This body of work I’m going to be putting together might make more sense with an understanding of where it’s coming from, and how I got started working in this style.

Back in 2005, I was working a summer job as a landscaper; I knew that come September, I’d be starting my thesis year at art school, and I wanted to hit the ground running, rather than aimlessly wandering between styles and ideas. I laid out all these intricate plans, and mentally sketched out images that I would later paint.

At the time, I was making a lot of work that looked like this. While it doesn’t necessarily photograph all that well, the iridescent and metallic colours glimmer and shift like jewels, creating a very alluring effect. The challenge was integrating this technique into larger images an compositions, rather than the all-over textures I had been producing.

September arrived, and I started testing out my ideas; and every single one of them bombed horribly. Over the next four months, I produced nothing but garbage.

One spark of inspiration happened when I came upon a showing of Denyse Thomasos’ recent work. As one of my personal favourites, I wanted to steal the magic of her work to use in my own.

“The line work is key!” I thought. “I have to put lines all over my stuff!” So I started doing stuff that looked like this: it was certainly a step in another direction, just not the right one.

One of my thesis profs who I had been clashing with saw these and commented that I was on to something, but I had to find a mark making technique that was genuine to me; something that fit with my own sensibilities. At the time, I was unsure what she meant by this, but I knew that these weren’t working, so I moved on to other things.

Over the Christmas break, I had my first hint of free time, and I started playing video games for the first time in years. The experience turned out to have a bigger impact on my work than I ever would have imagined. The rush of data on the computer screen being displayed simultaneously was a nice analagy for the rush of energy and excitement this small country boy felt in the big city. I started taking screen shots from all these games and putting together digital collages in photoshop. I was pleasantly surprized by the results.

I took one of my digital sketches and began painting. I was about half way through the painting, looking at the thin pencil lines on canvas surrounding a few areas of roughly blocked in colour, and I knew I was on to something. for the first time in months, I was excited about what I was doing. Unfortunately, I took it to far, and I kinda killed the piece, but I did manage to work this technique I had been obsessed with into a composition, proving to myself that it could be done. But it also lost much of the raw energy the pure, unglazed colour had.

Looking at the finished piece, I couldn’t help but think about how much better it had looked when it was only half done. This is when my natural laziness chimed in: It looks better when I only do half the work? Score! Now I can produce twice as much!

I sketched out another image and began painting outlines and blocking in areas of colour, and while I was extremely pleased by what I was producing, the line work just didn’t seem right. The work still looked like a half finished sketch, not a completed piece. And all this fine brushwork was not making my inner expressionist happy. I had to come up with a better solution.

I dont know where the idea came from, but I took a milk bag, loaded it up with paint, cut out a corner and started squeezing on thick lines of paint. It was magic! I had found my own unique and genuine mark-making technique. I cranked out a few more paintings in this style, finished my thesis, graduated art school, then spent the next year trying to figure out what direction to push this style. This was another long period of time spent producing crap, but I learned one important thing: don’t try to force a change, let it happen naturally.

In 2008, I turned off my brain and started cranking out work in this style without consciously pushing it in one specific direction or another, just working, and letting the art change and evolve on it’s own.

Lately, I’ve come to think that I’m focusing too much on the urban aspect of my work, I want to start paying more attention to the paint itself.

Over the next several months, I’m going to be putting together a body of work for my next big art show. Typically, whenever this happens, artists disconnect from the outside world and disappear into their cave for several months, only emerging once the work is complete – or the deadline has arrived (usually the latter).

For this body of work, I’m going to try something a little bit different. Rather than producing something in private, and only releasing the full finished series of work, along with a poorly written essay filled with confabulations, non-sequiturs and trendy art jargon to back it up, I’m going to pop up every week or so, pull back the curtain, and invite you into my studio. (virtual invitations only. Invitation does not extend to the physical world.) Discuss what I’ve been thinking about, explain how I see my work (note: what you get out of it may vary), I’ll talk about where I plan on taking it. But mainly, this series will be about my working process.

Not the whole working process mind you, that would be rather boring.

Who wants to watch 20 hours of me sitting and painting? Not me, and I’m the one doing it!

I’m going to try focus on the more interesting bits of the creative process .

And since this whole process is being shot and posted as it’s happening, you can have your voice heard. Feel free to chime in with a “hey, thats awesome, you’re awesome.” or a, “oh, no, don’t do that! That’s terrible!” (Hopefully I get more of the former. I like hearing nice things about me.) Not that this is some sort of attempt at interactive production process on my part, more of an open auto-documentary into my work, but I’m not closed to suggestions if you make them. Once I get the ball rolling, you might just be able to nudge it one way or another. Note: your ideas had better be pretty awesome for me to implement them.

Hopefully, this will be revealing for you, while preventing me from going stir crazy.

If you’re interested in keeping up with this whole thing, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. I’m creating a playlist specifically for this video series. “Kyle Paints 2012″ so if you don’t want to see ALL the random crap I post, just pay attention to that one playlist.

So long!

A lot of our projects (like Take a Picture and DRM Box) poke fun at intellectual property. We do things to challenge, subvert or outright mock copyright and content protection.

Why do we take this side of the copyfight? Aren’t we artists? Don’t we benefit from these things?

I take the stance I do because of stories like this: Guy Gets Bogus YouTube Copyright Claim… On Birds Singing In The Background | TechDirt

Companies like Rumblefish claim copyright ownership of birds chirping in the background, and profit off of ads that are placed on these videos, depriving the actual content creator of income. And this isn’t a one off mistake. TechDirt has talked about this same company doing the same thing back in 2009.

Rumblefish has a long history of making false copyright claims against people.

They do seem to eventually drop their false claims after getting a ton of bad press, and being mocked publicly on BoingBoing, Reddit, TechDirt, Google’s own help forums, and Slashdot for several days, but the problem remains: Companies with long histories of profiting by abusing artists and creators go unpunished. And while the issues are being resolved, they are profiting from work they have falsely claimed as their own. This is not a minor mistake on their part; This is mass-piracy for commercial purposes.

According to American law, making a false copyright claim is supposed to be punishable by perjury.

So where are the charges?

As an artist, it absolutely disgusts me that companies push for laws that not only enable censorship and erode our right to free expression, but they also make it harder for me to create. Then they demand ownership of my ideas, strip me of my ability to make a living, try their damnedest to avoid paying me, and claim to be doing all this in my name.

No.
You do not speak for me.
You do not represent my interests.
You threaten everything I stand for and believe in.

That’s why I’ve taken this side of the Copyright debate.

If you’ve been paying attention to this place, or any of the social media venues I frequent, you’ve probably heard quite a lot about the “DRM Box” project Brad and I have been working on.

But it’s been dragging on for months now, and I’m getting a little frustrated, so here’s a little behind the scenes scoop on the project.

The DRM Box was originally envisioned by me as a quick, week-long project to post online as a little internet joke. In my eyes, it just had to be good enough to hold up to video, then we would be done with it. Brad insisted that if we are going to do something, we should do it right, using nothing but the best materials and fabrication techniques for the job. It should be treated as a sculpture, where everything must be perfect, so after the video is made, we have a sculpture that is gallery-worthy. This is a situation where I do think Brad was right. This is art; we aren’t cranking out mass-produced wares for consumption, we are trying to make a unique object to express an idea that we are passionate about, and doing our best work is important.

Of course, going from, “just tape some crap together and hope it sticks together long enough for the shoot” to, “it must be perfect” necessitates a bit of a schedule correction. So, we went from a scheduled week-long build to an estimated month-long build. Then something big came up and my personal schedule changed, cutting out our free time together to about one third of what it once was.

These two factors lead to a project that started to really drag on and go nowhere for a long time.

But, this was ok, because we had a gallery show lined up for the project. The extra work was all worth it. They would be shown in a gallery after all!

Then the show never materialized. I don’t know what happened, but the show fell through.

So here we are, 10 months later, with a project that is well built, and it will be used for a quick little video, then put aside as we get to work on the next project.

But when you spend this much time with a project, when this much effort has been put into it, it becomes hard to treat it like a quick joke. It starts being something that you take seriously. And because we have been talking about it for so long, I fear the audience might also have begin taking this project seriously. I am worried that as far as the DRM Box Project is concerned, the humour is lost.

I’ve been thinking about doing something similar to this since mid-2008:

Martin Klimas’ Paint Sculptures – Images and Story Presented by the Huffinton Post

This is why ideas should be acted upon, rather than just being discussed over and over again. Without execution, ideas are worthless.

Poor execution of a great idea is less valuable than good execution of a poor idea.

One those rare instances where we find good execution of a good idea, that’s where the magic happens.

Link to the original article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/21/martin-klimas-paints-with-sound_n_1290756.html?ref=arts&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000008

Phase 1:
Kyle: “Hey, this will be unbelievably awesome”
Brad: “It wont work”
Kyle: “Sure it will!”
Result: FAIL

Phase 2:
Kyle: “Well, this wouldn’t be as awesome as the original plan, but it would still be pretty cool, and it lets us salvage some materials”
Brad: “I don’t think that would work”
Kyle: “Sure it will!”
Result: FAIL

Phase 3:
Brad: “Well, I guess we could just do it this way, it’s passable, and means we wouldn’t have wasted all this time…”
Kyle: “Yea! that will totally work!”
Result: FAIL

Phase 4:
Kyle: “Whatever, we’re artists…let’s just do this and BS our way out of it when people notice the shortcomings…hmmm…no, I refuse to go down that path, lets just burn it now, and never speak of this again so the world never finds out about our failure this winter”
Brad: “it’s on facebook, tee hee hee”
Kyle: expletives deleted

A random rant about something that pisses me off about the art world: concept being used to justify incompetence.

Art dealing with difficult or complex concepts doesn’t bother me, art should be a balance of aesthetics and idea; but what happens when these complex ideas are just a cover for artistic failure, or technical limitations, or incompetence? How can the audience tell the difference between a genuine concept being tacked by an art work and a concept tacked on after the fact?

Is the artist dealing with ideas that are over my head, or is it impenetrable and vague by design?

Over the next several months, I’m going to be putting together a body of work for my next big art show.

Typically, whenever this happens, artists disconnect from the outside world and disappear into their cave for several months, only emerging once the work is complete, or the deadline has arrived (usually the latter).

For this body of work, I’m going to try something a little bit different. Rather than producing something in private, and only releasing the full finished series of work, along with a poorly written essay filled with confabulations, non-sequiturs and trendy art jargon to back it up, (commonly referred to as “an artist’s statement) I’m going to pop up every week or so, pull back the curtain, and invite you into my studio. (virtual invitations only. Invitation does not extend to the physical world.) I’ll discuss what I’ve been thinking about, explain how I see my work (note: what you get out of it may vary), I’ll talk about where I plan on taking it. But mainly, I’m going to talk about my working process.

Not the whole working process mind you, that would be rather boring. Who wants to read about every brushstroke and colour mixture? I’m going to try focus on the more interesting bits of the creative process .

And since this whole process is being posted more-or-less as it’s happening, you can have your voice heard. Feel free to chime in with a “hey, thats awesome, you’re awesome.” or a, “oh, no, don’t do that! That’s terrible!” (Hopefully I get more of the former. I like hearing nice things about me.) Not that this is some sort of attempt at interactive production process on my part, more of an open auto-documentary into my work, but I’m not closed to suggestions if you make them. Once I get the ball rolling, you might just be able to nudge it one way or another. Note: your ideas had better be pretty awesome for me to implement them.

Hopefully, this will be revealing for you, while preventing me from going stir crazy.

If you’re interested in keeping up with this whole thing, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, where I will be posting videos along with these blog posts. I’ll create a playlist specifically for this video series. “Kyle Paints 2012″ so if you don’t want to see ALL the random crap I post, just pay attention to that one playlist. So long!

I’ve been working on a fairly large blogging project since last August.

The talk Brad and I gave at SoOnCon, “Why People Hate Art” was assisted by a mind map I had created in a program called Semantik. Since the talk, my mind has been exploding with ideas relating to that talk. As I was working on it this morning, I realized that I have over 9000 words in rough, point form notes. I really, really need to sit down and develop each of these points into a post here, but the way ideas are interconnecting, I want to do this this most comprehensive way possible.

The good news: a whole lot of content is being worked on
The bad news: it’s gonna take a long time…

I edited the talk down from 28 minutes into a much more focused 18 minute presentation. The other half will be posted shortly (well…eventually) but here is the meat of the talk.

If you want the background to this talk, and don’t feel like digging through my earlier posts, here is a brief summary of this talk and how it happened:

Brad Blucher and I were invited to give a talk at the TIFF Bell Lightbox for SoOnCon 2011.

The topic for our presentation was “why people hate art”. Using examples of things we have experienced first hand, we launched into an attack on the pervasiveness of obscurantism masquerading as deep insight within the art world.

Art is often nothing more than a footnote to a (poorly written) essay using invalid logic to make unsound arguments, all the while using technical and scientific terms inappropriately and without justification in an attempt to apply a veneer of rigour and profundity over their steaming pile of banal observations and utter nonsense.

This talk is a criticism of that tendency in the art world.

Our Self-Published photobook, Illuminated Landscapes is now available in ebook format for your iPad or iPod or iWhatever.

Illuminated Landscapes can be found on the Blurb Book Store

Note: You can still get the 2-part PDF version of the book for free by sending us an email. (smile_takeapicture@ymail.com)

I know, I know…I probably shouldn’t be telling you about the free version while I’m pushing the paid version on you, I’m a terrible marketer, but yay! ebooks!

Now trees don’t have to die for you to have a copy of my book. Although if you like murdering trees, you can always pick up the paper version of our book. (I’d recommend the soft-cover version, it has a very shiny cover. I like shiny things.)