Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Adult Contemporary Coasters are here!



For the last two years I have been working on and off again with digital images of older paintings. Really I've been doing this for much longer but that's beside the point. These new "paintings" are filling up my hard drive. Occasionally I'll share the images on twitter or facebook or tumblr but they've always remained "working drawings", things I make that don't exist as anything but little notes to myself. Proof, I guess, that I'm still working, but I never really thought about showing them, not in a gallery at least.

I like a lot of things. I mean when I was a kid I always liked the section of the hardware store where they kept the twopenny nails. That hardware store used to have a huge container of nails, several containers really, all different types of fasteners, you just had to reach in and grab as many as you wanted. I liked grabbing a bunch and letting them fall out of my hands into the container as if it were gold instead of galvanized steel. I liked the part of that store that sold rope too, giant spools of rope. I can't say if those buckets and spools are why I work serially but I do remember always liking a lot of things. Things in great quantity, long series of paintings followed by even longer series of digital rearrangements of those paintings are somehow satisfying. I suppose it's a compulsion to compete with the efficiency of manufacture.

You might remember I made a doormat a few years ago, sales of that venture went so well I have decided to once again step into the world of manufactured "editions" (I still have all of them, get at me, they're now old stock, available at a steep discount!). Which brings me to the point of this post. I've started a line of drink coasters, the first of which are available for sale below. I've called the series of images Adult Contemporary for reasons that remain mysterious even to me. 


The coasters are double sided, with a different image on each side, four images in total. They are offset printed using vegetable based inks on heavy weight pulp board manufactured, I'm told, from managed forests in the EU (that means for every tree they cut down another gets planted). They are available in packages of 8 and each package will also include an original drawing on a coaster. All coasters are highly absorbent and reusable, if you'd like to read more about them you can on the manufacturer's website.





Adult Contemporary coasters are available in packs of 8 plus one drawing for $15.00, and come in a windowed gift box. Please select the shipping option in the drop down menu if you need me to ship your coasters. Get yours today.
amount

Monday, June 10, 2013

New Digitally Manupulated Photographs.

Christopher Moss   Amnesia Haze II, 2013

Christopher Moss   Aurora Indica II, 2013

Christopher Moss   Ayatollah II, 2013

Christopher Moss   BC Blue Cheese II, 2013

Christopher Moss   Betazoid II, 2013

Christopher Moss   Betazoid II, 2013

Christopher Moss   Big Buddah Cheese II, 2013

Christopher Moss   Black Domina II, 2013

Christopher Moss   Blueberry Northern Lights II, 2013

Christopher Moss   Blue God II, 2013

Friday, November 16, 2012

I'll trade you some art for some hurricane relief funding.

Hey, I've been thinking a lot lately about how miserable life would be for me if a hurricane were to come wash away everything I own. I don't think it would matter much how good life was for me before if I had to start all over from scratch. Add to that the insult, the lack of response, the ignorance of a city that pretty much got right back to business as usual in just over a week and I think I'd be downright despondent. 

There are many, many people out there in the Rockaways, in Coney Island, in Breezy Point, and on Staten Island, to name just a few of the New York (not to mention New Jersey) places still struggling to recover from Hurricane Sandy. Maybe you've noticed, or read about it.


I'm fine, I was barely affected by the storm, but I know a lot of people were. For those people who are not fine and who won't be fine for a long time I want to help. One of the fastest moving and quickly reacting groups who continue to help people recover is called Occupy Sandy. I don't know them and I don't think they have time to notice me, but I'm deeply impressed by their grass roots response. It seems their help came faster, has been more helpful and is better organized than any other more established agency. I'd like to donate to them in a big way, they're directing relief on the ground by listening to what people need and updating the public to what can be done via their website


I don't want to keep you here forever, reading this blog post and not doing anything so I'll get to the point. As incentive to help I'll be donating all of the proceeds from the sale of my paintings and drawings through this page. I'll be updating this as things sell, when something is purchased I'll post another, starting with these, just click the buy now button below each painting and I'll accept your payment via paypal, pack up your painting, send it to you and donate the payment through their "wedding registry". Each of the paintings are offered at full retail value ($500.00 is pretty cheap as far as art goes, have you seen the auction results at Christie's and Sothoby's recently?). I totally understand if you can't donate that much, which is why I also have drawings for $40.00 too. I also understand if you don't want an artwork in exchange for a donation, in which case I'd recommend you donate here.


Lastly, if you'd prefer not to donate through paypal but you'd still like to buy a painting for hurricane relief you can contact me by email here.

UPDATE: the first drawing has sold, I will be updating this page as quickly as I can but these are first come first served. In the event you've purchased something that has already been sold to someone else I will contact you regarding a replacement. I'm sure we can work something out.  

UPDATE 2: Thank you for your support, the sale is now over. If you donated you will be happy to know that almost $800.00 went to hurricane relief, a small but nonetheless helpful amount I could not have raised without all of your help. Thanks again. 


Ayatollah, 2011, acrylic on masonite, 10 x 10 inches

Blue God, 2011, acrylic on masonite, 10 x 10 inches


Bubble Gum, 2011, acrylic on masonite, 10 x 10 inches


Candy Graham, 2011, acrylic on masonite, 10 x10 inches
SOLD 

Drawing 9, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
SOLD

Drawing 13, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
SOLD
Drawing 19, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
SOLD
Drawing 20, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
SOLD
Drawing 1, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches

Drawing 14, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches

Drawing 2, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches

Drawing 4, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches


Drawing 10, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
Drawing 7, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
 
Drawing 21, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
Drawing 11, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
 
Drawing 8, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
 
Drawing 22, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
 
Drawing 12, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
 
Drawing 15, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
 
Drawing 3, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
 
Drawing 16, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
 
Drawing 17, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
Drawing 5, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
 
Drawing 6, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
 
Drawing 18, 2012, ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches
 

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Mr. Hop the Scissor's Origin Story

As it turns out this space is a monthly for me, I don't move at the pace of the internet, and really I'm not a blogger, I simply have a blog that I tell some of you about. I've sat on this post since January it was intended to be a response to Sharron Buttler's post on her blog Two Coats of Paint  about an MFA final crit she sat in on. I've been thinking about the relative value of an MFA since 2006 when I was sent my first bill from Brooklyn College for that particular degree and I sent Sharon some comments about what I thought about the experience. This is a version of the same things I sent her with pics I thought would be helpful.

Boats, c. 2003, approximately 10 x 12 inches

In 2003 I moved to New York with the specific intention of attending a fairly cheap graduate school in pursuit of an MFA degree. As it turns out I got into my second choice school, Brooklyn College (Hunter was first on my list). I thought I was a pretty hot shit, if modest, painter and I spent my first year at Brooklyn making competent modernist figurative paintings. My heroes at the time were New York School second generation painters like Louisa Mathiasdottir, Leland Bell and Paul Georges. In turn their heroes were also my heroes, the first generation ab-ex painters DeKooning and Hoffman but also figurative painters like Balthus, Derain, Matisse, Bonnard. I was making paintings just like they did, and I was at grad school trying to figure out how to make paintings like that matter to the world, it was a stance I took against the last 50 years of art history, but I was fine with that, I was a “rebel” in the sense that I was rejecting contemporary mores.

Untitled, 2004, 24 x 19 inches


I found some support for my beliefs at BC, Archie Rand and Patricia Cronin were hugely supportive. I liked Archie especially, he really understood what I understood about how important these artists really were. He was respectful, even reverent, in my studio. At the same time I was studying with Elizabeth Murray and William T. Williams. I'd met occasional resistance from both of them in personal studio crits but nothing I couldn't handle, I knew how to argue for an ideal beauty, I knew how to argue against how stupid and wrong minimalism and conceptual art were, I had moral high ground to stand on.

Bed, 2005, 24 x 36 inches


At the end of my first year I was confused but confident I was right, and it was with that confidence that I walked into my first year critique. Armed with some fairly large new paintings and tons upon tons of studies and small watercolors I was there to prove my worth as a painter, if not by quality at least by sheer volume. I was prolific, like Picasso, ya know? I made a lot of stuff, just look at my stream of semen, look at how well I paint! Look, will you? And if you don't see how great this particular bowl of apples is please look again, you have no IDEA how hard I worked on that pile of fruit, and it's grand, isn't it?

Untitled (after Caravaggio's Flagellation), 2004, 24 x 19 inches


The critique was vaguely praising, nice this, good touch here, lovely color, nice palette knife work there, etc.

And then, the last person to speak finally spoke. Elizabeth Murray, who I'd grown to respect for an abundant amount of reasons and who had recently suffered through an unimaginably grueling session of chemo therapy on what turned out to be one of her last days with us on this planet but who also somehow felt well enough that day to crit me and my classmates, said:

“Your work is inane”.

Which was a pretty easy thing to brush off, I mean the whole rest of the room pretty much told me I was the genius I knew I was so fuck her. Right?

And then it was suddenly summer and I had what seemed like eons of time off from the pressures of grad school. I had one more crit with a visiting artist that summer, Kara Walker, who couldn't figure out why I liked dead white guys any more than I could explain what it was about art that I was so in love with.

I felt awful, and worse, out of touch. That moment of that day killed something in me that needed to be killed. I went home and cried.

[ed. you can't feel bad for me here, I was an incredibly naive person, unaware of my own naivete, thinking it was some kind of secret knowledge.]

Untitled, 2005, 19 x 24 inches

I spent that summer making lots of paintings, reams upon reams of paintings on paper. And I thought all of that work was shit; horrible, awful, terrible things, an amazing amount of paintings, a whole new portfolio. Paintings I spat on, paintings I pissed on, paintings made from soap bubbles and ink, cartoon paintings, stuff I'd never made before. It was an awful summer of awkward growth.

Untitled, 2005, 19 x 24 inches

Untitled, 2005, 19 x 24 inches

I spent my second year at BC making what are probably the worst, ugliest paintings I've ever made, but I was making them as a free person, I discovered I was really good at making bad paintings, I was good at having bad ideas and I was really good at ugly. I had never let myself do that, I'd never really let go, I'd never let myself into my work in the way I did that semester, and the results were horrifying.

Quadripples, 2006, 18 x 24 inches

So I just made ugly art for a few years. I remember my second year crit was nearly silent. Quite a few of the undergrad faculty who sit in on the crits couldn't figure out what had happened, or why. I had murdered something precious, my own “taste” I guess, whatever it was that was preventing me from speaking from my own experience. Fear was part of that thing I'd just killed, fear of making a bad painting, fear of saying the wrong thing, etc. The thing was I didn't even recognize my defense mechanism as fear, I was proud of that mechanism, or at least I had been.

Untitled, 2006, 48 x 56 inches


Dancing in the Show Tonight, 2006, 48 x 48 inches
 
I spent a lot of time in my second semester reading artforum from the 70's, I figured I'd go to at least one of the sources of the rhetoric I was hearing. I read Don Judd's reviews in Arts magazine, the ones he wrote about the scene around him. I discovered young Jerry Salz's paintings were heavily influenced by Jasper Johns. I realized why he had quit making art and began writing. I began actually liking a lot of stuff I'd rejected before, not just liking it but thinking critically about why it was made and why it might be important.



Dickheads, 2006, 48 x 48 inches

Best of all, for my own work, I did get comfortable with making ugly things, and those ugly things became less ugly to me, because I'd made them and I had discovered a way of owning the things I'd been afraid to make. Making work became a way of working through having my ass handed to me by Elizabeth Murray. I never want another person to tell me that my work doesn't need to exist, and I'll likely never have the opportunity to have someone tell me that again in my life. But that's what grad school is for.

Untitled, 2006, 48 x 48 inches

I remember saying one thing in that final crit, when the notion that the new paintings were less than pretty came about I remember answering “yes, and I should have been making paintings like this years ago”.

70 paintings titled individually, the work as a whole has no title, 2011 - 2012, 10 x 10 inches each (excepting the one that's 10 x 12 inches) photo by Sharon Butler.