Test Flights

Above is a four foot by 2 foot display of flow. I don't consider this a "done" painting. This isn't even its orientation. I just thought I would point it out before I went any furthur with it. Now that you've seen it, I can go ahead and risk destroying it.

The painting below came out of nowhere. It has been leaning in a corner and occasionally cries out for attention. I would walk over to it and stroke it now and then. Last night, however, it began to oscillate, and I panicked at the doors of possibility it kicked open.
I have been trying to keep those doors locked.

Bookmark Gems

Unusual Life

Art Blog By Bob

Xiangyuan Jie

Michael Paulus

Hyungkoo Lee

Day Job Disaster

I finished these two drops at 3AM Saturday morning. I let them dry for eight hours and then pulled the staples and folded their 8ft x 12ft into nice compact packages. The disaster arose when I discovered that the client NEEDS to have these by Sunday night for opening. I had the package in my paws but neither FedEx nor UPS makes deliveries on Sundays. It became apparent that FedEx has a "same day" service but all the pick-up times in our valley are around noon. I'd missed the boat.

Resort-attendees won't have photo-op backdrops for opening night. My turd-feeling-factor is quivering at eleven.

I had a grand time painting the flower sprigs.

Steven LaRose, Karma 2008
paint on panel, 20" x 16"

Simply My Tale

If you look just beyond the long-faux-fur Styrofoam-bean-bag chairs that Stacy created, you can see my new bike. I am now creating my own power. Top that. . . you lame and lazy mo-foes.

There are bean-bag chairs in our work space because while I worked, my daughter watched My Neighbor Totoro projected upon the wall.

It is a holiday vacation and all.

Can you believe that that animation will be twenty years old in a week?

Cyborg Selfy with Chops

The Miso Chronicles

On Christmas Eve I wasn't about to go to the scene shop, nor was I in the mood to leave my family and enter into the realm of the Uncanny Mist (the basement studio). Instead, I fired up ye-ole-yellow-number-two and doodled these sketches.

Anticipatory Dinner

Garlic Cheese Stromboli = The loaf looked like a small tanned log. It was a perfect balance of textures.
Broccoli Cheddar Soup = This was not the goopy-glop that comes to mind with most cheesy soups, in fact it barely makes the "Creamy" category.
Croutons = I'm trying to convince Stacy that we would be independently wealthy if she'd let me mass-market these Nuggets of Ambrosia.

“There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.” - John Calvin

"The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only. " - Thomas Hobbes

What a Drag

Employing the same backdrop of abstracted industrial domination -- LaRose hails from Seattle, site of some of the bleakest post-globalization urban landscapes in America -- as found in earlier studies of the female figure in the landscape such as Tongueless Vigil (1995), the similarities end there – LaRose’s garage door paintings are utterly devoid of overt sexual content.


Instead, these remarkable works propose an equivalency between Ad Reinhart and Albert Hurter – between the chromatically minimal tail end of the existentialism-tinged Abstract Expressionist school and the more truly subversive eruption of the Grotesque which was occurring throughout American popular culture over the same period. The geometric complexity in a piece like The Three Meulers (1997) is almost as compelling as the outlaw imagery it encodes. Drawing substantively from the automotive outsiders of Roth Studios (including Roth himself, Robert Williams - whose comic-book advertisements for Rat Fink tee-shirts bear a resemblance in wit and graphic complexity to Reinhart’s How to Look collage strips - and Dave Mann, later of Easyriders fame), LaRose's painterly garage doors posit a plausible integration of the transcendental geometry and improvisational materiality of the church of Abex with the post-Jungian pop mythology of EC horror comics."

- from the fictitious catalog essay A Modern Movement by Doug Harvey.

There is still time to purchase a REAL 2008 calender from the Kristi Engle Gallery

Thank You

My exhibition at the Kristi Engle Gallery is coming to a close tonight. I must give Jacques and his students high marks for their Thank You card. That de Beaufort may sometimes use words bigger then "ketchup" but he is certainly setting a steller etiquette example.

Steven LaRose Features presents:

The Connoisseur's Nemesis

A Triptych

Back "in the day" The Supersuckers used to play a 35 second song called I Say Fuck.

A couple of years later their country flag was flying in Pretty Fucked Up.

Lately you can see them with Willie Nelson on Leno singing Bloody Mary Morning.

A stereo-type-myth-buster from Mose Allison

Day job

Darn it. Just when I wanted to revel in the reverberations of my fading stomach flu and poo-poo the process of painting, I had to paint this mural in fifteen hours. It was a frustrating budget and someone else's design but through the simple act of doing, I found myself taking notes regarding my own painting. Now I just need to find some studio time.

Happy Winter Solstice

One More Time Is Good Enough For Me

Flush

On Monday I was violently assaulted by a stomach virus. An explosive use of all exits left my body weak and confused. Bliss was achieved during the post-puking adrenaline rush. Eighteen hours of feverish bed-time recalled Wim Wenders' 1991 movie Until the End of the World in which characters in a pre-apocalyptic environment become addicted to viewing their dreams on a monitor. Their only desire is to sleep, so that they can record their dreams, and while they are awake, they only want to view their dreams. Is there any research on how Depression can be euphoric? It is Wednesday now and I've had no protein, stimulants, depressants, leafy-greens, hallucinogens, etc. and so I was not prepared for the arrival of this month's Artforum. The "Best of 2007" issue left me feeling as if I didn't miss 18 hours but 18 years! Well, a couple of things stood out:

Charles Ray, Hinoki
and

Peder Balke, Northern Lights over Coastal Landscape, ca. 1870

I'm sure this is just a phase, give me a week, maybe after "the holidays" making paintings these days won't seem so ridiculous.

Tachisme

Last month Jacques turned me on to the Tachisme movement. Today, I have curated an exhibition of images that were all painted before my birth.

Wols

Bram van Velde

Pierre Soulages

Georges Mathieu

Andre Lanskoy

Hans Hartung

Sam Francis

Henri Michaux

Jean Fautrier

Norman Bluhm

Camille Bryen

Alberto Burri

What Have I Done?

Steven LaRose, Midas, 2008
Paint on laminated wood, 24" x 36"

(update: footnote photograph)

Keep in mind anatomical details when sketching the figure.

This advice comes from How To Draw and Paint a book "Designed both for art students and for those who paint for pleasure" written and illustrated by Henry Gasser in 1955. Do people need to be told this?