I am sorry if I ever stepped on your drawing. It was disrespectful.

My mother has a very nice handwriting - so does my father, but his is not cursive. My mothers handwriting was created years ago in the old school. She was taught, by strickt teachers and repitition was a big part of it.

Her handwriting is outstanding. Everything about it is great and it makes me sick. Well, actually it doesn’t, but drawings that to the same degree reflect a cultural indoctrination makes me puke. Womit my guts out.

There can be many nice things said about drawings and many drawings are awesome, but the two drawings I have been working on suck. One is of Harpo Marx and the other is of one of the mittens from Monument Valley.

First of all I am working on glass matting(glassfibre fabric). It is the stuff you glue onto walls before painting them - to make sure you get a smooth fine surface, and that the paint wont crack if the walls expand or contract due to weather changes. My surface is created just like a wall prepared for painting. Thin layers of spackle are applied and sanded down creating a flat fine very receptive surface. Anyway it appears to me that the drawings are born bad - the highly prepared surface is just too old school. It is too much happy high school art teacher. It is too easy to like. Too preaproved to make the grade. It is, I guess, too much work towards something pretty and not enough is’ness. It is fake. It is not what it is. It is manipulated into being aestetichally pleasing. Maybe it should be challenging(but maybe not).
Like my mothers handwriting. It is born to too many peoples liking. There is nothing new under the sun. And that was what I wanted. I wanted to make things simple and just have charcoal drawings on a white surface. It is easy to sand it down and I wanted the marks from the different layers of drawings to show through - like the renaissance pedimenti or what ever it was called. But it was just to crappy.

I love Monument Valley, though. I love the name and how it came to be. Years and years of ’sannding’. I love it, beacuse to me the name embodies everything that is terrible about the western view of the world - eurocentric view, or what ever you want to call it.

I also like using Harpo Marx. I mean a funny guy, who doesn’t talk. What better image can you put out into the world - artworld.

Anyway these drawings just ended up really boring and crappy - and maybe that is why my moms handwriting suck. I wanted them to be inspirred by Alex Dodges computer drawings. The crisp thin line, but then layered over eachother sanded down. Giving it some sort of mistery, nostalgia etc. etc.

I still like the material, but it wont be used for drawing on - it will be used for painting on. With housepaint - interior housepaint. Inspirred by Kurgan Waves - the Joe Bradley exhibition. In my own weird way I guess. Anyway hopefully soon you can see pictures of what has happened with all this. Art Copenhagen is coming up.
By the way, I also tried painting some smoke on one - it was smoke from bombs in Irak 2003, but it could be from anything burning. It just seems to me that everytime I make some sort of representation or image I get so sick of it I want to puke. It feels contrived and boring. Set in stone. I don’t know. Maybe I need to revert to my ‘natural’ images, like the creek Rob brought into studio in school - at least that was interesting to look at.

ELvis Costello wrote an opera, The Secret Songs(The Secret Arias!), for The Royal Opera in Copenhagen during the 200th birth year of Hans Christian Andersen. The story covered PT Barnuum’s succesful signing and touring of Jenny Lind, a swedish singer and love of HC’s life. The opera never showed in full(yet!), but the preview was amazing. Elvis performed as PT and HC, the sound was Elvis material and reflected his back catalogue, but also the environment of the Opera and its context.

It only just dawned on me that Costello might have drawn a parallel bewtween himself and PT Barnum - and in general to artists being “The Biggest Humbugs in the World”(a PT book title) or self declared as “The Greatest Show on Earth”.

PT Barnum is known as the father of modern advertising - everything you hear and see on the home shopping network can be indirectly attributed to him. And I guess pre-mortem succesful artists all have well proportioned self promotional skills in common - if not also ability.

So the question today as an artist must be how to define ones target group and direct ones promotion towards them. Should one sell out and buy into the modern ideas of bohemia that our culture still seem revel in and appear so rampant in NYC’s Lower East Side i.e. in Jefrey Deitch’s self acclaiming “Live through this” book. Artist struggles, roughness of life - the same old story, Scenes de la Vie Boheme (”Scenes of Bohemian Life”), published in 1845 and Pucinni’s opera La Boheme, the same group of people and the same ideas that Emile Zola furhters or tries to revamp in his L’Oevre and that has been continued by our cultural legacy of hopelesly romanticizing art historians and critics - who might have been noticing the need for collectors and our society in general to historicize (wether Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini using the grave of Emperor Augustus or someone buying the most expensive Klimt ever) and now tie themselves to the lower class or bohemian lifestyle of the avant garde - reckless-wild- nerve- etc. etc. Rent and Moulin Rouge has proved popular in ‘post-modern’ times testifying to a soft spot in western culture for these ‘heroes’ of the avant garde - discarding life and the actual story of these individuals - truth.

Come on! Shouldn’t we get real instead of getting intoxicated and calling ourselves free or reckless.
I would venture as far as to give my audience the honest story, but maybe I should start a stint of heroin addiction and live in the gutter for a while, to become a true artist. Life as it is lived by millions of people might fall short of being TRUE artist material. Ok - so heroin might a tad old.

I guess I think that Elvis Costello by making his HC Andersen opera about the unfulfilled love of Jenny Lind and HC Andersen displayed by PT Barnum as the master of humbug is telling me someting about art never satisfying the creator and that no matter what your story is, just call it The Greatest Show in The World and people will buy the tickets.
Getting of my high horse I strained my ancle and felt very sorry