Real painting

Here's an article in praise of cubism.

Paranoia

Gary Indiana on conspiracy theories.

Robonaut

Those freaked out cats at DARPA (who've previously brought us the Total Information Awareness project (complete with eye in the pyramid watching the world logo) and a market for trading in terrorism futures (as a way of predicting future events)) have got together with NASA to develop Robonaut.

Mondrian machine

Piet Mondrian's been ripped off by a huge amount of advertisers. Now he's been automated.

(Nicked from RandomURL.)

Up in smoke

It seems Tracey Emin's tent and the Chapman brothers' Hell could've gone up in smoke.

Grim

You know the outlook is bleak when a respected environmentalist is saying the only way to avoid environmental catastrophe is through nuclear power.

(Cheers to No Right Turn for the link.)

On the tiles again

I went to the Liz Maw opening at Peter McLeavey's last night (the requisite photos are here and include as a special bonus a pic of a McLeavey conceptual art work - an envelope pinned to the wall with 'leave pinned to wall' written on it - as well as a couple of bits of graffiti I spotted on my travels). It was a good opening. Lots of people came along, and a good time was had by all. Matt's got a description of the works in question.

We went to a horrible chain Irish pub afterwards, where I drank Murphy's and ate a stuffed potato - all part of that fake Irish experience. I got home at about half eleven and had to lie on the floor for a while.

The problem of course is getting up heinously early to go to work the next morning, though I haven't been as hideously affected as usual recently. I must be slowly pickling myself or something.

Profiling

Rose has been playing round with the old Blogger thing, changing her template and adding a profile. When she found you can click on the interests and things in your profile and find other people who've listed the same things, I thought I should get in on the act. It's just a preliminary stab at it at the moment. I need to get a picture sorted as well.

Incredible

It's amazing how amateur hour the US can be. I well remember seeing one of Jay Garner's (remember him?) televised addresses to Iraq, shortly before he got hurriedly replaced, and just being truly blown away.

It seems Iran has also realised how Mickey Mouse they can be, and set up neocon darling Ahmed Chalabi to string them along.

Little red dots

I got an email yesterday to say a couple more paintings at Thermostat had sold. That's three out of twelve. Bloody brilliant. Yay, those little red dots!

Pissing around some more

As is pretty bloody obvious, I've changed the template. I'm not sure whether I like it, but I'll leave it for a while to see whether it grows on me. I'm not sure how readable it is. I suspect though that that's just down to me being used to the old look.

I've lost all the previous comments, and it seems as though only some of the posts will let you comment on them.

Pissing around

I've just been pissing around with the old website and have moved the phone camera photos from the bio to the paintings page.

I need to sort that bio page out. It's extremely boring.

A Scanner Darkly

BoingBoing has some goss.

Gregor's exquisite corpse

On a lighter note, Gregor's trying an exquisite corpse experiment.

Hersh on prisoner abuse

If you haven't already, read this.

Slacko bastard

I've been a bit crap at blogging recently. Must try harder.

Here we go

Matt's started a blog.

Sorted

I've put some more photos up. I kind of had to include the one of me sleeping in the gallery.

The Palmy experience

I've put some Palmy photos up (from up until the battery on my phone ran out). I'm having technical difficulties with the installation photos for the exhibitions page, but hope to have them up some time.

The top left one is where I slept on Friday night - in the gallery under my work. The one in the middle of the third row is some of Matt's stuff ready to go up on the wall. The one on the bottom left is my stuff ready to go up on the wall. The one on the bottom right is both of our's stuff ready to go up on the wall. The bottles are Foxton Fizz.

It never rains but it pours

I had a suspicion this would happen. I start a full-time job, and then get offered freelance work from a new client I want to do work for in the future. This Correspondence School thing only goes till December, after all. I want to have some things lined up for afterwards. However, doing any kind of decent sized freelance work as well as working full time would be heinous. Besides, I'm really hanging out to get stuck into some painting. Dilemmas, dilemmas.

Wagging

I'm wagging today and tomorrow. Today, I'm packing my shit up, doing a price list, and other sundry related things. Tomorrow, we take stuff up to Palmy and hang the sucker.

Sarah's back

For those of you who enjoyed Leto, Sarah's back.

Very swish

I fired up Blogger this evening and found that it's all changed. They've added some swish new features. I might start using their comments feature instead of my current one, which'll probably mean the current ones will disappear. They've got some new templates, so I might try one of those out for size as well, though none of them really grabbed me straight off.

I'm not about to do anything radical tonight though. Too buggered. This having to show up to work in the morning thing's to blame. It's a shock to the system, let me tell you.

Still, the people I work with are good, and the Correspondence School's got a good art stash. The boss of the area I work in has prints by Pat Hanly, John Drawbridge, and Gordon Walters on his walls. From where I sit, I can see prints by Robin White, Jeffrey Harris, and Richard Killeen. Apparently there's a large Fomison painting in one of the other buildings, along with various other things.

I've started thinking about what I'm going to do after these shows are over. I don't want to leave it too long before I have another. Got to keep up the momentum and all. Of course, most places are booked up well in advance, so it will necessarily be a while. The obvious thing is to try to find a dealer in Wellington willing to take me on. This is problematic. I'm really not sure who to approach. I need to think about it some more, and probably chatting with various people on the subject would be a good idea.

The other thing, of course, is doing some more bloody painting. What with one thing and another, I haven't done any for ages. I can't really focus at the moment - it'll have to be after the Thermostat opening. It'll be more Skeleton Guys for the meanwhile.

Gmail

I've signed up for one of these test Gmail accounts. My address is everything[at]gmail[dot]com. Now, obviously, in order to test the thing, I'll have to use it. I might try using that in preference to my normal one for a while, so if you're going to send me an email, send it there rather than to yog. We'll see how we go.

Website updated

I've added a couple of pages to the paintings section under an 'Exhibitions' heading - one for the Mahara show and one for the Thermostat show.

Opening photos

I didn't take my phone to the opening. I'd foolishly neglected to recharge the battery. Rose did, however, take her phone, so I've slapped a couple of photos from it up (they're at the bottom of the page). The first is the bag Rose bought. It's by (if I remember correctly) Maiangi Waetai.

Rose also took her digital camera, and I'll try to put some of those up tomorrow.

One down

The Mahara Gallery opening was tonight. It was a lot of fun, despite my being horribly hungover (which made talking to people awfully hard). The show looked really good - a nice diverse range of things that still hung together well. I particulary liked the way my stuff was hung. Rose took some photos, and I might try to put them up on the website tomorrow.

It wasn't quite as bizarre an experience as I thought it'd be. Maybe feeling like complete and utter crap contributed to that.

Catherine (who runs Thermostat) and her partner came down for it. It was good to see them and have a chat (though see above).

One of the artists showing (who shall remain nameless) came up to Rose when she was talking to someone and said (in a peremptory tone of voice), 'Who are you? Why are you here? Do you know someone in the show?' She answered, 'Well, my partner Dave, his brother, and a friend.' To which he responded, 'So you go out with that guy with the glasses over there.' After she said yes to that, he simply walked off. He didn't introduce himself or anything, or try to have an actual conversation. Plonker.

A small group of us went out for dinner at the Paekakariki Cafe afterwards. All in all, it was a good time.

Last day of freedom

I start at the Correspondence School tomorrow morning, which'll mean catching the ancient and decrepit Johnsonville line train at some ungodly hour of the morning.

I thought I might as well start as soon as, though I did point out that I'm off to Palmy at the end of next week to set up the Thermostat show.

Speaking of which, the catalogue's come together nicely and is pretty much ready to go off to print. All I've got to do now is type out a price list and get everything up there.

Explanation of experiment disproving Many Worlds Interpretation

If you had trouble following the gist of this post, there's a good explanation here.

I can't explain things clearly at the best of times, let alone at twenty past four in the morning!

Miscellany

Ben and I took our stuff up to Mahara today. It was a fun trip, and they turned on coffee and panini for us. Any imaginary readers running galleries take note.

We passed by the foreshore and seabed hikoi on the way up, which was busily clogging up traffic going the other way. Thankfully it'd cleared by the time we made our way back.

Arriving home, I discovered I might have a job at the Correspondence School - a fixed term contract till December.

This evening we headed into Hamish McKay's to check out the Tony de Lautour opening. It looked pretty good, and I strongly recommend that any imaginary readers dwelling in Wellington go check it out. I put an option down on one of his books. Ben put an option on one of the revisionist paintings.

On our way in, we spotted a clear zip-loc bag with a couple of pills in it lying on the pavement directly outside the door. It wasn't there when we left.

I've put a new page of photos up out of today's efforts. (The open door was in the dining room of the rest home where we went to visit our grandmother this arvo.)

Bizarre

According to the SiteMeter statistics, ever since I put up this post a whole lot of people have been coming here after searching for a few specific phrases on Google. What are you doing people!?!

(Hmm, note to self: work on your titles to posts.)

More silly photos

I've put some more phone photos up.

Freaky

The invite to the Mahara show came in the post over the weekend. There at the end of a long list of people (17 in all, including Matt, Ben, and me) are the words 'David Cauchi' in black and white. Very, very strange.

You can see an image of the invite (featuring Matt's Miffy and bottle) here.