honeybees

Our cell phones have been proving to kill honeybees. They cannot find their way back to hive thanks to the cell towers. This will result in the death of all our crops..keep yappin'

a must read

http://books.google.com/books?id=ZJox8Eh-gs8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false

one in ten

One in ten people are now on anti-depressants. Some people are clinical and need them. The world is a brutal place and some people cant face life without some help. I wont even take an aspirin. I think a lot of people's depression comes from some deep Freudian/ jungian denial of who they are and what their dreams are. Fear is a factor. Living a lie is the quickest way to a heart attack or a bottle full of Brave New World "Soma." I dont mind a good drink now and again, an iced concoction that serves as a mini vacation from "the storm." I know people who haven't the slightest idea who they are, their mettle has never been tested. This can be because they either had it too easy or they lived in a shell of their own careful construction. Growth comes from boldness and self- knowledge from facing fear toe to toe. I have put my neck on chopping block of fear many times as an artist---If it doesnt kill you, you just get stronger as does (hopefully) the alchemy of your art and soul. Live a lie you will learn to regret it. Sew your own moccasins and and make your own choices and place no trust in a bed that is ready- made.

rembrandt cellphone

This picture is a composition of pure genius. It is Jungian and Freudian and contains the entire universe of knowledge in its play of dark and light. It is Visual DNA--- the staircase a double helix into the dark unknown of human wisdom. The old man sits quiet for eternity waiting for man to discover the mysteries around him--- the light of a million sunrises have come and gone and still he sits...Maybe he is waiting for american idol to come on.

why I keep making art...

(someone emailed me this)


I wanted to check out the galleries to see what was being sold in the area. You would not believe the schlock that's being passed off as art. Between the "modern" art, the Picasso rip-offs, and the landscapes with uninspiring use of color and no sense of light, it's hard to understand why this stuff sells for thousands of dollars. I actually looked at a seascape and wondered what you would say about it. After pondering it for a few minutes, I came to the conclusion you would think it was no better than a paint-by-numbers picture. Then I overheard that the artist's family comes from money and paid for their son to go to school in Paris. I nearly shrieked "what a waste!"

I hope you know that your blog has given me an education in art, from theory to practice, that is unavailable anywhere else. Before I knew you, I would have been one of those people who thought "Oh, how pretty!" and wasted money on the painting. Now, I know better, and so does everyone else who follows you. Thank you for sharing your insight - you are a blessed artist and an outstanding human being!

M.

(I'll take the blessed artist part but I am not so sure about the outstanding human bit)

in progress

bookcover--nassau county (in progress)

genetic memory

http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20090819/959/tod-kidney-transplant-op-transforms-plum.html

mural sketch

Here is a very rough first sketch for a mausoleum mural. Final mural will be roughly five by ten foot or so.

painting of the day--raphael--- st. micheal

DAli

http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=6971264

alex explains two paintings

Just got a commission to paint a St. Micheal mural for a mausoleum. will post sketches and studies as I am finished. This is a "scaffold mural"...they can be a little bit of work but I love to paint the "old master" saints so it will be a great job.

alex

Bernie Madoff has cancer. He is supposedly spending time in his prisons native american sweat- lodge. Is any man above salvation? Is any killer worth more than his crime? Imagine it took all this to get a guy like bernie to find his soul, his center. I know people without souls, I know people who have no idea who they are as people. Nature works to bring you to center. Know thyself, Socrates...If you dont know thyself you look to external elements to find yourself--- you become a consumer of what you consider the you that you are supposed to be. There is a conspiracy against people knowing themselves, the powers that be want to sell you identities via consumerism. You are not your house, your shirt, your fancy car, you are a spirit having a human experience. The sweat lodge called modern life can guide the lost souls into knowing themselves it can lead us to reason. For many it is just a sad maze.

the harder I work, the luckier I get.

cell phone photo

new prints available

I am offering a series of prints for sale of some of my best works. I think I will offer about ten different pieces. Will post options and prices tonight.

dinosaur park---Texas

as a kid in the middle of nowhere in Texas we had a park called dinosaur park...Here is a photo I found online. I went here many times as a child, there are real dinosaur footprints in the park. They are like the memories mashed into the soft earth of my child-brain.

art of the day---fleur du mal--alfred kubin

Alfred kubin is an odd one, his art flows from the hand of strange forces..His technique was a bit limited but his work is undeniable and he deserves more attention. Imagination is rare (even in artists) people think artists are imaginative, most aren't. Most are just apes with opposable thumbs.

costa rica

I am putting all gears in motion to spend some time painting in Costa Rica. Thus will require a lot of handling of the old details and then I will need to sell some new works to fund the journey. Where there is a will there is a way---they say.

the camera eye

Grim-faced and forbidding,
Their faces closed tight,
An angular mass of new yorkers
Pacing in rhythm,
Race the oncoming night,
They chase through the streets of manhattan.
Headfirst humanity,
Pause at a light,
Then flow through the streets of the city.

They seem oblivious
To a soft spring rain,
Like an english rain
So light, yet endless
From a leaden sky.

The buildings are lost in the limitless rise.
My feet catch the pulse and the purposeful stride.

I feel the sense of possibilities,
I feel the wrench of hard realities.
The focus is sharp in the city.

Wide-angle watcher
On lifes ancient tales,
Steeped in the history of london.

Mist in the streets of westminster.
Wistful and weathered,
The pride still prevails,
Alive in the streets of the city.

Are they oblivious
To this quality?
A quality
Of light unique to
Every citys streets.

Pavements may teem with intense energy,
But the city is calm in this violent sea.

N.C. WYETH

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,540780,00.html

detail...Sleep Of Reason
Sleep of Reason... new version

20 x 24 oil on canvas

an old magazine cover---by gardega

the excellent tragedy

Some people are born with an innate sense of adventure. A sense that they are supposed to "go out" into the world and do things. A sense that the town you grew up in just aint big enough and to inter your psychic bones there for the rest of your days would be a tragedy "par excellent. It is fine to re-visit for the holidays but then your skin gets itchy and its time to ramble on . I've always felt this way. I need adventure, if not external, then internal. I need to feel alive because (unlike marriages) it seems to me you only get one go around in this world. I was always comfortable falling on my face as long as I was on the edge of something I didn't understand. I look in the faces of those I have known and I see the trap they have so carefully built for themselves, full of strange and unconscious levers and mechanisms. I am not knocking the safe and secure and suburban life nor am I looking down on another people, one mans trap is another man's paradise. ( I suppose) But I meet some of the people I grew up with and they lived "by the book" and did all the "right things" and yet I get a sense of a slow and ticking malaise, a sense of a hero's death and dragons of un-slain. I am sure there are fingers pointed in my direction at mutterings of "unstable" and wild and the like but we each live according to our own nervous systems. we are hard-wired by our super-ego's, a script handed to us by parental and often unknown forces. My nature is one that prefers life, not sipped but swallowed whole and gulped. Fear is a great shepherd and outside the corral of consensus there is a life that is vast and vibrant and exciting. I dont like boredom. Boredom is a sign of lack of interior recources. "Some are born to rule the world and live their fantasies, most of us just dream anbout the things we'd like to be...." I would rather sleep soundly in a cheap self-made bed than live a lie and swallow medication to help me slumber through the ticking of self laid traps of a bed that is ready made--and besides, there may be a dragon "under there."

Words of the day

The dancer slows her frantic pace
In pain and desperation,
Her aching limbs and downcast face
Aglow with perspiration

Stiff as wire, her lungs on fire,
With just the briefest pause ---
The flooding through her memory,
The echoes of old applause.

She limps across the floor
And closes her bedroom door...

The writer stares with glassy eyes ---
Defies the empty page
His beard is white, his face is lined
And streaked with tears of rage.

Thirty years ago, how the words would flow
With passion and precision,
But now his mind is dark and dulled
By sickness and indecision.

And he stares out the kitchen door
Where the sun will rise no more...

Some are born to move the world ---
To live their fantasies
But most of us just dream about
The things we'd like to be

Sadder still to watch it die
Than never to have known it
For you -- the blind who once could see ---
The bell tolls for thee...

N. Peart

drawing of the day

Studies for the Libyan Sibyl (recto); Studies for the Libyan Sibyl and a small Sketch for a Seated Figure (verso), ca. 1511 (recto), ca. 1510-1511 (verso)
Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, Caprese 1475 - 1564 Rome)
Italian
Red chalk, with small accents of white chalk on the left shoulder of the figure in the main study (recto); soft black chalk, or less probably charcoal (verso); sheet: 11 3/8 x 8 7/16 in. (28.9 x 21.4 cm)
Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1924 (24.197.2)

This is one of my favorite skecthes of all time. It is a study by Michelangelo of the Libyan Sibyl for his Sistine chapel. This is the definition of "line quality..."

important video

http://www.pyrabang.com/view.php?ref=freepress&post_id=37131&pd=20169&org=&visitor=true

out of chaos..

It was a friends fortieth birthday party yesterday. His mom asked me to draw a caricature/ portrait of him as a gift. I wasnt able to attend party but I finished the piece. Caricature is a nightmare for me as it doesnt come natural. I have to battle and fight my way through the dark. After 8 hours of hell I emerged victorius and delivered piece on time. My apt. looks like a bomb went off, ink, spray paint, paper, paint everywhere. The bottom line is I got it done. There is no room in the "art lane" for excuses or failure, a lazy artist is a dead artist. I awlays find as way to get things done although the method is a bit crazed I arrive with the goods (usually...)

Toe Shoes

My sister is a great ballerina, she gave me a bunch of toe shoes so I could paint a still life. I decided to draw a design on one of the shoes...driven to distraction. There is no surface that my brain doesnt want to scribble and draw on. I think I have a compulsion, a fear of empty spaces so I have to fill every space I can with art. Some people make art because they want to, I make art because I have to.

Rao's kitchen watercolor--in progress

Rao's kitchen watercolor--in progress

artist of the day--Puvis de Chavannes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Puvis_de_Chavannes

I have come around to liking this artist he has a certain "something" I believe he taught picasso for a while..there aren't many symbolists I dont like...

word of the day--cynosure

cynosure

1.

An object that serves as a focal point of attention and admiration.

2.

That which serves to guide or direct.


The lady is the cynosure of the pic.... The fallen log leads the eye into the pic and up to her...

central park photo

I took this snapshot off some random trail in Central Park. This snapshot really reminds me of a sargent watercolor. I hate Sargent's buttery oils of rich people and dogs, they are like chewing on butter sticks. but his watercolors have life! LIFE is the elusive fourth dimension of art. You can have technique, you can have concept--- but LIFE is the heartbeat of the work.! I know techie artists who have all the skills locked down tight and they have as much life as a toad on a texas highway. I know other artists who have only concepts and no technique. There is somewhere a happy sun-dappled meadow of middleness where I try to put up my camp.

update

blogger is not letting me post pictures at the moment so I will paint a mental picture of my latest work... imagine the failed light of some hellish place filled with the cries and agony of souls trapped for eternity. The sky is dead save for a few fowl beasts on wing. The waters are still and lifeless and deep and the colors muted. This is my next painting.

I may visit the suburbs for inspiration..

eat more pound cake.

gardega rd.

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=uq4&q=cleburne+texas+gardega+lane&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&resnum=1&ct=image

This is really named after my last name..I lived there until 11. It was not named Gardega rd. while we lived there..

the death of a wolf...

Here is chipmunk. He is a good friend and a great bartender. He used to be special forces.
Another bar shot of Chipmunk. I used black and white as an homage to Rod Serling, one of my favorite people. His writing often covered such concepts as the one elaborated below.


In my neighborhood there is a wonderful neighborhood bar restaurant called the Wicked Wolf. It is the last of the Mohicans--- of real neighborhood "joints." Over the last year I really got to know the place and its patrons, everyone knows everyone, it almost like family. Being a lone wolf myself I took a shine to the place and used to go there and draw and listen to a million stories. I was one of the youngest regulars in the place. I don't do prefab yuppie bars where khakied upper east- siders drink beer from golds fish bowls so my choices were/ are limited. Sadly, "The Wolf" is now closing--bought out by 2nd avenue deli. Progress. I went to the party for regulars there last night. I wonder where "the family" will now go? People get to know each other after 20 years of frequenting the same place. Like suburban marriages-- all good things come to an end. I promised myself I wont support the deli but rather my local Arab owned deli where they are happy let me pay for my redbull tomorrow if I am running in sweats without my wallet. The world spins a course to complete homogenization and even people have been brainwashed into a conformist dough that has no flavor or spice. I believe in the individual at all costs and in individual thought above all. The future will one day be a walmart-ian utopia where overweight Americans shop for American idol CD's and gallon jugs of mouthwash. Do not go lightly into the dark fluorescent light of sameness and sou less reality. Here are some pics of a place I came to know so well.

a great man.

http://www.rodserling.com/brevelleint.htm

one of my favorites--carl jung

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=daniel+estulin&emb=0&aq=f#q=jung&emb=0


great video for a saturday

flouride

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3y8uwtxrHo&feature=related

who is the artist?

Can anyone name the artist who painted this masterwork?

my glass wall is not tacky

Aspen Social Club New York, Venue Description

Despite its proximity to Times Square, Aspen Social Club is a welcoming relief. Designed by Steve Lewis and Mark Dizon, we might as well call it the faux-Aspen winter equivalent to The Brier Group's faux-Miami summertime hotspot, Highbar. The décor of the eatery cum lounge cum nightspot is spot-on. Designed by nightlife guru turned interior designer Steve Lewis it boasts a gorgeous $100,000 ceramic antler chandelier, a fireplace (ok so it's fake, but it works in setting a cozy mood), and a glass wall etched with tree trunks (surprisingly not tacky). Best of all there's no wall separating Aspen Social Club from the Stay Hotel next-door, so not only is there a nice balance of light and dark, there's two equally well designed spaces (the hotel lobby is full of comfy white leather chairs and lounge tables, a mirrored wall, and animal-inspired artwork), for patrons to spill-over to when they're in need of some light and quieter conversation.

yesterdays answer---

Gericault-----not vermeer!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9odore_G%C3%A9ricault

who painted this

Alex would like to see if my readers know their art...who painted this great work?

the first person to answer will get a watercolor by me.

alexgardega@gmail.com

1984

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/britain-to-put-cctv-cameras-inside-private-homes/

Hope

Here is the kind of stupid stuff I do when I am bored..Now back to work.

vermy

I am trying to get permission from The Met to paint a copy of this Vermeer painting. They were supposed to send me the paper work but it never arrived. Maybe that's what the lady is looking for--the mail man with my paperwork.

Pablo Picasso - "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

Ponzi Art

I have determined that the modern art world is essentially one big Madoffian ponzi scheme. That is why we now have Ponzi Art!

words of the day

slow and stupid wins the race---alex

last supper

My last supper is getting picked up today by shipper...finally! She will grace the walls of a top Colorado law firm and I will again have room to breath in my studio! Knowing me I will start another large piece so I can trip on it for the next two years. I am seriously thinking about moving somewhere to put my next show together. I need a place that is mellower and cheaper (every place is cheaper than NYC) where I can hide in my work for 6 to 8 months--- If anyone has a cheap barn or a tent please let me know. Maybe I will go to Norway as I have a connection there, maybe kenya or the North Pole or...

Alex goes to The Met---again

I went to the met yesterday to take a look at Michelangelo's first painting. It is based off the etching by schongauer (above) I am not sure if it is a real Michelangelo but the painting is well done and the etching is a fav. of mine since I was a child. The landscape in the painting is not top notch but the creatures are. Some people go to church--I go to The Met. I then wen to the Francis Bacon show which didnt really move me, I prefer the bacon that goes with my eggs.

My sister's ballet---cell pics

Rao's kitchen

This is a cell phone pic I took of the kitchen of the famous restaurant Rao's...The only restaurant I know where you cant get in---you cannot get a table at Rao's...It is impossible, you cannot bribe $1,000 and get a table at Rao's. The president cant walk into Raos and get a table.

I will watercolor this--- my second "kitchen" watercolor.

proof the government is brain damaged

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/31/air.force.one/index.html

how could the gov. not factor the memory of 911 into this scene?