Upcoming Show!

I will be participating in the inaugural show at Avant-Garde Gallery, 925 South Street, Peekskill New York, which begins May 6th.

Being shown are:


Ascension, copyright 2005 MJAndrade



Modern Theology, copyright 2005 MJAndrade



Lazarus, Come Out, copyright 2004 MJAndrade

Domm domm Da DA!

I successfully added a memory module to the iBook this morning, doubling my RAM.

Me,...

...the guy Apple Tech Support has to tell "check to see if the computer is plugged in" when I call with a start-up problem...



...it must be the coffee.

Gendercide

Ayaan Hirsi Ali who with Theo Van Gogh made the film "Submission" and is a Dutch Legislator (while hiding due to death threats related to Van Gogh's murder) has written a truely frightening article about Women's Rights and the staggering statistics of murder, deaths and disapearances of women across the world.

The editorial is at the International Herald Tribune site.

H/T Charles Johnson of littlegreenfootballs.com

Since I don't know how much posting I'll get done, I'll forward you to someone who writes much more eloquently than I. Assistant Village Idiot has a wonderful post on Ionesco.

It makes me want to pull out my old theatre books and anthologies.

Of course, if I could do that, I'd have time to write more posts.

Apologies,

I have not been posting as much as I'd like. Life has become very interesting. We have added a little foster child (a wonderful little girl) to our family, and I have been focusing on completing the latest painting. Also, I will be driving Tuesday to Peekskill, New York to submit three pieces for the openning show of a new gallery there. I will do my best to keep things going here, but it may continue to be sparse for a while...

Thoughts on being an Iconoclast

A lot of the old family photos have ended up in my hands, so I began scanning them at the highest resolution I could and loaded them onto a Flickr page (see side bar) so that family could see them as well. I also began loading some stuff I had shot, and old resources and research that I had always meant to digitize but had never gotten around to doing. Needless to say, it's become a bit of a monster, with almost 1300 images uploaded in the last two months.

However, it is not without its value.

Flickr has numerous groups focusing on everything from A to Z, including artists. So I began to load low-res versions of some of my paintings, sketches, and step-by-step photos of the painting process, and then posting these to some of the appropriate groups. The response has been very encouraging.

One particular response from a very kind gentleman was this, "Anybody who is an iconoclast can't be all bad."

Looking at the rest of his comments and the time-stamps, I'm not sure if he had time to follow the links to my website and see "Iconoclastic Realism" in the title, or if he chose that word because of the image he was commenting on. Either way, it got me wondering what people think when I say I am an iconoclast?

From a cultural standpoint, the last fifty years have been fraught with change. Virtually every norm, moral, scruple, and standard have been questioned, and a vast number have simply been jettisoned. There is no doubt that my children are growing up in a very different culture than that which my parents knew as children. The slogan "challenge authority" has become the new authority. Speech codes, diversity by enforced quota (not by providing equal opportunity for merit) "fake but accurate," PC religion and the cult of the victim are the moral landscape of today. Common sense, common decency, truthfulness instead of agenda, and personal responsibility are out the window.

Yet when I look at culture, what passes as 'edgy' art is still focused on the same topics as it was in the Sixties. Of course, with the wide changes in our culture the subjects are all now moot, and so artists are left only to try to be more shocking than last year's art. So instead of trying to promise sexual freedom, art now offers sexual degradation and objectification. Instead of trying to promise a new enlightenment by experimenting with religions foreign to our uptight parents, art now assails faith itself. Up rooting the Old was the foundation of the ideals of the Boomer generation. However, up rooting and foundation laying are diametrically opposed. And so the undermining of 'the Establishment' has led to a new Establishment that has no idea what to do next.

Yes, I am an iconoclast. But that may not mean what you think it means, for the icons have changed.

UPDATE, for a look at this subject in action, see Sissy Willis' take on the Whitney Biennial

Memento Mori


drawing of coyote skull, copyright 2006 MJ Andrade

Other sketches here, here and here

Previous Memento Mori here and here

If Warhol Had Photoshop







of course, he wouldn't be using my face...




from an antique photo of my cousin, upon graduating high school

Sigmund, Carl & Alfred have an excellent piece on the continual and premeditated failure of the education system. It is a long post, but if you have kids, want to have kids, or care about kids it is well worth reading and following the links.

When stuff like this is going on, I can't help but wonder why so many people look at us strangely when we say we homeschool our kids.

This was so good I have stolen (uh, reprinted, yeah - that's it! Reprinted!...ed.) this in whole cloth from Dr. Sanity.



Introducing the new Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge device, trade named: BOOK

BOOK is a revolutionary breakthrough in technology: no wires, no
electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on.
It's so easy to use, even a child can operate it.

Compact and portable, it can be used anywhere -- even sitting in an
armchair by the fire, yet it is powerful enough to hold as much
information as a CD-ROM disc. Here's how it works:

BOOK is constructed of sequentially numbered sheets of paper
(recyclable), each capable of holding thousands of bits of information.
The pages are locked together with a custom-fit device called a binder
which keeps the sheets in their correct sequence.

Opaque Paper Technology (OPT) allows manufacturers to use both sides of
the sheet, doubling the information density and cutting costs. Experts
are divided on the prospects for further increases in information
density; for now, BOOKS with more information simply use more pages.

Each sheet is scanned optically, registering information directly into
your brain. A flick of the finger takes you to the next sheet. BOOK may
be taken up at any time and used merely by opening it.

BOOK never crashes or requires rebooting, though like other display
devices it can become unusable if dropped overboard. The "browse"
feature allows you to move instantly to any sheet, and move forward or
backward as you wish. Many come with an "index" feature, which
pin-points the exact location of any selected information for instant
retrieval.

An optional "BOOKmark" accessory allows you to open BOOK to the exact
place you left it in a previous sessioneven if the BOOK has been closed.
BOOKmarks fit universal design standards; thus, a single BOOKmark can be
used in BOOKs by various manufacturers. Conversely, numerous BOOK
markers can be used in a single BOOK if the user wants to store numerous
views at once. The number is limited only by the number of pages in the
BOOK.

You can also make personal notes next to BOOK text entries with an
optional programming tool, the Portable Erasable Nib Cryptic
Intercommunication Language Stylus (PENCILS).

Portable, durable, and affordable, BOOK is being hailed as a precursor
of a new entertainment wave. Also, BOOK's appeal seems so certain that
thousands of content creators have committed to the platform and
investors are reportedly flocking. Look for a flood of new titles soon.



If you don't regularly read Dr. Sanity you should.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Lucy Lawlesses?

We don’t have cable, so the only way I can keep up with Battlestar Galactica is to wait till the season is over and download it from iTunes. (Waiting for the end of the season means I don’t mess up and overlook an episode.) I just watched ‘Final Cut’ guest staring everyone’s favorite warrior princess, when the above title free-associated in my head. That lead to the realization that Edward James Olmos wasn’t very good at “retiring” evil androids in ‘Bladerunner’ either. Then again, if the Battlestar was commanded by Rick Deckard, the season would only last 117 minutes, and that’s the director’s cut.

Alexandra Von Maltzan at All Things Beautiful has an excellent and clearly written post on the differences between Islam's view of Allah and Western Christianity's belief in God.

Go read it

Hell's Angels sue Disney for intellectual property violations.

I just saw a news report saying that the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club is suing Disney for using the club's trademarked name and logo in a yet-to-be-released movie.

Disney sued for trademark infringement, it's just too rich! Michael Eisner must be spinning in his grave.


...oh, wait! He's not dead yet.

UPDATE: Here is an article on the suit by the BBC

Ceramic Chinese horses at the MFA












These have are my favorite objects at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The glazes are beautiful and subtle. The forms are graceful, at rest and yet dynamic. There is no way to capture them properly in an image (even if the quality were much better than these shots). If you are in Boston, it is well worth your time to go see the museum, even if it's just to gaze at these for a while.

Sketching

Going through my old sketchbooks I found this...


head of a young woman, after Michelangelo, copyright 2004 MJAndrade

I had done this in a sketching session with a private student I had two summers ago. Looking at it I realized that it is the only piece of sketch-work I had done in years just for the sake of sketching. All of my drawing has been subservient to my painting projects. It really felt like I had lost my chops. Yesterday I did the 'Deacon' of the previous post. Now I've decided to sketch every day for at least an hour. Below are the most recent. I will post new ones (of quality) as they are finished.


Head from the Gallery of Kings, Notre Dame, Paris - copyright 2006 MJAndrade - #2 5mm lead on paper with dark sketching lead


the Prophet Haggai, copyright 2006 MJAndrade - Gioconda conte pencils on paper