Thoughts on Richard Prince and the State of Appropriation Today

Richard Prince was in some hot water for taking a bunch of Instagram pics, adding comments, then presenting it as his own work and selling it for insane sums of money.

But is he wrong? Or his the message his work communicates saying something important about the times we are living in?

Moving Hosts

I’ve changed my website hosting company, because I’ve had some issues with my website’s former home.

This turned out to be a much bigger ordeal than I had expected.
When I first started my website, I had zero idea what I was doing, I just coded inside Gedit and kept everything inside a disorganized blob – an entire website with over 10,000 files, all contained within a single folder. Ugh…
When I upgraded from handed coded crap to WordPress, I made a few more bad decisions – I took some lazy shortcuts to save myself some trouble, which required a few creative work-arounds.
Over the years, more and more creative workarounds were introduced with every major change or update.

When I switched hosts, every single workaround broke, and the issues they were covering up reared all their ugly little heads.
What a mess.
With the help of a good friend, we were able to solve the problems…we think

I hope everything is working flawlessly, but if I missed anything, please let me know.

Apophenia

Apophenia is one of my favourite bugs in the human mind.

It describes the way we will so eagerly find patterns or connections in random noise.

Every day, countless random things happen, and a few of them, by chance, repate to other things, and our brain will tell us, “Oh, this is interesting! maybe it’s a sign? maybe it means something? Is the universe trying to tell me something?

No! Of course not. Of the billion things that happen, you are only paying attention to the few that mean something.

Getting dealt a 10 of clubs, king of diamonds, 8 of clubs, 7 of hearts, ace of hearts is just as unlikely as getting dealt a royal flush, but it doesn’t mean anything, so we ignore it.

Sometimes, you don’t have all the information, and you think you see something, but when you go back and get a clearer picture, you realize that you were just seeing things wrongly the first time around; it’s nothing.

Even though I understand what’s going on, I still feel it, and get excited by apophenia.

I had quite the strong case of it the other day; I was sitting in a fancy lobby, waiting to negotiate a new gallery contract.

I was thinking about how well my last show went; how big the turnout was, and how cool it was that Claire Danes, the actress, popped in to the gallery for a few seconds during the opening. My first celebrity spotting at an art show!

As I’m sitting in that lobby, waiting for the gallery owner to come in, I look at the magazine on the coffee table.

Who’s on the cover?
Claire Danes!

“It must be a sign!” -nope, no, it’s just apophenia.

I still signed with the gallery, though, you know…just in case…

Sakura Trees at High Park

I’ve used my new Samyang 14mm f/2.8 for a lot of architectural shots, working on collecting new source material for a batch of new paintings that I will begin production on in the near future. But I can only photograph so many cubes before I long for rougher, rugged, irregular shapes. I wanted to take my new lens out into the wilderness and get some landscape shots!

Of course, there isn’t a whole lot of wilderness to be found in downtown Toronto, so I headed off towards the next best thing: High Park. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom this weekend. If you’ve never seen High Park’s famous Sakura trees in full bloom, then you are missing out.

KYL_7110

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It’s My YouTube Birthday

Today is July 15, 2012. I was wasting time, watching some random videos, when something caught my eye; I looked at the side window of my channel, and I realized that I joined youtube on July 15, 2006 That means that today is my 6th anniversary of being a YouTuber.

In the *90 months* that this website has existed, I’ve been around for 73 of them. In that time, I’ve uploaded 248 videos. Those videos have generated over half a million views, which is pretty incredible.

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Kyle Paints 2012: Pt. 3: Some Background Info on My Style

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.

Continue reading Kyle Paints 2012: Pt. 3: Some Background Info on My Style

Kyle Paints 2012: Pt. 01 – Introduction

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.

Continue reading Kyle Paints 2012: Pt. 01 – Introduction