A Preview of Southern Pop Surrealism: Conjuring Heaven and Hell

As promised from yesterday's post, here's the second portion of our group painting session from last month for Southern Pop Surrealism, opening in 10 days at Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center in New Orleans.  After the freestyle session early on, we moved straight into the religious material...

"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."  -Mark Twain

HEAVEN

After taking turns laying down some base colors for a background, we decided one looked like Hell and one a Psychedelic Heaven.... we'd each do our own Angel and Devil!

Charles painting his praying Angel after I was the first to go to Heaven

Jeff Bertrand added the ultimate Angel, Christ- making it rain!

Eyes on the Prize with Dustin Dirt!

Charles getting his line-work in

HELL

"The Voice of the Devil"
(Plate 4 from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

All Bibles or sacred codes, have been the causes of the following Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight

Dustin Dirt! working opposite of Bertrand's three-legged Devil

Believe it or not, they requested my Devil have tits.

Charlie getting grabby

No better way to fill the negative space than a variety of 6's

Jeff finishing touching up as we dirty things up

FIN

These painting will be exhibited at Southern Pop Surrealism: Artwork by Charles Bennett, Jeff Bertrand, Dustin Dirt! and Brandt Hardin. Drop in on us if you're in The Big Easy to see these paintings along with dozens more from all four artists!

- Opening reception will be held Saturday, July 16th from 6-9PM -

Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center

1618 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd

New Orleans, LA 70113

(504) 827-5858

 

All four exhibiting artists will be on hand for LIVE Painting, LIVE Body Painting, LIVE Short Films and even a Surreal Costume Contest- just dress up and you can WIN ART!

- Click HERE for the Facebook Events Page and RSVP -

[Click HERE for the Southern Pop Surrealism STREAM]

THEOLOGICAL THERMODYNAMICS
(Mathematical proof that Heaven is Hotter than Hell)

Southern Pop Surrealism Live Painting

Ink, Spray Paint and Acrylics on Wood / 2011

Next Saturday night at 6PM, Southern Pop Surrealism OPENS at Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center in New Orleans. I'll be on hand doing some live painting with Jeff Bertrand, Charles Bennett, and Dustin Dirt!

To countdown to the show next week, here's some shots and video from a group painting session we did a few weeks back. These panels will be exhibited in the show along with works from all four artists.

I had a beer- Dustin Dirt! drank it all up...

There is nothing more adorable than a Charles Bennett Yeti

(Left) Charles Bennett  (Right) Jeff Bertrand

Here's a time lapse video of our paintings for the group show in The Big Easy... 

Stay tuned tomorrow for the latter half of this painting session, where we collaborate on Heaven and Hell- with each artist painting their own Angel and Devil.

Click HERE for a stream of all the posts about Southern Pop Surrealism

Celebration of the Lizard King: Jim Morrison

It's been said that poetry is a young man's sport.  It was for me and it was for Jim Morrison. His myth and legacy superseded his wild ride of a life when he died in a bathtub in Paris 40 years ago today.  Morrison became forever young at the age of 27 after he fled the United States and rock stardom to revisit his writing.

Inks on Bristol / 2011

When I was 15, Jim Morrison pried open my third eye.  His words served as scalpel and their journey the funneling void- which twisted open a vortex straight through me to the channel of the great creative spirit.  I carried around The American Night as my own vade mecum (one of two posthumous collections of his writing) months before I ever heard an album of The Doors in length.  Much of Jim's early writing emerged in epic material for the band, recording masterpieces at 10 and 12 minutes with the singer providing a mixture of lyric and spoken word.  The Universe gave Morrison his ultimate instruments of translation with The Doors- I don't think any other three musicians alive could have kept up with him.  
 
Morrison devoured much of the same writing I was interested in at the time of my discovery of his poetry.  The Doors' name came from my own favorite author, Aldous Huxley's work- The Doors of Perception.  The book was an essay inspired when Huxley (an already world-renowned author) ingested a powerful hallucinogen, mescaline to see what it was all about.  [Click HERE for my portrait of the author.] In turn, Huxley had taken his title from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell...

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru' narrow chinks of his cavern."

This quotation is indeed a fine source of verbal comparison for a hallucinogenic experience, especially dealing with with substances such as mescaline, peyote, or psilocybin mushrooms.  These sacred substances lift the veil on reality.  So much so, that one can't feel the effects of alcohol or even marijuana while on them.  Such drugs provide a mystical experience, which Jim indulged in excessively.  A hit of blotter LSD is incorporated into my memorial portrait of him you see today.

I went on to find other wonderful coincidences in Jim's writing and his inspiration from other works such as The Yage Letters from William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.  This is another drug-inspired tale woven through a series of letters between the two authors.  The first portion of the collection begins with Burroughs during his visit to the Amazon Rainforest in 1953 in search of yage, one of the most powerful hallucinogens known to man.  The latter series of correspondence occurred when Ginsberg went on the same conquest in 1960. Burroughs wrote back to Ginsberg after his mystical journey...

"WHAT SCARED YOU ALL INTO TIME? WHAT SCARED YOU ALL INTO YOUR BODIES?"

Not a decade later, Morrison wrote...

"Who scared you? Why were you born, my babe?
In two-time's arms with all of your charms, my love.
Why were you born? just to play with me?
To freak out or to be beautiful, my dear?
Load your head, blow it up, feeling good, baby"

-The Doors, Who Scared You  

All artists, writers and musicians draw from the collective creative spirit- the universal energy which seizes you and picks you and gives you the compulsion to create... but it takes guidance.  Someone has to lift the curtain and someone has to urge you along.  Jim had Huxley and Burroughs and then his Doors.

One of the main elements of my illustration of The Lizard King is the Shaman funneling out of The Third Eye at the top of the page. One of the duties of the Shaman in Native cultures is to guide individuals through sacred ceremonies involving the ingestion of drugs which have inspired countless creators over the past hundred years. Jim looked at his role as an entertainer and musician in the same respect- he would guide his audience through a journey and if you listened just right, you may never think the same way again.  As a child, Morrison witnessed a highway accident and as his father drove past, the young boy saw an Indian dying on the side of the road. Jim was convinced he was possessed with the spirit of this man and that he was a Shaman...

"Indians scattered on
Dawn's highway bleeding,
Ghosts crowd the young child's
Fragile egg-shell mind."

 -The Doors, The Ghost Song

Click HERE for a stream of my portraits from Rock Star Martyr!

800 Milligrams

inks on found index card divider / 2008

"Remedy" is the theme for this week on Illustration Friday.  There really were a lot of works to pick from today to suit this posting.  I grew up and live in a society with a deep-rooted drug culture.  Being a midnight toker, I am often inspired by this facet of our carnival of life through cognitively altering my consciousness via the few relatively safe substances I'm willing to use.  These experiences and the drugs themselves do surface in my work from time to time.

There is a remedy for every malady in the circus we call America- and you can have them all.  For 40 years, our country has waged a world-wide War on Drugs, hemorrhaging over $1,000,000,000,000 (yes- that's trillion) in a grossly failed attempt to stop drug trafficking.  All of this money, time, resources, and human life were squandered on battling the importation of natural substances such as cocaine and marijuana.  How much of that money was spent of drug education and drug treatment?  A very small fraction- we got Just Say No and D.A.R.E.

The truly frightening statistics with drug-related deaths and illnesses aren't found in the shady world of street trafficking, but right in front of our faces.  We are exposed on a daily basis to a LEGAL drug industry which makes far more money than the ILLEGAL one with Big Business and their pharmaceuticals. While 10,000 people die from Illegal Drug Use per year in our country, a whopping 100,000 die from legal prescription drugs which were pushed by Doctors, Television Ads, Clinics and anyone else getting their pocket lined by Drug companies.  These manufacturers hire lobbyists to corrupt Washington AND the FDA into not holding them accountable for these preventative deaths.  Pharmaceuticals are the #1 cause of death in the United States annually and are statistically 10x more lethal than all street drugs combined.

An American is arrested every 30 seconds for violating Marijuana laws.  $500 is spent by our government EVERY second to fight such illegal drugs.  Marijuana has NEVER killed a single person throughout thousands of years of medicinal, holistic, and cognitive use.  The Top 20 Big Pharma drug manufacturers average nearly $25 Billion in revenue EACH...and caused 1 MILLION deaths in the past decade.

In Memoriam: The King of Pop [Top 10 Michael Jackson Music Videos]

Inks on Bristol / 2011

On today's date two years ago, Michael Jackson moonwalked right out of the stratosphere and into the great Neverland beyond.  As duty holds, Joebot is taking care of the juicy details of MJ's rise to stardom, fall from grace and eventual demise over at Rock Star Martyr today, where my portrait will be featured.

My idea for this work was to show the transformation of the King of Pop from circa 1982 to circa 1999.  When I decided to incorporate Bubbles, his monkey- I knew he had to progress as well.  For my series of portraits for Rock Star Martyr, the element contributing to the star's death is included in each work.  Bubbles is holding a healthy dose of a variety of pharmaceuticals, which Jackson accidentally overdosed on at the age of 50.

[Click HERE for more of my Rock Star Martyr Portraits]

As an added treat today, I put together a time lapse video of the coloring process of my portrait...

Read more »

Illustration Friday: Campy

I believe "Midsummer Night" is my favorite theme so far which Illustration Friday has thrown at me.   I really had fun digging around looking through old work and musing summertime memories just now.  Today's featured illustration is from my Topsy Turvy series.  One of the things about summer which turns me nostalgic is campfires- I've had some of the best times of my life around them here in the south with guitars and stories and dancing (til dawn often times.)  That's where this work and theme brought me today so I'll be on my way- it's a beautiful summer day and I gotta find my next fire...

"Topsy Turvy: Campy" inks on paper / 2007

All works from this series can be hung either side up- today's for example, will look more like the sun in space than a campfire when you flip it over!

{ Click HERE for more on my Topsy Turvy series}

{ Click HERE for a stream of my Illustration Friday entries }

Southern Pop Surrealism PRESS RELEASE

"Monkey Worship" inks on bristol / 2011

 I whipped up our PRESS RELEASE this evening for our trip to The Big Easy next month and thought it was worth while to share what I wrote...

Southern Pop Surrealism

The Artwork of Charles Bennett, Jeff Bertrand, Dustin Dirt! and Brandt Hardin

NASHVILLE INVADES NOLA!

The original Surrealism movement of the 1920’s was the most visionary and revolutionary change to ever occur in the mainstream arts world.  With the invention of the camera, art had slowly degenerated and transitioned from its need for realism over the previous thirty years.  Most Popular Art didn’t require as much technical skill, but rather an expression of movement and composition.  Surrealism required realistic imagery to be twisted and morphed into a dreamlike, hallucinogenic state… this loosening of reality inspired everything from film to animation to even written works with surrealist poetry.  A few decades further in time, Pop Art emerged in the 1960’s, using imagery in popular culture from mediums such as comics and television.  Flash forward to today, in which the fusion and evolution of popular arts has brought forth a new doctrine with Pop Surrealism.  Middle Tennessee artists Charles Bennett, Jeff Bertrand, Dustin Dirt! and Brandt Hardin prescribe to this movement and bring their twisted take on reality to the Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center in July!

Saturday, July 16^th from 6-9PM, the exhibiting artists will be on hand for the opening reception of Southern Pop Surrealism.  This event will be curated by Myron Warden and Rene Broussard (founder and Executive Director of Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center.)  Admission to the show is $7 ($5 for members) and includes live painting, live poetry, live music and body painting along with a special screening of surrealist short films.  Create your own piece of surrealism and enter the Costume Contest to win artwork from the exhibiting artists!

Contact information, yadda yadda ya... and boom- artist samples (including mine from above!)

Dustin Dirt!

Charles Bennett

Jeff Bertrand