Bog moving

Hey everyone,
This blog is being moved to the curiousroom.com site. Please visit the new and improved site whenever the mood takes you!
This site will no longer be updated.

see you there
Larry

It's an all-art issue this month for Rare

Featured in the Art issue of Rare this month, my work (including Vanishing Austin) is in good company with many notable Austin visual and performing artists:

Rare Magazine :: August/September 2009 :: Art

Shared via AddThis

'Vanishing Austin / Frisco Gold'
by Jann Alexander (c) 2009

Pray to the sun goddess and Laugh

Masses of people reach to the sky, pray to the sun goddess, men jumping with joy, women running naked around bond fires and children laughing with delight. The new and improved curiousroom.com web site is ready to launch. Of course it took way more work than I anticipated and I couldn't have done it without the html wonder worker Josiah Spence, who endured hundreds of my emails throwing abstract design instructions in his direction, and the sound web wisdom of Tom Bartling offering advice as needed. At the risk of changing gears and downshifting to reverse brings me to the topic of staring at large amounts of artwork for long periods of time on a monitor. Styles blur together, images of surreal Bambi's and colorful cows invade my sleep and I have dreams of being frozen in place as a huge blue-green wave of (high quality) oil paint submerges my body in a aqua velvet world. Of course this is preferable to my usual re-occurring dream of being in an existential black and white mock up of my elementary school (no joke) and a footnote sitting in the corner of Naguchi's 1940's studio. Go figure...... so browse the site and then build a fire in your yard and dance around it (counter clockwise please).

Anselm Kiefer : Operation Sea Lion

Interesting film!

My Idol

I just finished a six week course at Steve Dubov's studio on bronze casting. Excellent class and I learned that the process is a HUGE amount of work (endless grinding). I made these crazy idol friends. I think I need to give them names so they will stop staring at me!

Ryuichi Sakamoto - Trioon

This is beautiful http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7az9jgc5wz8

Beauty, or how I found beauty in the ugly cracks

On Beauty,
I want to ask a question, what is your idea of beauty? It is something I have been pondering recently. I was in a sentimental mood last night and was watching The English Patient because I always marvel at how well crafted the film is. Writing, visuals, acting—all in one cohesive package. I thought it was beautiful and in my mind I link art with beauty. I was speaking with a sculptor friend and we were debating the age old question, what is art? He said that art is intention. At first I was unsure, but now I think it is true. You cannot have art without intention. Taking this one step further, can there be beauty without intention? The intention to find beauty in life. When I asked myself the question what is beauty to me, strangely, the first image that came to mind was watching my hand change shape as I ran it under the green water while in a small boat at a lake. Strange, I didn't think of beautiful women or amazing paintings or wondrous architecture but an event that happened long time ago. Other things come to mind; Snippets of memory watching a film with a high school girlfriend, or eating an amazing risotto on a sunny Italian patio, or drawing intricate patterns in blue chalk on cracked gray sidewalks. Beauty can be an event too. It can be action. There is beauty in love making, but there is also beauty in other actions. A powerful image that comes to my mind is pouring cold water over my head after spending sweaty energy in a hard played soccer game. Beauty makes you feel good as does some actions. Last night it stormed with fabulous lightning storms and driving rain and hail. I loved it. It was like mother nature (or whatever you bow down to) was saying, "hey, look at me! I am beautiful. And tonight my mood is dangerous and I am tragically beautiful." Glorious indeed.  Beauty, sometimes I have to work for it.

Be Well
L

New Jann Alexander Photos

Hey All,

Here is a succulent taste of some new work by Jann Alexander. Enjoy.

The Floating World

Cool stuff by Pae White

Wish I was in Venice

Check out this article about Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/arts/design/04icel.html?_r=1&ref=design

Anselm Kiefer

I really like this guy, Anselm Kiefer's work, as do many others because he is super famous. I'm not sure about the bit with the stacked concrete cubes though. Humm... again, what is art?

Amateur or Professional?

Hello Everyone
I am teaching my first class of the summer tonight and I thought that I would re-post this bit that I wrote at the beginning of last semester as I think it is still relevant. Enjoy!

As some of you may know I teach a couple of illustration and design classes at ACC. Today I had my favorite class, illustration, and only a few of the students showed up. Seems things have become hard and it is easier to stay home than come to class and face the work. I read a book once called "the war of art", where the author (can't remember his name) said that the difference between a professional and an amateur is that the professional shows up no matter what. Professionals are at their work even if they feel crappy, uninspired and uncreative. The amateur thinks about working but never actually does anything. When making art it is important to designate a time to work every day and stick to it. Even if it's just standing in front of your easel (or computer) and making random marks. Something will happen. If you think the thoughts of how hard the work is or if it wouldn't be nicer to go watch TV, or even worse you go watch TV, then you have robbed yourself of the chance for the universe to help with your work. Beware of distractions! TV, video games, drinking, the list goes on and it will divert you from the creative path. So back to my class. The ones that are here today are working hard. The ones that are not here are not working hard on their projects. Period. Amateur or professional?

ps I added a cool photo of an Emigre cover by uber illustrator Henrik Drescher because we all need something fab to look at!

Curious Room Site Redesign in Progress

Hi All,
A quick note that the Curiousroom.com site is currently undergoing a complete site redesign. Even though the current site is visually eye catching it needs some updating in terms of back end streamlining and ease of database use. We will be merging this blog into the new homepage and making the site more interactive and aiming to drive more traffic to the site using the latest web optimization techniques. Not sure when it will be done (soon I hope) but keep an eye out.
Cheers

Frozen Art

Hi Everyone,
I have always been in awe of the ice hotel in Sweden. I love the idea of making something beautiful that lasts for only a short time, then melts back into the earth. Disposable art. Impermanent art. Precious art. I think we as humans try to preserve almost everything, old paintings, buildings, our bodies and emotions, are some examples. This may be a subconscious need to combat change. Or perhaps a need to resist the fear of change. I had some steel chairs made from some of my designs and they, like a lot of my art, take up space in my house. So I put one out in the yard and it started to rust. No surprise here but what did surprise me was peoples reaction. "How can you let that beautiful chair rust?", perplexed people would ask. I found that it was peoples reaction that had become the art. Their fear of things falling apart that reminds them of humans rush to unavoidable death. We become so attached to "stuff" that we forget that objects are not that important really. We spend huge amounts of time and energy keeping artifacts from rotting away to dust instead of creating new work. I love to watch cooking shows. Partly this is because it is fascinating to see a chief create a beautiful dish with the purpose of having it destroyed (eaten). Performance art? So my advice is to make something you love, art, food, whatever. Then give it away, eat it, let it rot or destroy it. The feeling of liberation is amazing. Anyway, the ice hotel, at least from the photos I have seen, is a wonderful place that I have on my list to visit someday, along with Iceland, the Nile river and Japan.
Ice hotel: http://www.icehotel.com/ and my chairs that become rusty with time: curvy chair
cheers
(It's hot here - is it fall yet?)

Uber cool art from Janet Reeves

Hi everyone
So one of my ex students is doing some very cool work. Kinda a hybrid between fine art and illustration (is there a difference?) check out her site here: www.janet-reeves.com.

This Twitter Thing

Ok, so I am rather a newbie at this whole social media stuff and I have been trying to figure out, like everyone else, how to use social media to promote the curiousroom.com site and get more people to view (and buy) the artwork for sale. This leads me to twitter. At first I was unsure about it but signed up because people kept inviting me to to join it. ( by the way: http://twitter.com/larrygoode) One of my friends was curious (pun intended indeed) why I would want to use twitter to keep up with friends when you can only use two lines of copy. I informed my buddy that it's real use is for networking, getting new clients, and keeping existing clients informed and frankly, remembering that you exist. A good friend of mine, John McElhenney, http://uber.la is a social media guru and gave me tons of good info that can, hopefully, help with my art sales. Anyway, from time to time I will be writing about my journey through the social media vortex and my assesment on it's usefulness for us artists and creative types.
Cheers
Larry

Happiness

I was thinking of doing a series of portraits of famous people. So I started with the Dalai Lama. And here he is!!
I've been thinking of happiness recently, with the economic downturn and all, and I have come to the conclusion that I am not my work. For many years my happiness seemed to depend on how many projects I had going and how much money I was making. This is a hard thing to maintain year after year through good and bad times and eventually becomes a boat anchor around our necks. I think it is important to shift with the times and not let the boat anchor keeps us mired in the mud of the past. When I get down because all my marketing efforts come to naught, I try to remember that I am alive and healthy (sort of) and there is much beauty in the world. I just finished a book called 2666 by Roberto Bolano. A brilliant book indeed and it made me happy that there is such skilled art of staggering beauty that I have access to. Is that not a gift? I once was taking a print making class in Florence and in the class was a woman who created very beautiful prints. She would say out loud that everything was a gift. When she created a brilliant piece it was a gift, when the piece was a disaster she would laugh and say it was a gift. When the attendant failed to show up one day to unlock the studio she said it was a gift and now she could go shopping! I had never seen such happiness and it rubbed off on the rest of the class. Our quality of work soared with the positive energy. Now I don't particularly think of myself as a positive happy person who spreads joy, but I feel something shifting in the world for the better. I hold on to that and look for the gifts that come from inside and outside my work.

cheers
Larry

The baboon knows what you're doing!

I decided to create a series of animal illustrations.... Here is a baboon for no particular reason.

Good article on graphic design

Interesting bit for all you graphic designer types
http://designobserver.com/archives/entry.html?id=39207

Some monoprints

Hello you fabulous world citizens.

I have a small press in my garage and on occasion I feel like using it. I blurbed out some monoprints the other day, faces for some reason and I felt like putting a few of them up. So here they are.
cheers
L

The Mid-Century Works of Mort Baranoff

Hey all you lovely people.
I am helping my good buddy Carl put this show on. If you have a chance, drop by the opening for an extra fun time and fabulous art by Mort Baranoff.

You can check out his bio here
AND preview the show here

the details:

The Mid-Century Works of Mort Baranoff
Opening Saturday, April 11th
5:30pm to 8:30pm

Austin Art Space
7739 Northcross Drive, Suite Q
Behind Northcross Mall
Austin, TX 78757
512-771-2868

www.AustinArtSpace.com

Curiousroom Show April 4th

Hi Everyone,
I'm having the first annual Curious Room spring show from April 4th -April 10th at the Austin Art Space gallery featuring the work of Jann Alexander, Rebecca Bennett, Larry Goode, Judy Paul, Terrell Powell and Lin Swanner. The opening is Saturday, April 4th. I hope to see all of you there for a fabulous art time.

www.curiousroom.com/show/index.html

Austin Art Space
7739 Northcross Drive, Suite Q
Behind Northcross Mall
Austin, TX 78757
512-771-2868

Curious Room Show

AND.... I am having the first of (hopefully) many shows for the curiousroom.com artists. The opening is Saturday april 4th at Austin Art Space. Write it down!!

When creating becomes Hard

As some of you may know I teach a couple of illustration and design classes at ACC. Today I had my favorite class, illustration, and only a few of the students showed up. Seems things have become hard and it is easier to stay home than come to class and face the work. I read a book once called "the war of art", where the author (can't remember his name) said that the difference between a professional and an amateur is that the professional shows up no matter what. Professionals are at their work even if they feel crappy, uninspired and uncreative. The amateur thinks about working but never actually does anything. I think when making art it is important to designate a time to work every day and stick to it. Even if it's just standing in front of your easel and making random marks on the paper. Something will happen. If you think the thoughts of how hard the work is or if it wouldn't be nicer to go watch TV, or even worse you go watch TV, then you have robbed yourself of the chance for the universe to help with your work. Beware of distractions! TV, video games, drinking, the list goes on and it will divert you from the art path. So back to my class. The ones that are here today are working hard. The ones that are not here i'm sure are not working hard on their projects. Period. Amateur or professional?
Thoughts anyone?

I really like Ryuichi Sakamoto's music

Hey all, I really like Ryuichi Sakamoto's
music to paint to. check it out. Music that is designed.
L