Work in progress

Pondicherry we have a problem

this is an old painting (04) from the odd planets series

I painted two wild mushrooms in space, a Macrolepiota procera and a "pied beu", as the frensh call it. You can see this kind of mushrooms in the post bellow.
I miss painting mushrooms in space. Some day soon I´ll paint some more.

wild mushrooms galore!

This morning I went to pick mushrooms in the forest, then I cooked some for lunch and froze the rest.

two older paintings

This one is from the Odd Planets series. It´s a spaceship painted like traditional portuguese potery, and it´s now in the collection of Chris Pew.
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Exhibition in Foz do Arelho

In the painting bellow, for the first time, I included free pubicity. Two outdoors on the side of the road, one for Leonard Cohen´s CD "Dear Heather", which was out just before I started this painting, and the other for Aloe vera. The idea for smoking Aloe vera came to me after seeing all lots of different products for sale containing the miraculous plant: yougurts, biscuits, shampoos, soaps, toothpaste, toilet paper, shoe polish, (actualy I never saw the last two). Probabily smoking it will also be good for your health...
The two huge cranes forming a door over a highway to the entrance of a city would be a fitting public sculpture to the construction empresarios that, toghether with corrupt local politicians, have been calling the shots in most cities around Portugal.

Restaurante/galleria Adamastor, Foz do Arelho.
December 2009, art exhibition.
Jaime Braz - paintings
Suzanne Oldewarris - collages

Go see

The view outside the restaurant:

More photos from Évora

In Évora, with João Cutileiro

Today I went to Évora and visited the workplace of the great portuguese sculptor João Cutileiro. Some photos:

By appointment to her majesty the Queen

Wild mushrooms, a cat and a dog.

I went to pick up mushrooms in the mountains. I filled a basket with tasty Boletus that I cooked for dinner, froze some and dried some to store.

For the fist time I saw a cat sleeping on top of a sleeping dog, and it looks like a fine arrangement: the dog gets a warm blanket, and the cat gets a heaten mat.

John Daido Loori (1931-2009)

Link to the NYTimes obituary : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/nyregion/10loori.html?_r=1

How creativity works

(at least for me)
The late Heinz von Foerster, one of the founders of cybernetics, established the Principle "Order from Noise", which states that well organized systems can only evolve by assimilating "noise", ie, information that was disturbed while being transmitted. It applies to natural and man-made systems, as well as for creating art.
Biologic evolution only occurs because the transmission of genetic information may go wrong (mutations). If there was no "noise" in the process, if the genetic information had been correctly transmitted from one generation to the next, living organisms would still be very simple and very similar.
It is said that the musicians in Jamaica developed Reggae music while trying to play the music they heard from England on short wave radios, with lots of interferences. I remember travelling long distances by bus; at night, half asleep, with the sound from the engine and the musics from the radio that the driver forgot to tune , I would make my own sometimes very interesting musics in my head. I felt sorry I didn´t know how to write music down.
Ideas for paintings come to me in a similar way. Pictures I half perceive when going through a magazine (then I go back to that page and realize there´s a different image there, although I might prefer what I thought I first saw there), or looking at poorly lit images in the dark, or a departure from this same process: seeing faces or bodies in the irregularities of a wall or a floor. This is departure from this process because, to start with, there is no information in those surfaces.
This process can be deliberately replicated to make art, and it would be interesting to use computers to do it: feed them random unfocused images and have them make an image, or have them compose music from random bits of music and sounds from the streets.

Previously unreleased material

More painting

Another painting from the Strange Planets series.

I´ve shown a picture of this paint before, still unfinished. Now it´s finished.

Three old paintings

"Homeland security"

New paintings

This isn´t complete yet. It´s oil on canvas, as usual, and I´ll paint some small changes.

This two are from a series : "The death siamese twin - snails"(left) and "The death siamese twin - caribou" (right).

For the caribou painting I thought of giving it two titles: the first quarter in the bottom (the plants) would be called "Poliamory", and the rest "The death siamese twin - caribou". Paintings having two or more names would compensate for all those millions of paintings that go untitled...

Russian Esquire

I was featured on the May 09 issue of russian Esquire.