The Subconcious Art of Graffit Removal

I recently got a copy of a short film called The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal. I found a clip on YouTube. It has gotten me thinking about those places where you see odd colors of paint, where once there was a tag or a graf piece, and now there's only the record of it being there; the recorded gesture of someone covering up someone else's art, thus creating again on top of a creation. I have begun to find instances in my own travels where I'm drawn to such areas. This image was taken in Newport, Mass on a trip we took there. I was smoking a big cigar, and there it was. I find it interesting that this electrical box holds all of the remnants of work pasted by other artists, and yet it seems to me to be a complete piece in and of itself with or without the original items. It's enigmatic to say the least; leaving us to wonder what made up this surface at different points in time.

Drawing on the demented within us all: the art of Mario Torres

I want to post briefly on one of my friends, Mario Torres, a young up and coming in the world of comics and art, maybe somewhere where the two of those meet. He's been compiling work for his first series called Subhuman, and Track 1 is now available. He calls them tracks, as in music track on an album. His idea is to create a series much like a cd with and handful of tracks and then call it a day, publish a compilation and move on to the next project. In this mode of working, he wouldn't have to stick to one story line for too long. It's smart; inspired by music, comics, underground metal, and art of all kinds.

His prints from the past semesters in printmaking have been quite interesting. He made a nice portrait of Rasputin, and if anything, he's got the work ethic that will take him somewhere. That's the main thing about being an artist, and when I come around the studio at odd hours, it's Mario I run into. He out-produces most people around Las Cruces, and he's starting to fall in with people who not only make art, but those who find ways in starved economic situations to make a little bit of money. Bit by bit, he's getting out there, and I wouldn't be surprised to see him in the compilations some day, spreading the intelligent demented word for us all to guiltily consume.

If you'd like to get a copy of Track 1, contact him here.

DIABOLUS@NMSU.EDU

Found: your artwork?

I was at the RISD museum the other day, and lo and behold, there's this little plaque on a strange wall, and nowhere around is any identification. I stood there and read the sign, and then read it again, and it still doesn't make much sense. Obviously a RISD kid pulling a Banksy move in the museum there, and who knows how long it stayed up, but it's nice when you're moving through impressionist painting galleries to see something totally strange. I like being caught off guard, like that. Museums need a little more of that.

Ready, Aim, Rock!

Just listed on my facebook marketplace site, this print is now available in the red color version, or you can also get one in black and white, which is also very nice.

This is a piece from my series of drawings this past year, where I started with appropriated images and then turned them into prints after some alteration. I'm never too sure about who these people are when I begin a piece like this, but I get a feeling early on exactly where to take it. To me it speaks about American nihilism, and our media world where information about our wars and our popular culture are presented with one another without noticing the irony of that situation. As a friend of mine says, "...that tired irony story again."

Los Trabajadores: still working

I've been making prints about the farm workers in the valley here in Las Cruces for almost two years now. It's the kind of work that I feel is important and for a long time I guess I had made assumptions about the people who would take this kind of work. I had yet to meet the workers themselves, and my language barrier does not help when I'm trying to communicate or ask questions.

One advantage of my latest living situation is that I go out almost every day into the fields. My favorite place to run is along the irrigation canals, and I even made this my subject matter for a while, but it didn't amount to much. The other day, there was a ho crew working in an onion field, so I ran home as quick as I could, and I returned to take pictures and to speak to the workers themselves. After staring at their images for so long, and spending hours creating life size depictions of them, I finally got up the confidence to just go out into the field and to speak up. I spent about two hours traveling from end to end of that onion field. I met them all, spoke to a few, and even found myself to lean over and pick out a weed or two that someone had missed.

What I found was simple actually. One guy, Vincente Rodriguez, 24, spoke English and he made a simple case for why he does this work. He travels two hours to and from work every day from south Juarez. They cross the border to and from home six days a week. He said that he had a baby, and that was his reason to drop out of school. Because there's no work in Juarez, he chose to come to work the fields, like his brother and his father. This picture shows all three of them, a family portrait. It was a simple choice. He had a child and wife to support, and this was work he could get. He said that he would work those fields for the rest of his life. To know that he would be in those fields for the next 50 years has stuck with me. We in this country take pride in always wanting more, to always rise farther and farther up, to have more than our parents, etc. I'll be sitting with his words on my mind for years to come. More than ever, I feel that it is important work. It is something that I want others to know. That out there, working for a small amount of money, are people who have no hope of doing anything but what they do. And what they do is hard work, unforgiving, and unnoticed.

Brack's sound print

Brack Morrow is my collaborator on sound prints, and he almost achieved recognizable sound on this track. You can tell something is there, but it's not clear yet what is playing.



This second track is more of the noise side of my research, where I'm searching for rhythm only made through etching. This is more about timing, print process, and not necessarily to make music.

The body and Cheryleve

I wanted to talk about Cheryleve's work for a while. Of course I'm biased about it, but her work has really come together in the past year or two, and her MFA exhibition is going to be outstanding.