Category: Art

Posted on

Update Website, A Sale

Okay, cats and kittens, I’ve uploaded my new Thundercrack! series to my website.

I just made a big sale–including one of my larger pieces, and over the internet! I’m hoping the collector read correctly that one of them is 10 feet tall–and have been busy getting those pieces printed and framed, as well as getting everything printed and framed for the Portland and NYC shows. I don’t like being this busy. But I’ve only one more piece to make for the Thundercrack! series, and then I’m taking the rest of the year off to watch the leaves fall off my plum tree.

Posted on

Calling All Bears

Okay, so the BEAR BODY show is going to happen. (We definitely need a catchier title–but no slashes, dis’s, con’s, or ism’s–any ideas?) 20055, February, at the LAB, San Francisco. Here’s the list so far:

Su-Chen Hung
Chris Komater
Dean Smith
Chris Vandemore

Conspicuously missing from this list are visual artists (real ones, BC) of a more hefty furry nature, making visual art about their own bodies. We need about 4 more artists. I have a short list of artists who interest me, but since we envision this show as representing a balance between lesser-known and seasoned artistic sensibilities, please pass on any names of artists you know who might be appropriate. We’re not looking for the soft-core bear porn schtick, but work that addresses the eroticization and aestheticization of body hair and weight subtly, even abstractly. Okay, we’d show the bear porn stuff, but it’s got to be really good.

The LAB is a cavernous space, with 20 foot high walls, and I’m thinking of making something really big. Big and hairy. Or something really really small, since smallness will be amplified by the space and the subject matter and given a certain grandeur by juxtaposition.

Posted on

Thunder and Chinese Food

Okay, so I’ve come up with a few ideas. They don’t look too much like my mock-up of a few days ago, except that the first one is a near reversal of the mock-up (I use an old Hasselblad and everything’s backwards). In the first piece, your eyes are drawn to the left, but to a space that’s kind of confusing, and just not very interesting. It’s that ass in the upper left corner that I want your eyes drawn to–and the images below it seem to have too much weight, drawing you away. Perhaps this is good?

The second piece I feel is easier to look at, and there’s a nice tension between the left and right sides–the eyes are directed into the work through the ass and out the other side–cachoong! I want some fabric in there, though, and is it too simple…?

I want to tell you about my dinner last night, in Chinatown. I’m not going to tell you the name of the restaurant, because you’ll have to promise to take me there in order to get it out of me. $35 prix fixe. My friend Su-Chen organized the dinner, and was one of two people in our group who could communicate with the chef/owner, who speaks only chinese. The eight of us filled the restaurant–Su-Chen, Bob, me, Michael, Denny and Ed, and Jeff and Nick. Jeff and Nick were new to me, and made a striking and dynamic couple–one a furry round software engineer with a goatee and Madras shirt, the other a slim Taiwanese recent MFA graduate with ultra cool brushed metal rectangle glasses and white Guyabera shirt. Anyway, there were 12 appetizer courses, and 14 main courses that I can remember, each a meticulously prepared work of culinary art. The cuisine was based mainly on jiangzhe cuisine, from around Shanghai. Most dishes were lightly sauced, and with a few bright ingredients each, except for a small ham hock cooked in a brown sugar/soy sauce that was the one heavy note, oh wait, and the inside-out fried fish with the sweet tomato sauce. Here are the dishes that I can remember…

APPETIZERS

Boiled peanuts
Pressed sliced tofu
Soft tofu with chinese greens
Drunken chicken
Salty duck
Compressed tofu with malanto greens
Deep fried crispy shrimp
Jelly fish salad
Sliced 5-spice beef

MAIN COURSES

Scallops with egg white
Orange beef
Squid with mystery stems
Kung-pao chicken (you’ve never had it like this!)
Pork with brown sugar sauce
Shrimp
Julienned snow peas and bamboo shoots
Julienned celery and compresses tofu
Tofu and edamame
Wheat glutten cubes with fava and ginko beans
Mushroom and basil skewers
Whole fried fish, with sweetened tomato sauce
Whole duck with yellow plum sauce
Crispy garlic eggplant

DESSERT

Corn and coconut milk soup

Mmmmmmmmmmm….

Posted on

Parrots, Shaving, New Piece, Voice Recognition

It’s been a while, blog, and I haven’t been terribly busy, just lazy, eating lots, drinking more, entertaining out-of-town guests from New York, the midwest, and Tokyo while also enjoying some time alone in the house while Bob’s been away on vacation, and not getting a thing done, although I am working out again, after a 3 (or 6) month hiatus. Yesterday the Parrots of Telegraph Hill (a noisy flock [?] of 80 or so parrots that were set loose in San Francisco around 1972) came and visited my hawthorne tree, having a sensational time eating the berries and squawking hysterically. I love them. Around this time of year they come to my garden and eat the berries and poop all over the place. Just like relatives.

I shaved my beard off this morning. I haven’t been able to convincingly transform myself into a bear, or even a cub, so it’s back to being a twinky–a 36 year old one, though, with 20 extra pounds and graying hair. This is not an age that I know what to do with. Can I fast-forward to old and distinguished?

Okay, so it’s back to work tomorrow. I have to finish this piece for my show in Portland this week. Big Chrissy is going to model for me tomorrow. I’m taking no chances, and have designed the outline for the piece.

I usually don’t work this way, so I’m extremely nervous that it’s not going to work, especially since I’m starting with a 2-dimensional draft and I want to make a piece that’s multi-dimensional. Typically I respond to my subject without a finished piece in mind, and then find inspiration in the individual images, piecing them together like a jigsaw puzzle. Stay tuned for the results… or the lack thereof.

I and BC are bonding with our G4s–we’ve discovered the voice recognition software. Frequently I can be heard screaming “Computer, BEARLICIOUS” or “Computer, FUR BEAR DOT NET.”

Handsfree, finally.

Posted on

Portland in November

It looks like I’ll be showing some new work, possibly just one big piece, in a three-person show in Portland, Oregon, in November. TJ Norris is opening up a gallery there, called SOUNDVISION, that looks to be an exciting addition to the west coast art scene. The other artists are Bruce Eves and Ira Tattelman, and the show is to be called Male v.2: disembodied + reconstructed. I’m thinking of making a single photographic piece that will either fill an entire wall or occupy it in some dynamic way–maybe a wall of lightning.

Does anyone know anybody in Portland?

Stay tuned…

Posted on

Third Thundercrack! and Studio Visit

So my meeting with the museum curator went great. She was very encouraging and amazingly honest. At one point she asked if she was being too rough, and when I responded that since most of my friends tend to be too nice to say “Chris, this isn’t working for me,” I encouraged her to be honest since I respect her opinion and that I could take it, well then she really let me have it, but it was all really accurate and smart and she even confirmed some of my own misgivings about several pieces. She said the work was very strong, and when looking at Scylla and Charybdis, she actually gasped and said, “I’ve never seen anything like this before…” and added that it showed a real deep engagement with my subject matter and with looking.

So anyway, this morning I went to see a film at the Jewish Film Festival that a friend of mine from New York, Lily made. It was a little gem about Lily’s relationship with her father, more specifically about her coming to terms with the complexity of her father, who cheated on his wife but then later took exquisite care of her in her dying days. Lily asks her bedridden dad, his legs amputated, why none of his children can communicate with him, and he just blows off her question–she’s left to deal with the subject on her own–and she does just that. Afterward we had lunch at Luna Piena, which I guess is now just Luna, with her west coast friends and family, and drank wine that David made. Which is probably why I have a headache at the moment.

Posted on

Tonight and Tomorrow

Well, the jam is pretty tasty, but I think I heated it to too high a temperature. It’s a little too firm, but still well within acceptable parameters. It’s hard to reach that delicate balance between runny and firm that your grandmother seemed to be able to reach without a candy thermometer.

Big Chrissy and I watched the new Todd Solondz film Storytelling tonight, which I thought was great. Not as stellar as Happiness–bleaker, and more cynical. The characters weren’t given as much depth, too. I find that he often creates characters who are defined by a particular flaw or idiosyncrasy (and sometimes even named after them, like “Hope” in Happiness), but rather than be limited by their one-dimensionality, they’re surprisingly complex. So although these characters were interesting and given great dialog, they seemed a little thinly drawn. I really like his directorial style, though, particularly in how stilted all the acting is, which somehow isolates the actors and draws attention to their actions and words, and abstracts the emotional content.

Tomorrow the museum curator is coming over to visit my studio. I’m hoping to finish this piece that I’ve been toying with for the last few weeks, so that I’ll have three pieces from my Thundercrack! series to show her in addition to all of my other obsessive works. Keep your fingers crossed!

Posted on

Bill J

The photographer Bill J came over for dinner last night. He’s in town housesitting for some friends, and rethinking his relation to his work. Since the 1980’s, he’s been making blurry shadowy portraits that evoke the sense of loss and faded memory associated with the AIDS epidemic.

He’s such a nice guy, and amazingly down-to-earth for an international artstar, and he seems to know everybody, including people from my past that I don’t even remember, or want to remember, or have forgotten for some very good reason. He went off to meet an old college buddy of mine from the Art Institute, Jim. Jim photographed black men, exclusively, ala Mapplethorpe, but with more edge, if you could imagine. During our crit classes, there’d be his naked black guys, my naked old guys (I hadn’t discovered hair yet), and Jason’s naked young guys (or self, can’t remember or distinguish between the two), providing much lively discussion about the male form, obsession, and desire.

Tonight it’s Ann Miller!!!!