Calgary: City of my past's future

It mistakes the marketing for content in a mash of Oprah Winfrey MANIFEST DESTINY, Marshall McLuhan, and well aged puritanism.
It is a 14 year old girl. By accident she created the greatest Myspace profile in the world, but now she has to violently alter her life so that it could appear that one resulted from the other. But she doesn't know that the profile didn't HAVE to exist. She's made a mistake, thinking both are chosen.
How many times can I say the words "You can't lie your way into Heaven" in a 4 day stretch?
Yes Calgary.
And especially when I am in you: I am a Catholic.
It is the only way that I can make sense to you...there's other names, but I can't ask you to imagine what you cannot imagine. It feels like a head full of cat hair, allergic when I think of you and the crown of your head rubbing on the carpet...YOU KNOW something is there, but that part of your head can't make out shape at all. If you'd just turn your head, I swear your cheek would tell you that the empty streets are like that because you are not on them.

Boxing Day and further

Alchoholiday/ Boxing Day/ Friend Christmas was phenomenal.
I can still barely stand up.
More photos from Angela Yee here

I remember falling asleep during a Philip Guston film.

"When I first come into the studio to work, there is this noisy crowd which follows me there; it includes all of the important painters in history, all of my contemporaries, all the art critics, etc. As I become involved in the work, one by one, they all leave. If I'm lucky, every one of them will disappear. If i'm really lucky, I will too."
-Philip Guston

I remember falling asleep in drawing class while Don Kottman(The Coach) enthusiastically showed us some film on Philip Guston. I've never liked Guston's work, and use him as some kind of indicator when talking to other artists. I've just never met anyone who counts Guston as an influence who made good paintings, illustrators maybe, but painters no.
He did say something in that film about the "anyone could do that" response to his work. Something like: "Yes, anyone can do it, but not everyone can do it again again for their whole lives". While his work may speak more strongly to others, and feel to me like wood-paneled basements with stucco walls, his words have jangled around my head for years.

PS. Thank you to the anonymous poster who sent me this quote.

Friend Christmas

The yearly adventure that is "going home for Christmas" has had its pitfalls, but Boxing Day/ Friend Christmas has never been one of them.
Me. Jesse Proudfoot. Twyla. Gallons of Christmas Cheer, aged to perfection.
This has everything to do with painting.

I'm gonna win the art fight with this analogy

"But that's like assessing the merits of a newborn baby by the sexual position through which it was conceived"

There is an imaginary art fight going on in my head 24 hours a day.

PS. this popped into my head after seeing the Rodney Graham Exhibit at the MACM...I'm far too lazy to bother backwards-engineering what the analogy is referring to....if you know his work maybe it makes sense, maybe I'm just slipping on wanting to prove how wrong other artists are. I'll just store the analogy in some internal bank and if you're lucky I'll start saying it over and over one night drunk with you next to me.

PPS. I actually really, really love Graham's upside-down-tree photos.

This and That...No, sorry Pots and Pans....No Wait, Paint and Sex

I've not finished a paintings since the end of August.
I have spat fire at the mention of sex since about the same time. Indeed I've sung the Television Personalities song "Paradise is for the blessed (not for the sex obsessed)", and asserted I will get a shirt printed with Fuck Sex.

Three paintings are in the midst of being completed.
Each night I dream sex and plot lines that seem like young adult literature.

I am always amazed at how uneasy people get with my expressions of disdain for sex in times like the past couple of months, and know that this post will be received like a prodigal son tale and relief will be expressed at my having returned from sexless illness.

Days unravel nicely.

I find that I don't really read anything online, just skim.
This means that I mistake comments on blogs for blog content.
This was the case with seeing the following on Dennis Cooper's blog:
"Other folks I know manage blogs that might interest regular readers here, and yourself. I like a blog called vananodyne, and the blog maintained by painter Wil Murray... I share some connections with both of these people, but WTF, I admire them and this will probably be my last post here..."

I am delighted by having spent the day trying to figure out where this Mr. Cooper would have seen my work, and why he would express admiration for me. I decided to try to find some of his work and read it. I really had a lovely time.... and found a good blog.
I invited him for a studio visit if he were ever in Montreal and he expressed interest.

The comments were in fact made by a friend in Vancouver, John Veldhoen(whose expression of admiration is well appreciated).

This is not unlike how paintings get made. Whole series of actions based on all kinds of assumptions and conclusions made without sufficient information. I have always said that a huge component of my work is my absolute hatred of researching things properly in order to properly replicate them. I am more able to suss out a version with what I have readily available to me in the studio. In the end, I never wind up with the thing I am attempting to do, but rather some frankenstein that has far more to do with the rash and the ridiculous than the original object, or the desire to replicate it. That fleeting time where you build a fuck of a lot on something you're not even looking at anymore, or checking for stability.

Hyperbolic mistakes , and the arrogance they provide take me where I didn't know I wanted to be.