Chickens, Chickens, Chickens and Guernica

Here it is Saturday morning again and I'm sitting here sipping coffee, reviewing my week, planning for the next.

One of my lovely artist myspace friends asked what it was with me and my chickens that I've been posting there.

I've been working on a better answer to the question for a while that may involve some discussion of western culture's roots - Plato's discussion of the real v. the ideal, the development of city-states, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, medieval concepts of God, Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy," monarchical forms of government and the feudal period, the Black Plague, the Renaissance, Flemish art, the importance of Venice as a cultural/artistic hub, Galileo's gazing at the heavens, Homer's The Odyssey, advances in science during the Enlightenment period, including theories of perspective, three dimensionality, the replacement of one planar surface with three planar surfaces in art, and later with two, or multiple perspective points, Einstein's revolution of science that came wtih his theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics, the Great Wars of the 20th century, its wholesale mechanization and industrialization of the War Machine, with its fragmentation and its destructions of whole worlds, reflected in the development of "modern" abstracted art forms, from Braque and Picasso, culminating in Guernica, to the elimination of representational art entirely, replaced by the emotive content of Kandinsky's synaesthesic works and the abstract expressionists, to Klee's mathematical precision, and the suprematists, to the importance of the artist him/herself as portrayed by the work, to Pollack's work culminating in the "action" paintings for which he is so well known through the 1950's, in which the "action" of the painting process is the focus, to the emergence of the popular culture and television and consumerism, Andy Warhol "pop" art, to post-modern contextualism, deconstructionist pyschosis and the impossibility of communication, and a multiple generations of millions and billions of our fellow human beings who have suffered and are suffering unfathomable conditions in this current world condition of ethnic bigotry, and religious zealotry, terrorist psycho-frenzy, mass murders, "pre-emptive" wars, on-going traumatic stress syndromic Military/Industrial Complex world Eisenhowerr warned us about.

But for now let's just say that my working theory is with all the strife, hunger, violence, corruption, greed, and hypocrisy in the world, a few more chicken paintings might help!

At the very least, it can't hurt!

So today, I'm painting another chicken. Maybe I'll call it "Anti-Guernica."

Bud