Ancient Language: The Excruciating Intimacy of Being Alive

I do a lot of things with life.  All the so many many things.  Just finished teaching my first art class, printmaking for 9-11 yr olds.  Those guys were bananas.  Got some cool art out of the deal though.

I'm designing these cabin kits for a non-profit my aunt is starting up in Lake County that will help people that got burned out by the terrible forest fires during the drought get housing back on their properties.  Check out website.

 


I'm processing the last batch of the trees, the surrogate/simulacra/ersatz human bodies.  Their writhing, twisting, straining to be upright, their reach towards the light, their connection between the earth and the sky.

I take these forms that are already obfuscated metaphors for my own struggles and I rinse them through my abstract/mixed media/organitecture/stylistic filter, the origami/loopy square dialectic that started back in Oakland with The Breaking Spaces Series, passages that reference art historical moments from my own bloodlines (Mediterranean, Meso-American etc.)  Here's a few finished ones that I'm excited about:

Bodhisattva, oil on canvas, 18" x 24", 2017
View artwork page on artist's website here.

Survivors Pt 2, ink, colored pencil, graphite, laquer, burning &
charcoal on sanded pine, maple branch frame, 14" x 26"
2017, view artwork page on artist's website here.  

I went to a critique meet-up group at SLOMA with the Painter's Group; I was much younger than everyone, there was only only other male there, he and I were the only artists not working in the representational landscape or folk art genre.  I showed my work and asked the group there feedback.

One woman asked me what I wanted to say with my art.  I thought it was a rather expansive question and it annoyed me.  I told her that I wanted it to say was "wait, don't kill yourself, life will do that soon enough, anyway.  Isn't that beautiful enough?  The long fall.  Look at how many colors there are, and feels, textures and moments."  Another woman asked if I kept a journal.  Another said that the trees reminded her of bodies.

Her: Are they the same tree?

Me: Are we the same body?

I've been writing this blog post since the beginning of the year, running running running, shows coming up: http://jordanquintero.com/news.html

Trying not to seize. Trying not to be afraid of seizing. Posting moments of the process to instagram and tumblr and facebook.  Drawing buildings for people.  Surfing.  Meeting ladies.  Loving life.  Trying not to be scared of it's immensity, and the way I constantly slip into

“Whenever the dullness of the profane is left behind, whenever life grew more intense, through honor or death, victory or sacrifice, marriage or prayer, initiation or possession, purification or mourning, anything and everything that stirred a person and demanded a meaning, the Greeks would celebrate with fluttering strips of wool.  White or red for the most part, which they tied around their heads, or arms, or to a branch, the prow of a ship, a statue, an axe, a stone, a cooking pot.  The modern eye encounters these strips everywhere, but doesn’t see them, removes them from the center of attention as mere decorative details, and hence insignificant.  To the Greek eye, the opposite was the case: it was those light, fluttering strips of wool that generated meaning, gave it its boundaries, celebrated it.  Everything that took place in the soft frame of those woolen strips was different  and separate from the rest.  What was it those woolen strips, those tassels represented?  An excess, a flowing wake that attached itself to a being or a thing.

Isodore of Seville could still write, "Vittae dictae sunt, quod vinciant:" "The woolen ties are called so because they bind."  But what was this bond? It was that momentary surfacing of a link in that invisible net which enfolds the world, which descends from heaven to earth, binding the two together and swaying in the breeze.  Men wouldn't be able to bear seeing that net in its entirety all the time: they would get caught in it at once and suffocate.  But every time someone achieves or is subjected to-but every achievement is subjection, and every subjection achievement-something that uplifts him and generates intensity and meaning, the woolen strips, the ties come out.  At one end they are bound tight to the body in a knot that may become a noose.  At the other they flutter in the air, keeping us company, escorting us, protecting us.  The victorious athlete has woolen strips tied to his arms, his torso, his thighs, and they follow him, waving in the air like a triumphant tangle of snakes.  Nike, Victory, always carries a bunch of woolen ties to hand out to her chosen favorites.  And the initiate keeps the strip of wool he wore on the day of his initiation and preserves it as a relic his whole life long.  But woolen strips were also hung from the horns of sacrificial bulls.  The girls tied them there carefully before the ceremony, the way the bride's mother tied them around wedding torches of hawthorn wood, and relatives hung them from the dead man's bed.

All these woolen strips, these vain, winged tassels, were nerves of the nexus rerum, the connection of everything with everything else, which alone gives meaning to life.  We live every moment of our lives swathed in those ties, white because white is the color the Olympians like, or red because blood ties us to death, or purple, yellow, and green.  But we can't always see them, indeed we musn't, because then we would be paralyzed, trapped.  We feel them blowing about us the minute something happens to dispel our apathy, and we become aware of being carried along on a stream that flows toward something unknown.  And just sometimes, but very rarely, those ties twist and turn and weave around us, until one loose end becomes knotted to another.  Then, very softly, they encompass us, they form a circle, which is the crown, perfection.

Heavy with nectar, Poros stretched out in Zeus's garden.  He slept, but in his mind thought was thinking: "What is a garden?  The ornate splendor of wealth."  Then Aphrodite appeared among beings.  She was the daughter of thought.  Soon there would be many copies of Aphrodite everywhere.  They were demons, each one accompanied with a different Eros, with his buzz of gadflies."