Kingman Studios

02/26/2020

An important message for those of you who think you can tell what is valuable art. BTW: I've got a half dozen bananas and an almost whole role of duct tape. Any offers?

Artist Maurizio Cattelan duct taped a banana to a wall, titled it "Comedian", and sold 5 editions of the artwork for as much as $150,000 each. Why did it cap...

02/09/2020

I believe we are all visionaries. One reason it may be hard for you to recognize your own visionary capacity is because most visions appear to flow continuously--expanding from a source of concentration. This is one of my first experiments with animating my visions. Kinda looks like a psychedelic trip doesn't it?

02/06/2020

In 2006 I was invited by the principals of the World Bodypainting Association to attend their annual festival competition in Seeboden, Austria.

Curiously, this morning I found this pic of myself face painting there. That's my friend Kara Lovemelt (who attended the festival with me) in the stockade which was at the castle where the event opening was held.

What makes this most curious is that this morning I also saw this Bored Panda feature of 30 face painting images that are stunning--and almost for sure Photoshop enhanced.

https://www.boredpanda.com/optical-illusion-makeup-dain-yoon/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=BPFacebook&fbclid=IwAR0iW5T2E9JmpJCbgE4YnuSJGEj5NIW4tMpFmMMUVOK9HoZwKpcs-qwsMYo

01/23/2020

As long as I'm promoting myself as an art guru, I might as well draw some of the things that pop into my head when I close my eyes instead of repeatedly drawing the stuff we all see in the world out there.

Thing is, we can all see the inner light. But to see the inner light, we have to stop talking to ourselves. You can't see what's there if you're continuously telling yourself what's there because your words will create stories that will generate images that will cloud your vision.

01/21/2020

Today I tried drawing in a way I have never tried before. I tried coloring a drawing in Photoshop. Thing is, I haven't really liked digitally rendered drawings because they seemed too perfect to me. I started with a couple pencil sketches. I photographed them, took them into Photoshop where I multiplied, distorted & arranged them. Then I colored them.

This one is called Concentration. It resembles what I see when I concentrate on my "third eye".

Hey, just for fun, try drawing your own version of Concentration and post it here. Let's see if we can collectively see what it looks like to concentrate.

01/04/2020

Here is a quote, the concluding paragraph of a long article by Michael Ungar. If you agree, or especially if you could be convinced, you may want to read more of the article:

The science of resilience is clear: The social, political and natural environments in which we live are far more important to our health, fitness, finances and time management than our individual thoughts, feelings or behaviours. When it comes to maintaining well-being and finding success, environments matter. In fact, they may matter just as much, and likely much more, than individual thoughts, feelings or behaviours. A positive attitude may be required to take advantage of opportunities as you find them, but no amount of positive thinking on its own is going to help you survive a natural disaster, a bad workplace or childhood abuse. Change your world first by finding the relationships that nurture you, the opportunities to use your talents and the places where you experience community and governmental support and social justice. Once you have these, your world will help you succeed more than you could ever help yourself.

This thinking lies at the core of my belief that our salvation (from the many woes of our own creation) emerges from the community in which we immerse ourselves.

This translates into the daily life of an artist such as I am in the following way: Art is no longer a "hey look at what I did" proposition. It's much more about what we can do together.

12/29/2019

Facebook thought I'd want to share this picture. It is an artwork I made for a New Year's celebration I hosted 12 years ago.

This year, as 2019 fades out and 2020 suddenly comes into clear focus, I see I will not be hosting a gathering as I have done many times in the past. I thank all of you who have attended these past gatherings, you have been a source on inspiration, and you have provided me with a lot of great memories and many enduring friendships.

My wish for this New Year is that all our encounters be charged with curiosity and fueled with love. Every person we meet presents us with a unique opportunity to discover what we share in our soul with the diverse population around us.

We can learn by ourselves, and we can feel love without involving other human beings, but two of life's greatest pleasures are learning from others and loving one another. And while we can learn and love remotely through various kinds of transmissions, nothing takes the place of direct contact.

It is through our direct encounters with each other that we come closest to fulfilling our divine purpose. This purpose, though not always recognized, nor agreed upon, is to reunite ourselves with the Oneness.

We begin to do this when we include each other in our activities, venues and personal lives. We continue to bond when we determine how to lead our diverse groups, with all their varieties of aspirations and assets, forward. And we accomplish this journey into the unknown future through devotion to the sundry causes we invent.

I will miss not seeing you in person this New Year's eve because your company on this precarious path provides me great comfort. But know that I appreciate each person I meet, the many viewpoints we've contrasted and the One Love we all continue to share.

12/27/2019

Well, how about that? Art may be medicinal! No wonder I feel so healthy.

A new World Health Organization report lends "heft and credibility" but it's only scratching the surface.

11/11/2019

It's quite hard to see the world through our reflection. How do you know what is the world out there and what is an interpretation of that world filtered through your own reflection? Did you even know that you're doing this almost all the time? And most frequently, your interpretation of what you see will have more power than what is actually there.

I want to show you a process of how to look out and see in. I call it "Drawing What's Not There."

When you look out and see confirmations of your own thoughts and feelings reflected back to you, you know you need to Change the Channel. But before you can delete your own cache of bad ideas about yourself, you have to notice that they are out there.

You can start this process by delaminating the world you see "out there." I'm going to show you a very simple technique by which you can do this. We're going to start by looking at an ambiguous surface. Clouds are good, trees are good, old walls, pavement, any ambiguous surface with a lot of information works.

Then we're going to look for faces or a face (in more complex situations, it may be a scene like a memory or a teleported view of another place or time). And we're going to draw the object out there as accurately as possible so that the face or other image we see is also visible but not predominant. Then we're going to draw our drawing. And in the second drawing, we are going to bring out what we glimpsed.

The pictures below are examples of this technique. The first shows a pic of the blanket on my bed. I noticed that the shadows looked a bit like a face. Does this happen to you? It happens frequently to me. It's a sign. Low light helps this process. Low light cuts out excessive information that makes us interpret what we are seeing as real and out there. This can be valuable but it also robs us our dreams and fantasies.

We want our process to open the doors to those realms. So everything we do will be by candle light. In the three pictures below I've pictured the source, the rough sketch of the source, and the drawing of the drawing in which I saw the face in the blanket.

Then, because the word divides the light from the dark, we are going to describe what we see and ask others to describe what they see in our second drawing. We're going to do this because new information is almost invisible to our rational brains until it is pointed out to us. Then it becomes obvious to us.

What I see in the second drawing is a very sad face. Stare at the eye on the left, and stare at the mouth and you will see the emotions. I can see in those features that I am still grieving my mother's death or maybe my own mortality. I can see lines of an intense sadness that I could only caricature if I were to try to draw them intentionally.

So that's proof. You have to face this assignment without knowing what you're going to get, without judgement of what you see and you have to accept the truth you find. This is a hard and uncomfortable exercise for most of us. But it's sort of like learning the state of existence in which you find yourself is not Kansas any more. And it frees you to enter the door to the realm where things are more real than in the outside world, yet they are not there at all. Because it's your own pure inner world.

11/11/2019

Change the Channel by Drawing a Door into a New Moment
in a workshop that shows you how to use art as a natural remedy for anxiety, depression and all the other crap that cripples our spirit selves from shining through.

Change the Channel is Tuesday, November 12th, enter Kingman Studios through red door by loading dock 14 at NW end of the building at 77 13th Ave NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413

Tuesday, November 12, 2019 — 6:30-8:30 PM

$35 (materials included) sign up through the link below

Yes, it's true, you can HEAL STRESS AND ANXIETY WITH YOUR PENCIL - No art talent, experience or therapist needed!

Change the Channel by Drawing a Door into a New Moment (art as a natural remedy for anxiety and depression) Kingman Studio (enter through red door by loading dock 14 at NW end of building) 77 13th Ave NE Minneapolis, MN 55413 Tuesday, November 12, 2019 — 6:30-8:30 PM $35 (materials included)

11/11/2019

Keep at it. Do what feels natural. A single notice doesn't necessarily make a career, but sometimes it does.

9-year-old Joe Whale’s parents sent Joe to an after-school art class and his artistic abilities were quickly noticed. In fact, Joe was invited to decorate the dining room of the ‘Number 4’ restaurant in Shrewsbury, England.