Spirit Celebrations

Aside from being my 45th birthday today, I am also celebrating  30 years of being an artist. I always drew as a child and especially I liked to copy other drawings. But it was after copying a Frank Frazetta poster I had called The Snow Giants, that I realized that this is what I wanted to do and from this moment on I called myself an artist, with an intent to create fantastic worlds. Today I am not only celebrating the birth of my physical body of 45 years, but also the birth of my astral body & spirit.

This is the drawing I did.  December 1978, pencil on paper, 20 x 26 in.

La Luz de Jesus Gallery

FANTASTIC NEWS

I will be showing new work at LaLuz De Jesus Gallery in L.A - OPENING April 3rd 2009

This is a two person show with MARTHA RICH - a wonderfull fun Illustrator!

I'm excited! There is so much I want to show.

I'm thinking of my Metafigure paintings and GeoFigures (the digital metafigures as above).

www.laluzdejesus.com

www.martharich.com

  

Portraits

     This is a recent portrait that was commissioned by the little girl in this picture, though now she, along with her twin brother just turned 30. This was a gift from her to her brother on their birthday. I have not done a portrait in a long while and forgot how much fun it was. I've done all sorts in a number of styles and mediums from acrylics, pencil or ink. Would you like a portrait done for yourself or for a gift? nak@mts.net   

16 x 20 inches    pencil crayon on matt board

     One of the things I really enjoyed in this commission was the construction of the crazy hair these two kids had and how my play-full abstracted doodling came into the drawing by way of having to make up the details in this mass of hair as the photographs I had were quite vague. 

     

Emerald Heart

     I love painting in an automatic and intuitive way. I have to do this to counter balance the heavy realities of straight lines and linear time. This is one of those paintings. It can be viewed in any direction probably because I am always working on it in every direction  Vertically it is very figurative where the head becomes the heart. Wouldn't it be nice if we all could think a little more with our hearts.

acrylic on canvas 22 x 28 inches 

Right Braining

     One of my least all time favorite things I like to do is draw. For being an artist, I'm not sure if that is a good thing. In fact it isn't a good thing. I think everyone should engage in the act of drawing. It's simple really and requires next to no art supplies.....a bic pen or a stub of a pencil. I think it is important to draw because it engages your mind in the world around you and allows for some critical right brain hemisphere touchy-feely-spacial associations that are so much lacking in a lot of people. I pretty much have to force myself to draw. 

    Ah, but then there is my favorite way to draw..... through doodling. This way of drawing opens up your untapped right hemisphere as well as your heart. These drawings I have here are some of the hundreds that I have done over the years that show what I draw when I am on the phone talking to friends of mine. Because I am concentrating my effors in listening to the conversation I am not as aware of what I lay down with the pencil. I'm looking but I am not controlling. My drawings have evolved over the years to a form of language containing the symbols of beings or people that I believe mirror the movements and actions of my relationships and communications with my friends and my self.

       

Sgt.SMOKES

     My newest novelty item. The butts are real for now untill I can figure out a way to make fake ones. ( but I will always have the 'real action' ones because that was really the whole idea )

      Like most of the novelty items I come up with I really get excited about designing the right kind of package  and making the design fit into a certain era. I had the idea 4 years ago and started to collect butts for it. I was waiting on creating the art because I was waiting to find that classic image I had in my head of the teeth-clenched seargent with the broken dangling cigarette in his lips, but could never find one. So I finally bit the bullet and just drew it myself. I was planning to ink the drawing traditionally, but for the heck of it I tried to see how it would look if I drew out the black inks on the computer in Adobe Illustrator with my mouse.(Its all outline vectors) It happened really fast. The lettering is Dom Casual and the colors kinda instantaneously appeared. I think I captured that cheap toy plastic dollar store (drug store in the old days) look.  I am really happy with how it all came together though I've only been able to make two packages so far as it's hard to find good butts these days.  

Soon available at the NAKFACTORIUM on my website.

Definitely OUT THERE

     This is a new drawing done in Conte pencil. It is 8 1/2  x  11 inches and is part of a series of 9 other drawings I did last summer. This one never got completed until I started to chip away at it throughout this past month. Like most of the other ones it can be viewed multi-directional, but I like this one as a vertical most. I'll let you think which is best for you.  

Bacon Bookmarks

New Bacon Book marks are Here! Shaped and looks like the real m'coy. It also opens up like a note card. You can purchase them on my website. www.robertpasternak.net

Nobody Writes Anymore

Loose Leaf No.3    22 x 28 in     acrylic on canvas

Loose Leaf No.4    30 x 36 in.    acrylic on canvas

     Here are a couple paintings from a new series of work that I just started and am super pumped about. Though I have 7 completed so far I have barely scratched  the surface of all what I foresee that this series could entail. All of them will be titled Loose Leaf No.1,2,3,etc. but the overall series will be titled Nobody Writes Anymore. This series is an offshoot of my Still Life (moving life) paintings where I have sometimes had loose leafs placed on a larger table surface. 

     By using the graphic platform of the Loose Leaf note paper these paintings are basically about communication on a few different levels. Through symbols and writing I want to instill a sense of mystery back into the hand written note or doodle. I want these notes and fragments that could be from a child, student, scientist, writer or artist to imply that there is a larger dialogue taking place that we can partake and share in to ask a question and investigate further into what I have presented in fragment. In time I hope that more people will look upon their own doodles as something important to look at.

     These paintings are all meticulously designed. There are no actual doodles or pieces of notes that really exist of these paintings. In time I may search out past notes of mine to copy what already exists in miniature but this I feel would be a simple thing. I am after something a bit more and want to create a larger arena of dialogue through various levels in the paintings that I foresee to come out of this series.          

Transformer

Totemical Stop-Motion Drawing

     This is a stop motion drawing I did in 2006  for the One-Take Super-8 event held in Winnipeg in conjunction with the WNDX film festival. It was recorded on a Super-* film camera then shown sight unseen before a live audience with all the other participatory films. This year I transfered the film onto digital video and edited it for some reverse and slowed down motion. Other than that it appears as it was with no other editing. This work is part of an ongoing series of drawings, paintings and films that visualizes the spiritual and energy fields that surround, permeate and communicate with the human body.  

                                             

Terracelestial

     This is a digital art piece that I started in 2001, picked it up again in March this year and finished it last week. Usually a digital work such as this is done in day or two but sometimes you get to a point where you either just don't know what to do with it or you have run out of time for the day and it gets put on the back burner because you have to do some 'real' work. 

    This is a real interesting piece for me because it comes at a time in my life that helps me confirm my place in the world and allows me to know and be who I am. I really think of this piece as a self portrait and in a generalized way also a portrait of most other human beings. We are all terrestrial beings living within a higher celestial self.       

Pranic Journey

     Its been a pranic journey in getting this painting to you all. I thought I was near completion a couple weeks ago but now many hours later, I've also added a lot more thinking time. Thinking about what this painting is telling me about myself. Because my paintings are self reflective and come from a well deep within me, there are always things I learn as a result of painting them that were not part of the original plan or thought process of the painting. 

     The artist/obsever/recorder in this painting is seeing something different in the atmosphere. Its is not different in form but in the heightened sense of color. Everything in this artists world seems to be curvulinear and in limited color tones. But here exists a structure more startling. Can everyone see it or just the artist? Through something within the heart of this being, it is able to touch upon it and see even further within the structure and is drawing it on the table surface. This structure is a Star Tetrahedron and is a major elementary particle of light and energy fields and is a component of pranic energy- the life force of all heart breathing entities.       

     Before I was aware of Pranic energy I often meditated and one of the things I did as I concentrated on my breathing, was to notice color formations in the blackness of the space through within my closed eyelids. But before seeing any real color swooshes there was always a period of these sparkles of light twinkling like stars in the sky. Sometimes I would look at one and focus on it. I called each of these lights a globule. As soon as I focussed on one I was able to zoom in to this light and draw it nearer to me. Then it exploded in a ring of rainbow light. It was a portal with a voice accepting me to join in on a journey.

    

Globule

     I am on the verge of finishing a new painting and thought I would share the process with you. Here is the almost finished work above in my studio. I thought it was finished at one point, but after giving it a few days, I see a number of things that don't quite jive with me. These are a few things that seem out of place such as areas of color, tone and balance of light and dark areas. I will post the finished piece when it is done so that you may compare the two.

     Here is where it all started, with this little sketch idea I did a few years ago in the kitchen. There are a number of paintings that I want to do that illustrate different lines of communication which take place during our interaction with one another. These are unspoken forms of dialogue such as body language and the exchange of energy information or what I would term the 'higher self dialogues'.

     This drawing done last year is an interpretation of the first drawing, done not necessarily as a preliminary for a painting but just as a drawing. But it was after this that I really wanted  to do a painting with this image. 

     I had a board that I had already primed that I thought would be a good size fro this painting and as it was sitting on my easel, I saw an interpretation of one of the figures in the brushwork of my gessoed ground. I was now torn between this new perspective or to keep to my original drawing layout. I decided to do some small sketches with this new figure and various combinations of placements to help me decide. It was not an easy decision.

 

     You can see here that I decided upon the new perspective. I thought that there was a reason why this figure showed up, so why fight with it and I knew that I could always go and paint another picture with the original drawing. So, with brush and paint, I sketched out the figure I saw in the gesso. You can see it on the left. Then after sketching out the other figure, on the right,  I started to paint with color.

  

Being There

     This is one of my newest paintings.

Well see if the title stands the test of time. I'm pretty excited about this one as it seems to be a hybrid of my surreal and metafigure paintings.

Up to now, the meta figure works stayed in their own time and place or setting, that being the figures setting. But this one is into our known world.

 

     The idea is of this person sitting in a chair, or rather he was sitting in this chair and possibly staring into space or just thinking or meditating when he was then able to shift his perspective consciousness and now exists 90 degrees to our known reality. When you tilt your head sideways you will be able to see the figure within the bubble.

     Originally there was to be a person sitting in the chair, but then the chair itself was enough to represent the person. But then when the painting was done, except for the chair , I really wanted to leave the chair out because of the ambiguity of scale and of what was actually happening. Also the painting worked in any direction without the chair. The chair acts as a anchor quite literally. 

Happy Birthday

It's my son's birthday tomorrow. He's 14 now! Man how time flies. Those times when I was his age was pretty tough for me all through school. Annachie though is well adjusted and will coast along pretty good. He has his humour to loosten him up. I think I was pretty stiff and serious all the time which allows for the stresses of the day to stay inside you. You have to make sure you laugh and shake things off.

Later this year in early December I will be celebrating my 30th anniversary as an artist. Yes it was after this drawing (a copy of a Frazetta poster I had in my room) that I decided at age 14 that this is what I wanted to do, create fantastic worlds and experience new visions.