June 2004 Art of the Day Club Newsletter Vol 1, No. 2

Because of the overwhelmingly positive response I got from my first newsletter (two replies), I have decided to send out number 2. In the event that I am murdered (several of my friends are conspiring to purchase my art, kill me, and destroy all but a few copies of my pieces), there will be no further newsletters.

In light of this, I thought I might continue with pre-contextual pre-paradigmatic agio-historiobiographical data:

I was born, as were many of you. More on this later.

It has been a phenomenologically discrete journey fraught with spasmodic imploding jargon of lexicon of argot by the riverrun. Reality perceived,considered,and expressed which becomes another reality perceived to be considered and possibly expressed anew. Layers of impressed and expressed cubist integrated molecular disintegration and abstract seeing intellect numbing critical paranoia ala Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Van Gogh, August Macke, Hans Hoffmann, Lichenstein, Liebermann, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keefe, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns, Rembrandt, Rauschenberg, Warhol, DeKooning, Munch, Braque, Die Brucke, Chagall, Monet, Manet, Corot,Henri, Degas, Renoir, Pissaro, Kandinsky, Tanguy, Kirchner, Courbet, Chirico, Klimt, Leger, Michaelangelo, Calder, Modigliani, Mondrian, Watteau, Morisot, Duchamp, Turner, Seurat, Ensor, Ernst, Gauguin, Appolinaire,Klee, El Greco, Hals, Titian, Toulouse-Lautrec, Neel, Dove, Gorky, Hockney, Oldenburg, Parrish, Rosenquist, Stella Wood, Hopper, DeMuth, Marin, Wyeth, Wyeth Notteth, Eakins, Whistler, Prendergast, Childe Hassam, Davis, Avery, Sam Francis, Burchfield, Rossetti, Rothko, Rousseau, rubens, Sargent, Stuart, Pollock, Krasner, Winslow Homer, Hudson River School, the Regionalists, surrealists, the wild beasts, Pointillism, Bosch, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Raphael, Redon, the ash can school, the group of eight, the cubists, the orphic cubists, dadaism, French Academe, the impressionists, the abstract expressionists, the antwerp mannerists, the Albegenzian heretics, the Camden Art Group, New English Art group, Tenebrism, underparism, Norwich School, Barbizon school, art nouveau, tryptichism, pasticcio, perspectivism, linear composition, the neo-post modern retrospectivists, et. al. ( I looked up Van Gogh in an art history book I have and it says, "See, Gogh, Van.") Which I thought was interestingly but unnecessarily precise. Each of the above has influenced me in particular ways which I will get into later. So let's go.



My life has been a journey fraught with peril and puerile, much unlike the young boy victim/hero of Jerzy Kozinsky's novel, The Painted Bird, which coincidentally, myself and two others at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (Skau and Carroll) authored a fine critical essay published by The Polish Review. And much unlike too many others to mention such as Lewis Carroll, Carol O'Connor, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar to name just a few.

I grew up in a religious household in Oregon, Washington State, Wyoming, Utah, and Nebraska. My father was a Congregational minister which has roots in New England puritanism and the Pilgrims who the English were glad to see go. Four hundred and fifty years later, and a brush with Emerson and the Unitarians, this denomination became the United Church of Christ. My mother was raised Episcopalian. My mother's ancestors include the chief translator of the King James version of the Bible. My father's ancestors include Irish kings and vagabonds. My great grandfather's brother built the first oil refinery in Colorado in 1878? and my uncle was an electrician. In some ways not unlike the narrator of the young protagonist in James Joyce's Araby, which coincidentally enough, I also published a short critical piece about in The Explicator, along with Professor Skau at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, I have viewed life through a lens of religious belief and non-belief bordering on faith and non-faith. Wavering between faith and non-faith is a precarious balance of small proportions and daily effort. Perhaps the road to faith leads to the road of belief.

Music has also played a part in my life. More on that later.

Influences on and in my life and art include in no particular order other than this one:

Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Taos, New Mexico, Carlos Castenada, James Joyce, DH Lawrence, Tennyson, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkle, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Peter Max, Max Levy, Mahler, Tchaikovsky - especially the 1812 Overture, Dvorzak, Tolstoy, Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, Ramsey Clark, Jimmy Carter, General Patton, Relativity Theory, Hubble, Galileo, Leonardo DaVinci, Doestoevsky, Adam Smith, Adam and Eve, Mighty Mouse, Deputy Dawg, Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle, Perry Mason, Emily Bronte, thomas Hardy, the Hardy boys, John Milton, John Lennon, Thomas Jefferson, William Jefferson Clinton, Clint Walker, Johnny Walker, William Butler Yeats, John Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards, Rudyard Kipling, Richard Brautigan, e.e. cummings, William Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Casady, Butch Cassidy, Shakespeare, William Golding, Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Russell Means, Francis Bacon, Spencer, Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, HG Wells, Pierre Boulle, Sir Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Aristotle, Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, Atilla the Hun, A.O. Lovejoy, Sigmund Freud, Jung, Skinner, Karl Marz, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Jerry Ford, and others which will be named later.

timeliness (and/or timelessness) of art v. artlessness of time - I'm still working on what to say, but I thought it was a catchy phrase. I think it means something. Creation v. aging, permanence v. transience. Beauty v. chaos and entropy. permanence within transcience. Connection to the age and the disconnect of aging.


America Could be the Beautiful Shining City on the Hill. So far, the dream is greater than we are.

Oh beautiful for specious skies.
For iambic prayers for peace.
For people's fountains travesties above the towering trees.
America, America, God shed his blood for thee.
And gave his rood with much more good.
From thee to singing sea.




So endeth #2.

P.S. Happy Birthday to my Sister