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Archive for the ‘Neat Stuff’ Category

And the Winner Is…

Posted in Neat Stuff, tagged on May 1, 2009| 3 Comments »

Laminae in Harmony

Time has come to pick a title for this piece, to choose a winning entry.  From the many deserving entries I have chosen this one from Noah Ristau:

Laminae In Harmony

There is a certain rhythm in the words as well as a descriptive element that just seemed to fit the piece when I looked at it with the title in mind.  The title has stuck in my head since i first read it.  It just seemed to fit my conception of the piece.

This was a much more difficult decision than I had thought it might be when I first decided to have a contest to let readers submit names for this painting.  I had a short list of several finalists from which  the final choice was chosen.  The titles submitted were well thought out and any number of them could be used as the final title and be a powerful addition to the painting.  To everyone who took the time to consider this piece and formulate a title, I extend my sincere appreciation and thanks.  Your titles will live on, attached to the rear of this painting.

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Name this Painting!-Last Day to Enter Contest!

Posted in Neat Stuff, tagged on April 30, 2009| 2 Comments »

Name This Painting!TODAY IS THE LAST DAY TO ENTER

Tonight at Midnight is the deadline for submissions to the Name This Painting! contest.  Simply think of a title for the painting shown here, a new piece that will be shown at my 10th annual exhibit at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA in June.  Submit your title either in a comment to this post or by e-mailing it to info@gcmyers.com .  The winner will be selected and announced tomorrow, May 1 and will receive a prize.  Let me give a hint on the prize: It’s not a Mercedes Benz…

I have been wowed by the submissions thus far and have seen many that I will surely borrow for future titles if they don’t end up as the title for this painting.  I have been duly impressed by the thought that has went into the submissions and am deeply appreciative of the efforts.  This is going to be a tough decision.

Here is what you’re up against.  These titles have come in so far:

Multiple Layers

Brilliant Determination

History Lesson

Memory

Remembrance

Smooth Foundations

Simple Foundations

Rooted in Terra Firma

Layer Cake

Time Rising

Standing on History

This Is the Day…

Layers: Memento Mori

From Mother to Daughter

Above and Below

Reaching For the Sky

Red Tree No. 148

Time Soluble

Laminae in Harmony

Intentionality

Time Heaves

Life Over History

The Hero’s Memory

And Life Goes On

So, put on your thinking beanies and give it a shot.  You might surprise yourself.

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Contest Update!

Posted in Neat Stuff, tagged , , on April 27, 2009| 12 Comments »

Name This Painting!Four More Days!

The Name This Painting! contest ends on at the end of the day on this Thursday, April 30 so there’s plenty of time to submit your idea for a title for the painting shown here, one painted for my upcoming 10th annual show at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA.  If your title is chosen you’ll receive a prize (I’m not saying what it is except to say you won’t be disappointed) and even if you’re not the prizewinner your title will be listed on the back of the painting, to be seen by,  hopefully, generations to come.

You can submit by commenting on this post or via e-mail at info@gcmyers.com

I’ve been really pleased by the titles that have come so far.  It’s apparent that some thought has went into these, making this a very tough decision.  

The titles submitted thus far:

Multiple Layers

Brilliant Determination

History Lesson

Memory

Remembrance

Smooth Foundations

Simple Foundations

Rooted in Terra Firma

Layer Cake

Time Rising

Standing on History

This Is the Day…

Layers: Memento Mori

So, take a moment to look at the painting and give it a shot.  I can use the help and maybe you’ll walk away with a prize. What have you got to lose?

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Night Skies

Posted in Biographical, Early Paintings, Neat Stuff, tagged on April 23, 2009| 4 Comments »

Night Skies 1995The other morning I was walking down my driveway to fetch my newspaper.  It was semi-dark and still fairly quiet as the morning commute traffic on the main road hadn’t picked up yet.  My driveway is a long straight affair about an eighth of a mile long that runs due east.  As I came down it I could see the moon sitting directly over the end of the driveway.  It was a crescent but it was extremely bright and just to it’s left and only slightly lower was a glowing Venus.  Both almost glowed in the early morning light.  It was an impressive sight.

This brought to mind how far removed we have become from real interaction with the natural world.  We no longer know the night sky as we once did.  In most cities it’s hard to even see the night sky.  There’s something about this that is a bit sad.  Watching the stars has a calming effect , almost like connecting with the greater universe as it turns in its epic motion.  It gives me a sense of proportion.  On second thought, maybe that’s why many don’t want to see that sky.  They don’t want to be reminded that they are not the center of the universe,  that they are small cogs in a great machine.

A couple of months back, I went outside with my best girl Jemma (she’s our  great little big dog, a Corgi who was rescued from an Amish puppymill a few years back after all the overbreeding had left her with breast cancer -but that’s another story) and we were on the wooden walkway in the cool, dry winter air.  I laid down and looked directly upward.  After a few moments a shooting star broke into my sight from a point above my head.  My eyes caught it immediately.  It traveled straight down the length of my body and kept going to a point where I was looking several feet beyond my own feet, crossing almost the entire visible sky sky above me before suddenly disappearing.  It was a blazer, the kind where as you watch you can distinguish the flames being pushed to either side by whatever is causing this.  It was, by far, the most remarkable shooting star I’ve ever seen.

And I wondered how many people were looking up at that moment, how many saw that brief second or two of brightness and brilliance?  In another time that would have probably been viewed as an omen of things to come or some sign from the heavens but now such a thing is barely noted.  But to those who saw it, it brought back that primal thrill of seeing a grand event firsthand.

The painting shown is a small piece from 1995 that I call Night Sky.  It just kind of fit the post.

 Name This Painting!Reminder!

I’m asking for your help in naming this painting and am offering a prize (it’s better than you think though it doesn’t involve air travel or posh resorts) for the title that I deem fitting for the piece.

So put on your thinking caps and let me know your title for this painting.  Even if it’s not chosen as the final name, your title will be included on the painting’s reverse side for all of eternity.  Well, for an extended period of time.  I’m just not so sure about eternity.

So, submit your title by simply commenting or email me at  info@gcmyers.com

I look forward to your titles.

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Name This Painting!

Posted in Neat Stuff, Recent Paintings, tagged , on April 22, 2009| 20 Comments »

GC MyersI’m looking for a little help.

This is a small painting that I’ve completed for my upcoming June show,  at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria,VA.  It is my tenth solo show there and I wanted to do a few different things for this show.  This is one.

I’m looking for suggestions on names for this piece from anyone out there.  You can simply submit a title as a comment or if you’re a little shy about such things, e-mail it to info@gcmyers.com .

All submissions will be listed on the back of this piece so that all titles will, in a way, live on, so long as the painting exists.  I will select a title from those sent in to be the official title of this painting.  I will send the person who sends in the title I select a small gift.  I won’t disclose what that may or may not be .  Let me just say that it will be appropriate for the winning effort.

Let’s see, we’ll end this thing on April 30.

So, be creative and give it a shot.  At the very worst, your title will live on on the back of a piece of art.  Or maybe you’ll come away with a prize.  So, please send me a title or this will look pretty embarrassing.

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Six Words to the Story

Posted in Neat Stuff, tagged , , , , on April 15, 2009| 3 Comments »

sandals2I stole the idea and the photo for this particular blog from one of my favorite blogs, A Dark Planet, from David Terrenoire.  I hope he doesn’t mind my theft but i’ve had this rolling around in my head for a couple of days now and felt like sharing.  Sorry, David.

In his post, David talked about coming across this tiny pair of sandals in the office park where he works, a place not frequented by children.  He wrote about how this sparked all sorts of speculation.  It was basically the start of a story which reminded him of what Ernest Hemingway had written when challenged to come up with a story in just six words:

For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.

It’s a stunning use of six simple words and nine syllables.  It conjures up all sorts of storylines involving all sorts of human experience- love and marriage, tragedy and loss, etc.   It’s like the spark that sets off the explosion that creates  a new universe. A Big Boom of ideas.

I found other examples.  For instance William Shatner came up with this:

Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.  

Then there’s this from author Margaret Atwood:

Longed for him.  Got him.  Shit.

And Augusten Burroughs wrote:

Oh, that?  It’s nothing.  Not contagious.

To his credit, David Terrenoire came up on short notice with:

A mother, now childless, seeks divorce.

There’s a website, Six Word Stories, that has a running log of such stories,to which anyone can submit.  Some are pretty witty.  Some very creative.  A few recent ones:

No thanks, Eve.  I prefer oranges.      – from Ruth Polleys

And from Brian (just Brian):   

Five zombies.  Four bullets.  Two zombies.

There are many more but I still haven’t found one that has that completeness of idea and emotion that Hemingway brought with his six words.  I keep running some through my head, kind of like trying to put together a puzzle.  For me, it’s like composing a painting. I’m trying to create something that has a sense of its own world with the fewest elements, paring away detail but trying to find an iconic image that carries all sorts of meaning, needing no other words.  I always seem to find myself in a dark, kind of noir setting.  

Greyhound into Reno.  Cuckold fingers pistol.

Okay, it needs work.  I never claimed to be Hemingway or even a writer.  I paint pictures!

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The Golden Age

Posted in Biographical, Early Paintings, Favorite Things, Influences, Neat Stuff, tagged , , , , , , , on April 9, 2009| 2 Comments »

Babe RuthI recently picked up a book titled Baseball’s Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles Conlon.  It is, as it says, a book of photos of baseball players from the first part of the 20th century.  The photos are all black and white and give the players a grim, rough edge.  Not that they needed the help.

From the time I was a kid I was always interested in baseball from the turn of the century.  I read all sorts of books on my heroes and we had an old souvenir-like program from the 40’s that had many of these same photos with short stories and stats of many of these players.  I spent hours and hours looking at these faces and names until they took on a talisman-like quality in my mind.  Guys like Nap LaJoie, Rabbit Maranville, Wee Willie  Keeler, Cy Young and on and on.  In reality, many of these guys probably wouldn’t shine in today’s game but in my mind they were magic.Ty Cobb

Of course, there was a hierarchy.  Shown above, the Bambino, Babe Ruth, was the king.  An actual Sultan of Swat accompanied by his prince, the steady Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig.  Then there was the nasty tempered Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach, shown here in one of the most famous of baseball photos of its time.  Renowned for sharpening his spikes and using them on waiting fielders as he stole numerous bases, Cobb was always bitter over Ruth’s dominance of the spotlight.

These players always really stuck out in my mind because of the images and stories I encountered as a kid.  They were brawny and raw looking.  They drank hard.  They fought.  They had a hardened mythic look in their gray wool uniforms.  They didn’t look like the players of my youth.  In the 70’s baseball started to be played in awful multi-purpose stadiums with hard artificial turf surfaces, vast cold edifices that sapped all of the organic quality from the game.  The uniforms were evolving as well.  The 70’s brought these stretchy polyester space suits that only added to the artificial feel of the stadiums.  I always think of Willie Stargell, a large first baseman for the Pirates with a big personality who would’ve fit in well with my old-timers) in this god-awful form-fitting spacesuit.  He looked ridiculous.

Walter Johnson The Big TrainIt was easy at that time to drift away from the game that had provided so much magic when I was young.  I stayed away for almost twenty years, barely checking the races or stats.  I have a huge hole in my knowledge of the game from the 80’s and early 90’s.  The return of smaller stadiums built to fit baseball saw a rebirth but it was the Yankees that brought me back.  I had grown up despising the Yanks ( the voice of their announcer Phil Rizzuto was like fingernails on a chalkboard to me) but this team in the 90’s was a throwback.  They had grit.  They fought. They made plays that became mythic.  They made me feel like I was 9 years old again, reading the wonderful hyperbole of the old sportswriters as they made mighty pronouncements about the exploits of the Bambino.  Baseball was magic again.

So leafing through this book rekindled many memories.  With that I leave you with a short piece of film that simply shows the great Big Train,  Walter Johnson, throwing. I saw a part of this on Ken Burns’ wonderful documentary series on the game and was mesmerized by his extraordinarily long arms and the whipping action his arms.  There is a kind of poetic beauty in the motion.

Maybe that’s the poetry of baseball that people talk of…

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The Spiral

Posted in Influences, Neat Stuff, Quote, tagged , , , on April 1, 2009| 6 Comments »

 

Robert Smithson Spiral JettyProgress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral
with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I was looking at a book catalog yesterday, just browsing for something new and I spotted a book on the works of Robert Smithson, who is best known for his monumental earthworks.  The most famous is shown here, the Spiral Jetty, which juts out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah.  I’ve always been somewhat fascinated by earth-moving on a large scale and have always  admired Smithson’s work.  

The reason I mention this now is that I found myself thinking smaller lately, painting smaller paintings for a smaller economy.  Part of this was a conscious decision but part was the result of just becoming a little more wary with all the turmoil in the world.  There has been a period of introversion marked by a noticeable withdrawal from thinking boldly.  Seeing this reminded me of the need to think big.  

I realized I had become a bit fearful of pushing myself, perhaps afraid of exposing my limitations.  I had lost a little faith in my own abilities, including the ability to adapt to new challenges.

I was being safe.  It was the retrogression that Goethe talks of in the quote above.  I was in the spiral.

This all flashed in my head within a few seconds of seeing the spiral jetty.  Funny how a single image can trigger a stream of thought with so many branches off of it.

I had forgotten that I had to trust myself and throw the fear of failure aside, that thinking bold almost always summons up the best in many people.  Once you say that you don’t give a damn what anyone says, that if you fail so be it, the road opens up before you and your mind finds a way to get you on it.

So I have to remember to think big.

To look past the horizon.  Just freaking do it.

Then progress will come…

 

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He Is the Most Interesting Man in the World

Posted in Neat Stuff, Video, tagged , , , on March 30, 2009| 1 Comment »

dos-equis-boringI kept seeing this ad on television for some time, kind of out of the corner of my eye, never really paying attention.  I never really even saw what product was being advertised.  All I would think as it was fading from the screen was, ” Why are they using a werewolf as a spokesman?”

Turns out it’s an ad for Dos Equis beer featuring this character as the Most Interesting Man in the World, a jet-setting, sword-fighting, arm-wrestling bon vivant whose personality is so magnetic that he can’t carry credit cards.

Who cures narcolepsy by merely entering a room.

Whose blood smells like cologne.

Whose beard is listed on his organ donor card.

Who has alien abductors ask him to probe them.

Who ends each ad with his catchphrase, “Stay thirsty, my friends.”

When I finally paid attention to the words of the ad I had to laugh.  It was goofy and offbeat and seemed to have little to do with the product.  But it eventually had me looking at it.  There’s something captivating to me about goofiness in advertising.  I appreciate the fact that they’re willing to be creative and not go with the obvious.  Like the  Caveman in the Geico ad  or the Snickers ads with the Viking, Pilgrim and Polynesian characters, it’s at least an attempt at making an individual identity.

Here’s one of the ads.  While you’re taking a look I think I’ll open a Dos Equis and have a Snickers.  Don’t laugh, it’s possible.

Stay thirsty, my friends…

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Chuck Jones

Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, Neat Stuff, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 25, 2009| 5 Comments »

Marvin the Martian and DaffyI have often cited artists who have been influences on my work , people who are often giants in the world of art and sometimes lesser known but equally talented artists.  Sometimes you overlook the obvious.

What's Opera DocLast night, TCM honored the great cartoonist Chuck Jones by showing a documentary and some of his landmark cartoons starring Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck.  He also did the Roadrunner/ Wile E. Coyote cartoons as well as the seminal holiday favorite, How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  His work was and is a vivid part of an incredible number of people’s childhoods.  His What’s Opera Doc? with Bugs and Elmer in a Wagnerian setting with a tragic ending is classic and might be the only exposure to higher culture that many viewers may get.chuck_jones-opera-set

For me, I was always so drawn to the color quality that Jones had in his cartoons as well as the way he interpreted the landscape with a form of artistic shorthand that cut out extraneous detail yet never took away from the feeling of place, unlike some of the lower quality cartoons from Hanna-Barbera in the early 60’s.  Don’t get me wrong.  I loved those cartoons as well but even as a kid I was really distracted by the poor quality of the landscapes that scrolled continuously behind their characters.  With Chuck Jones, it always felt fresh and real, as though there was thought given to every detail in every frame.  Who else could put imagery like this set from  What’s Opera Doc? before the eyes of impressionable children?  Probably only the artists from Disney can match Jones’ work at Warner Brothers, but that’s another post.

His work also treated you, as a kid, like you had intelligence.  They were smart.  Clever and nuanced.  They never talked down to you.

For a kid this was potent stuff.  Scratch that- it’s just potent stuff. Period.

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