Working on this one

Thank You

I thought I would take a post to say thanks.

I have been really enjoying writing on this blog lately because I am getting a lot of feedback. I get some comments on posts from friends, some private emails, and even a couple of comments from people I don't know.

Having this serve as an informal forum, similar to the painting forum and workshop at the University of Iowa, is probably the most fulfilling thing this blog could be for me. I will try to continue to develope my writing and subject selection to produce topical and interesting posts that invite discussion.

I really enjoy putting ideas out and then having them challenged or affirmed. I feel lucky to have a community of artists who read this website, and my favorite thing to post is other artists' work.

Collaboration # 2, from Jesse, Dan, and I

Here is the second drawing I have drawn on from Jesse and Dan.

Maps and Landscapes

How do images of landscapes and maps function differently?

I was thinking about putting a landscape photo on a wall in my bedroom, but I thought maybe a map might be more appropriate. Because a landscape references the outside world and the space it takes up, but a map lives inside your thoughts.

I was thinking a very precise hand drawn map might be best, because it would serve as a reminder that my job is to be precise and make amazing things.

I put two nice images below this from flickr, which is the yahoo photo sharing website.

Happy holidays.

Bill

Painting

I have been painting a lot lately.

I think I have figured something out about being an artist. Making art is thinking about art.

You do not need seperate thinking time. Painting time is thinking time, they are the same time.

Thinking about painting when I am not painting is really just thinking about starting a painting. The process of making a painting includes making a lot of decisions that would be very hard to predict before you start.

Here is a new drawing.

John Prine

I was sitting in Texas on a rainy Sunday afternoon, waiting for training to start up again on Monday. We were getting deployed to Afghanistan, a place I did not know too much about at the time, and I was feeling alone, tired, and dejected. I had just had to dropout from graduate school during my final semester, and I was feeling frustrated for the first time in an otherwise charmed life.

My friend Dan Attoe (a pretty famous painter in his own right) sent me a mixed CD of music he thought I would like, he named it MRE 1, after the Meals Ready to Eat in the Army. I was sitting there on my bunk, miserable, and I put the CD in my player, and I heard this song by John Prine. Man I started crying so fucking hard, I was beyond being embarrassed, and I cried so hard my throat got sore and swelled so I could barely swallow. Afterwards I felt better.

John Prine has a myspace page. If you search his name on YouTube there are a bunch of great videos, especially some duets with Iris Dement who has a phenomenal voice. The guy is pretty old. I already said what I had to say about his music.

Update: Click Here for John Prine singing and talking at the Library of Congress, John comes on stage at 10:40, there is a lengthy introduction

I found some photos from Afghanistan I thought I had lost

It is cathartic for me to present these photos to the world to see. My time in Afghanistan was so stressful and so hard to relate to people who have not been there, that it remains a secret despite my trying to talk about it. The top photo is me, the middle photo is a food stand next to a highway outside of Kandahar, and the bottom photo is the kids that lived next to our base.

Joan Linder is on the cover of the Entertainment section of Newsday

I went downstairs this morning, and sitting on the kitchen table was the Newsday Entainment section with my name written on it with arrows pointing to a story about the artist Joan Linder (she is on the cover). I have written twice about Linder's work on this blog, frankly, because I really like her drawings.

Joan has a solo show up at Dowling University, at the Oakdale campus. Oakdale is on the southern coast of Long Island, about 45 minutes from NYC. I will see the show sometime this week, and afterwards I will write about it on Ink Stained Hands.

I have been thinking about what makes a drawing interesting to me, and it has a lot to do with if the drawing can channel my imagination into an enjoyable, quiet mindset, where it does not matter if I am thinking in language or not. Joan Linder makes drawings that put me in that particular mental space.

Newsday has a video of the artist in her studio.

Here is the main article.

warning:

The video puts a political spin on the work that is there, but is not the emphasis. When I saw the work it came across more as a personal expression of careful perception, created by someone who enjoys subverting the viewers experience by including themes and rendered objects that are funny, surprising, politically conscious, and seductive.

Buy a Book and Call it Your Own, The Rest of the Richard Prince Interview

Richard Prince, Interview pt 1 of 4, VBS.tv

Richard Prince makes the most detached art possible: jokes culled from playboy magazines, posters of the marlboro man, and other laconic cultural references. Here is the begining of an interview from VBS.tv with Richard Prince, they have a neat program entitled Art Talk, it's worthwhile to check out.

Prince is living in upstate New York, in the wilderness. The town he lives in reminds me of places like Savoy, population 600, in Massachusetts. My experience is that people who live in the middle of nowhere, in places where it is cold for large stretches of the year, also prefer to be alone for large stretches of time.

Underground Temple in Italy

I was amazed and provoked by the story of a man in Italy who lead a group of people to excavate a gigantic (300,000 cubic feet) underground complex. The underground complex is based on the visions of a mystic Italian man named Oberto Airaudi, who prefers the name Falco. It really takes my breath away, and makes me remember the forts and tunnels I built as a child, and my grander ambitions that I never fullfilled, like turning my hometown into a medival walled city.

What makes it even better is that they created it in secret, and that the Italian authorities upon finding out about the caverns threatened to dynamite the hillside above the complex.

'They are to remind people that we are all capable of much more than we realise and that hidden treasures can be found within every one of us once you know how to access them,' says Falco.

Wonderful. Click this link for more images.

Very Important Post, Book Arts

I was reading through the interviews on the Zine Arcade website for a second or third time, having enjoyed hearing from creative independant publishers so much the first go round. Knowing that my memory is for shit I thought a second read would be interesting and useful.
While reading the Jackie Batey interview I came across (important link---->) a link for the Book Arts at the centre for fine print research. It is part of the University of the West of England, and I do not think I have ever seen a site that could be more rewarding and interesting for a bibliophile, there are links to many independent publishers, which I think could easily fill my spare time for the next 2 weeks, as well as news, explanations, exhibition information, they curate a traveling exhibition of bookmarks every year (I am definitely contributing, I always create my own bookmarks), they publish a bi-yearly journal documenting current book art practices, there is a plethora of promising projects presented, and I gleaned all that info having only found the site half an hour ago!
Ok, enough writing to you about it, I am going to check it out myself.

Book Arts Centre


-Bill

Zine Arcade

Check out the Zine Arcade, it produces a zine anthology from across the pond, it also has some great interviews with independent publishers, and links to zine distros, bloggers, and artists. Zine Arcade is run by Andy Johnston who is also a dedicated self publisher of his own work, kayak.

Here is a cartoon and some text I wrote in Zine Arcade No 1 resting in a pile of art supplies

Hey, hey check it out!

If you have been visiting Ink Stained Hands for very long you realized that the website address (URL) was http://billdonovan.blogspot.com

Which is impossible to remember, and useless to try and give to people in a conversation unless they also use blogspot.com to host a blog.

Now, I have got a real URL www.inkstainedhands.com the blog is still the same, and you can still enter in the old address and get to this blog.

NYC on wednesday (Joan Linder!), My Drawing, McSweeneys

I saw a really good show of drawings at Mixed Greens gallery , they are selling a catalog of the show for $10. The artist, Joan Linder , made two different groups of drawings, one was something along the lines of the sexual confessions of an humanish(oid) female bunny rabbit, and the other was a (not immediately) funky, convincingly realistic rendering of a wall(s) behind a bar with all the liquor, political stickers, street signs, and celebrity ephemera on it. Very, very good drawing. The drawings were mostly ink and pen from what I could tell.


I had never been in Mixed Greens gallery before, and I was surprised and pleased to find a new artist to enter into the group of artists I like. Also the staff at the gallery was friendly.


I walked over to Printed Matter after I went to Mixed Greens. Printed Matter is the mecca in the US for artist books. It is very interesting and engaging to walk into this store, because there is a lively hand formed quality to the place: tables covered in books with shelves on the sides of the tables filled with books, bookshelves with books piled into them, cabinets with glass display cases filled with books, counters covered in books. If someone could illustrate my brain when I die I hope it metaphorically looks like the inside of printed matter.

Here is a photo of the drawing I am working on now. Laur says it the best face I have drawn in a while, the photos at a bit of an angle because (I am lazy) I ran out of room to hang and shoot it.


The 4 McSweeneys books came, I can not recommend them more strongly. I actually feel bad having gotten them so cheaply, (I just checked and they have raised the price 5 dollars, so you may want to act quickly).

The copyright notice on book 13 was an extraordinarily moving letter detailing a meeting between the books editors and the books namesake in Ireland, Timothy McSweeney. A book where the copyright notice is so well written and heartfelt it made my eyes sting has a lot of potential (and I think the books will continue to provide unorthodox, thoughtful, and interesting entertainment and reading) (it could have been written by Rudyard Kipling) (and I was a frickin soldier), if you need any further proof that there are more people out there like you (me). Then just spend the 20 bucks, scratch that, they raised it to 25.

Ok, I am going to work on my drawing. You re a better man than I am Gunga Din.

New Drawing

The new drawing, zombies religion searching for a way to live

(close up)

26 x 20 inches, marker, pencil, acrylic paint

Great Art Book

If you are looking for a great new art book, look no further, Neue Rollen, a catalog of painting by Neo Rauch is an awesome book. <---- click there.

The reproductions are very good, and there is a lot of text, which I am sure is interesting (I have not read anything except the quotes from Neo Rauch that are positioned on opposite pages from the reproductions). The words are secondary in this kind of book.



It has been a while since an artist really captured my imagination, but Neo Rauch does the job. His quotes are provocative in a not overbearing way, but he does not seem to rely on art theory, instead focusing on an almost surrealist motivation (which is the last thing I think I should be interested by, but here I am, interested).

The reproductions are interesting because they cover paintings that the artist is less well known for, and that are obviously less sucessful visually, so there is a narrative that becomes apparent of someone who figured something out, and this something is how to stop making quirky unsucessful paintings and make blockbuster international fame paintings. It is a rags to riches book.



I recommend buying it.






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My friend Brandon Buckner

I would like to introduce you to my friend Brandon Buckner, a painter, sculpture, musician, and video artist.

You can see his blog here.

You can see his myspace "Vest with Hood" here.

My favorite memory of Brandon is when, during grad school, we had some old paintings up in the art building that were strange and disconnected from what we were interested in at the time, decided to hang an intentionally bizarrely painted picture of Kenny Rogers with a card listing medium, and dimensions, and a title that was something like "The Gambler," so that the painting was presented in the same way as the other artwork. It remained undetected for around a week or two before it was removed by the school.
He didn't tell me about it, and I noticed it one day walking through the hall to class, and it was a very nice, funny moment of recognition.
Now he's faculty at the University of Tennesse at Chattanooga teaching foundations.

Dan Attoe, New Paintings