Catalog Of Editions

Digital Illustration / Photoshop / Illustrator / 2022

Ocean Mayhem

jrdko

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.

Untitled No. 9 (Monolith on Planetary Rotation)

It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.

Untitled No. 8 (Sherbet and Spinach)

The constant repetition of falsehood is more convincing than the demonstration of truth.

Untitled No. 7 (Infrared Thermography)

I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.

Untitled No. 6 (Dilapidated Obelisk on High AQI Sunset)

The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.

Untitled No. 5 (Dirt and Oil Slick on Asphalt)

Untitled No. 4 (Boxwood on Aged Brick)

Untitled No. 3 (Pepto and Kentucky Bluegrass)

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

Untitled No. 20 (Minimum Wage on Bifrst)

I"m not an abstractionist. I"m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I"m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

Untitled No. 2 (Rust on Mercury Gilding)

You might as well get one thing straight. I"m not an abstractionist... I"m not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else. I"m interested only in expressing basic human emotionstragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.

Untitled No. 19 (Crystal Guts and Purple on Grass)

It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.

This is surely the death of all thought.

Untitled No. 18 (Schnoz and Deseret on Void)

When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.

Untitled No. 17 (Creeper and Brush Fire on Mello Yello)

In art, as in biology, there is a phenomenon that can be described as mutation, in which appearances radically change at a tempo much more rapid than that at which they normally proceed. As in the case of biology, we have no means to determine the process by which this radical change occurs. Yet we do know that it is a reaction to a form of congestion. It is a desperate change due to the arrival at a point where the corollaries to a situation are exhausted, when the stimulus to additional growth is sluggish and a rapid rejuvenation is needed so that art, through disuse, does not atrophy in much the same way as an unused human organ. Here art must attain a new start if it is to survive. Then, assiduously, it renews its traditions by marriage with alien traditions, by the reexamination of its own processes, and by those means reestablishes contact again with its own roots. It is in this way that new plastic worlds are born. For art, like a race, cannot inbreed very long without losing its incentives to continue; it needs the rejuvenation of new experiences and new blood. These mutations, it must be clear, however, do not constitute a change in properties, or mean that art has discarded its past. On the contrary, mutation involves a more conscious evaluation of arts inheritance and the redirection of that inheritance into channels where it can be continued with greater force.

Untitled No. 16 (Windex and Pea Puree)

If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.

Untitled No. 15 (Sublimated Lisa Frank)

Therefore we can posit this generalization: That a painting is the representation of the artists notion of reality in the terms of the plastic elements. The creation of a plastic unit reduces all the phenomena of the time to a unity of sensuality and thereby relates the subjective and objective in its relevance to man. Art therefore is a generalization. The use of the plastic elements to any other ends, which are most usually particularizations and descriptions of appearances, or which serve the stimulation of separate senses, are not in the category of art and must be classified in the category of applied arts.

Untitled No. 14 (Raspberry Prosecco and French Press Sediment)

We thus see the artist performing a dual function: first, furthering the integrity of the process of self-expression in the language of art; and secondly, protecting the organic continuity of art in relation to its own laws. For like any organic substance, art must always be in a state of flux, the tempo being slow or fast. But it must move.

Untitled No. 13 (Snow Cone Syrup on Ketchup and Mustard)

For, while the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.