Terbo Ted

Terbo Ted Artist Statement: ArtIsMobilUs“Now you’re either...

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 09:52:15 -0800

Terbo Ted Artist Statement: ArtIsMobilUs

“Now you’re either on the bus or off the bus”
- Ken Kesey of the Merry Pranksters in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

I actually had the opportunity to meet Ken Kesey not long before he passed away; he was on an art gallery tour with his new version of his bus Furthur that was later rejected by the Smithsonian for not being authentic. It was indeed a marvel, an explosion of color and sound.

Grateful to be showing on ArtIsMobilUs, and having the opening at Oakland’s First Fridays, February 1, 2013. Curator and artist Richard Felix Felix is a hero for his community-minded spirit, both with the bus and First Fridays. Also thrilled to have my work associated with many of my other favorite Oakland artists, Eddie Colla and Ezra Li specifically; their work has also blazed from this rolling gallery.

I am very pleased with the installation here. For many years I’ve worked with plywood squares designed to tile together, made of incremental breakdowns of ordinary plywood, in this case, one foot and two foot square pieces that happen to exactly match the plywood backing along the interior bus wall, which measures 12 feet wide and two feet high. Also thrilled with the black light- or more accurately- blue LEDs. It’s funny, I use lots of fluorescent materials and have lots of black lights but had never seen these pieces glowing until this setting. About half of these works have never been displayed in public until now.

Again, the pieces are meant to tile together. People who have collected multiples of my work through the years (most people who buy my work end up getting more over time) are able to- like we see here- put together new narratives with pieces created and collected at different points. If you look at my works individually, it may seem that I create disparate, disjointed realities; how do these various bits of iconography come from the same source? Certainly, there are ways I approach materials or colors or strokes or shapes that is identifiable. And then- all of these works taken together- here we are in Oakland looking at skulls and op art and pinup girls in one larger composition— and if we were to go to Eddie Colla’s new lOAKal gallery in Jack London Square and take in their current exhibition, we’re seeing skulls and geometric art and lots of female nipples and hips. So it all is in the now. Somehow.

If the skulls look familiar, you may have seen my permanent installation at CAFE VAN KLEEF on Telegraph in Oakland. Or, a number of years ago I had a different set of skulls on display at Mama Buzz for Art Murmur- although Mama Buzz is now missing. Some of the skulls have a QR code in the corner; scan it and you’ll get a website of skull art and other mayhem I made in 1997 called ‘Death Patrol’ for atlasmagazine.com, which was added to the SF MOMA Permanent Collection that same year, with the very first set of web art they recognized.

Ted Terbolizard,
Oakland

Terbo Ted’s works can be collected through Arttitud in San Francisco, 111 Potrero Ave, www.arttitud.com

Terbo Ted “11/11/11 Spiral” Artist StatementMixed Media on birch...

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 15:39:56 -0800

Terbo Ted “11/11/11 Spiral” Artist Statement

Mixed Media on birch plywood, six panels, 192”x96” total.

Highly Ritualized Mark Making:

At 11:11am on 11/11/11 I made my first marks on a series of six birch plywood panels that are now called “11/11/11 Spiral”. Actual work on this piece lasted seven days at Dimension 7, 150 Folsom, San Francisco, and was highly documented in photos and video. Five pounds of glitter were used on the surface of this piece, all of it applied by hand, brushed a half dozen layers deep, suspended in acrylic. The piece is intended to survive as functional art and can work as a single, flat wall installation, or as a series of three hinged, free-standing room dividers, each 64”x96”.

There is no formal dogma or numerological meaning to this work, which is an extension of my 2011 op art series. I always insist that meaning of any art is up to the eye of the beholder. I certainly care as to how well the piece will age, and what it feels like viscerally. But those are subjective unknowns, fantasy.

While working on this piece, I couldn’t help but think and rethink of large format pieces I’ve seen by two contemporary artists I admire, specifically Alex Grey and Rex Ray. Somehow this work ties into the realms those two gentlemen walk in. Grey’s work is far more graphically psychedelic than mine, but there is a shared hyperdimensional consciousness in our works. Ray’s works are more decoratively ornamental than mine, although I can see how comparisons could be made between this work and his, especially with the flowing, curvy shapes.

My late father was a graphic designer who owned a small advertising agency here in the Bay Area, and in my childhood during the 1970s, our home and his offices were always adorned with at least one wall of what he called ‘Super Graphics’, usually wall sized circular or wobbly shapes he meticulously painted in variously bold or vivid colors. This work reminds me of those roots. My father never considered himself an artist, but he certainly was, and had a fine art collection which I have inherited much of. I really wish that his murals and accent wall panels had survived to this day, but they are all lost. While this work is much more elaborate than his pieces, the wish for the panels to survive informed this creative process; This work is made to time travel past my decades here on earth.

Working on this piece at Dimension 7 was interesting, inspiring, challenging and problematic, and I wouldn’t have wanted it to transpire any other way. I share a long timeline with this space, and this work ties strongly into a long body of work stretching back fifteen years, both by myself and the associated artists who have done work here. Normally, I would want to work on a piece this size in my large West Oakland studio, where I have tremendous natural light and four story high ceilings. At D7, the space is darker, colder and just blocks from the Bay. That this work was created in November and was bookended by rain caused lots of problems for me as I worked. Drying times are a huge consideration in my process, and I work mostly with water-based materials. When I work at my home studio, it’s easy to take a break to wait an hour or two or three for a layer to cure or dry. With this project, things were not drying as fast as I’d like in the dank conditions, even with work lights and space heaters blazing away at the panels. Further complications were caused by this location being so close to the heart of the financial district, where parking can be a total nightmare, if not simply expensive. The preparations for the opening at Dimension 7 lasted all week while I worked, and often this would interfere with my process; for example, a band soundchecking, or video or light show artists needing to cut the house lights to work on their installations would often throw me off of my schedule, although I was always able to recover. The people here are all amazing in various ways, so the inspiration from watching other artists and technicians- whether they were writing code, playing music, generating video and so on- far outweighed any delays it caused to my work. And I take great delight in that my work was inspirational to the other artists here. This community/collaborative magic has always been a key component of the D7 immersive environments.

This work is represented by Arttitud, 111 Potrero, San Francisco, www.arttitud.com, 415.272.5588. All enquires about the purchase of this piece should be sent to Arttitud.

Terbo Ted Artist Statement Fluid.com InstallationI’ve been...

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 14:14:00 -0700

Terbo Ted Artist Statement Fluid.com Installation

I’ve been telling people over and over again that I much prefer to show my works outside of the traditional gallery environments. Art is so much about context and dialog. Art in an art gallery is like music at Guitar Center. Showing art here at fluid.com evokes a lot of dialog that I find very interesting.

As a child, my father ran a small ad agency that specialized in various graphic and printing production for Silicon Valley tech firms, companies that changed the world through innovation. Even though today’s digital agencies are far evolved in terms of tools and application of their services, much of that era my late father lived in echoes through a place like fluid.com. I feel at home in a place like this. My father had bold graphics painted on his walls in the 70s and 80s, stimulating the senses.

Looking back through my own adulthood, I lived and breathed the dot com era here in San Francisco. In the 90s was a regular visitor to places like WIRED and Razorfish, digitally focused shops that were full of wild eyed Californian optimism, and a confidence we were changing the world— because we were. Fluid is very much descended from those heady days, although times have certainly changed in the last decade and a half. With this installation, I very consciously made an effort to conjure the lurid, bold pixel colors that adorned the WIRED and Razorfish offices. The 90s are so far in the past now, we’re not that far away from young hipsters romanticizing that era, and if we’re going to get into retro nostalgia, let’s take the best bits. We can change the world and be bold and colorful! Yes! Sometimes we forget this.

There was a study out in Europe earlier this year that scientifically proved how visual appreciation of art releases dopamine in the brain, a chemical reaction that is similar to the feelings of being in love. This year, I have prolifically made a great amount of op art pieces, focused on stimulating the cones and rods in the eye- teasing the senses- a chemical reaction layered on top of the chemical reaction referenced in the scientific study I just mentioned. When I make these pieces with lurid colors or vibrating patterns, I’m trying to literally stimulate myself as I hard as I can with only my eyes. I see people walk by these works, and so many times, they turn their heads and smile, or laugh and grin. I can’t think of a better thing to put on the walls, especially in an office where everyone here can help change the world.

Terbo Ted ‘Dia de Los Muertos’ Installation at On...

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 08:39:51 -0700

Terbo Ted ‘Dia de Los Muertos’ Installation

at On Mars Salon, 210 Fillmore at Haight, San Francisco

October 4 - November 10, 2011

I am extremely Grateful for this opportunity to participate in the culture of my homeland through this Dia de Los Muertos themed art installation at On Mars Salon. Best wishes to all of the staff and patrons of this establishment.

Dia de Los Muertos in itself is worth mentioning. San Francisco proper used to be part of Mexico, and Spain before that; the Latin culture here is unique to itself in the world. Growing up here, it’s part of my life, undeniable in its influence on my life and works.

Our proximity to Haight Street is of multi-layered importance to these works. My great grandfather lived at Haight and Webster as a child, before the great 1906 earthquake; this is my ancestral stomping grounds. I myself as a young man spent lots of my early twenties in this neighborhood, living at Haight and Scott and other locations half my life ago. The Grateful Dead should also be mentioned; my life has been in the periphery of their brilliance; skulls are a huge part of their- and our- visual identity.

I first started making skull artwork in the mid-90s. In 1995 I made a trip to Chichen Itza in the Mayan Yucatan, to witness the centuries old equinox celebration at the Temple of Kulkulkan, the great pyramid there. At the ruins- ball courts near the ancient city center- rows of life size human skulls are carved in limestone, a thousand years old. Seeing these in person made a great impression on me. Not long after, in 1997, my daughter was born. Around this time, I created an early internet collaborative project called ‘Death Patrol’ that was a series of cyberpunk/hacker themed web pages, full of buggy and glitchy rich media plugins, designed to shock, stun and crash early web browsers. Part of atlasmagazine.com, it was in the first trio of websites added to the Permanent Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1997, and it is still online to this day in it’s original form. The modern QR Codes in the lower corner of many of the pieces at On Mars Salon link to the vintage Death Patrol website, a digital fingerprint: provenance.

A photographer friend commented this year that they don’t like skull imagery, because it represents death. Certainly, ‘Dia de Los Muertos’ translates as Day of the Dead. While I am enormously respectful of day of the dead- and remembering ancestors- the skull imagery means something different to me as a person. To me, it is a representation of the enduring human condition, how we live greater than just our time. Our bones, while they still return to dust, outlive our living body. I get off on the concept of “Immortality Gratification”, the idea that we as individuals live beyond our natural lifespan by our works and deeds; that our residue leaves memories that lead to our time being recalled by others in the living world after we are gone.

These objects are made to withstand all kinds of calamities: mixed media on plywood, covered with various varnishes to protect against the elements. One of these skulls in your life may very well live as long as you and even longer; all the hope is that these life spans are as long as you can imagine. I am certain that a great amount of my skull artwork will long outlive me.

Over the past decade, I have made more than 600 skulls in this 12”x12” format. It has become an annual event for me to make these each fall. Bought out earlier this year- literally, down to like five or so, I made more than 200 this past season. People who have been collecting my works over the years may have one or more of this ongoing series. Indeed- to you- I extend the invitation for you to add one to your life. You can also give them as gifts, or set up larger installations as shown here. Anything is possible. Everything you see here is cash and carry; don’t worry, if you take one or more of them off the walls, there are more of these waiting to take their place. Also, there is a box of loose, uninstalled ones if you don’t want to endure the hassle of unfastening one to take home.

Don’t be afraid of death, and travel safely through the physical world. Love and peace to all.

Artist Statement:Terbo Ted Installation at Mom’s Silver...

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 12:20:44 -0700

Artist Statement:

Terbo Ted Installation at Mom’s Silver Shop, Watt and Auburn, Sacramento, CA. http://www.momssilvershop.com

Full disclosure: Mom from Mom’s Silver Shop is my actual mom.

I am a grown man and have displayed my various art works throughout the State of California, and as far away as New York, France, Australia and Japan. Yet it is super cool to have pieces in my Mom’s retail store. Buy some! My mom can get plenty more, and commission new works as well.

My mom has always been a huge supporter of my creativity, from the finger painting age through middle age. Our taste in artwork is certainly very different; my mom prefers large frames heavy on bevel, engraving detail and color; I avoid frames or go for square black minimal. When my late father died and we were sifting through the estate, my father had many pieces by the artist Marty Viljamaa; my mom took all of his landscapes and I took all the abstracts. Even when it comes to artwork we both enjoy- florals- our taste is widely different; I prefer bolder, more vivid; my mother, softer, more pastel.

The installation before you at Mom’s Silver Shop is very much to my liking, and faithfully assembled by my mother and stepfather in a manner consistent with my aesthetics and not theirs, of which I am highly thankful, humbled and grateful. I’m fairly certain if it was up to my mom, each one of these pieces would be carefully framed and separated, and not installed in a cluster like I prefer.

For the past decade I’ve been working with a fairly simple design system that’s very much like TETRIS or LEGOS. I like to make square pieces on plywood that are based on symmetrical breakdowns of a common four by eight sheet of ply. So I might make objects that are 24”x24”, or 12”x12”, or 8”x8”, that are intended to be free associated back together later. Even my larger works are based on this principle; this year I’ve been making 72”x72” pieces, which also fit this system. People that have collected my works over the years can add new pieces and then reinstall them in new groupings.

I prefer for the works to be fastened directly to the wall with common drywall screws. This is useful in a number of ways: the screws generally leave less marks on the wall than nails and are super easy to install with a cordless drill; when installed properly with a level, the pieces can’t be nudged crooked from passers by, normal settling of buildings, or small earthquakes; they won’t fall, which is something that happens sometimes to framed prints or hung canvases. I also like to make my pieces very durable, and like what happens to them as they start to age and wear, I’m kind of rough with them myself and don’t mind them getting marked up over time, which is what happens to most objects as they age anyway. Most of the works here are finished either in epoxy resin or layers of water based floor sealer. To clean the epoxy pieces, isopropyl alcohol and a paper towel work great. To clean the pieces covered with floor sealer, don’t use too much water- especially around the edges- but the surfaces can withstand some gentle scrubbing if they somehow get stained, which isn’t the case with normal paintings on canvas, which are very difficult to clean.

It should be noted in context that I have designed nearly 20 silver bullion rounds that have been produced over the years, and my mom might have some on display, feel free to ask. One of the motifs I’ve worked with in .999 fine silver is skulls- ‘Pirate’ coins we call them- and here in Mom’s Silver Shop, she has my 12”x12” mixed media skulls on plywood for sale as well. If you’ve been following us for awhile, these will look familiar.

www.terboted.com
www.flickr.com/photos/terboted

Artist StatementTerbo Ted“Idealization of Shapes”...

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:37:39 -0700

early computer sketch, July 3, 2011

computer sketch of layout, July 19

computer sketch of layout, July 19

install with curator Betty Bigas July 28

finished wall installation

Artist Statement

Terbo Ted
“Idealization of Shapes” Exhibition
Roll Up Gallery, San Francisco, July 29, 2011

In the week leading up to the opening, I had completed a large body of pieces specifically for this show, and I greatly enjoyed appreciating them stacked around my artist space. My mind couldn’t help but recognize other artists my age from this area who also gravitate toward covering large wall surfaces with lurid visual patterns, artists like Ezra Eismont, Romanowski, Barry McGee. Last weekend I saw Romanowski’s opening at Fabric8 over in the Mission; he’d done a full wall covered in shape-encrusted wooden tiles, in a fashion that reminded me of Barry McGee’s techniques. Last night I had a fun facebook messaging back and forth with Ezra after he *liked* an image I posted from yesterdays install; we traded links about decades past op art from Sol LeWitt and Vernor Panton, while also agreeing that at some point in the future we should try and do a large scale, full coverage op art installation, including the ceilings and floors. Look out!

While we were hanging the show, we kept laughing, and seeing spots and the wall move. At one point I figured out that if I went outside and stared up into the blue sky and got a little bit of sunlight in my eyes, and then walked back in and stared at my main wall installation here, it would swim in blurry spotty red patterns, wow, super cool. I tried this several times an got one of the gallery staff to try it to. Eye fatigue. Good times.

One of the things I have been deliberately focusing on as I’ve made lots of op art this year is visual interference patterns. You’ll note the dense concentrations of white and black squares repeating as a motif. In my studio, I test photographing various visual patterns with my digital cameras, attempting to freak the camera out, getting them to display wiggling pink and green triangles and zebra bending moires instead of the black and white lines. Finding that lines around .25” tend to work really well for this. Try pointing your cellphone camera at these pieces and see if anything unusual happens. Indeed, as I was leaving the gallery once we’d finished, someone I didn’t know was pointing their iphone camera at the wall and laughing at the results, they instantly ‘got it.’ I am using the digital media lens and pixels as a paintbrush, feeling it. Also, I have been really into large fields of fluorescent color, and really love how these photograph as well; they oversaturate today’s cameras, which generally can pick up every nuanced shade of ordinary wall color. If the next century of art is going to be about scrolling quickly through thousands of thumbnail sized images, I’m trying to get my works to stand out from the pack, vivid, moving, alive.

I use a variety of materials for the works in this show, which are either on plywood, PVC or plexiglass. The attempt is to create objects suitable for a long lifespan, durable, weather-ready. My favorite varnish these days is water based indoor/outdoor concrete floor sealer. The PVC prints are with UV and weather resistant inks; these could be placed on an outdoor fence facing the ocean for several years and still hold their color. The distressed blue and yellow quarter circle pieces are some of the newest in the show. After I painted the yellow and blue, I sanded the corners with an electric sander, tossed them around the parking lot, wiped them down with coffee grounds and olive oil and then later in a wash of water with a few drips of gray acrylic craft paint added.

Enjoy.

Terbo Ted Artist StatementArttitud. Arttitudy. I discovered...

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:10:00 -0700

Window Installation at Arttitud

Purple Circles, 42"x42", Mixed Media

Red Cell, 24"x24", Mixed Media

Black White Squares, 24"x24"

Terbo Ted Artist Statement

Arttitud. Arttitudy. I discovered Arttitud in San Francisco not long after it opened in Spring, 2011, and have been fascinated by its unique blend of furniture showroom/design center/art gallery aesthetics ever since. The works I present here are made specifically for Arttitud, and very literally represent a design process within the space. Physical objects that are now on the wall started as computer sketches on my laptop, made while sitting in the showroom and staring at the various furnishings and objects on display: there’s a direct dialog with things like Vernor Panton’s classic op art carpets on the floor, or the square and rectangular foam furniture from Sixinch in Belgium.

I’m never that comfortable presenting art in an art gallery; to me, art in an art gallery is like music in a music store; a great place to discover something new perhaps, but not to truly appreciate it. At Arttitud, it’s more than just an art gallery, there’s a dialog between the furnishings, where ‘every piece of furniture is a work of art.’ There’s a lot more going on than just art on the walls.

While the idea of you purchasing some of the works here directly from the wall is pleasing- go for it(!)- the design studio process at Arttitud is something you can tap into to transform the world around you. We can create custom artworks specifically for your desires, anything is possible if we make it happen. For a serious collector, I am very willing to create commissioned works, starting with design sketches created here in the space with showroom owner Tatiana Takaeva’s direct input and oversight. We can make more than what is shown here: we can print custom wallpaper, or print on a range of weather safe materials like aluminum or thick plexiglass.

For the past decade I’ve focused on making extremely durable mixed media objects, primarily on found plywood, which I like for its strength and character. Some of the pieces I present at Arttitud are made on found plywood that initially came to the Arttitud showroom from Europe as shipping materials from high end furniture manufacturers like Artifort or Sixinch; the apple plywood sent from Holland for example is more sublimely exotic than what can be easily found in the San Francisco Bay Area. To transform these materials into art evokes a sort of ‘green’ harmony within the space. To compliment the durability of the plywood works, I’ve also recently been working with prints on plexiglass and PVC. These materials are extremely long lasting, and the 6 color CMYK process I use is weather and UV resistant; some of these works can be displayed outside, in full sun and weather for years before the colors deteriorate.

To the future!

Terbo Ted
aka Theodore Terbolizard

Artist Statement by Terbo TedOn Mars Salon Installation, Summer...

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 10:10:16 -0700

Artist Statement by Terbo Ted
On Mars Salon Installation, Summer Solstice, 2011.
Show at 210 Fillmore at Haight in San Francisco through the end of August.

(On Mars Salon link)

Thank you On Mars Salon!

Twenty years ago I spent much of my time in Lower Haight, during the early 90s rave heyday here in San Francisco. I lived at Haight and Scott for awhile, and couch surfed the neighborhood for awhile too, which included sleeping in Alamo Square or Duboce Park at times between girlfriends. In that era I dyed my hair every color of the rainbow, and wore wildly multicolored clothes with clashing collages of patterns on them. It is a complete thrill for me to return to this neighborhood with an art installation that visually ties into these personal roots.

Art makes me happy. Making art makes me happy. Having my art live outside of my world makes me happy. I get off on immortality gratification, the idea that I live beyond our lifespan by my works. Certainly, I’ve created various images, sounds and writings that will outlive all of us and be experienced after we have left this physical plane. When making objects, I make them extremely durable and rugged, and present them distressed, weather-ready, rustic, set for a long unknowable journey through time and space.

I work in series, squares, on plywood, all designed to tile together as shown here, like LEGOs or TETRIS. Once you start collecting my works, you’ll see how the new pieces over the years will fit with ones going back this past decade. The visual subject matter of this installation relies heavily on personal motifs, including: my never ending love of stargazer lilies; pinups (done in the current street art style), and op art.

I’ve really been feeling op art in 2011, and so have many others. There are lots of strongly favorable reactions to op art right now, both in my works and works by other artists. I’ve been heavily studying the past fifty years of op art, as well as optical illusions, and how the eye works. I’ve been studying how the human eye sees with chemical reactions in a series of cones and rods; we have three kinds of cones that see: purple-blue; blue-turquoise-green; green-red, and rods that see dark/light/contrast/nightvision. Some of the op art in this show draws heavily on 90s retro, such as the fractal looking spirals, the old patterned fabric prints available by AMEBA clothing on Upper Haight back then, and early desktop computer graphics, like what I was creating for rave party flyers all those years ago. I’ve also been studying op art further back into the 70s, 60s, and 50s, some of that shows here as well. I’m trying to hurt my own eyes, after decades of staring at and creating trippy visuals. Constantly getting better at it, refining the vision.

Some of the pinups here- the ones on the distressed blue plywood- are from a set of seven from this spring I call my ‘Blue Period’, a Picasso joke. When he was around 20, Picasso had a friend die and for several years afterwards painted depressing, very blue images of old, broken people. My spin on this is that now I’m a broken down middle aged man, and spring has passed me by, my sex life passing before me, realizing how short our time on earth is. So instead of painting sullen, depressed people, I glamorize youthful female form, fertility, life, while I am alone.

Everything here is for sale. Buy one or a pile, cash and carry, take it with you, the show is asymmetrically installed in a manner that allows it to visually work in a deconstructed state.

Feel free to contact me through my website, www.terboted.com, (link) and say hi!

Ted Terbolizard aka Terbo Ted
Summer, 2011

I’ve recently started showing some of my artworks at a...

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 12:35:43 -0700

I’ve recently started showing some of my artworks at a brand new furniture, art and design shop in San Francisco called ARTTITUD. (arttitud.com). They focus on classic modern European styles and have been blowing my mind with some really cool stuff. Here’s a quick video of one of their furniture pieces: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6bkNIpoISg

Stop by their space at 111 Potrero if you want to see some of my recent OP ART pieces in person, or grok out on their cool furnishings….

I have a new favorite food, AMARANTH GREENS. I can’t say...

Sat, 28 May 2011 13:01:00 -0700

Amaranth Greens

Amaranth Greens

Amaranth Greens

Amaranth Greens

I have a new favorite food, AMARANTH GREENS. I can’t say that I’d ever had them before until yesterday; I’d only been familiar with amaranth grain in baked goods. I bought a big bundle of amaranth greens from a Chinese speaking man at the Old Oakland Farmer’s Market (yelp link) on a whim, it was $1 or less, can’t remember, maybe 75c.

The greens were appealing to me because I’ve been modifiying my diet to eat way more fruits and vegetables, especially green leafy vegetables. Also, these are simply visually or viscerally fascinating; the deep purple center on the green leafs is decidedly poisonous or even psychedelic looking, that was interesting: wow, these have something special about them, I’m starting to recognize this sort of thing better as I age. The guy at the booth let me taste a raw leaf; sort of sweet like spinach, or like edible flowers people put in salads, like nasturtiums but not as bitter. I’ve been bored with spinach and eating way too much kale, a recent favorite for me this year.

For lunch yesterday I stir fried some of the leaves up with some mushrooms and clove powder; yummy. Sort of suprised by how quickly the amaranth leaves wilt or decompose on high heat; they don’t need much to cook them. Defnitely want to try them raw as a base for a salad. Anyway, lunch was so great, I cooked up another pan of amaranth leaves in the evening, this time with whole almonds, cinnamon and nutmeg. NOM NOM NOM.

Sort of craving amaranth today, I’m hooked. I’m almost out. I know where to get it now. Chinese guys at the farmers markets. Sure they have plenty of it in Chinatown, will have to go investigate soon.

Learned a lot about amaranth last night searching around on google. Stayed up late in the dark with my iphone in bed reading up on amaranth at wikipedia and nutritiondata.com. Apparently amaranth greens have complete amino acids, super rare for plants. Also, they are high in carbohydrates, and way off the chart with tons of Vitamin K, like 399% daily dose in one serving. I had to look up Vitamin K last night as well, studied it’s known scientific effects, super impressive, especially as it relates to diseases associated with aging. Aging is on my brain now, can’t help it, I’m 43 and that’s one of the things motivating my new strict eating habits.

links:

amaranth nutritional value on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth#Nutritional_value

amaranth greens at nutrition data dot com: http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2303/2

vitamin K at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_k

Just for fun this past weekend- it was supposed to be the end of...

Wed, 25 May 2011 09:51:00 -0700

24"x24", mixed media on plywood

24"x24", mixed media on plywood

24"x24", mixed media on plywood

24"x24", mixed media on plywood

Just for fun this past weekend- it was supposed to be the end of the world, judgment day- I made a small set of very deliberate abstract expressionist pieces as shown above. I’ve been super prolific, and working in two foot square tiles in a variety of themes and motifs; I’ve never done any literal abstract expressionist works before and wanted to have some sitting around for possible future deployments, as part of larger installations. And, just to please my own senses.

My late father was a graphic designer and had a fairly extensive fine art collection. He’d monitored classes at the Design Center in Pasadena in the mid 60s when he was younger, and I still have his portfolio case, which is covered in brightly colored rectangular blobs. One of his best friends was , a fine art painter and commercial illustrator who was also art director at Atari back during their late 70s heyday (more here). I still have a bunch of Marty’s abstract expressionist canvases, mostly from the early 70s, in blue and white hues. One of the pieces- this one:

hangs not far from my computer in my studio. Marty was creating pieces in this style years after they had first come into vogue back in the 50s and 60s, coinciding with the beat era. The one piece pictured here I used as reference point for composition on my new works. Of course, copying someone else’s abstract expressionist gesture painting forms in series is so not the way to go about it! But I’ve grown up with this painting and wanted to create in the same vein. I decided to use a very different color palette however, ones that matched another Viljamaa painting that used to hang over my bed when I was younger.

So I set about making the pieces; you can see steps in progress here:

If you compare the Viljamaa image, it’s clear the composition was appropriated. Like I’d mentioned above, I wanted to recreate a different color scheme of Marty’s, a cyan/red contrast, although as I was inventorying my paint I decided I’d go for an orange/green final product. I started the underpainting with different coloring; I wanted to have a richness underneath to set the final colors off. Working on this project was way harder than I had anticipated; making amorphous blobs that are appealing to the eye are not as easy as it seems! By the end of day one and start of day two, I was non plussed by where I was at; the image above with the four pieces in a row against a metal fence is that point. I took the pieces outside to sand them with sandpaper, they are works on plywood, not on canvas.

The second day was pretty magical, started to take the pieces somewhere I really enjoyed. Part of why I like painting so much is that it makes me happy; I get high from it- not the fumes (I use water based paints)- but the act of creating something from nothing, something that is bold and lurid and makes my eyes and brain work, is immensely pleasurable for me. From the various colors of paint I was layering with, at some point it was clear to me that I should finish the pieces in a red/blue duotone with lots of extra texture and color layered in, and that’s how they finished. Heavy multiple coats of water based floor varnish were the last stages; these things will probably live longer than I will, I make them that way. I threw in some big blobs of dayglo paint at the end, to fill up some knots in the surface of the plywood; that effect does not come across in regular photos.

As all the paint was drying I went on google images to do some more research about abstract expressionism. Already, the internet has been super useful to me as a tool; my previous entry here on tumblr about op art links to a wikipedia article on how the human eye sees color. These pieces are still playing with things I’ve been learning from those studies. Over at google images, I was able to realize that the new pieces I created were almost entirely in the fifty year old early 1960s style of Hans Hoffman (click for google image search on his works) . Obviously, if I’m making deliberately retro pieces, it’s going to come out like some person from the past; in this case, a genius who had started an art school teaching this style. I’d never really studied Hoffman, which is probably a side benefit of never having gone to art school. One of my friends compared my new works to Rothko, but clearly, Rothko’s composition shapes and color choices are very different. I’d like to be very very clear at this time that I’m not comparing myself to Hoffman, or suggesting that I’m a peer or equal, just that I made some retro pieces for my own enjoyment and they kind of resemble his shape and color choices.

Hans Hoffman, ‘Rising Moon’, 1964.

Overall, very pleased with this exercise, it made me happy to be sitting there watching the paint dry, and have a brush with vivid colors in my hands. My works shown above are at this time still in my studio and very much for sale. If you’d like to collect these for your own enjoyment, contact me through my website, www.terboted.com. Even more sublime would be to commission me to make some pieces in this same style, at custom sizes in a chosen color palette to suit your mood.

…continuing my recent fascination with OP ART, which has...

Tue, 24 May 2011 11:06:00 -0700

24"x24", mixed media on ply, in progress

sketches/studies in adobe illustrator

marker sketches, color opposition theory

'eye theory dots 3', finished vector art

…continuing my recent fascination with OP ART, which has obviously been pushing a lot of other people’s happy buttons as well. Already, I’m booked for summer art shows in SF and LA that have op art themes and motifs.

Viscerally I totally get it, and have for most of my life, op art is sort of self evident, duh. But I’ve been doing some research too. These pages at wikipedia, and their diagrams of how the cones in the human eye see color, are heavily influencing some of my current visual decisions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision. Very much interested in how humans have three sets of cones to see color in our eyes; one in the purple-blue spectrum; another blue/cyan/green, another green-red. And then playing with how these work together and against each other.

Also great fun is to do an image search for ‘black and white op art’ at google images, witness: http://images.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1463&bih=774&q=black+and+white+op+art&gbv=2&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&oq= light/dark contrast in the human eye is seen or perceived with sets of rods, not cones, which is why night vision is different than our daylight spectrum color vision.

There’s about a dozen recent op art works of mine you can see up on my flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/terboted/5712125132/in/photostream/ most of them are still in my studio and very much for sale.

And if you’d like to surround yourself with some great op art objects at home or work, I can easily help set you up with that, either from my existing collection of works, or custom commissions based on a particular image or effect you are interested in. everything is possible, from self adhesive wallpaper to printing on thick plexiglass, to grittier hand painted or assembled objects evocative of today’s street art craze, my current favorite. contact me through my website, www.terboted.com

HELLO WORLD

Mon, 23 May 2011 12:57:27 -0700

What it says.