Coming Soon. & On rats. From Daddy Wolf. From James Purdy.

"I don't object to animals, see. If it had been Mama Bird, say, which had come out of the hole, I would have had a start, too, as Mama Bird is seldom about and around at that hour, not to mention it not nesting in a linoleum hole, but I think i feel the way I do just because you think of rats along with neglect and lonsomeness and not having nobody near or around you"




Photos by James Schidlowsky

New Painting

Hey Girl You're Ruthless, Now So Am I. Hey, Hey
40" X 48" Acrylic On Board, 2006

Photos by James Schidlowsky

Sleep Does Not Have His House: Anna Kavan

A very rare bout of insomnia seems like the perfect time to discuss dreams.
Well, I did sleep for a few hours and woke up after a particularly vivid dream. Which I will not describe.
I ask that no one, ever, describe to me their dreams.
The Drowned World by Ballard was abandoned for placing a description of a character's dream on the first or second page.
Dreams, described in words, are inevitably wooden and exhausting, or far too fantastic and elaborate. It simply takes too long to describe in words what dreams provide instantaneously.
They are fast. We all know what they feel like. They are written so badly.
I have bought myself "Sleep Has His House" by Anna Kavan, due in no small part to the album which shares this title and a smashing author's photo. It looked like what I read.
Written in the third person, in the present tense, and consisting mostly of descriptions of dreams interspersed with biographical remembrances, I am finding it impossible.
It is missing terror and softness. The biographical bits become rafts. If she is to sit with me and the dreams described as if we were both seeing it for the first time, they are meaningless.
Without you, there's nothing in your dreams for me.

The Adoration of Sickness

"You are wrong that it was long ago I gave up thinking anything could be worked out on the surface. I have found it out, like everybody else, the hard way and only in the last years as a result of I think two things, sickness and success. One of them alone wouldn't have done it for me but the combination was guaranteed. I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies. Success is almost as isolating and nothing points out vanity as well. But the surface hereabouts has always been flat. I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both"

-Flannery O'Connor, 1956

Jacqueline Mabey wrote the text for a catalog of mine that never got published

Now she's working on her curating chops out in Vancouver:

Oh, What a Blow That
Phantom Gave Me!
20 January-
18 February 2007


Belkin Satellite
555 Hamilton Vancouver, BC

Opening reception:
Friday 19 January 8-10 p.m.


Raymond Boisjoly, Melanie Bond, Natalie Doonan, Jesse Gray, Joshua Hite, Paul Kajander, Marilou Lemmens & Richard Ibghy, Elizabeth Milton, Colin Miner, Ryan Peter, Kristina Lee Podesva, Sarah Turner

More Info Here

Dead Rat(s), One per day for the last two days.

Fuck the Terrorists, it is the Horrorists I am worried about.

No camera...
It was a grisly scene (stock photo at left, not my actual under-sink). Complete with blood splatters and whatever those marks are called....you know: the ones where an animal, blood spilling from its mouth and nose, thrashes around and smears said liquid all over the ground.
All the traps were snapped, but had not caught him in any way. I expect it was a rather macabre slapstick routine.
Oh, and a pool too. Not the turtle variety.

Loaded him into the thin white plastic coffin, printed with his death-name: Pharmaprix.
I thought to myself: "I've done all kinds of things in the name of my own biography. They're all bullshit" You feel the difference between one rat and an unspecified quantity somewhere near your clinched asshole.

He....no, one of them did bite me on the face last summer.

Sometime around dinner time, I think

I will have completed my 29th trip around the sun.
Happy Birthday to me.

Powder Coating: An Ode to My Father

My father, besides passing me rather good business sense and a bucketload of charm, directly affected my relationship to paint.
From the age of 12 to 22 I worked in nearly every capacity at Dwight's business Calgary Powder Coatings Inc.(if you don't know the process, buy me three beers and I will explain it...it involves a gigantic oven) . Besides making me most comfortable around bikers and dudes who work labour jobs, it gave me something that feels like insider knowledge about paint.
By seeing poorly-coated cured paint shearing off of metal, I was let in on a secret about paint. It has dimensionality, an underside. It does not just fill in a space with colour. This disallowed my becoming a painter uncursed by a curiosity about what I was painting and how it looked form the board's side.
Seeing the daily ridiculous of 100 panels flying past, all fuschia did something too.

This post doesn't do justice and feels like the old "I was built to be a painter" routine...how do you deal with experience and what it did to your work. Especially with how common attributing special to every memory you have is. It feels like saying I was a drug addict because I have addiction in my family....so what about my sister? Is she not one because off the same reason.

I have a lot of discomfort around discussing my upbringing and how it affects my work. Tomorrow I'll describe my Mother's work at Observation Nurseries Calgary and what that did.

The Letters Of Flannery O'Connor

On a recommendation from a friend I picked up a copy of "The Habit Of Being". Al selection of Flannery O'Connors letters from 1948-1964.
Feeling as if I have backed into my own Catholicism, this book is becoming something like sacred. As I described to Alex St. Onge the other night, it is not that I am seeking to return to Catholicism, more that I am finding that while I tried in many ways to empty my heart, it remained full and that hurt....all along I was Catholic with my eyes lowered to the horizon, but knew the horizon for what it was only because I knew what was above.
This all goes over like a lead balloon at parties. A fitting quote from the book mentioned above:

"I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. (She wrote that book, A Charmed Life) She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn't opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequecy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned to the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said that when she was a child and received the Host she thought of it as the Holy Ghost. He being the "most portable" person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, "Well, if it is a symbol, to hell with it." That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of my existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable."

It is that final sentence. Qualified by "outside of a story" that sets my head on fire.