I Am Too Old For This Shit

I’m even more old for this shit…:)

Van Gogh and I

La Bohème, la vie d’artiste, for the moment I will set that aside. As you can read in my title, I really am too old for this shit… 20 years older than Vincent at the moment of his death. I’ve tried and will still try to go on and finish what I can, I know this is just a phase and maybe, one day, if I’ll live, the nostalgia of an artist life, the urge to draw and to paint could come back with a vengeance. But for now, I will just stay (literally) on my arse 8 h per day, helping clients of Chatr to Talk Happy… It will pay the bills…

What can I do? No Mecena offered to do for me what Theo did for Vincent or Ambroise Vollard for Gauguin…

Painting, art, literature, will still be with me and I’ll even try to write a blog…

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The Jester DAnu…

Still true, that one, I’m still somewhat of a jester…a clown…

Van Gogh and I

Summer is a wonderful time here,  in Quebec (in other parts of the world I suppose is the same but given the long, long winter, when the summer comes, man! are we “Quebecois”  glad!)

Everybody is wearing shorts and sandals – even if sometimes the temperatures are not that warm – and if you work as a portrayer-jester (as I do, in the summertime – Remember? Janis Joplin’s “Summertime”? and Ella Fitzgerald’s?) you’ll see a lot of people jogging, walking, skating, bycicling around the Lac of Nations…

Yesterday I was trying to make a portrait or two (you can see what I did right here) and my friend Raymond and his Zoo en Folies (4 parrots) came along… and then also Stephane, the accordionist (the one who’s playing amelie poulin’s musical theme and other «Paris-Montmartre» tunes … Some tourists and some pickpockets and a hill or two (maybe a cathedral…

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The Scarecrow

The scarecrow principle is that he has none. But he accepts all.

He do accepts everything else, too.It rains, he accepts it. The sun is shinning, ok, he accepts it. It snows? So what? He accepts it. Anyhow, what can he do about it? Nothing. So, he accepts it, whatever it is.

Old, stinking raggs clothes him. His old carcass is rotten and he’s ridiculous with that funny hat they put on his sac filled-with-straws head of his…People laught at him, kids point him with their little fingers (the small, good ones) and throw stones at him (the hooligans!)…

Crows and other birds are scared of him, at first, at least. Then they get used and begin sitting on his wooden shoulders. Some, meaner, even shit on his head…So what? That’s life. And he accepts it…

Painters and photographers like to take him as a model. Some may even paint some fancy masterpieces with him as a free, benevolent, model…Big deal!

Since he was planted there, in the cornfields (or whatever) he has to BE there. No choice. No legs to take him elsewhere…And then, what for? Is there any better elsewhere? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not.

Either you stay put, in silence, and the world whirls around you or you move in a noisy Ferrari around the world, it’s the same thing, eventually… Eventually, the Ferrari and their proud owner will be, too, a rotten/corrugated carcas. What’s the difference, essentially? No difference.

They say – the Japanese, who else? – that you arrive at your destination when you cease to travel…When you cease to WANT to travel…

Anyway, the scarecrow accepts that, too…It is what it is… He is. As simple as that. He is. For as long as it takes… For as long as it takes the sun, rain, snow, frost to turn his carcass to rotten wood and his clothes to turn to pieces…

My scarecrow signature

Japanese sign for scarecrow

Premonitions in Painting: my Premonition

Still kicking…maybe the premonition was true…

Van Gogh and I

Yesterday morning, the 01 01 2014, I woke up with my face to a painting of mine on the wall close to my bed. This is the one I’m talking about:

Trieste

Until yesterday, this painting, one of my favorite (and subjectively, one of my best works until now) was not “personal”, so to speak… It did not have a personal, visceral connection with me. But yesterday, sliding from my dreams (whatever they were – usually I do not remember them…) to reality, I saw that slender, kind of skinny naked man (maybe that’s why it wasn’t personal… I wasn’t skinny until recently…) was lying there, encircled by a dark, black green shadow. I had a minor epiphany: that was me, shadowed by my cancer, menaced but still calm… All of a sudden, this painting (one that I’ve started painting years ago and then repainted in the present form in…

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Art Therapy, here I come!

Until I got the time to write my new post about Vlaminck & Van Gogh…

Van Gogh and I

It seems that doctors die, statistically, at around 57-60 years old, a lot sooner than the “coach patatoes” (statistically), so why trust them entirely and blindly when it comes to our lives? (the statistics are for the US of A)  

Well, most of us are conditioned a lifetime to do just that…

So, it was not easy for me to say NO to the surgery they in a hurry programmed me for (even if I feel quite ok and my cancer seems to be stabilized…I’ve started to paint and draw again…)

But I did, even if most of my friends said I was crazy… Well, now, artists are a bit crazy, aren’t they? (at least a little bit…) So, instead of lying “gutted like a trout” on an operation table and then for 2 months (if everything went ok and they wouldn’t forget a scalpel or some gauze in…

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Art Therapy, here I come!

It seems that doctors die, statistically, at around 57-60 years old, a lot sooner than the “coach patatoes” (statistically), so why trust them entirely and blindly when it comes to our lives? (the statistics are for the US of A)  

Well, most of us are conditioned a lifetime to do just that…

So, it was not easy for me to say NO to the surgery they in a hurry programmed me for (even if I feel quite ok and my cancer seems to be stabilized…I’ve started to paint and draw again…)

But I did, even if most of my friends said I was crazy… Well, now, artists are a bit crazy, aren’t they? (at least a little bit…) So, instead of lying “gutted like a trout” on an operation table and then for 2 months (if everything went ok and they wouldn’t forget a scalpel or some gauze in your belly…) lying in bed with a caca-bag (yes, those details got me disgusted and taken aback too…sorry for that…)

I’ve prefered to take my chances with God and to trust my body to recover with diet, meditation, prayer and exercise… And if not, at least, I’ve decided for myself and wasn’t just a sheep or cow (well, bull) hearded to the slaughter-house… Painting, drawing will help me enormously too, I know it. I have a purpose and a meaning in my life: to paint, to draw, to photograph the beauty all around us (my grandsons included, whom I hope to see going to school, at least…) for as long as I possibly can… not that bad as a purpose and meaning in life…

Here there are some of the latest paintings and drawings I’ve “committed”:

Self-portrait, the 19 th of April 2014

I look here a lot more severe and somber than I really feel… Refusing the surgery  – at the time I was considering the options – gave me peace of mind and I’m now a lot more serene…

Madona With Owl

To paint this I’ve used one of the photos I’ve took at a Medieval Festival, when I was still in Sibiu, Transylvania, in the summer of 2013…

Model and artist

I even started to draw nudes again… here it is another one…

marie-claude

A Stalin’s fan with Big, Big Ear…

Sometimes, when I still have color on my palette, in order not to waste it (since I’m still poor as a church mouse…) I do indulge myself in fantesies like this one… The ones who lived or heard about Stalin and communism (I did), know why the guy has such a large ear…

Finally, here I am with my grandsons Gabriel and Thomas and my daughter at about the time when I was about 90 % sure and decided NOT to take the surgery, taking instead my fate in my own hands… If they are not very skilled with a scalpel (don’t trust me to remove your appendix!) they still can hold a brush and a pencil and do some, supposedly, not that bad paintings and drawings…

my daughter, grandsons and me, the 25th of April

So, beware Art Therapy, here I come!

P.S. If I do not kick the bucket right away or even, it’s possible if not probable, get  cured, it will be a reason to hope for all those who have (or will get; it seems it’s about one in three, right now…) “cancer”…and this WORD (for it’s JUST a word) will not scare the living shit out of people, who will croak just as the Australian Aborigenis do, when being “pointed the bone”…I’ve read about this in the book “You Can Conquer Cancer” by Ian Gawler, a real “Crocodile Dundee” of the fight with cancer, who survived for more than 30 years and is still kicking (well, at least with one leg; the doctors amputated the other one at the beginning of his cancer…bad joke, pardon me, Ian…)

 

 

A discovery: Sergio Kokis

It seems there are a lot of visitors for this post…

Van Gogh and I

A few weeks ago I’ve rediscovered Sergio Kokis. I “re-discoverd” him since I’ve seen and even browsed one of his books, La danse macabre du Quebec (The morbid dance of Quebec?) but, for some reason , I did not clicked at the time…

But, “browsing” through my old papers, I’ve fall upon a cut from L’Actualite (a magazine from Montreal, I think) with an interview featuring Sergio Kokis. And, this time, it clicked! His opinion on today’s art market, on the level of deception and falsity and stupidness and snobishness in today’s art seemed to be simply mine. He formulated the same thoughts, almost, that, for years, had populated my thoughts. The tirany of art “experts” and museums curators, the usually mean spirited and mercantile approach of art merchants, their money-grubbing and vulgar approach of art (under snobish and distinguished appearances, which are valid for the most art “collectors” too…Exceptions…

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