Entering Emeryville (Los Ladrones)
Wednesday night I stayed late in Berkeley talking about Love in the Time of Cholera and then walked home to Emeryville from the MacArthur BART station around 11 pm. Ten blocks through the hood. I'm not particularly nervous about it but found that I was cautioning myself to be alert--"para los ladrones," as I put it mentally. Ahead a light that partially illuminated the sidewalk blinked off, bushes and buildings suddenly sinister. But it was nothing. I passed solitary across MLK Boulevard and down a neighborhood street. And then they were there, stepping out of the shadows, crossing the street to block my way.
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The Marten
Breeze Lake is the highest in the line of Chain Lakes of the southern Yosemite, around 9,200 ft. From the fisherman's trail I angled my way up a series of rubble-strewn inclines from a monstrously dead ponderosa to a guardian group of redwoods that marked the way to Gaiea peak.
The marten was driven downward to escape quickly but it forced him to come straight at me. Those seconds were spent trying to recognize the animal, angry clenched eyes, a lanky and determined runner.
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Skronked
More of this pantheistic stuff. Skronked by an azure wave I crawl to shore in a swirl of brown pelicans.
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Cats, Pigeons, San Mateo Bridge
Near work, the bay cats eye wary pigeons.
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The Burning Wharf
A long time ago (around 2000 a.d.) I wrote a pirate story, "The Burning Wharf" set on the Baltic Sea, northern Germany, around 1000 a.d. Last summer's project took this story as a starting point for some interesting paintings.
Drops of Amber
"Have you brought a few drops of the amber with you?" Jör asked eagerly. I shrugged. From the leather bag I slung down I pulled my small vial and drew out a quill full of the precious commodity. The thickened liquid exploded as it touched the wine’s ruby surface. Immediately the rich scent emerged, as penetrating and evocative as spring thaw.
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Felix, Karl, Ratka
Two young boys burst through the narrow doorway of the tavern at the same time, followed after a moment by a slower, slenderer shape. With a rush of bewilderment, I recognized the young woman who stood just inside the tavern as Jör’s oldest child, transformed.
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Berserkers
In battle you find your man and take him, and I saw mine, a tall fellow topped with a tangled spray of yellow hair, a shaped leather helmet. He dodged the first murderous overhead sweep of my sword—but they always do that. Alert to the dangers of the weapon in my opponent’s hand, I simply stepped aside as he stabbed it futilely toward my guts, letting my own extended blade fall around heavily against his backside. The Viking went to his knees as pretty as a hamstrung hog and I spared him a lengthy contemplation of his foolishness.
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The Christianic Woman
"The woman has been like this ever since she began this Christianic stuff," he explained dismissively. "Magya, do you think that your fine house here has grown by itself?" His broad hands swept the air, as though gathering together the rich fabrics that lined the walls of the large room. In the center of it, Magya slumped noticeably at the words.
"It's Christian, as you know," she said. "And I have always been 'like this'. For all the years you have had me here--wanting a world in which people's children were not seized and raped and taken to foreign lands."
"You came quite willingly, as I recall," Jör said. "I found Magya in a little village in Hungaria," he explained to me, "It was in the early days when I was trading in metals." Now his look took in the children as well. "You might today have a fine gypsy family, a hard-working tin miner for a husband."
"I went willingly," she replied. "We would wish for more choices."
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The Giants Return
"This was in the days when the old gods still worked their ways with the world," I said, in deference to Magya, "which was not very long ago. Baldur himself was watching over Snorri and his clan, as they tended to the reindeer that spring. Now, it had been a hard winter again and yet even the year before that. And so even the beasts of the wild had come down from the uplands and mixed with their animals, and that was good, the family thought, because it meant that the herd would become stronger from the new blood.
One day the young boy Snorri was sent out to look after the reindeer and on this day the herd had pressed up against the hills where the green plants grow in the fresh snow streams. And what do you think he found there? It was the wastage of a young cow, her side torn open and the calf taken, with blood and evil smells everywhere, and a trail of crimson that led away from the place. Snorri knew when he saw this that the giants had returned.
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Oh, Betrayer!
"Oh, it was a fine day to be wed and a sorry day for giants. For what the invader had never said was that this was the thousand years, and that these were the times when everything changes, when everything sits balanced on the edge of the sword. The giant knew that the woman he bore away could give him many children and it would mean the future for his race. Or else he would be the last of the giants, and fade away a muttering old man."
In the kitchen before the wedding was to take place the mother Mrrta helped her daughter prepare her cake. It was long and thick and fat, the outside of it glazed with summer honey and baked brown and hard, and it was the tradition that this cake be shared among the village whenever a wedding of consequence occurred
....
Now the naked belly of the giant began to swell and churn from the efforts of the young deerherders within—now it distended as they arched and prodded the inner linings with feet and heads and elbows—now the giant groaned and pressed his four fingered hands to contain this inner enemy. A bump appeared, poked between the fingers and Sateen gasped in misery as yellow bile burst away from the point of a sharpened knife, the very knife which Anika and her mother had baked whole within the wedding cake that morning.
"Oh, betrayer," the giant screamed, his last scream. And he dropped to his knees as Snorri ripped the blade through and opened his gut to the air. 'Your vow..."
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Painting in Tongues
Stephen M. Skaar
They begin most often with a headache, a migraine that disrupts perception from within, a postnasal trickle of vision. The mildest are simply archaeologies, incised mental images that are revealed by our brushes’ ability to wisk away the overlaid gravel and dust. In these grooved inscriptions we find confirmation of the truth of the old stories, reassert our ancient civilization.
More clinically serious are the prophecies and hallucinations. Can we credibly claim that we of the winged sandal are the deliverers of a divine message? Only with the greatest humility and the most potent psychoactive pharmacology. And yet, let the glyphs shown here speak for themselves…
The term “earlyposthuman” spans both these realms, a semi- fictional zone that persists between the revelation of the Shittite Heresies and that imminent moment when our soft sculpture finally hits the fan. Here we find items as mundane as a horoscope and as cosmologically tainted as instructions for planetary evacuation.
Click Here for Frequently Asked Questions about Art. Yes, it’s true that transcription errors have occurred between inner and outer space. But much of the true story is still discernable within these images.
Hermeneutic
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 37” x 56”
I had already been using drugs and so I began taking drugs even more to relieve the paint.
This time, I threw everything I had onto the canvas. God spoke to me again and said," Whatever thou paint shall be true!" Just then, He filled me with the holy Ghost! With tears running down my cheeks, I began painting in tongues.
I arrived home about 3:00 a.m. and told my wife everything that had happened to me, word for word, as she can attest.
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What comes after Z?
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 37” x 56”
How can we possibly evoke the new with no tools at our disposal but our existing alphabet and vocabulary? Doctor Seuss seems to speak of a similar conundrum in his classic treatise, "What comes after Z?" As much as any of the other explanations offered here, “Z” may actually be the genesis of my longtime desire to bring these strange character sets and their associated animals to life. Here we reintroduce the Glass Bead Game, grow Concepts By Accretion.
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Pedagogical Exercises / Self-Schemata
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 47” x 48”
It all started rather tamely decades ago, with sketchbooks full of abstract line drawings exploring the relation of shape and repetition, like Paul Klee’s “Pedagogical Sketchbook,” from which I took my working title. In my case, a glutinous distillation of the weird has resulted from the low heat of thousands of versions and variations. It’s just gotten out of hand.
Taking the material from small drawings to larger paintings added complexity. The paintings set up a shallow space where tensions across a number of formal but unusual dimensions are arrayed, between open and enclosed, opaque and overlapping, real and symbolic, unfinished and complete. A variety of painterly concerns—scale, color, value--provide additional depth.
The term “Self-Schemata,” maybe that refers to the alambic vessels into which the weird spirits are drawn on line 2, maybe to the red row of faceless placeworkers above.
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Musica
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 37” x 45”
A concert. Riffing on musical notation, thinking about painting on black velvet.
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Horoscope, maybe yours, maybe mine too
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 37” x 51”
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Earlyposthuman fetishes
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 38” x 54”
spores;
sublimation;
sexual thermodynamics;
sprouts.
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Alien Transmission
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 38” x 56”
In the movie “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers” replacement townspeople curdle from the soufflé interiors of interstellar seed pods, soon absorbing enough of the details of speech and behavior to pass for any of us in regular life…
The fear of the foetus that came out of this first alien beachhead is still with us in society’s endless wrangling about stem cell differentiation, veal, and mushrooms. Here a team of extraterrestrial podlings drift to their assignments in Contra Costa County, each optimized for effective information transfer. Don’t look behind you…
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4JZ
Stephen M. Skaar 2007, Acrylic on Canvas, 35” x 57”
Just as Dr. Zeier had promised, every new painting became better, more “fluent,” as the therapy continued and my augmented language centers begin to fire on their own. After only six weeks, the CAT scans showed a substantially enlarged medulla, the new stem cells growing well.
At this point I had already processed multiple messages from departed kin, past identities, god, what-have-you, John Malkovich, and the math guy that worked for the CIA in his garage.
Ironically, until this final series of injections, I had never channeled JZ himself. Three sessions are represented here:
o Better Baroques, “acid-baroque” without the acid.
o Headline, read all about it!
o Chromosomy, with homage to the crazy creatures in Stephen Jay Gould’s “Wonderful Life”
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The 20th Century Room
Four Women 1995, Acrylic on Canvas, 17" x 28"
I know I still have a napkin sketch from the burrito shoppe where I watched these four friends during my half hour lunch break one afternoon. I spent a lot of time on the idea of purse straps looped over the backs of chairs, but the real kick was in the people that emerged when I began the painting months later. I’m not sure where these personalities came from—the slight attention I had been paying them was no more than the irritated envy of my stressed out mood, but I’m glad they graced me.
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La Ramasseur 2003, Acrylic on Canvas, 22" x 23"
If I’ve spelled this right, it means “gatherer.” In one of the walled villages below the Dordogne a very young girl was kneeling at the edge of the sidewalk, selecting and collecting a set of small rocks. This image of careful evaluation struck me as a simple metaphor for something like thought or intention itself. I based this painting on a photo I took of the little girl, and more than that, on an ink sketch I did a few days afterwards. Probably it was the homework I’d done in thinking about this pose and position that allowed my technique here to be so immediate. Along the way that jeune fille became a character much more austere and mythic.
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Elevator Group 1997, Acrylic on Canvas, 18" x 25"
I like these situations where the physical space strongly defines the possible action. Maybe that sense of story again, or perhaps only frottage.
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Bus Stop 1997, Acrylic on Canvas, 18" x 24"
I saw the kids swinging around the bus stop pole years before I finally painted the image. When I painted the yellow stripes on the boy with two left feet’s shirt, I knew I was in trouble. “It’s fucking Balthus!” Ah, yesss, the fatted thigh of the pubescent child, the spooky looks, this dog or reptile jumping with excitement. But this painting grows on me the more I look at it. It has some really good stuff going on.
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Death Strikes All 1995, Acrylic on Canvas, 21.5" x 30"
This image is of our beloved dog Jackie's last moments. A moment so poignant I couldn't keep from painting it and still have a hard time showing it to anyone. I think it's revealing that in starting to work on this emotion-charged scene I began with a scribble to develop Jackie's body. I usually work with a contour drawing approach and I have a lot of confidence in my line, but I was on unsure ground with this one.
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Mother and Daughter 1995, Acrylic on Canvas, 21" x 27"
Camping out at Lake Berryessa with several couples and a mixture of children, I came upon a tender moment between a mother and a daughter who were not related to each other. For some reason I’m often driven to express the inexpressible in ways like this.
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Doom 1978, Acrylic on Canvas, 37" x 52.5"
During a NFL playoff game between Dallas Cowboys in the early 1970s, the TV cameras panned unexpectedly to show a man dressed in a “Frosty the Snowman” costume that had burst into flames. As we watched, the snowman leaped to his feet, hugging and slapping himself, twisting awkwardly in the narrow space between the stadium seating, and finally falling, still on fire, across his neighboring spectators.
I was so impressed by the scene that I didn’t understand for a long time how obscure the image was—even the elemental irony of snow in flames turned out to be hard to convey. And what did it all mean, really? Surely there were elements of morality in the fact that we witnessed this collateral disaster on the road to the Superbowl. In those days the irrelevant bellicosity of pro ball and casual military imperialism were closely allied in my mind.
Doom was probably the first painting I did that consciously tried to create a story. This is actually a really hard thing to do—maybe it’s better left to literature, multimedia, and explanations like this. The main figure is our friend and babysitter, Dave Brinck, who suffered a schizophrenic breakdown. Dave was a major influence on us, and one of his persistent theories was this pop-science elaboration of the destruction of Atlantis, probably on Santorini island. In Dave’s platonic conception, Atlantis is a symbol of not human pride or arrogance but of humanity as an organic machine containing the seed of its own inevitable destruction. That flaw is a recapitulation of an atomistic fusion of being and nothingness, which is viewed as the basis of meaning, and always contains its own antidote. We had grown up not only with Dave’s endless reiterations, but with a sharp cold-war sense of nuclear annihilation, and this fed into the Atlantis theory well, but you really need to hear this about a thousand times to understand. We spent an inordinate amount of time talking about this stuff as kids.
Dave had always posed as a schizophrenic and was inclined to heavy drinking and obnoxious recitations of his theories. It was really pretty harmless, but at a certain point it became a crisis, and he often confessed in early morning phone calls to an inability to hold it all together. That would result in personal doom, and who knew how far it might extend. In the end, I pulled my famous Judas act and drove with Dave and his parents to the state mental hospital at Warm Springs, Montana. That’s me in a one-eyed duplicitous role, standing behind Dave’s horrified apprehension.
Was there any justification in mixing the football metaphor with Dave’s dire state, or in morphing the melodramatic fiery iceman into a falling warhead? Maybe not. But I still think we’re all doomed.
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Doom II 1984, Acrylic on Canvas, 42" x 32"
How significant is it that I chose to revisit this theme six years later? I had always been bothered by the inconsistencies of the previous piece, and I spent a huge amount of time trying to rationalize its elements. The scene is simplified and delineated in this second painting, with more clues to its placement. Probably it doesn’t have the same irrational impact as the original. It kind of reflects my continuing need to prove my painting vocabulary, with a greater consciousness of composition. In this painting the picture plane is a television screen, indicated by the rounded corners, which were cut from the canvas. This cliché shape of the TV’s cathode ray tube has lost some of its meaning a generation later with the flatter, more rectangular displays we see today. But there was another deeper meditation going on—a reflection on the legitimacy that’s conferred on every image framed by the television window, partly by intent on the part of the content providers, partly by the intentionality we confer to the medium. What, am I jealous?
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The Intruder 1996, Acrylic on Canvas, 21" x 29"
In a trip to New York we saw a retrospective of this German at the Guggenheim Museum and among the deconstructivist tricks he employed in his tedious career was painting things upside down. This creates a twinning difficulty both in representing and in decoding the visual image. So I think that was a pretty direct influence on the crazy angle I depict this scene from. The fairly obvious permutation is the question "What if the subject being painted is already upside down?" An interesting aspect also is the way my modern vocabulary mixes upside down and diminished (basically photographic) foreshortening of the figures.
But the real story is the way that the real subject wrote itself into this painting. While we slept the burglars sneaked into the yard and silently removed thousands of dollars of tools and equipment left in the open while we showed our art in the studio. And came back to the neighborhood on several successive nights. It was an unsettling experience, and then one evening the intruder just appeared in the doorway in the painting that had been prepared for him.
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The Runner 1997, Acrylic on Canvas, 22" x 29"
Running has usually been a very solitary experience for me—punctuated by brief encounters at near light speed by entities traveling in another direction, the identity of places established by thousands of individual glimpses accumulated over months and years. I think I only saw this lady once as she pounded around .the curving crest of the Hill Trail at Rancho San Antonio park I was ascending. Her cross-eyed and startled look, her face dazzled and illuminated by a sudden band of light.
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Vista del Ocell 2003, Acrylic on Canvas, 32" x 23"
From Tibidabo, on the hill above the city, you can see everything, and one thing I observed was a bead-eyed magpie which hopped cautiously in circles around us as we threw small pieces of a chocolate bar to a pair of bustling and greedy pigeons. Something about the difference in attitude between the two kinds of birds drew me down into their little scene, and I was pleased by the idea that a “bird’s-eye view” might actually be a ground-level one.
In the historic region of Catalunya they favor their own point of view as well, whatever its virtues, and offer their own language, Catalan, as the local alternative to Spanish. It’s an odd tongue, with grammar and vocabulary that borrows a little from French, a little more from Italian. So the birds in Barcelona are not pájaros or oiseaux but ocells.
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Portents 1997, Acrylic on Canvas, 22.5" x 30"
Every night that spring I looked up to locate the Hale-Bopp comet, striking even in the urban sky. Word came early of the ascension of the Heaven’s Gaters to the mother ship…would we be next? Here the astrologer ponders the signs, including the possibility of a budget tour flight to Hawaii, far beyond the unencumbered Golden Gate.
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Toro 2003, Acrylic on Canvas, 26.5" x 52"
In this new era of war and threats of weapons of mass distraction I was recently motivated to another story painting. It reminded me of the two previous pieces, Doom and Doom II. Since then I have mostly tried to avoid high drama and complex story in favor of a more gentle allegory, but here again you have a strong fusion of somewhat arbitrary compositional techniques to depict a horrific event. In most of the paintings I’ve been doing recently I’ve been trying not to overthink my game. I’m just out there to have a good time, get on base, hopefully score a few runs. I do like the treatment of space I achieved here, with its sprinkling of visual capsules.
Something I’ve been working with for a long time is the tension between inspiration and realization, between the finished and the incomplete. I think this dialectic probably began from an inability to deliver, but it’s evolved a lot since then, along with my understanding that this isn’t a matter of either-or. Some images we value because they are fresh, gestural, and suggestive. Some because they convey a deeper level of engagement. But it isn’t a continuum and both these aspects exist in nearly every artwork.
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Southpark 2000, Acrylic on Canvas, 27" x 19"
After my escape from the silicon valley, I ended up in a small startup company on the fringes of multimedia gulch in San Francisco. Although we began rapidly going out of business, business was in the air—this was as close to the heart of the dot-com boom as anywhere on the worldwideweb could be, and at noon the small park off Third Street was a place to be, as counterculture battled counterculture for possession of a merchandisable vision. This was in the days when observations about people talking to themselves and walking with their hands to their heads still meant something.
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Vickie
To my love and constant inspiration. Dedicated to a certain sassy swivel she doth possess. Dig those red jeans.
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Urban Gleaners 1986, Acrylic on Canvas, 32" x 29"
What constitutes Nature’s Bounty? Today the answer is Best Buy, the consumer electronics store that now sits in the place this painting shows. Twelve or fifteen years ago it was a bumper crop of blackberries that grew in the shadow of a still standing steel smelter smokestack tucked in the armpit of Interstate 580. This urban setting has a lot of history. Apparently the few points of IQ we lost through ingesting our heavy metal jam haven’t hurt us none.
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