| 7/13/2021 OK, I'm working on my second
new painting since my stroke 3 years ago. In this case, Janet,
in addition to being my wife, primary health care worker, chef
and life-saver, also became my muse and model. I don't know if
I'll ever finish this. Poraiture is not what my right hand should
be attempting, but here it is so far. |
My Hot Wife, 7/13/21, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches
OK, it may not be finished, but this is as close as I can
get.
My Hot Wife 7/31/21, oil on anvas, 16 x 12 inches
And here is
my third right-handed attempt at a new painting since my stroke:
skyscape Early April 2022 oil on canvas 16 x 12 inches
3/19/2021 Almost a year ago I wrote
this:
Okay, so I have nothing in progress at present. Since finishing
the painting below, Epilogue, a year after my stroke, I have
continued trying to get my left hand working again and trying
to learn to draw and paint wih my right hand, but with maddeningly
little progress. And the muse has apparently dumped me. Bitch.
What comes after an epilogue? But if and when I start something
new it will appear here. 6/17/2020
And now, finally, I am attempting a new painting, "Waiting"
Been working on this little thing for weeks of right-handed fumbling,
not sure I'll ever finish it to my satisfaction. But I promised
I would put any new attempt here, so here it is so far. 3/19/2021
|
Waiting 3/18/21, oil on canvas, 10 x 16 inches,
in progress?
OK,
this may be it:
Waiting, 4/5/2021, oil on canvas, 10 x 16 inches
ALSO CHECK ME OUT ON SAATCHI ART.
CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE
|
Epilogue (the Red Giant), oil on canvas
24 x 30 inches, in progress
In a few billion years, long after we humans have wiped ourselves
out or left the planet, the sun will begin its last gasp, burning
its helium and expanding into a red giant, swallowing Mercury,
Venus and Earth. In my version a cockroach has survived to watch
it happen.
12/14/19
OK. I actually finished it.
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7/30/18 (charcoal & pastel) |
8/1/18 (acrylic grisaille underpainting) |
8/2/18 (oil) |
8/11/18 |
8/4/18 |
| Devices, oil on canvas, 24 x 48 inches, in progress |
|
I didn't know this when I started
this painting, but it turns out that that's a Himalayan Salt
Lamp over our bed. Himalayan salt is used to make sole (pronounced
solay), which is water that has been fully saturated with
a natural salt. But here's the kicker: the name comes from the
Latin "Sol," the sun....
Then on researching Himalayan
salt, I find out it comes from End-Permian salt beds which formed
at the bottom of the primal Tethys Sea, dried up some 250 million
years ago by a scorching Sol, and then over the next few hundred
million years was shoved up into the Himalayas as India crashed
into Asia. The End-Permian apocalypse was caused mostly by CO2
released by enormous eruptions of basalt by volcanoes in Russia,
creating a poisonous hothouse that acidified the oceans and killed
almost all life on Earth, just as humans are now doing by burning
fossils - actually releasing CO2 at a faster rate than those Pangean
volcanoes did. And the high water temperatures in the Permian
ocean (higher than 100 degrees F.) would have generated hypercanes,
"continent-sized hurricanes-from-hell, with 500-mile-per-hour
winds ...,"* one of which had already turned up on the dark
side of the burning and flooded Anthropocene Earth which had
strangely materialized in my painting.... Go figure.
 |
*That quote is from the book
the old dude in the painting is reading, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses,
Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass
Extinctions by Peter Brannen.
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6/25/18 |
6/25/18 |
7/03/18
|
I don't know, so don't ask. After several
months with no new images, only a few reincarnations of old ones,
so that I was really beginning to accept that the muse had left
me for good, this is what she brought me. I was in the upstairs
bathroom filling my watering can for my tomatoes' afternoon drink,
when my eyes suddenly focused on the bottom of the sink, where
fallen drops of water from the faucet were reflecting the overhead
light in strange ways. Something I had never seen before! Just
when I thought I had seen everything worth seeing and there was
nothing more to discover and therefore nothing more to paint.
When I started to draw it, I saw the spiral curling into the
drain. The dead bug seemed to animate it all somehow, but I have
no clue to what, if anything, it might mean as an image.
So that night I dreamed of another
painting. "Again, Mr. Benny?!" This one also had some
kind of sink in it, but in the foreground was a landscape, a
highway, the kind of thing I've painted way too many times, but
this looked different somehow. But when I tried to sketch it
the next day, I realized it was the same image! So I started
painting. I don't even know what the title is. But a desperate
artist doesn't question the muse. You just paint the damn thing.
"Only one thing in art is valid - that
which cannot be explained." Marcel Duchamp
(However, if you want a deep reading of this
image - an explanation of the unexplainable - by a well informed
viewer, check this
out.)
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6/26/18 |
6/27/18
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5/28/18
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6/30/18
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| #1438, acrylic & oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches |
| After failing
twice to make a print of Fly Me to the Moon, like Sisyphus
I decided to try again. Here is the result. It is a linocut,
basically, but part of it (the tree) is printed intaglio over
a base printed in relief and a pastel enhanced sky. Plus the
collaged leaves. So each one will be a little different--but
then so are all my prints. |
| June
7, 2018 |
i.jpg)
Fly Me to the Moon, 2018, linocut with pastel, collage
& other stuff,
image 10 x 7 inches
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And then there's this one, an artist's
proof, in which the leaves began to evolve ...
mattedi.jpg)
Fly Me to the Moon, 2018, linocut, a.p. 1/1
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I tried to make a print of this before but
failed. After listening to the song again - via a video of Dietrich Fischer-Diskau and Alfred
Brendel, sent to me by Lisa Bostic on Facebook - I thought I might
try it again.
lino1of12-1410i.jpg)
Vapor Trails (der Leiermann), 9/20/16, linocut with pastel, image 7 x 10 inches,
1 of 12
While I was
waiting for those to dry completely so I could do the "post-production"
work on them, working on my studio
catalog, I stumbled upon another pole dancer, this one less
vaporous, an old drawing from 1996, Rita. Comparing the drawing to the lioncut I made from it, I noticed some things
I seemed to have missed when translating the drawing to the print....
That was a traditional linocut, made long before I invented the
"Criswell Linocut," so I decided to make another version
of it using my present methods.
First I ran it with 2 blocks, white over black... |
|
 9/29/16
But then I cut a 3rd block and overprinted
a red glaze.
|
10/1/16 |
| Rita, 2016, 3-color linocut, image 5 x 7 inches |
Blind Man's Bluff,
2016, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches |
|
Criswell on Facebook
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