Happy Valentine's Day

New Places...lets go there!

I have recently placed my work for sale in a couple new venues.

Villekulla

962 Westminster at Lipton

Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 12 - 6

Villekulla will be selling some of my Novelty Art Objects. Not all what you see here below (article from March 2010 from my Visual Chew show at Martha Street Gallery) but there are at least 22 different items, including Bacon Bookmarks, Booklets, Love/War Capsules, Oxygen Capsules, Empower Rings.......and so much more by so many other local crafty artsy folk with lots of cool stuff!

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Kustom Kulture

470 River Avenue. Winnipeg

NOW currently on display and for sale at Kustom Kulture for a few months are seven of my paintings. Some of my newest smaller work as well as a few older items that look really good in there. On one larger wall I will be switching it up every month with a new older large painting until the work comes down in June.

 

Here is the larger painting currently on display.

Saturn Conscious - 30 x 40 inches - acrylic on canvas

twelve + eight = 2new

My latest One Take Super8 film will be screening at

8FEST  in Toronto 

January 27-29 at Trash Palace

Notes from Nowhere: Super Winnipeg Super 8

Curated by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan

-exert from the program-

Winnipeg is an impoverished city, famous for its frigid winters and its artists. Sustained by cheap studio rent and fantastic thrift-store finds, the creative class thrives in the geographic centre of North America. There is very little cool factor to living in the middle of nowhere, so most of us just keep out heads down, get our work done, and try to keep the tips of our ears from freezing. Very little changes in Winnipeg.

Perhaps that is what makes the archaic technology of Super 8 neither outré nor hip. It simply is: a vehicle for ideas, images and experimentation. Friends come together to make something. It doesn’t cost very much. Like Ed Ackerman, you can even develop your own footage in the kitchen sink. Whether the subject matter is, like Deco Dawson’s, seemingly hundred-year-old gestural studies or, like Jaimz & Karen Asmundson’s, an unselfconsciously goofy celebration of place, the particulars of the form continue to enamour. Super 8 looks like memory and is similarly malleable. Winnipeg filmmakers continue to use it to create works that seem to exist outside of time, that reference an earlier time or that simply mark time with chemical collisions and light. Films by Robert Pasternak, Mike Maryniuk, Jaimz & Karen Asmundson, Noam Gonick, Deco Dawson, Heidi Phillips and Ed Ackerman. 

Stills from Robert Pasternak's Super8 film RGB

INNER VIEW

Sunday, December 11th from 8am - 10am 

UMFM 101.5

Robert Pasternak interview on Sacred Space with George Rideout

 

     On the 28th of November my friend George and I conducted an informal interview in my studio space. George has conducted hundreds of interviews through the years on his Sacred Space show and they have all been done live at the UMFM studio. This interview is the first of his interviews where the interviewee is in their 'sacred space'. We talked about the nature of an artist's insight, happenstance and the colors used to bring the bridge of thought to life. I can't wait to hear it myself.

     This interview will be made available as a podcast at a later date.

MONA LISA ART MEAL

1697 Corydon Ave.

Winnipeg

November 6 - December 5

Mona Lisa Ristaurante Italiano this year presents the work of Peter Dumans and myself. Last year I was showing work with Luther Pokrant and the three of us used to show together at the Conservatory at Assiniboine Park here in Winnipeg some years back.

I have been showing  new works and old at this restaurant off and on since 1985. It's a great atmosphere and they have fantastic food.  Enjoy! 

Branching Off .... and ON

***NAK'S UNIVERSAL BRANCHING BLOGS

This News Blog was getting into areas and topics that were not really news, so I decide to start a whole NAK universe of Web Blogs related to... my work, thoughts, and interests of course! Who cares about other things going on in the world when you can have Joy and Happiness right here!

***NEW FILM MAY OR MAY NOT BE SPECTACULAR

BELIEVE IT OR NOT and SEE IT OR NOT

November 2 at the Gas Station Theatre  7:PM

I have a new film at the One Take Super-8 Event held in Winnipeg every year at WNDX film Festival. October 29 - November 2 

"This year I threw away the camera to make my film. Who knows if it will turn out. I've never done anything like it before. I'll see it for the first time along with everyone else." 

 

Uptown Article Online here

***JUPITER ALIGNS WITH La Luz de JESUS Gallery in LOS ANGELES

OPENS OCTOBER 7th

My painting Jupiter is in a Group show celebrating 25 years of this Los Angeles Institution and It's hist Billy Shire. I am very happy to be showing with an incredible roster of artists that includes none other than folks like Matt Groeming, Mark Ryden, The Clayton Brothers, Robert Williams, Mary Fleener, Frank Kozik, Gary Panter, Victor Moscosso, and the lost goes on.  

La Luz de Jesus 25

Billy Shire celebrates 25 years with huge group show & book

Part 1 opens October 7 & 8, 8–11 PM

Part 2 opens November 4 & 5, 8–11 PM

To celebrate 25 years of groundbreaking art shows, Billy Shire presents his biggest event ever: La Luz de Jesus 25, a major retrospective exhibition and companion book. The show, offering work by more than 260 artists who have exhibited at the gallery over the years, is so extensive that Shire has split it into two parts, each with two opening nights: part 1 opens October 7 and 8, and part 2 opens November 4 and 5. The  list of participating artists is a veritable Who’s Who of art world luminaries. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see all these artists together in one show.

View the complete list of artists here. 

View the artist roster for each month here.

The book, La Luz de Jesus 25: The Little Gallery That Could, features images of all the art in the show, a personal anecdote about Shire and the gallery written by each artist, essays by La Luz gallery directors and a foreword by Shire. The book is more than a simple record of the show. Taken together, the images and essays present a history of La Luz de Jesus through the eyes of the artists whose careers are intertwined with Shire and his gallery.

Jupiter - 2011 - 18 x 22 in. - acrylic on canvas

About La Luz de Jesus

Billy Shire opened La Luz de Jesus in 1986 to showcase the work of underground and folk artists largely ignored or dismissed by the legitimate art world. The first permanent gallery space to exhibit alternative art, La Luz quickly became famous as much for its splashy, raucous monthly opening parties as for the often outrageous and confrontational art on its walls. When choosing artists, Shire challenged received notions of “good taste” and “high art” and rejected the arbitrary but long-cherished distinction between commercial and fine art, embracing illustration, underground art, outsider art, animation, and comics, both underground and mainstream. As a result, many artists hugely successful today credit Shire with having launched their careers, and he is widely acknowledged as a seminal figure in contemporary art movements such as Lowbrow and Pop Surrealism.

***FOUNTAIN of YOUTH FOUND in COSM

Yes, it is right here in the pages of COSM the Journal of Visionary Culture. It must be true! I have a new work, or rather thought/teaching in this new issue #7. This Magazine is published through the leadership and insight of one of our foremost visionaries, Alex Grey.

***CART EXHIBIT in Baltimore at CURRENT SPACE is extended to October 21st

Here are links for reviews in the Baltimore Sun & and a new arts review blog based out of Baltimore
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/arts/bs-ae-arts-story-0805-20110804,0,1807348.story
http://whatweekly.com/2011/07/13/6873/

***ARTWORK at Gallery LACOSSE 

For those that love my Concrete Expressionism work, well they are now available at Gallery Lacosse at 169 Lilac Street, Winnipeg.

Night Watchman - oil pastel on paper - 7 x 10 in.

From Jungle to Jungle

1981, acrylic on illustration board, 20 x 30 inches, (top part is cut off)

Another 30 Year post for your retro pleasure. This is my 5th painting. ( you can see the first four in my May 2011 post ) As my first four paintings were done while finishing high school, this painting was done in a summer limbo period before an unknown future of not going back to school and not having a job. One can see some obvious influences such as a Frazetta, Whelan or Boris setting and the use of a Kull or Krull figure from a comic magazine Bizarre Adventures #26. I thought at the time I had quite an original idea with the juxtaposition of the two different worlds, a theme that would be prevalent in many future work. Wait a sec, It already has been prevelant in my previous three paintings. Funny. I remember feeling really at home painting the buildings without any reference, but I was stumped by how to paint the vegetation. To this day I still really like this one, though I cringe a little bit for the swipes of reference. Hey, I was only 17. I am amazed that I kept track of how long it took me to paint the different parts of the painting and how long I spent on preliminary drawings etc. In total, 63 hours.