Ahem. This blog is really not the most up to date thing on the Internet. Not much fun to report since last post, which is depressing. A few shows with really not much public attention and a few more paintings, all incredibly beautiful but also very much stored in the studio crap chamber.

New and notable: I'm now subject to the Government program for intimidating unemployed lowlifes, such as myself, to internalize the structural inefficiencies of our economy. The program is called Face 3, preceeded of course of Face 1 and 2, and is based on Dante's progression through the Inferno. Face 3 is the Final Solution,, but in lieu of concentration camps and gas, Sweden prefers boredom and plain stupidity. As so often, I'm recieving pay not to paint. Should i err on the painterly side, I, my kids and my local grocery store will suffer.

Today´s epiphany

My paintings are dysfunctional skeletons wrapped in the wrong flesh.

Merry etc

Some sparkle in my kid´s eyes when carpet bombed with expensive gifts, buckets of whisky and snaps, those are the things that make this time of the year bearable. The food is not among those.

One more day of Ye Traditional Swedish Yulefood and this blogger will be no more.  A pig´s carcass sliced and minced in all traditional fashions looses it´s novelty value in about ten minutes, but will stalk you all through the Swedish festive season.

The birth of a Jew, celebrated with buckets of pig flesh. That´ll teach´em.

Ljungsbro 2

Guess I should display a couple of images that actually still have some connection to the theme.

The Ljungsbro Project

I´m embellishing a gym in the Linköping suburb Ljungsbro with ten smallish paintings, 30x30 cm. Today I submitted them for framing, thus making the shitty pay even shittier (framing gobbling down 5000 SEK from the petty pay).

I started out with an idea that the images should portray Relaxation (it´s a gym, right?), but under way I failed miserably, as always. Check these paintings out, can you spot the "Relax" in them? Will soon post paintings more in line with the theme.

Finally!

April 29:th

Today I cleaned up the studio. Might not sound lika such a big deal, but people who know me are launching fireworks and declaring this date a national holiday.

OK, this isn´t the fastest blog in Internet history. Last posting was about me worrying about the January show in Linköping. That one´s done and bubble wrapped, almost ten people attended the opening and it was, of course, a huge success.

***please, somebody, kill me***

Normally, this blog should have at least fifty posts, with me ranting endlessly in agony about the second show, the Biggie in Umeå.

Museum hall, the size of a Zeppelin hangar and situated in what still counts as my home town. The prodigal son returning, masses of people chanting my name, stunning girls adorning me with garlands, you know the drill. Oh my, to measure up to that. Mene Mene Tekel. Anyway, the show opened this Sunday, but it was a rather solemn affair, no art hooligans, no mass hysteria. The army could stay in their barracks and Umeå is still standing.

***please, please***

dear diary

OK, so I´ve got to produce a show by jan 22. And send them a picture for PR by, like, yesterday. A quick glance at the studio tells me I´m in trouble.

Oh my, a new one man show in the calendar. Jan 22 on the glorius Galleri Vända Sida, a 25 something meter wall at the public library. Strange thing, this Linköping habit of turning walls into galleries. Maybe the proverbial white cube is on it´s way out, but a white sheet isn´t much of an improvement. My last show, at Galleri ALKA, also in Linköping, was also a wall. Just a wall.

Hooray for galleries that dare to emphasize the flatness of true art (i.e. painting).

My website revamped, finally

After a lot of tedious editing, I finally got the ugly duckling off the ground. Please visit http://www.orat.se, make a lonely webpage happy. Other than that, nothing much (still trying to treat this blog as a studio diary, but my propensity for procrastination makes this a very slow reader experience).

My entry to that f-ing Salon

Forgot to show the painting I sent into the gap of the local art world

More on the Salon

So, the party´s over and my poor darling picture hangs there, surrounded by the offal of local art. The guy next to me boasts having renewed art by utilizing something he calls "vegetable oil colour". Further away glows tepees of the American Indian persuasion, adorned with the glow of escaping spirits.

In front of my painting hangs two tinted photographs depicting a man in various stages of constipation, although the titles suggest that he is either Hamlet or communing with some deity. A good thing with painting is that if you´re really, really bad, chances are that your shitty content drowns in your shitty craftsmanship. Photography, alas, does not have that benevolent hiding power.

When doing jury work myself at salons, I often noticed that there is a correspondence between the seriousness of the works subject matter and the quality, or should I say, a negative correspondence. The crappiest works tend to deal with things like man´s eternal spirit, the profound qualities found in undisturbed nature and power seeping down from the Universe, while worthy works of art is more about ephemeral entities like shoes, dirt and cigarette butts. Is this a shortcoming in Art, this inability to cover the Grand Themes without belly flops? Memo to self: produce a Profound Painting over a Really Grand Subject next week.

The lesser aesthetically fine tuned might interject that my art inhabits Crappyland already when fiddling with little things in life, but I forgive you. Without means to kill you, I choose to forgive you.

Salon de Refusés

Today a letter reached me, telling me that two of the paintings i submitted to the regional Salon was rejected. I sort of hoped that all three of them should be thrown out, thus adding to my self-inflation by defining me as truly avant-garde. But alas, one shitty little painting managed to penetrate the impenetrable, rendering me a middle of the road, bland little hack of a painter.

Then again, I´m now officialy invited to the show opening mingle party. Might mean free booze, i.e. a microscopic plastic glass of plastic wine. Might also mean close encounters with the Linköping Art Groupies, unless they get competely soaked from all that wine and stumble on their Zimmer Frames.

Anyway, I feel I should share my rejected little darlings with the world, before they fade away into oblivion.

 The first one is from my Uppsala series and not really a favourite, probably because it has got better siblings in the suite. 

 

The second one is called Boom Box and is, to me, a seminal work of extreme beauty.

so...

...this is a blog. My, am I updated.