract (basically it transfers ownership of the painting to you, but I retain copyright and other usual artist's rights). You get the contract to me with a check (or I can set up a PayPal acocunt), and I package and ship the painting with the necessary documentation.

If a painting has a defect in workmanship (I am pretty meticulous, but these things do happen, even in works of the masters), I will make a reasonable effort to repair the work, or will offer a substitution painting. If the painting arrives and you just don't like it, send it back and I will refund the price, but not the shipping (otherwise abuses could occur, however, I am flexible, so if you want another painting instead, we could make some accomodation in the shipping cost).

If you are interested in renting a painting, we can talk. Basically, we could do a lease, after which you get the option of applying that fee to the price of the painting, or could ship it back.

I am also available for art consulting and for on-site installations, commissions, and site-specific works. I will even do dog portraiture if that is your thing (Good Lord, I hope not, though), and I have become pretty handy at restoring and touching up religious statues.

So, at the risk of turning this blog into the sort of blog that is always flogging work for sale, take this as an announcement that Erik's Rants and Recipes will begin functioning as an online gallery within a week.

If you like what you see, buy it, and spread the word!

One final note: feel free to link to and to post images on posts on your non-commercial blogs, so long as you credit the image with a link and post the copyright notice. If you want to use one of my images on your permanent template, that is probably fine, just ask my permission first.

Thank you.

The End of an Era... And a Question

Everyone knows that lead can be bad for you. What most people don't know is that lead artists' paint, when properly handled, is fairly benign stuff. The oil that is the vehicle for the paint effectively isolates the lead carbonate, preventing almost all absorbtion. And, most artists I know take care to not ingest their paints.

However, because of the hysteria against this wonderful pigment, it is getting harder and harder to find good lead oil primer. Fortunately, I still have some stockpiled. But I am getting down to the end, and will have to find a new source. The various titanium/zinc substitutes simply do not handle quite the same way.

If we want to see a rebirth of traditional painting, we need to ensure that artists have access to traditional materials. If it comes down to it, I have some pure lead and am prepared to make my own lead carbonate and to grind it into paint. However, handling the unbound powdered pigment is far more hazardous than the paint that is produced in factories and comes already in oil.

I could make a primer from flake white, but that is not really as cost effective as getting a ready-made lead oil primer.

I am no luddite. I have recently switched from rabbit skin glue for my canvas sizing to PVA glue size, mostly because I have been convinced by the literature that pva is better resistant to changes in humidity, and thus stabler.

But they can take my lead paint away when they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers (probably death induced by lead poisoning, nevermind the fact that the linotype operators of yore, who worked constantly in hot, crowded rooms with pots of molten lead were tops in the printing industry for longevity).

What annoys me even more is the fact that Naples Yellow is endangered for the same reason. Have you ever used Naples Yellow? It handles beautifully and has a great color. The color of the substitutes is fine, but the paint is never as short and buttery as the real deal.

In a related note: has anyone ever primed a large canvas and, while priming, decided that it still does not have enough tension (and the keys have already been driven in quite far)? I am thinking of taking two sides off the bars and stretching those. Is this daft? Has anyone done something like this? Is this a conservation nightmare waiting to happen?