Roots Design: Art and Architecture for the People

"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 doesnt 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 frome the rest.  What was it those woolen strips, those tass...

City Roots: LA , mixed media on plywood, 8 x 24 inches, 2013, ORIGINAL SOLD,  Purchase full-size giclée print from my website.  $95 City Roots: Singapore,  mixed media on plywood, 8 x 24 inches, 2013, SOLD First Building,  mixed media on cherry plank, 3.5 x 9 inches, 2013, $95                             click to go check out through my Etsy shop Pyramids Are Cheap,   mixed media on cherry plank, 3.5 x 9 inches, 2013, $95                            click to go check out through my new Etsy shop

Scale Model: 1/8"=1'

A day in the life, courtesy of my iphone, so middle class it hurts. 6:45 am, morning walk, 29° F, Templeton morning drive, US 101 S, just north of SLO: Morning class, Business and Engineering quad, Cuesta Communty College, San Luis Obispo, Ca: Afternoon drive, Old Creek Road: and Hwy 46 E  Afternoon walk, 5:45 PM, Main St, Templeton: then sit ups.  I love America.  Screw the environment.  Bless up. all images copyright Jordan Quintero, 2012

Fates: water+color: relationships: the best and the brightest at work: bonsai, UCSB Lagoon: all images copyright Jordan Quintero

"crying like a fire in the sun... the empty handed painter from your streets, is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets..." -Bob Dylan, Its All Over Now, Baby Blue I make art every day.  It's the first thing I think about in the morning.  I have dozens of notebooks filled with ideas for paintings, to-do lists, artist statements, notes about art history and theory, quotations from authors I think are important to keep in mind while I'm trying to make work that I think is both honest and beautiful.  It's a hard road, and despair always walks right behind me and to my left.  What is the point, nobody cares, we'll all be dead soon at any rate, and no one will know, and no one will care... Life gets so much in the way.  There are hundreds more paintings and projects in the notebooks than ever see the light of the studio (and dozens more paintings than will ever see the light of a legitamate gallery, but that's another post).  Those to-do lists, those end...