John Hopkins

ED, 2014, A Portrait of a Young Man, acrylic on mylar, 24x37

John hopped into the front door and started his way upstairs. “Hi, John!” Mrs. Mom said. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Mom! I came to see Evan.” “It’s ok but you may have to wake him up.” “Oh he knows that I am coming.” “Good, come every afternoon, then…”

A minute later John hopped downstairs making his way towards the front door. “Hey, John, how are you doing?” “I am doing good, Mrs. Mom,” John answered a bit nervously. “What school are you at?” “John Hopkins.” He looked handsome and clean in his sky-blue polo and snow-white shorts. “How is everything on this end?” he asked loosing his tone and sticking a little package into his pocket. The host of ghosts swirled around Mrs. Mom’s head. “We are doing great, John,” she smiled and nodded her head.  

At Doctor's Office

ED, 2014, A Portrait of a Blond, acrylic on mylar, 24x37

She was at the Melrose Park office again. Doctor’s face glowed in the dusty light of antiquated lamp in the corner.  “ I have doubts if it has any sense at all,” she said. “You see, I want to paint, but feel like I lack the audience. I mean, I paint, but I feel guilty, because what is the meaning of doing something that nobody asks you to?"  Doctor cleared his throat, “It must have something to do with your father,” he said. “What?”  “ You seem to not to notice boundaries between yourself and those who surround you… Women are fluid; men are all about boundaries. It is your father’s ingredient that I don’t see here,” he explained. She sighed. The bluish puddle in the corner of the rug trembled again with another drop penetrating its thick surface. When she just stepped into the office, she noticed the puddle but didn’t pay much attention. It was raining outside, and she assumed that the isolation in the glass slide door leading to the garden was leaking. She forgot about it until now. The sleeve of doctor's white shirt was wet. “I say, doctor, you are dripping,” she said. Doctor corrected his spectacles with the right hand and glanced at the puddle sideways. He raised his brows and wiggled in the armchair. His right hand crawled towards the left hand that looked a bit sleepy. When the right hand got close enough, the left hand woke up and rose from its rest. The right hand carefully picked the edge of the latex glove with the thumb and the index finger and pulled it up towards the shirt calf. The calf button was undone. Doctor’s eyes followed his right hand as it fastened the button and tucked the glove under the calf squeezing in the process yet another drop of the jellylike substance....

A Letter to a Doctor

ED, 2013, small works, acrylic on polymer paper

 

Dear Dr. C,

I am a creature of the margins; someone who cannot function as a part of the machine that human society creates of itself, someone who sees this inability as an indication of a higher calling.

Society may be cruel to the likes of mine, but there are always those who are not blind to the clandestine beauty. We recognize each other in the midst of crowds like members of some secret society. We depend on mutual recognition; otherwise who else will notice us?
I am doing my best to function in the retched machine, but its labyrinths are scarier than the untamed monsters of my dreams or dangerous cycling on the busy roads at dusk. I am willing to demonstrate courage to myself and to those few who notice, risking my life in order to quench thirst for acknowledgment I desire but cannot obtain.

I am doing my best to reveal the signs from the realm of unconscious whose agent I consider myself to be, but I cannot find a way to turn my work into commerce, my fear of labyrinths setting me back.

Art I am practicing is self-imposed solitude measuring to nothing in today's values.

For years I have been struggling to enter the labyrinths of mundane, but I paused at their portals long enough to learn to get satisfaction from occasional appreciation rather than actual currency. I work for recognition of a few lacking the fortitude to attach price tag to my works.

I came to your office with empty pockets. You are not blind to the shining of my inspirations. I ask you to lead me through the horrifying entries of labyrinths into human practical existence.

My art is all I can offer as a pay for your services.

         

A New Commerce

 

 pARTners, 2014, Stacks,Trader Joe's paper bags, acrylic, wood 18x18

pARTners, 2014, Portrait Against Lanscape2014, mixed media, 30x25

Look at the artwork and love the colors!

What were you expecting?

Trendiness?

Expressiveness?

Inklings?

I am an artist. What am I after?

Filling up the blanks in the puzzle handled me down by society?
You are a part of society; you already know the right answer.

Have I entered a contest with you as a jury?

Am I trying to please your taste presenting you with what you already know and like?

I am an artist working with individuals with intellectual disabilities.

I have worked out a few techniques that allow me to engage my counterparts in the process of art making. These techniques are specifically designed to absorb unpredictable outcomes on certain stages of overall processes given that people with intellectual disabilities cannot follow the rules. These techniques allow some predictable randomness, but I still get to lead the processes towards the preconceived results. Meanwhile, I treat my partners in the art-making with smiles and praises, but I don’t engage with them equally. Knowing the answer to the puzzle beforehand, I am superior and regard them as objects whose free will should be harnessed to fulfill my expectations.
How do I get out of this predicament?
I am an artist, I repeat
An artist as in the receiver of inspirations from the unconscious
Seeking nothing but unknown  
An artist as in the market creature
Seeking nothing but public approval
Pulled apart by perpetual dichotomy I turn for help to individuals with intellectual disabilities. Their mind is a mystery for me, and so is mine, when I am not grooming it according to the public expectations. This alone makes their company stimulating, and I am grateful for their intellect resisting advanced standardization.
Helpless in the face of perpetual dichotomy I turn for help to people who I lead. I think of the projects where my preconceptions don’t have to block the freedom of their will. I am creating a milieu for individuals with intellectual disabilities to engage in art activities, widely defined, on their authentic impulses and terms, and then follow easy participatory steps to assemble the traces of their involvement into art samples. 
We want to avoid the conforming captivity of the market.
We want to initiate a new nonconformist commerce, the mutual exchange of visions, participation and personal identifications through sharing art processes and their results. It means inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities in society and opening the doors for them to public discourse.
   
Look at the artwork and love the colors!

Proud to Be Lost

E.D, 2010, Lost Rembrandt, acrylic on canvas, 60x60

I have found the Wissahickon Creek’s beginning.

It has always been there.

Coexistence of creeks and roads dazzles me, as I get lost in their parallel universes.

Creek beginnings like thought origins are mystifying, but to follow their capricious wakes with all the turns and insignificant tributaries may only contribute to overall confusion. Switching to a paved road instead is an understandable temptation, albeit it may end in a dead end, too.

Old cherry tree at the creek bent is dry and coarse, her few still alive branches covered with sweet tender flowers.

"Menopause in human females may be explained by their contribution to caring for their children’s offspring because it matters more for species reproduction than their own late breeding," scientists suggest.

The only reason for menopause in human females I can think of looking at the blooming old cherry tree is our ability to think. Caring for the caring of our children’s’ offspring seems a bit obsessive on the part of nature, whereas developing the only unfinished growth in an aging human, intellect, makes sense.

Intellect is as natural a phenomenon as reproduction.

I wrote, “Considering the point were it flows in the Schuylkill River at the site of Philadelphia Canoe Club below double cascades of flashy falls, the Wissahickon Creek comes a long way.” Proudly and simultaneously stupidly I recite it in my head. It sounds paved, and simultaneously leading to a dead end.

What is the point of that writing?
It has more than one point.

I was working on the task of finding the origins of the Wissahickon creek together with my loyal companion, a young man on autistic spectrum. He, too, couldn’t keep it strait according to the road maps somehow always escaping their logic. The ways of water made more sense to both of us as we continued on our search.

It was not as simple as looking at the Google Maps because we were concerned with life itself.

We were lost on a trail at Fort Washington State Park right below the historic point of Militia Hill, when Jack spoke to us. A supporter of bearing arms he felt a need to protect American freedoms.  Unfortunately he was bitten by infectious tick and left his lime disease untreated. It screwed him up, and his wife left him taking along their daughter. Jack told us that the Wissahickon Creek beginnings were in Lansdale, inside some folk’s backyard pool.

Who would believe a crap like that?

Jack told us how important it was for American white man to protect American freedoms. I was not convinced, but he assured me that enemies of freedom were not the ladies with Russian accent or their black autistic companions. He lived with his mother and made sculpture of old bikes and junk at her backyard. Jack would always stay in my memory as an artist.

Is there any coherence to this story?

Does there have to be?

If intellect is a natural phenomenon, then coherence doesn’t matter. The story may follow paved routs, or twist and mingle like a stupid creek and still be justified in the big picture of evolution.

In our particular life it doesn’t have to make sense

In our particular life a reason may be routed

May I compare a reason to the armed protection against intellect?

“Wissahickon Creek whispers like unconscious thought under the charted map of established existence. Concealed under many small bridges of local roads, it runs mostly ignored. The settlers of green loans and hasty commuters alike have little business with its waters besides maybe zoning," I wrote.

People are blind to the obvious presence of unaccounted facts.

Three years later looking in the window of small apartment in Lansdale I spotted a rapid. My companion just moved in with his adaptive mom after foreclosure on their old house. In a narrow wasteland behind the building a creek was bobbling in heavy rain.

“With no obvious reason or clear goal a creek is bobbling in the patch of land unsuitable for development, blemishes of human refusals stuck in-between the branches of fallen trees,” I wrote.

Jack came to mind again, his outmoded figure, his whole existence defying the wisdom of today. Tanned and lean, bony and invincible to hormones and antibiotics of standard American diet, he was a vanishing breed.

The creek that comes to its climatic conclusion in the rocks around Boxborough takes us to the lot of nature-land in North Wales. Flanked by residential driveways it doesn't have an announced entrance. Two brooks run out of it to join together after crossing Knapp Rd in two separate pipes; one springs from the backyard pool at the 137 Winter Drive, where a doctor’s family used to, or still lives, and another descends from further north lost under the ground at the Sunset Drive and possibly secretly connected to the small natural lake a few yards away situated at the dead end of Sunset Dr. Encircled by Morningside Dr, Vilsmeier Rd, and W Thomas Rd right behind the Montgomeryville Five Points Shopping Center at the five point star intersection of 309, 463, and Doylestown Rd, it is only few paces away from the Starbucks where I have stopped for afternoon coffee.

Dead

E.D. she shows her real face, 2008, acrylic, canvas, 34x48

You are a subject of my art

Subject is alive, autonomous, greater than I can capture, a thing for me to observe, to learn and never have learned, because it exceeds my capacity at this particular moment and ever.

You are a subject of my art, a portrait I paint of you.

A portrait I have painted of you is another matter. I put it on the market with a price tag on.

Price is a measure.

Measure is a price for being on the market.

A subject cannot be measured. An object can.

An object is dead. 

Art is dead.

Subjects possess unique autonomous consciousness and therefore cannot be measured.

Consciousness compares and judges.

To compare is to measure.

Measured subjects are objects.

I don’t like to be judged, but I like to measure.

One way to measure is to compete. I like winning but in case I lose, instead of competing with the others I want to look like them.

There are things on the market for sale priced according to my measure of looking successful, comparable, and compatible with the others like any object and, like any object, dead.

Time is a mystery that escapes despite being measured but we are compulsive measurers.

Art is a mystery unknowable, a subject with a price tag on.

There are other things like that but we hardly notice.

Mystery wants to be solved.

Mystery cannot be solved.

Art is dead.

What is art?

Duchamp didn’t say

As long as it may be unknown, art may be alive.

A Stream

I am speaking trough sheer impossibility; every sound I utter is getting shoved back into my throat. The longer I strive the less it is likely to produce a distinct articulation. The isolation within the human stream becomes irrefutable although the noise coming from its wake sounds like communication. Deafening and undifferentiated at times it breaks into audible phrases occasionally echoing each other, joining in corresponding chorales, chocking in self-destructing reverberations and plunging back in cacophony. I force my breath but the moment it parts my lips my voice becomes muted. The futile efforts frustrate me, and seeking distraction I separate myself from the stream finding a refuge on a bench. The individual next to me is a homeless. He is understandably suspicious: I bear features of stream creatures. I lit a cigarette and strike a conversation. Defeated, he issues a toothless smile. We talk a little, a usual stuff. I am from the suburbs; he is from West Philly. I like it here; but he wouldn’t mind some money. He recognizes me: I am just another stream discard. I appreciate the break but betray him leaving behind as little as a half-smoked butt. How long a break one needs, anyway? I round a corner to get to my car. The task of submerging is not that hard. All it takes is trading the bipedalism for four wheals, and vertebrae verticality for amorphousness within the car shell. Giving up articulation of human voice makes it easier to follow the paved paths of multitudes. Everything here is more efficient for clear communication than ambiguous meaning of self-composed sentences, the lights left and right, red and white, front and rear and the horn to make them fear. Colony of insects is not our past. We don’t share common ancestors. Colony of insects is our future. We reach it by means of technological advances.

Know Your Audience

ED, 2011, Dancing Couple, acrylic on canvas,30X34

I don’t know you

Who are you?

The advice goes, know your audience, but I don’t know you.

And why should I?

Isn’t it enough that I am writing?

Do there have to be you?

Are you so important?

Just think about it is it absolutely necessary that you reed this?

Just get angry right now and say, that’s bullshit and close the site and never visit it again!

It will be sad

It will make me miserable because I need you

It is very hard to live without audience. I know that even more than you do.

I will be sad…

Sometimes it feels strange that there is no such word, one single word that says it all. There is no even a word that says a little part of it! How do you express in words what you feel right now? First of all, to express it you need an audience. The kind of audience that would be willing to give you chance to express, the kind of audience that will dig it. It means people who know what you are talking about, people who sometimes feel the same way.

So, you see, I want to reach out to you.

Not that I am lonely.

I actually like to be alone right now, but I still want to know that I can express something genuinely mine and be understood.

No research, no tickets, no stage, no music, but just from under the covers, from out of bed.

If this is possible than anything is possible at all!

Reflection

ED. Portrait of Young Woman, 2010, acrylic on canvas 14x44

If this is a practice for immortality then let there be museums

Like tombs for the dead ancestors, museums preserve art for eschatological resurrection

Galleries are for today; they package art for sale.

Preservation is for the soul what sale is for the body.

Humans are reluctant to die

A patron wants to last forever and commissions a portrait

An artist wants to last forever and paints a masterpiece, but it’s not enough. An artist also paints his own little reflection in the mirror in the corner of the patron’s portrait. 

There, that’s better!

Don’t be confused with different schools and styles: like science and religion, art is concerned with the split of consciousness

The amalgam between dualities ever tears us apart.

What are you looking at?

There is nothing there; you know it, why cannot you take away your eyes?

Animals are not preoccupied with their reflection!

Mirrors are for human use only.

How do you want your hair? Like Jennifer Aniston, she is my style model.

Animals are not preoccupied with their style or with their immortality. See the connection?

We recognize that we are mortal when our consciousness reflects on itself.

Perceived death calls for art and religion. Tightly entangled they grow from the split of consciousness.

Modernity has a problem with uncontrolled growth. It fights microbes with medical science and art and religion with groundbreaking theories.   

God is dead!

Art is dead!

Today our thinking is materialistic and art iconoclastic but we send helicopters and submarines to look for remains of relatives because we must bury our dead

An Image

ED Anna, acrylic on Mylar, 36X48, 2013

 

Awake and not hallucinating, image shapes itself following the rules of common understanding.

Before she is taught, a child doesn’t see in geometrical perspective.

The concept of discerning visual complexity into simplistic scheme of a horizon line with two vanishing points is an invention of the Renaissance, a developmental window in human evolution. The peculiar method of depicting 3-D images on 2-D surfaces introduced people to imaginary trips in newly discovered previously non-existing space. For centuries to come paintings and murals on the walls of palaces and churches and their architecture itself emphasized linear space expansion as the only logical, rational, and realistic way of seeing and protectively avoided anything that might have stigmatized that picture.

It may sound strange, but like the food we eat is capable of changing our digestion, the images we are presented with change our vision.

The world is too complex to process in one glance; simplifications, transformations, descriptions, maps, applied techniques and processes are needed.

Before photography folks had book illustrations to teach the “meaning” of raw material upsetting their senses.

Seeing is not an isolated task. We rely on collectivity and accumulated intellect of all sorts to transfer neurological stimuli into images we can digest.

Before humanity was granted camera objectivities cultures had different visions.

In Renaissance geometrical perspective tunneled vision in isolated directions.

In cosmic architecture of a dome structure space evolved around the center.

Flat characters of Turkish miniatures inhabited the flatness of infinite world.

Reverse perspective of Byzantine mosaics installed mystical practices and paradoxical insights in Byzantine psyche.

How Byzantine mosaic, Turkish miniature, or Renaissance painting represent the same notion of a human being?

One must blindly believe in objectivity of camera distortions to overlook alternative realisms.

Forget the camera:

My eye, my mind, my arm, my thought, my tongue can take me anywhere from here:

1. A Portrait

What is it? Appearance? Truth?

What is a meaning of a face?

Let’s try to change the focus and watch individual features disappear leaving us with a silhouette. I recognize it. It is you, and I, and he, and she, and god: a human shape, an icon.

Cannon’s dead, long live the cannon!

A tribute to the antiquated notion of cannon is its substitution, style.

What is a style but a short-lived cannon?

Style packages raw appearance, unaccounted individualities, unimagined idiosyncrasies to take them to the market.

We march along, I with my brush, you in your make up to pause for couple hours in The Cave, my art studio, to take a break.

We have been waiting for this encounter for our whole life.

Only two hours, and isn’t it too much to take, for you to allow me to look through your brand and for me to allow you to witness my helplessness?

We are two toddlers here, what is your name?

2. A Dream

Where is it coming from? Is it an image or a thought? Who thinks this thought?

What is a meaning of a dream? What worth the meaning I assign to it?

I take a brush to paint a dream. Is there a geometrical or a reverse perspective, a flat infinity or an interior of a sphere? Are all those notions just a mental construction of my helpless awareness?

3. Visual Imagination

Forget about it, its getting old! Aren’t you fed up with the mudflow of imageshit already?

I lost my meaning

I found my meaning but lost the image

I want to talk but something’s stuck in my throat

Khah-khah..

It was the image. Good thing I coughed it out or it would have killed me from within!

It better grow outside me now

Look, it is huge! I start to walk around but it moves, and rumbles, and rolls to the edge and falls down. It was too close! Why didn’t I take a snapshot? Now it’s all gone forever. 

I am alone and empty
My brush is dry. 

   

This Is a Portrait

E.D. A Portrait of an Old Woman, acrylic on canvas, 2012, 48X48

A man in me asks, is an image a thought?

A woman in me asks, is an image a thought?

A man in me continues, at least in the way I understand a thought.

A woman in me continues, at least in the way I see a thought.

Is this thought clear?

Yes, it is.

Is this image clear?

I… am not sure.

What does this image mean?

What image is supposed to mean?

A man in me says, let me analyze the image.

A woman in me says, let me emulate the image.

I wait. It is quiet. No one talks any more.

A though appears first vaguely, then it is repeated in a course of clarification, enters discourse until it turns into a cliché.

An image may illustrate a thought and bear its meaning.

An image may appear as a thought, at first vaguely.

Let’s not attach words to it.

It stays vague.

It turns into a symbol.

It becomes familiar.

It ages.

It is still disturbing.

Let’s keep it that way.

What is this image?

This is a portrait of an old woman.

Does it accurately depict the old woman?

She wouldn’t agree that it does.

How it is a portrait then?

It looks like an old woman.

What is there above her cheek?

Yellow patches.

Why?

I don’t know.

It is obscure.

It is a symbol

...................

This portrait exists not only virtually

This portrait exists physicaly

Like a pile of shit  

 

Undefeated

E.D. Undefeated, 30X50, acrylic on canvas, 2007

 

You cannot be defeated; your fear is just an anxiety.

You will always be just that: a field of thought, and a bunch of molecules and neither of it will ever disappear except for your fear because it is just an emotion.

           

An Act

ED, Portrait of a Girl, 9X11, acrylic youpo, 2012

It is simply an act, the thing you do when no one asks you to; the thing no one does without being paid for, or ordered, but no one ever would think of paying or ordering a thing like that.

It is simply a step you take when you don’t have to go anywhere, when there is no calorie count, when you are not a part of a program and it is not towards your refrigerator.

It is a thing you don’t have to submit, and don’t know how to justify if you had to. You do it alone. It leaves you in perplex. You look around and think, did anyone notice, because if anyone did, they may ask you what is it that your were just doing and why, and you won’t be able to come up with a plausible explanation right away, so you will say, um-m…. And they will get suspicious or just try to avoid you next time, or if they cannot avoid you at a party, for instance, they will have a very hard time to make a very small talk with you, and it will feel awkward to both.

  

Very few people do simple acts like that, which is strange because we all were children at some point. I am afraid that there are even fewer people now than ever, precisely because of the childhood where purpose competes with entertainment and boredom is a culprit.

Very few people do simple acts like that, and it doesn’t surprise me, because people have access. They can always busy themselves with something that helps them to blend in. So if you walk around without a devise in your ear, or on your arm, or in your pocket, if you are not wearing seat-belt or helmet, no name-tag, or uniform, you might start feeling very alien and very un-belonging. The last resort you might employ is to push something in front of you, or to find someone to ask, how can I help you, but if even these opportunities are closed, you might consider doing simply an act, the thing you do when no one asks you to; the thing no one does without being paid for, or ordered, but no one ever…