CIA Report

With this damning CIA report, I thought I would go through the archive and find some images of the Bush admin.

I did a couple of images for an imagined Tarot card deck that had W.Bush as the fool walking off the edge into Iraq. You have Gitmo as the Tower card, incorrectly I made Rumsfeld the devil card and Cheney the Hermit, based on the way he was always hidden from view like the Emperor in Star Wars.

Upon Seeing My Painting Again

We went to a friend's house for a great dinner a few weeks back, this piece is theirs now, from my 2011 Loop gallery show, Life Lessons.  Looking at these characters again, I was struck how the central character reminded me of one of my mom's strange Moroccan wives tales. 

The story is about, on the surface, about a woman who can't stay home, even naked because she is a busy body. But on another level, I think the story was about female sexual curiosity. 

Amazing how you paint something, and with time another layer of meaning comes through, even to the artist. 

Hey! a great review in NOW magazine for my current Loop show. You can read it, NOW Thanks to everyone who has supported me with getting this show ready, and opening on time. Thanks for the support from my Sarah and our baby sitting Grandma/Meme team and the copious amounts of Coffee from Jet Fuel and Rooster.

The start of something new

I've been working a lot in the last few months in the studio, and as a result seem to have done less posts, doing more tweets (@ericfarache) around my last show at the artist project. Anyhoo, I'm trying to forge something new these days, a bit a similar content but a different approach to the paper, going to try and really play with the whole space...which is ironic that I am posting a picture of this unfinished piece as it is mostly white space like my previous work- I'm playing with some abstract elements too.

I was driving around this city looking for a coffee, it has felt like a desperate situation, I was doing a loop in a plaza that had a Michaels, saw this guy leaving how looked a lot like this guy, our Michael Baumgart. Same glasses, same wry look, the guy in the parking lot may have one upped Michael as he had a little straw hat on versus Michaels military style ball cap and had a 12" long bristle brush is his mouth like a long stem rose, off to go an romance his canvas I suppose. Perhaps I like Mr. Baumgart's understated manner more when i think of it.

Painting studies continue

I have held on to these weird head sculpts for years, I got them in a trade with this psycho bastard who would want these toy parts for some weird thing he was doing with star wars or some shit. I would make the trade with him with hopes of re-configuring my old broken down GIJoes but it was never worth it as he would bring up the whole thing at a party or a bar when I was talking to a group of ladies. Total nerd-bot.

Inspiration

I have been looking at a number of sources for new inspiration, not for changing the direction of my previous work, but rather to keep pushing on, to deepen and fill out what I have been working on since my last Loop show with Larry. Anselm Kiefer has always been an inspiration for me, a master it seems in everything he touches. Sarah found these pieces on the Met's website when we were talking about art and inspiration the other night. The images have an intensity that I just love.

Scotty portraits

Here is a new photograph from this week of Scotty, I think this will be for his promo stuff.

I was pretty happy with the way this turned out, I had this image of Scotty under broken glass and that seemed to come together pretty well.

I also wanted to do some water colour paintings:

But the first one came out like I do not know what and there was no time for a third. This doesn't look too much like him but there is a feel here that I am happy with-

I was thinking a bit about the later work of the artist Francesco Clemente who is a damn genius and his portraits are stunning.

Just look at this one of Keith Haring, obviously done in the 80s

Clemente was part of the 80s Village scene, the breadth of his work is inspiring.

Paintings from this summer

Forgot all about these three 12x12 inch paintings from the AWOL square foot show.

Yes the work in that things ranges from artwork to insane crap, but hey, it was nice to have a deadline.

This centaur seems to keep resurfacing in this body of work, he is something of my totem animal- a mascot but also something that is a representation of the animalistic desires within people.

There is a certain sense of innocence that I was playing with here, somewhere between Darger and Disney.

Here is a little Darger, not a Dzama

But you can see how much Marcel Dzama studied the decrepit borderline pedo.

I just googled images of Disney and everything that came up for about 17 pages was computer generated, the images look so dead, not surprising I guess- but poor Ariel, she must so disheartened with nothing but her Dinglehopper to console her.

I have been using the image of trees and cameos. I feel that cameos are such an ancient and potent image of women. There is something so special about that.

Trees: old trees, trees of knowledge- what that knowledge means and do you really want that knowledge? Perhaps leaving well enough alone may be in our best interests at times.

Fire Jumper

Gaddafi plays with Libyans as if they are Toy Soldiers

Yes, Mr. Gaddafi, your people love you.

Yes, you are proving each day that they lay down their lives as you mow them down.

No matter how much of an insane megalomaniac Gaddafi seemed in the 1980s, he is outdoing himself in the present.

What really irks me with the SNL send up of Gaddafi recently is that they just straight mimicked his Africa pin rather than making that in the LIVEAID logo, as so much of that money was un-tracked and no one knows how much went to starving people and how much went to despots.

By the way, did you ever watch LIVEAID? That Saturday was really hot in Toronto and the last thing I wanted to be doing was staying at home watching a concert so I popped in a VHS tape ( my Dad always kept the Beta to himself)turned on the VCR and promptly forgot about it for about 10 years. SO, somewhere between 1995-2000 I watched the concert of the decade. It was, merdeloaf. Anyway you cut it, it was MERDE. For serious.



But I still have the tape and the commercials are the bomb, you cannot believe it was 1985, it looks like the 1980 or 1979. Commercials for Vodka Cooler and crap like that. Ok, ok, Queen was ok, Bono was already the Bono he is now, but we were 15 years away from realising that.

Anyways, back to tyrants....

But as Brutus was to have said and more recently John Wilkes Booth, who shouted Sic semper tyrannis, after shooting Lincoln and then jumping from the presidential box at the Ford theatre and onto the stage during the performance of My American Cousin (Sic semper tyrannis = thus always to tyrants {their brutal endings} is the translation ) but, in relation to Gaddafi, when I ask you, when???

Of course this is a mixed message as the senate behind the Julius Caesar assassination were a bunch of a holes and Booth was a racist narcissist.

Still, I hope you get the idea.

While we wait for some form of brutal ending for Gaddafi, I would prefer he played with toy soldiers instead of real people. He seems to be obsessed with toys, he has a cadre of expendable toy soldiers around him and his famous 40 female virgins that are his Amazon body guards.

Maybe what he needs is a few ACTUAL toy soldiers and less toying with real people.

Here are a couple of toys I painted a few months back. These 2 watercolour sketches show some GI Joes, both clothed and naked like Helmut Newton's photo of models from years gone by.

More sketches from Buenos Aires...Tango.

These are a few sketches of the very popular tango scenes down here, I liked watching all the people on the sidelines- a real interesting assortment of Lautrec to Bruegel types if you catch my drift.

These dance halls are interesting as you have some ancient creepy cronies and young people, a real mix.

I didn't think it was too fair to sit near the front, it would afford me the best view but would block people from the subtle head and eye movements that say whether or not a dance is on.



This Milonga, was set up like a high school dance, wallflowers against the long walls, men to one side, women to the other.




The lady in the middle of the above painting had crazy collagen implants on her lips that seemed to have gone sideways or something, blobs above and below her lips, it was hard to portray that.

More to the left, the woman in the red skirt is Christine, an Australian woman who is staying in the same place as us, soon after this picture was completed she danced with a guy who stomped on her toe and ripped the nail off, yikes.

working sketches

working in the sketchbook on some ideas for an upcoming show at Loop. Here are just a few of the things I'm playing with at the moment.





These sketches are my thoughts and creating the type of short hand that my new work will come out of in the next few weeks. With these pictures, I was thinking of British-Portuguese artist, Paula Rego. Her work about childhood and her handling of materials is always an inspiration.




On a totally different note, when I was in the market on Sunday I painted a few small sketches in watercolour of people, this is one of them. This guy gives a tango show, I won't bore you with the details, but he starts the music people all come together and then nothing happens for awhile and everyone leaves, or sometimes he dances, hard to figure out the reason.

Compare New and Old

Well, as promised, here are a few more watercolours from my recent trip to Buenos Aires coupled with a year old series I did on the beaches of Cuba.



This above image was done in the Plaza de Mayo, the red haired guy on the left was Federico, I think he was the producer of aforementioned TV series, he seemed to be a bit of a ring leader. As an aside, you see a great deal of people with red hair in Argentina, that may seem odd or perhaps a skewed result based on the fact that they stand out but hey, ponder this, my cousin is really a red head and her mom is from Argentina....I know!

Anyways, the couple on the right were from Calgary and I think had just arrived in town. I hit my stride with the simple and if i may say elegant profile of the lady's face (i don't remember their names) the guy seemed to like the portrayal of his special lady friend and took a photo and then stood beside her to watch the actor, well, act. I then included him into this painting which I guess looks a bit like a inflated image. He saw himself pictured like Mr. Macho and guffawed, which I think is a great reaction.



So here are some sketches I did on my birthday a year ago on the beach in Cuba, surrounded by rotund Quebec-ers who have zero desire to use a skin cream with a SPF factor. It was lobsterville, for serious. Anyways, this is what got me started on portraying people in this simple style versus using pencil or ink pen sketches. The large block forms and shapes of painting worked more for me, with hints of line drawing.

Plaza de Mayo

With my days in Buenos Aires winding down, I headed to the main square to do some painting. This place is known for protests but not much was going on this day, I think it was a Sunday? Anyways, instead of a protest there were a group of people shooting some sort of revolutionary recreation type thing for TV. Go figure.



If you look on the left hand side of the image, you see the television crew: far left in red is the make-up girl who asked me about immigrating to Canada and if she should go to Montreal; some crew members; the actor is the guy with the outstretched arm and beard; to the right of that the camera person with a 5D and an old lens and sound.

To the right of all that is a group of American tourists who were sitting in the park (actually my starting point, worked the other way across the page) the tourists were de rigueur annoying in the way you expect people to be, lame comments about the city and a insane allegiance to an overuse of the words 'like' and 'dude'.

As an aside, I have to admit that the Moleskine Watercolor Sketchbook has been really terrific for me for the past year: Cuba, Morocco and now Buenos Aires, the paper is great which has been what has been lacking with other Moleskine products for 'arty' pursuits. At some point I will upload these really crude (read rudimentary) paintings I did in Cuba which sort of got me started on this style of character depiction with watercolours.

Buenos Aires - Watercolour

These are a few of some recent watercolour sketches I made while in Buenos Aires over the holidays. We went to the horse track, the Hippodromo to be exact. These Jockeys had incredible satin outfits and I had about a minute to paint them before they go on their horses and took off. I was taking a picture of these Jockeys and guards stopped me-saying no photos. I pulled out my watercolour set and started to work.



This is one of the riders as they prepared for a race. This guy is the second person in on the watercolour above- with one minute to work with, they are more of a suggestion than a painting. This was Dec 31st, it was 20 +C in Buenos Aires, just a great day, not to mention we bet on the last race of the day and won!



I sat in a little coffee shop near the Once district and watched people go about their week day, slowly painting this over the course of probably an hour, watching the changes in the end of day traffic.

The girl who is in the lower right corner of this painting is part of a group of people who collect all the cardboard and bottles in Buenos Aires, they go by the name cartoneros,. Mostly it is gruff weathered bachelors who push these immense nylon bags on rollers around town but this girl was part of a family who were scavenging. She stopped for a moment and looked around. I would have liked to follow these groups of people around and get to know who their life is, and I'm sure it ain't easy. There story is I'm sure about the suffering lower income people have suffered since the economic collapse.

Anyways, more paintings to follow.

Automatic Television Portraits

While staying in this hotel room, i actually have a TV for once. To clarify- there is nothing on TV worth watch, NOTHING.


Having said that, I noticed these two southerners being interviewed last night. On the right, Jimmy Carter who was on the CBC show, The Hour with George. Still articulate, he talked about a bunch of other things. On the left, Dolly Parton, who was on this show that has not changed since the 80s and has these weird production values- i thought it was from the 80s (Dolly does not age) till they started talking about Julie&Julia with Meryl Streep. . These sketches were made from the moving images while lying in a king size bed.

Blossoms on a tree

An unfinished Japanese style book

Japanese foldout Moleskine, I started this when I got back from China, based on things I saw, my images etc, but I never finished it and now it is just too long ago.