Brussel Sprout Cheesecake
Ruptured Groceries
Withered and Rigid Dwarves
Pleasing Fungus Barbie
Return to Painting: I cannot say precisely when I recommitted to painting after my extended, post-graduate school lull. The few paintings presented at the end of the Portfolio pages comprised that inactive period. I first exhibited with lowbrow artists in 1998 at The Rico Gallery in Santa Monica, by which time I had made two of the paintings found in the first selection below. My slight reputation owed to an article featuring my work that appeared in Art?Alternative Magazine a year before.
Click images to enlarge. Contact me at: teaguemichael5858@gmail.com for purchase information on individual artworks.
Two-Man Show: My LA paintings include those shown in the two-man show (with Scott Musgrove) at La Luz De Jesus Gallery in 2002 in Los Angeles, where I met and compared notes with Robert Williams and other lowbrow artists. There has been no complete stoppage in my painting since this exhibition, although my output slowed to a trickle while I worked on my novel throughout the early 2000s, and also into the late-2000s once I returned to musical composition. Presently, I divide my time between all my activities, which is to say I work at a snail’s pace on everything.
Dates and Dimensions: Though I can provide dimensions for some paintings and drawings from this period, I cannot for others. The largest of the LA show paintings was Urchin of The Eyestalk, which was 30 inches by 22 inches. Several others are about this size or a little smaller. Table of Periodic Objects was completed in 1998, but most everything in this group of paintings falls within the 2000 to 2002 window.
For purposes of organization, works on paper from this show are featured on the next page.
In-Between Years (2002-2009): As of 2021, I ended up selling all but three of the paintings out of my LA show. All the paintings from the introductory selection of paintings (above) were sold before the LA show. This success, in retrospect, was promising, although at the time it was too spread out to be appreciated as an accomplishment. It was only a matter of time before I began to drift backwards, yet again. This last block of paintings comprises that period of drifting.
Digital Cameras and Time Stamps: Going by time stamps from my first digital camera (Lumix LC33), which I bought in 2002, half the paintings featured below were finished before 2004. Exit Wounds, iPebbles, Manacles, Insoles, and Fiber Optical were finished later in the decade. Fiber Optical was commissioned by Diesel Jeans in 2006.
My portfolio is reshot each time I purchase a new camera. This occurred again in 2015 with my Sony RX100ii, and then in 2022 with my Sony A7iii.
Aspergers Diagnosis: I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in 2007, and would have, for the first time in my life, an explanation for why I have never been a good advocate for myself or my creative ventures. Living in LA, with Aspergers, would have been extremely difficult. However, I would have had a supportive community and many more exhibition opportunies had I figured out how to get there.
It is not easy making a living as an artist, even in a large city where there is, at least, a theoretical market for your work. Allowing that I could sell my larger paintings in 2002 for thousands of dollars each, their density of detail meant I could make no more than a few of them a year. Add to this the cost of art production, photography, exhibiting, framing, shipping, and travel, and I might just break even on my expenses. I would still need to house and feed myself, and from what research I could gather from LA artists I spoke to in 2002, that would require a full-time job.
Lowbrow was by no means a sure thing in 2002. In rural Indiana—it was never going to be a thing. However, the little city where I live does not intrude on my safe space, so that math was easier to do than any calculation about the future fortunes for an obscure new art movement.
Outline in Problem Solving: Within Modernism (though perhaps more so in Post-Modernism) one may choose to pave over previous terrain lightly, thus leaving traces of the earlier architecture in place and preserving documentation of one’s thought process: Edvard Munch is the best example of this; alternative cartoonist Al Columbia is a more recent example. This ghost imagery works surprisingly well by creating gauzy spatial depth behind foreground objects. One may also see this technique in many of Willem de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist paintings. (I copied one such of his paintings, which may be seen on my first Sketchbook page.)
I was never happy with the left side of Envelope of Meat. I decided to carve out negative space by using the contours of the removed imagery to create a topographical relief, upon which I added an overlay of pointillist dots.
The End of The Still-Life Era: Envelope of Meat, Table of Periodic Objects, Withered and Rigid Dwarves, and Arcimboldo Ant Farm began as still-life improvisations. Manacles of Milk was the last time I used a still-life as a starting place for subject matter in a painting. Still-life setups were always problematic compositionally, so I abandoned them, if not the idea of painting objects from observation and incorporting them into other schemes such as monsters and landscapes.
In hindsight, this abandonment of the still-life formula is the point where I parted company with art school and art history.
Works on Paper 2009-2000/ Back/ Home
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