News from the nest

The three Turdus merula have grown:

Me on Newchemicalhistory

Some of my paintings can now be seen on this site: New Chemical History.
Thank you very much Kieran Guckian.

Alentejo

Saturday, 11th I ate this for lunch (sopa de beldroegas). I didn´t eat all that cooked garlic.


Then I went to hang this exhibition at Monte dos Seis Reis.






In the afternoon after some glasses of excelent wine from Monte Seis Reis, I took a nap outside, surrounded by this views:

Too much beer

When you drink too much beer, you end up doing things that later you´ll regret...

A Nest of Blackbirds

I just took this photo of young blakbirds (Turdus merula) that were born in my garden.

Thesis-2

By allowing the sky to appear fragmented, airplane trails played an important role in the arising of abstract art.
(...yes, I know abstrat art existed long before airplanes started leaving trails in the sky. But I still think this would make for a good post-doctorate thesis on art history)

Thesis-1

By allowing reality to appear fragmented, mirrors played an important role in the arising of abstract art.

This morning

The next four photos were all taken in the morning of June 12th, 2011.
Click to enlarge.

My latest two paintings

The final version, after some minor changes:

Celeste Olalquiaga

I bought this book in a catalan bookstore in Madrid, across the street from Círculo de Bellas Artes, a place I like to visit for the coffee, the exhibitions and the general atmosphere. Having a catalan bookstore in such a central place in Madrid shows that democratic Spain has come a long way since Franco. I can understand about 95% of writen catalan. Some of the books on sale in that shop are in spanish, as was the case with this one. I was imediatly atracted by the beauty of the cover and the sides color purple, then intrigued by the title, and finnaly seduced by the writing. It´s a wonderfull book and I became an instant fan of Celeste Olalquiaga.

From a review: " The Artificial Kingdom is the first book to provide a cultural history of kitsch, an immensely popular aesthetic phenomenon that has always been disdained as "bad taste," or a cheap imitation of art. Proposing instead that kitsch is the product of a larger sensibility of loss, Celeste Olalquiaga shows how it enables the momentary re-creation of experiences that exist only as memories or fantasies. Simultaneously exposing and celebrating this process, Olalquiaga gives us a bold, trenchant analysis of what and how we see when we look at kitsch.
Tracing its beginnings to the nineteenth century--when industrialization transformed nature into an artificial kingdom of miniature scale--Olalquiaga describes the at once exhilarated and melancholic atmosphere where kitsch came to life. In an arresting mix of theory and anecdote, she examines objects from both the past and the present, probing the fluid boundaries between reality and fantasy, and finding in kitsch a phenomenon as relevant to our own time as it was to the era that made it a massive experience."

Mars-1, Artist :: Off the Hook

Mars-1, Artist :: Off the Hook

My latest painting

Like the previous one, this is also oil on wood, some 35cm across. I cut my profile on an old seat from a chair. On the right of this painting you can see a bungaloo made from recicled parts of cars, the top and the sides, joined together in the shape of a tortoise shell. Some parts would be window glasses, instead of metal, to let the light in, and they would open to ventilate the place. Imagine a camping site in a forest, with bangaloos like this...In my surrealist paintings I like to include projects of objects or structures that could be built in the real world.
The shape on the left was the first element I thought of for this painting. I got the idea by looking at this painting I have, by Robert Bellm.
I was looking at it from a distance, without my glasses on, and in a dim light, on the left side I percieved what looked like a huge floating structute, a gut-like baloon, that I imagined the color of terracota, with paterns similar to the ones used in tradicional portuguese pottery from Nisa.
This is an example of criativity workig according to the principle "order from Noise" that I described earlier.


I tryed to alter the left side of photo to make visible what I perceived there, but I couldn´t. Try to look at it with the eyes half closed, or change the brightness in your screen.