January is getting away from me now, and I promised I'd at least do this monthly. I've been sitting on a long essay on how I feel about arts education, specifically grad school for a month or more. I thought I'd post it for January but I'm uncomfortable with about 50% of it, so it waits. Here instead are some recent paintings that you'll have a chance to see in person soon, if you live in New York and frequent new Bushwick galleries that call "the Bogart" home.

By way of explanation: I was about half way through this series of paintings based on avatars and emoticons when I realized they didn't have names. In the past I've always settled on "untitled" to name my work, but that was getting old, an artist can only have so much work that is untitled. So to give a bit of narrative thread to this group of 70 paintings I decided to look for a list of some sort.

Given the nature of the paintings I was looking for a particularly colorful list. I found my colorful list in a particular subset of pop culture, marijuana nomenclature. Weed growers are particularly proud of their progeny and give the strains pretty names like Bubblegumcrack and Rasberrycough. So I stole their names.

Here are four recent paintings.

Chris Moss, BC Blue Cheese, 2011, 10 x 10 inches

Chris Moss, Chesus, 2011, 10 x 10 inches

Chris Moss, Somalicious, 2011, 10 x 10 inches

Chris Moss, Yumboldt, 2011, 10 x 10 inches