Pastel Buying Review

Not the pastels themselves, oh no, today we're reviewing the stores.

1. Rochester Art Supply - If you call and make an order, make sure to ask for Andrew. He's their resident pastel guy, and knows his section well. Cheapest place to buy OS pastels and most sets. Your stuff goes out lickety split and arrives quickly. If you order any other way (as near as *I* can tell), your supplies will be shipped slow boat to nowhere. Customer service from anyone else at RAS appears to be spotty and can occasionally be overly abrupt (of course, this could just be a yankee thing, YMMV on this). Grade: B+

2. Jerry's Artarama - Good prices online, terrible ones in their retail stores. Online orders take forever to arrive and you can pretty much kiss the customer service aspect goodbye. My local store, despite the somewhat outrageous prices, is a great one. Its only flaw is that the store is in the middle of BFE and you can't get there without going through 10 dollars worth of toll roads. The staff mostly makes up for this defect. They're all nice, highly competent, and funny as hell. Grade: C

3. Texas Art Supply - Horrendous prices on everything but paper, both online and in-store. Customer service is excellent at their stores, though. Terrible pastel section; their "top of the line" is Rembrandt. 'Nuff said. Grade: A on paper, D- everything else.

Sine Waves

I just watched Rachel Getting Married. Right now I'm a bit torn up. The main character has, shall we say, issues. I recognized them in her, and I'm thinking of them now. Addiction.. to drugs, cigarettes, attention. Feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and deep-seated guilt.

My memories now consist of what others tell me. Maybe all those canned cokes finally gave me alzheimer's, I'm not sure, but I cannot remember my life. I can't tell you what I did five minutes, five hours, five days, or five years ago. Instead, I ask people who were there, who became my memory by proxy, to tell you who I was, what I did, and how I thought. Who I loved, who I hurt. Mostly I just hurt people, according to the calculations.

The memory problems began the week after my mother died, in 1997. It took 11 more years until I finally broke down from that, and spent a few weeks in the nuthut learning to walk, mentally speaking, again. It's been about a year since then, and I've existed in some sort of stasis.. not happy, not sad.. just here, spinning wheels. Flatlined from life, emotion.

Sometimes I feel like running back to the hospital, telling them to work on me some more, that I rushed things. The next thought is, but what if I cannot be fixed? Am I just screwed-up for good, no cure for this insane cancer, no parole from this crazy mixed-up jail in my mind?

I just don't know if I can face that. I don't know.

There are three songs I cannot listen to. End of the Innocence/Don Henley. Georgia on my Mind/Willie Nelson. Under the Milk Way/The Church. Too much pain there. Maybe someone else should listen to them. They're all great songs. I just can't.

Sunday Blues

Pastel Coverage Report:

Flight 29, Blue-Violet Range, Huechroval Book, on black textured Mi-Tientes

Diane T Soft Form
Diane T Terrages
Unison
Roche
Schminke, Sennelier, Daler-Rowney
Win & Newton

The Diane's are 4 and 5 bucks each, respectively. Unison runs around 3 and a half. Roche is 20/ea but I would honestly use them for highlights only (they're highly pigmented for that kind of cash, I must admit). Unison suffered the least loss of stick. Diane Soft Form suffered the most. Roche wasn't chewed up badly, but I expect on a sanded or velour surface, these results would change.. drastically.

My Brain On Drugs - No Questions

You know how I can sit here and see which brand has the most coverage across the color spectrum? Ativan, that's how. It turns me into a little analytical monster. Yes, apparently I am having a little too much fun with my Huechroval book.

Grand Poobah Masterpiece

So.. lately I've been hanging with the guys down at Gray Lodge #329. Yes, a bunch of Masons. The ironic thing is, I'm fairly certain that none of them have ever laid one brick or carved stone. I guess I can overlook that, although I do think they should have some sort of bricklaying/stonecarving weekend o' fun to make things official. Maybe I'll speak to the Worshipful Master about this idea next time I see him. No doubt he will think I am even more psychotic than I let on.

In the meantime, due to a lack of anything else to paint, I'm gonna pastel up a nice piece of their meeting room. It shall be spooky yet unmistakeably cool.

Hue Review for You

Received Huechroval's Pastel book today. It is a little gem of a book, comprised of damn near every pastel on the planet sorted by hue, value, and chroma. In other words... you get your 40 bucks worth the minute you open it. In fact, one could make the argument that the book is an absolute steal, considering the load of information you can get out of it (if you are observant enough).

Here's what I found after highlighting each and every pastel I have in my bins. Yes, this took hours. I am apparently in the middle of everything. I own every midtone out there.. and nuttin' else. Neutrals.. good and safe for interior decorating, bad and boring for the art business. Lesson learned.

I could go on a bent about how I am always "in the middle" of everything.. continent, country, class.. but that would probably make me suicidal. So I'll just leave it there, for now.

Anyhow, I highly recommmend throwing down money for this critter. If nothing else, because it rates the entire Henri Roche line (ooooooh! aaaaaaaah!).

Adjective Art vs. Noun Art

Ahh, the miracle of modern chemistry. What years of psychotherapy cannot accomplish, one little pill can. Or four pills. Four times a day, even!

Been thinking a lot lately on the subject of abstract art. What constitutes it. Definition (dictionary.com was so much nicer before it became popup city):

a. of or pertaining to the formal aspect of art, emphasizing lines, colors, generalized or geometrical forms, etc., esp. with reference to their relationship to one another.

b. pertaining to the nonrepresentational art styles of the 20th century.

Now, bear in mind, this is most people's use of the word abstract, i.e. as an adjective. I'm more of a noun person, which may explain why I have such a problem with abstract (adjective) art in general.

Scribbles are not art. Random paint thrown on a canvas isn't art. Lots of colored squares and rectangles bisected by black lines isn't art. Why? Because there's no noun there. You can't look at it and say "oooh, a boat!" or "wow, those titties look totally natural".

If those squiggles and squirts are art then I should have made my money by the time I hit kindergarten instead of twenty-something years later. As far as I am concerned, if I can look at a painting and identify a noun in it (trees, house, barn, dog..), it's not abstract.

Or maybe I'm just becoming a Philistine in my old age. Who the hell knows. *smile*

Train Wreck City

Ok, someone shoot me.

I have no business signing up for Baylor's alumni crap. I remember less than ten people fondly, and I'm sure half of those probably hate my guts. Is this a train wreck thing? Did I sign up to laugh at those idiots who wound up marrying their second cousin and working for Daddy?

Oh, these pressing issues -- subscriptions, actually -- that I have with my erstwhile youth. Yeah, I was a fat loser then. I guess I deserved what I got, to some degree. But why should I still feel so vengeful, two decades later?

Blame it on 8th grade boys, I guess. Specific ones. Some of them were ok. The good guys, I mean. The ones who made me laugh on the field. And I was glad to see that they're still the good guys.

I need a cherry icee. I'm getting way to introspective for my own good, here. Ciao.

Deep Thoughts on Xerox-ed Art

(This entry is brought to you by the makers of Midol)

You know, Andy Warhol was criticized heavily for making multiple, near identical works. An offset by chance here, a different color there, perhaps, but in reality he was just making copies of copies. Why? It was easy, quick, and made money. He saw that he had a product that could be mass-produced and sold to the world.

And then it occured to me that he wasn't the only one, nor was he the first. Degas heavily traced/copied his subjects to compose a particular scene, especially ones done in pastel, and as a result he wound up producing thousands of drawings in his time.

Yet no one dares to compare the two, unless it is to kindly say that Degas' was a superior draughtsman whose eyes were failing in the latter part of his life, and his way of dealing with this was to use a shedload of tracing paper and charcoal to produce print after print after print. He was simply being.. innovative!

I'm calling bullshit here, big time.

From the cradle of their art careers, the impressionists were taught to copy. They spent hours in the museums, copying this master or that, trying to glean what they could from their subjects' composition. They copied to learn and they weren't expected to turn the idea into cold, hard francs.

Yet, they did. Can one honestly say that Monet's Nympheas are nothing more than handpainted copies of copies (without being beaten to death)? How about those endless Japanese bridge scenes? Were they "real"... or were they simply copies with different color schemes?

In the age of the industrial revolution, commercialism was born. With no patron (a la Medici) to support their art and lifestyles, artists turned to quick and easy copies of their own work in order to support themselves.

So was/is it Art? Hrmm.

Calling Signac

Strangest few days of my life. All of my cats had to go to the vet in succession for ass issues.

I need to think Pink. The color of wanted love.

Psychology of colors. Yes, this could be something I need to think about. Especially in regards to the colors I choose on a daily/hourly basis. Which colors do I choose often? Turqoise. Teal. Gold-Yellow. Deep, Violet Reds.

Translation: I'm such a mood swing.