The last few months I’ve been on a search for that driving force that pushed me for many years.  The year has been busy with work, painting, music, and digging into the dark parts that I tried to ignore for the longest.  It’s a good feeling to rediscover things about yourself.   I recently made a new site that has a combination of the many things I’ve been working on.   The site is still coming along… I suggestion checking it out . www.bangzoompop.com

I’ve got  a ton of my old illustrations.  I’m trying to collect my ne pieces to be scanned.  I’ve also been offered a gig drawing a few comic pages again.  Which is a bonus.  The paintings are coming along.  I’ve been posting progress via Instagram.  A lot of the new work is post there as well.  http://instagram.com/revodubois  Going to up date the site with this once I get a better scanner.

Been thinking about living and following your dreams.  I had a good talk with an artist friend of mine, Akira Beard.  His thoughts about life and art are pretty on par with how I feel about creating and where it comes from. We conversed about art and the spirit.  The way that art can pull out and examine neurosis.  It was a breathe of fresh air to find someone with similar thoughts.

I find that there is so many good artist out there.  So many well done pieces, but how much of it means anything.  I see so much work that is a almost like a brand  work that feels like a McDonald’s logo.  You just keep being beaten over the head with something that is souless, like  a painting of a celebrity… When was it the job of the artist to just give into celebrity.  When did we just become microphones for pop culture.   Was it Warhol?  Have we not recovered from what he was doing?

In Warhol’s time it was original.  After reading the philosophy of Andy Warhol, written by the artist himself, you get a clearer picture of what his work meant.  He was bringing down the “high art” elite feeling and bringing it to the same level as the everyday artistic values we see.  The design of the Coke , the soup can, and the celebrity that we see on the big screen, but we’ve come farther than that.  In our world celebrity has taken over, art is now ever present and viewable by the public, and access to it is a click away.  I think that now,  if you paint a picture of some childhood nostalgia it is just as bad as a movie remake.  You’re regurgitating an idea that is not your own.   Is it a connection to  a “simpler” time or the just because pop is something everyone recognizes… Is it wrong for me to think of is as unoriginal…    I dunno.  I’m ranting.  More power to those artist, but it’s an unsatisfying visual meal.  I hunger for something that brings fits of synesthesia.  Something that can make me hear sounds, and ask questions about meaning in this world and the one of the artist.  I’m consistantly in search for meaning through painting.

  I just finished reading Concerning The Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky.   His theories a about art and how to move it forward are inspiring.
“The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal, but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning.” (Kandinsky, 54)  I’m just looking for meaning in art just like I look for it in music.  I want something to move me, to question an artist’s motives,  the artist’s inspirations, the life the artist themself… I want to have to look deeper.  I want to be confused, angered, scared, and excited.

Last tie I felt this was the Ai Wei Wei Show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.  At first, I was confused by some of his pieces, angered at how basic some of it was, but as I kept going you could see the power and the connection between all the pieces.  After I left the exhibition it all kind of sank in.  the ideas of change, transition, breaking tradition…defiance.  I was left in awe.  The artist made his life the art work.  He was the piece. How do you make life art?