ROME

 Yes it's been a long time since my last post. 

I would say that, up until about a month ago, my reason for not writing was that I was so busy with the house renovation. And my reason for not writing in the last month is really just that I have slipped into what you might call a 'hard time'. I won't spend a lot of time talking about having a hard time because no one wants to read about that, but I think the following should suffice: During our first 14 months or so here we were in non-stop trouble-shooting mode, whether it was paperwork or getting Kodiak settled in to his new school or learning Swedish or finding a house to buy or renovating that house. During all that time I was so focused on the task at hand, whatever it was, that I had very little time to really feel what it was like to leave my 'home culture' and jump headlong into this new one. My alienation from my feelings during that time was only exacerbated by a lifelong difficulty I have in identifying and experiencing emotions, even in the best of times. So, when the house renovation finally slowed down and Kodiak showed himself to be adjusting much better in his second year to being here, it was finally time for me to feel just how big a thing we've done, and just how hard it's been. If you liken a person who is able to healthily vent emotion consistently to a pressure vessel which maintains its equilibrium by venting pressure from time to time, I might be similarly likened to a pressure vessel with a faulty pressure relief valve, so that when the pressure is finally released, it's a bit more sudden and intense. Anyway, learning to recognize, experience, and regulate my emotions is an important piece of my lifelong psychological journey, and even though it's not always a fun journey, it's my journey! So there!

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OK, now that that's out of the way, I think my next challenge will be to streamline and focus what might otherwise be a freewheeling and sprawlingly wide-ranging post. After all, a lot happens when the signposts in life are spaced far apart.

I can see that it's been so long since my last post that we were not even finished renovating the house yet. Here's a great picture from back in the beginning of the renovation, taken by our good friend Krister:

While a renovation like this is never really done, we did get the house finished enough to live in, and we moved in at the end of August, meaning we've been here for a little over three months now. The house is sweet and cozy and is supporting our family well. 

Now that the house is basically finished, we are shifting our attention to the main workshop. 

This is how the workshop looked a few weeks ago... 

...and here's how it looked last week...

... and here's how it looks now. The first big job we are taking on is opening up the space by removing the low ceiling, much like what we did in the house. As of right now, I have stripped about 1/3 of the ceiling down to the rafter beams. 

When the rest of the ceiling is stripped, we will cut out the rafters and insulate the interior of the roof, thereby gaining a much taller space. 

You might remember from the last post that we have three buildings; the house, the main workshop, and the other building. The other building is the one in the middle, and will end up serving various purposes, such as guest apartment, wood shop, Christina's and my 'fine arts' studios (like painting and sculpture), and maybe even one day a gallery or café. The following photo shows one of the upstairs spaces that I cleared out and will one day soon serve as my painting and sculpture studio. 

I'm really quite excited about that, as it will be the first proper (meaning: large enough) studio I've ever had. 

And here's one last shot of our sweet courtyard, between the three buildings, back when it wasn't covered in snow!

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OK, on to other news (and here's where it could get a little sprawling, but I'll try to keep it tight!)

A few months ago I retrofitted three bicycles - one for each of us - with electric bike kits. Here is Kodiak letting us know how he feels about his new e-bike!

E-bikes are really pretty amazing; they've revolutionized our transport around here, and are especially helpful now that we live a little further out in the country. We can get to Lund in about 25 minutes. Although, to be honest, we haven't been using them much lately because it's too cold and icy now.

A few days before Halloween, Lund hosted the annual "Run For Your Lives", which is a zombie-themed mini-marathon through the city. Basically, runners have to get from start to finish without getting tagged by a zombie. Three tags and you're out. I played a zombie. I think I was born to play a zombie. It was really fun. 

Kodiak and I visited Stockholm a few weeks ago, where we visited with friends, went to a museum which featured some funhouse mirrors...

... and saw this fantastic sculpture, the Orpheus Group, by Carl Milles.

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I'm having a bit of a love affair. 

With Rome.

I just got back a few days ago from 4 days there with my fellow expat friend Scott. We decided to go... just because we could. For me it was mostly about the sculpture. Scott is a talented photographer and for him I think it was mostly about the opportunities for photography... and the beer!

Rome is sort of the anti-Sweden. Rome (and maybe the rest of Italy too??) has visual density, public art around every corner (most of it from antiquity), and tons of style. It's also well appointed with museums, antique stores, used book stores, and sprawling outdoor markets. Sweden has none of that. At one point during our trip, while strolling through Piazza Navona, I thought to myself "Sweden has no style."* My internal reaction to that simple statement was one of surprisingly strong emotion, which signalled to me that my observations about the differences between Rome and Sweden tap into larger questions about how well I 'jive' with Sweden. I know from chatting with Scott that he feels at home in the order and simplicity of Scandinavia, but I'm not feeling that right now. It occurs to me that it might not be a coincidence that Italy is a place which you might characterize as 'demonstrative' or 'emotional', and in the same loose way Sweden could roughly be referred to as 'withdrawn' and 'intellectual.' I am bored of withdrawn and intellectual, and I'm fucking bored of jantelagen, the informal Swedish rule which discourages standing out from the crowd or touting your own uniqueness. But, whatever. For now we are here... and as I've said before it is our job and our duty to give this experience our very best shot; to try as hard as we can to make it as good as it can possibly be. 

And... Rome (and Florence and Barcelona) is just a short plane ride away.

* This statement is obviously not true. Swedes do have a style, even if it's a bit homogeneous and unadventurous. IKEA is a good example. The more important part here is my reaction.

OK, get ready for a bunch of pictures...

My current favorite sculptor is Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the undisputed superstar of the Italian Baroque. Our four days in Rome were loosely structured as a tour of Bernini highlights.

This is probably my favorite Bernini sculpture, called The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. It depicts the moment Saint Teresa receives the awesomeness of Jesus, as symbolized by the little angel about to stab her with an arrow. The sculpture is considered scandalous by some because Santa Teresa's religious ecstasy looks just a little bit too much like sexual ecstasy. That's probably why I like it so much. Bernini apparently had a 'healthy' sexual appetite, so it's not a stretch, in my mind anyway, to imagine that he might have been intentionally riding that fine line between different 'types' of ecstasy. The sculpture is tucked into the side of a smallish church which was right in our neighborhood of our hotel. I went there at least three times. (Picture by Scott. In fact, so many of the following pictures were taken by Scott that I'm just going to use a red asterisk, like this * , to denote them in the future)

This photo is a little out of order in my narrative, but... later in the trip I spent an afternoon perusing some spectacular antique shops, where I saw this marble replica of Santa Teresa's face. Of course I had to ask the price, but... at 6500 Euros, I had to pass!

The church in our neighborhood also had this 'replica' of a saint, lying... apparently dead... underneath one of the sculptures. Not a common sight in Sweden. Actually, not a common sight anywhere I've travelled!

Later on day one we found these open-air used book sellers. I appreciated that you could buy all kinds of books here, from art history to pornography to philosophy. *

We had our first dinner on this square, or piazza. Rome is full of piazzas, and the piazzas are full of life. This one had a good bookstore called Fahrenheit 451 books. *

On the second day we went to the Galleria Borghese, an art gallery in the former private home of a rich Catholic cardinal. The place is full of amazing art, such as 'Apollo and Daphne,' by Bernini, above. In this sculpture, Daphne is escaping Apollo's amorous advances by turning herself into a laurel tree. *

Detail of 'The Rape of Proserpina,' also by Bernini, also at the Galleria Borghese, photo also by Scott *.

Cardinal Borghese was also a collector of Caravaggio paintings, and there were four in this room (three in this picture). If you've been reading this blog for a while you might remember that I'm a Caravaggio fan, and it was amazing to see them in person. Sometimes I can't believe that these treasures of art history, these one-of-a-kind objects, which are pictured in so many books and are so historically important, are just there... sitting there... in a room. If you were sneaky you could probably just touch one of them. *

Last pic from the Galleria Borghese. An amazing little drawing by... I can't remember. But it was great. Most of the time when Scott was taking a picture of me, I wasn't aware of it. I guess there might be more pictures of me in this post than usual, because he took some good ones. Like this one. *

We wandered into another church and saw these sculptures of women, kind of in a side room. As if they weren't that important. But the women were so beautiful. At least I thought so. Sad... and beautiful. *

In the same church there was this quite strange modern bronze sculpture of an angel. *

The river Tiber, looking back at the Vatican.

That evening we just wandered around some more, ending up at Piazza Navona, a huge piazza with quite a few sculptures by... you guessed it. Bernini.

The next day we went to the Vatican, which is....

Flippin' enormous. Over the top. Gigantic. Pictures can't do it justice. *

The first thing I wanted to see in St Peter's Basilica, the main church of the Vatican, was this funerary sculpture by Bernini... *

Check out the bronze skeleton with wings, holding an hourglass, trying to emerge from the red marble drapery. Amazing. *

St. Peter's Basilica is topped by a huge dome, which you can ascend by a series of internal stairways...

As you near the top of the dome's curvature, the walls of the stairways mimic the dome's shape...*

This is the view from the top, looking down on the Piazza di San Pietro, which was also designed by Bernini. Yes, he was also an architect. And a painter. And a theatrical production designer. Jeez! *

Scott and me, up on top of Rome.

On the third evening, Scott went to take some pictures, such as...

... this one of the Tiber, looking back at the Vatican. That's the dome we climbed. That's a damn good picture, right? *

Meanwhile I perused some world-class art and antique shops...

I was hoping to find something I would fall in love with, and that I could afford, and I hit the jackpot when I found this print. It's an engraving from 1895 of a painting by Emile Levy called The Death of Orpheus. In 'the old days,' before photography, sometimes prints would be made of famous paintings so that ordinary (not rich) people could have the artwork in their homes, or a facsimile thereof, anyway. The action in this image is incredible... a sleeping Orpheus is about to be murdered and dismembered by a bacchanalian gang of eleven dressed and undressed women. Now I need to find a beautiful frame for it.

Later that night we wandered through quaint neighborhoods...

... popped in and out of more churches...

and had dinner at a lively little beer place in an area called Trastevere.

On our last day, we wandered more...

... past more sculpture (there really is sculpture everywhere)...

... and ended up at the church where Bernini is buried. As I walked towards the tomb, a church worker pulled a red velvet rope right across my path, blocking me from getting any closer than this!

Had I been 2 minutes earlier I could've walked right up to it. Oh well. A fitting end to an amazing trip.

In this last picture I'm showing off the Italian ibuprofen that kept me going day after day. Old injuries flare up when you walk an average of 25 km per day! Yes, we walked 100 km in four days, an average of about 6 hours a day. *

OK, done with Rome.

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Our days and weeks here are still pretty well taken up by working on our homestead, but I have managed to do a little art here and there. 

I find the part of a tree where the trunk splits into two to be a very inspiring shape, for its similarity to the human body...

... so I've been doing some wood carving along those lines.

I took the idea a little farther in an application I made to an artist residency in February. This is the concept image. I'll update as to whether I'm accepted. The residency is in another part of Sweden, and I fear my proposal might be a little too... 'corporeal,' shall we say, and not theoretical and conceptual enough. But I think it's great, and I hope to make it happen! I've also been sculpting in clay with an eye towards casting another bronze, but the clay sculpture is not finished enough to show here. 

If you made it this far, congratulations! It's the end!

I have in mind another post, about a super mundane and pedestrian topic which is nevertheless quite close to my heart. We shall see if I can post that one sometime soon.

I hope this finds you all well,

Hugs,

Christian

And... Thank you Scott for letting me use your great pictures!

The Bad, the Good, and the Un-Sexy

I'm obviously long overdue writing this blog post.

I've thought quite a lot about how to structure the post, and I've decided to give you, my faithful readers, the bad news first... followed by the good news.

THE BAD NEWS

Section 1. The Soft Bad News

I am in a stage where I am finding many things about Sweden annoying. 

I read an article not so long ago which claimed that the lives of Swedish people are highly compartmentalized, which is to say: Work is for working, the grocery store is for shopping, the bar is for drinking (and maybe being friendly), and Tinder is for flirting, and when in Sweden you should not try to mix any of those. Really, the article said all this! I think it offers a pretty good explanation for why no one looks at anyone else in Sweden; you wouldn't look at someone on the street, because being friendly happens in bars, or worse yet, you wouldn't want a friendly smile to be confused for flirting, because that happens on Tinder. (Note: I seem to remember that friendly smiles between strangers are pretty common in many other cultures, but they are basically non-existent here. I'm currently in danger of forgetting what friendly smiles between strangers feel like, and probably also forgetting how to perform them.)

Some people thrive on the written word, others thrive on listening to music. I thrive on visual culture, and Sweden is pretty lacking in that department, at least out in public. It's visually dull here. The buildings are generally pretty boring, there is very little public sculpture, there is no graffiti and almost no advertising, and the advertising is bland and thoroughly impersonal and de-sexualized. Think "stark Nordic", and then mentally compare that to "lush and baroque Italian", or "seedy and gritty New York" to get an idea what I'm talking about. It's also annoyingly clean and tidy here. I found amazing free stuff on the streets while living in Los Angeles and Barcelona, but there's nothing out of place in Sweden.

Speaking of the de-sexualization of the public sphere, a friend recently told me a little story about a local blacksmith we know, an older guy called Torbjörn. He recounted: "I went into Torbjörn's lunchroom, and... he's got a topless calendar on the wall! You don't have that kind of thing in Sweden anymore, for years now, but he doesn't give a fuck! He's old school!" The way he told the story, it sounded like the old blacksmith had a Nazi flag on the wall. I imagine that this de-sexualizing of the public sphere comes out of the progressive impulse to make sure no one feels objectified, and that seems very reasonable. But does it make me an old-fashioned asshole to say that the result feels sterile and boring? Compared to Los Angeles or Barcelona or Rome, Sweden is a very un-sexy place. It also makes me suspect that paintings of nude angry women might not be such hot sellers here. I guess I'll have to show them in Germany or Denmark!

No place is perfect, and I know from previous experience with the well-established stages of expat adaptation that I will eventually arrive at a place of perspective and acceptance regarding these annoyances. I also know that in the bigger picture these are minor complaints.

Section 2. The Hard Bad News

You might recall from my last post, several months ago, that I spent a few weeks in Las Vegas delivering two sculptures for a festival called Transfix. Transfix was supposed to run for 14 months (sending us handsome paychecks each month), but six weeks after opening its doors the festival ceased operations. Apparently large Burning Man art wasn't the huge draw that the organizers were hoping it would be; the public just wasn't walking through the doors. There was allegedly also some financial mismanagement of the startup funds.

And then, instead of honoring their basic responsibility (and contractual obligation) to cover the costs of returning the art to the artists, the festival simply declared bankruptcy. Christina and I, like 30 or 40 other participating artists, were left high and dry and were never paid a cent. Our sculptures are currently stuck in Vegas and we're not sure how to get them home, but it'll likely cost us thousands of dollars. So our most significant projected source of income has quickly become a huge liability, throwing us into some real financial instability.

This "big art" thing isn't working as well as it used to.

THE GOOD NEWS

There is, thank god, also some good news.

Again, no place is perfect, and Sweden, for all its shortcomings, is a fundamentally sane and solid place. Especially for raising a kid... and especially compared to the US. I can recognize that. And, as I write this in late July, much of the Northern hemisphere is baking in temperatures around 30 - 40 C (95 - 105 F), but here in Sweden it's cool and rainy pretty much every day. I think there will be worse places than Sweden for getting through the coming climate apocalypse!

Kodiak stabilized considerably over the second semester of sixth grade and is now doing normal things like hanging out with other kids after school and staying home alone. In fact there's been a huge and sudden increase in independence, which has been great and feels very healthy. He even took his first flights alone recently, visiting his grandmother and his uncle Cles (my mother and brother) in Greece for two weeks. It seems he had a great time, and it's nice that we are so close to them. 

And we are slowly starting to make a few friends.

But the biggest news of all, really, is that we bought a house in Sweden!

Considering how much we like our home right next to a workshop, situated rurally about 15 minutes from a small, politically liberal city with a four-letter name in the Southwest of the country (I'm describing our home in Taos), we decided to buy another one of those! Yes, it's true... our new home has a workshop and is in the fields just outside liberal, little Lund, in the southwest of Sweden. We are calling it The Farm.

The property consists of a home, built around 1850, and two additional workshop buildings, arranged in a "U" shape around a central courtyard, all sitting on about 1 acre of land. We have a really big yard full of trees, including quite a few productive fruit trees. It is surrounded by farmland, and... since there are almost no property-line fences in Sweden, it feels very expansive and open. The fundamentals of the property (good-sized home and workshops, nice piece of land, close to Lund) were all just right. However, the home itself felt old-fashioned and cramped, so we have embarked on an ambitious remodel. (Christina and I can't seem to stop building homes!) We are under a deadline of August 31 to get out of our rental in Lund, so we have been working furiously on the house to get it ready. 

A few photos:

This aerial view is pretty self-explanatory, and shows how close we are to an active train track. I thought that the trains would bother me but I've quickly come to actually like the sound of them passing by. They make me feel like we are "connected" to the bigger world out there.

A view of the courtyard as you enter through the driveway. House on the right, workshops in front and to the left.

After entering the driveway, turn to the right and this is the outside of the house.

What follows now is a few pairs of photos; in each pair the first photo shows the house as it was when we first saw it, and the second photo is taken from the same spot and shows the house as it is today. Mind you, it's still under construction.

View from the living room. The two doors on the far wall are the bathroom (at left) and the old kitchen (at right). At the far right you see a window and doorway... these used to lead to a sunroom (which was sort of stuck onto the side of the house).

Same view, more or less. The door at left still goes to the bathroom, but the bathroom has been totally re-done. The door on the right used to lead to the old kitchen but now leads to Christina's studio. And we totally blew out the wall which used to lead to the sunroom and that is now the new kitchen.

Looking through the door into what used to be the sunroom.

Same view. The wall which contained those two windows and doorway is now gone, and that room will now be the kitchen. In the kitchen and bathroom, we removed the old floors down to the dirt to facilitate installing new plumbing and floor heating, then poured new concrete. You can see we also used a steel I-beam to support the two wooden ceiling beams, as the wall which used to support them is no longer there.

View from the living room looking back towards the master bedroom (which is the doorway at the far wall, below the staircase)

Same view. This picture shows a lot of what we've done... the wall which divided the living room (with the oversized square opening) is now gone. Much of the first-floor ceiling is also now gone, changing the living room from a cramped low-ceilinged room into a large double-height space. We also pulled the 1980's cladding off the main beams, exposing the original 1850's wood, and stained them dark. The new floor will be going in soon.

There used to be a full and proper upstairs...

... but as I mentioned we removed much of the floor to make a full-height living room. Note the same two windows in the photos. The bottom photo is somewhat dominated by a wood bridge I just built today to allow traversing over the open space, but this bridge is temporary, and will be replaced by a more elegant steel version at some point in the future.

Last photo from the interior. This one has no counterpart from before. Here you can get a sense of the living room and the height we gained by removing the ceiling. The red line shows where we cut the floor.

As I mentioned earlier, we will be living in this house by the end of August, and it promises to look quite different (better) by then. I will post more pictures soon, as we get closer to finishing it.

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When you write a blog but you go this long without posting, unfortunately not every amazing thing you do is going to get the full reportage it deserves. In the last few months...

• Christina and Kodiak and I went back to Portugal to finish the installation of The Flybrary, joined by friends Cedar Goebel and Brian Malley. The trip was a success.

• Several of Christina's oldest and best friends from the States visited us here in Lund for about 3 weeks. We did a lot of group bicycling - cycling as a gang around Copenhagen was a real highlight!

• I went to Denmark with Scott, my friend and fellow American expatriate living in Lund, to see Rammstein in concert (just before their singer hit the international front pages for all the wrong reasons!) The show was great.

• I finally cast my first bronze sculpture, which I found highly enjoyable and inspiring. Thanks to Clara and Ricky down at KKV for helping make that happen! Here she is:

Note that I had only one week to prepare the wax positive, which means that in that week I had to sculpt the clay original, make a two part silicone mold with plaster mother-mold, cast the wax positive, and do extensive cleanup on the wax. All of which is to say that I anticipate my next bronze effort to come out better, as I'll have more time. You can click HERE for more photos and info about it (that's an Instagram link so it might not work if you don't have an account...)

I intend to do more bronze work in the future.

OK, that's it for now.

Wish us luck retrieving our sculptures from Las Vegas! Not sure how that's going to happen, exactly... but hopefully I'll tell you in the next blog post!

Cheers from Sweden

Rant

Ok this is one of those times when a lot has been happening but I haven’t been too good at blogging about it. This post will divided into a general update about our crazy lives followed by some ruminations about oil painting. I’m guessing that more people are interested in our jet-set international lifestyle than my thoughts about brush strokes and paint thickness, so I’ll write the jet set stuff first.

Fitting. I’m on a plane right now.

You probably remember that we moved to Sweden. Wow, what a big and crazy thing to do. I think it’s good that whenever we humans embark on some ambitious new undertaking, we usually don’t fully understand the complexities and difficulties we will encounter along the way. I think if we had a really clear view of it, we might simply not try half of what we try. So I applaud our ignorance; I am grateful for it. To be honest, I think I have willfully cultivated this state of ignorance. Because the alternative is worry and anxiety. There will be time to freak out about situation X and situation Y when they engulf you, so why worry about them now? Stay focused on the present, and give it everything you’ve got. And stay positive, for Christ’s sake. Because the alternative to positivity is a bummer. That’s how I get through things like moving across the ocean with a 12-year old.

So, yes… we moved to Sweden. There’s a rich irony in the fact that we moved mostly for Kodiak - for his education and his future, and yet, of the three members of our little family, his transition has been the hardest. But then, what did we expect from yanking a 12-year old out of his established friend-group (and 12 years old, for those of you who can’t remember, is just when friend-groups start to become the most important thing in the world) and bringing him to a new and foreign place? It does bring some minor consolation to hear that his old pals back in Taos are actually also having hard times, in one way or another. Not because we want them to have hard times (which we don’t, because they’re all lovely, wonderful kids), but because it normalizes for us the fact that being a 12-year old is tough, whether you’re in Lund or Taos or Timbuktu. We must continually remind ourselves that he is learning skills now which will serve him the rest of his life, even though he might not appreciate that until years from now.
Life in Lund continues. Christina drives to KKV (the artist’s collective workshop in Malmö) with some frequency and makes beautiful things out of metal. When I can, I spend hours in my little art studio, tucked into a corner of our ostentatious rented mansion in Lund. Yes, I’ve been painting. I’ve also purchased clay and I have every intention of sculpting too, soon. In fact I intend to carry out my threat, soon, to cast a sculpture in bronze. 

Swedish winters are gray. Unrelentingly gray. When the unrelenting grayness relents briefly, and the sun shines unexpectedly for an hour or a day, you want to run outside and stand in it. Or ride a bicycle. Or something like that.
The brightest light in Sweden, so far, has been the friends we have made. Scott and his family, from Texas… Thanks you guys, it's so good to know you. And Krister and Ylva and your two boys, our real Swedish friends… we love you guys.

I said I was on a plane, and so far… I am still on that plane.
Since way before we left for Sweden, Christina and I have been in communication with a new art festival called Transfix which is starting up soon in the US about their intention to lease from us two sculptures, Hand of Man and Capsule, for long-term exhibition. Transfix will be a new kind of festival. They have leased something like 30 interactive 'Burning Man style' sculptures from various artists and will set up these sculptures in one place, in one city, for 3 months. Then they'll transport all those sculptures to another city and show them there for 3 months. And then another city, and then another. Think of it as a condensed Burning Man experience, without the fucking dust, accessible to city-dwellers.

The first city to be graced by Transfix and its cohort of spectacular artwork is Las Vegas, Nevada. And that's where I'm headed right now in this aluminum marvel of aeronautical engineering. After Vegas the show will move to Los Angeles, then New York, and finally Miami. If it's a smashing success it may go on longer, and might even hop the pond over to Europe.

Mind you, I am not flying from Sweden to Las Vegas right now. No, I have been in Taos for about 3 weeks preparing those two sculptures for long-term exhibition. The Hand of Man needed a bit of freshening up, while Capsule got a whole new hydraulic system, allowing its three hands to open and close mechanically, rather than through the use of burning wood. (The new hydraulic arrangement means Capsule will never burn with wood again, so those of you who saw Capsule’s fiery debut in Seco back in ‘22 witnessed a once-in-a-lifetime art event!)

In some sense, this has all been a buildup to bring me to talking about the most interesting thing that’s happened to me recently, which was my three weeks in Taos. The time was interesting, not in and of itself, exactly, but because of its context, its situation within the larger flow of having moved to Sweden. In other words, being in Taos for three weeks told me hell of a lot about what it means to have moved to Sweden, and also a hell of a lot about what we left behind in Taos. And it’s also given me some fresh data for a good old compare-and-contrast between the two places.

Basically, to put it succinctly, the life we built in Taos was lovely. The friends, the workshop, the home, the place… all of it was (and still is) wonderful.

And the task of building a new life, with new friends and a new home and a new workshop in a new country with a new culture… it’s fucking hard. Add a 12-year old into the mix, and it’s really fucking hard.

When I look at a snapshot of our life one year ago, in Taos, and compare it to our life now in Lund, in many ways things were better in Taos.

But America has an edge. There’s an edge of violence and anger here. And I think it’s born out of the economic disparity, the poverty, the desperation, and the political rancor. In the last two days someone lunged at my car in a mock attack, someone else flipped me the bird on the street for no reason (he was flipping everyone the bird), and I couldn’t cross the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge because someone had jumped to his death hours earlier (in front of his family, no less!) And that's just two days in Taos... not counting the mass shootings and other horrible things that happen across the US all the time. That shit just doesn’t happen in Sweden!

Democrats can’t seem to manage cities and Republicans are banning books and criminalizing being female. Taos is a beautiful bubble but America is a mess. History shows us that empires often decline after about 200 years.

And so, yes… when I look at a snapshot of our life one year ago, in Taos, and compare it to our life now in Lund, in many ways things were better in Taos. But that is the wrong way to look at it. It's an unfair comparison. Transitions like this take time. If Lund is tough and things aren’t coming together in 2 years, then we’ll reassess. But I really don’t think it’s gonna go that way. Because things are already coming together, and Christina and I are a pair of badass fucking powerhouses, and we make shit happen. We're hunting for a house to buy and might be closing in on one. And Kodiak is coming along. He’ll get there. The only tragedy here would be if we gave up on Sweden after NOT having tried our hardest. To quote my eloquent friend Jimmy, “Don’t be a bitch. Don’t tap out.” Word, Jimmy.

Before I leave the topic of Taos, I want to give a big thank-you to Matt and Richard for taking such good care of me in Taos. Everyone should be lucky enough to have friends like Matt and Richard.

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OK do you want to read about art and painting and A.I. and brushstrokes?

I have a bit of a pet peeve about loose brushwork. Perhaps you know the kind of brushwork I'm talking about; you see it in paintings by Sargent and Sorolla and many others.

I've been thinking about this a lot, trying to figure out why it bothers me, and I've finally realized that my negative reaction has two components. First off, I just don't like loosely painted artwork. But I don't usually hate it either; it is just a preference of taste. More importantly, though, I resent the fact that loose brushwork is so consistently presented as the right way to paint. Recently I came across yet another painting channel on Youtube featuring a video on the importance of this approach. I believe it was called "Why you can't paint loosely, Yet!" The implication is obvious; learn to paint loosely and you'll finally be painting correctly. And yet, no one ever bothers to explain WHY this approach is so revered.

Since no one else seems to want to explain this preference, I will propose two possible rationales. And then, my second rationale will quickly mature into some broader, more universal observations about the nature of painting, taking us finally to yet a third possible explanation.

Rationale number one goes like this: If you can reduce the complexity of a scene by capturing it with fewer and looser brush strokes, you can theoretically finish a painting much faster. And if you can make one painting faster, you can make a lot of paintings faster, and you can theoretically make a lot more paintings, and maybe even sell more. This is undoubtedly good for the painter. I propose that whether the paintings are really better or not is a question of taste.

Rationale number two goes like this: Painting will never fully and faithfully capture all the details of reality; it will always be a somewhat imprecise approximation. So then, why not make a virtue out of that imprecision? Why not treat it as a strength, rather than a weakness? Why not see how far you can push that imprecision while still making the scene recognizable? And somewhere along the line, some painter or another realized that, by playing with brush strokes (or color choices, or some other technical variable), he or she could make some judgment or interpretation of the reality they were capturing; in other words the painting could become subjective or interpretive.

And here we get to the meat of the discussion. Before the advent of photography, painters mostly aspired to simply capture reality accurately. They were record keepers, documentarians. But once technology produced a little machine that could make accurate images of the world (the camera), painters needed to carve out new territory for themselves to remain relevant. This actually made the world of painting much more varied and interesting. No longer bound by the slavish imperative to reproduce reality, painting suddenly became a way for artists to say something, in many cases something personal and idiosyncratic. And loose, impressionistic brushwork is one way to do that. But for god's sake, it's not the only way! And in my personal opinion, it's not even the most interesting way.

Because you see, there are many many artists who clearly couldn't give a shit about the Youtube doctrine that looser equals better, and they are, in my opinion, doing much more interesting work than the loose school. Painters like Salvador Dalí, Paul Cadmus, Michael Bergt, Alex Grey, Gottfried Helnwein, Hieronymus Bosch, and Alessandro Sicioldr, to name just a few. These painters, and the thousands of others like them, have chosen a substantively different approach to saying something personal, idiosyncratic, and interpretive with their images. They have chosen to paint images of specific narratives which are meaningful to them, but fall outside the realm of consensus reality (this approach is sometimes called 'magical realism'). And because they are trying to convey something specific, tight and concise brushwork serves the purpose better. And the purpose is communication.

It occurs to me as I write this that the tension between loose and tight brushwork can also be thought of, like so many other things, as a tension between emotion and intellect. I read somewhere that the real value in Jackson Pollock's paintings (which are, pictorially speaking, total garbage if you ask me) is in the fact that they are a record of action and emotion. When you see all those violently thrown splashes of paint, you are seeing the result of - and perhaps imagining the action of - a man in the throes of passion, the passion of throwing paint. This is why they are called 'Action Paintings.'

Insofar as any of the painters I mentioned two paragraphs ago are capturing emotion they are doing it in a totally different way. They are capturing a scene of emotion (or whatever other aspect of humanity intrigues them), as if in a freeze-frame, and then painting that image accurately. The process is fundamentally intellectual.

Now just for fun, let's go back to the question that started this rant: WHY is loose and expressionistic brushwork presented on Youtube and other popular culture media as the right way to paint? I propose this answer: Since the advent of photography (and artificial intelligence image generators such as Midjourney and Dall-E have only intensified this pressure), painters have needed to make images which are fundamentally personal and interpretive in order to remain relevant. And while loose brushwork and magical realism (which depends on having a unique outlook) are both avenues to achieving this, it’s a lot easier to teach people how to handle paint in a video or a book than it is to teach them how to have an opinion, or teach them to have something to say.

- End of rant.
- I'm not on the plane anymore.

- I got my motorcycle legal in Sweden and I'm looking forward to riding it.

- I tested out of my Swedish course, as expected.

- I'll probably write another blog post soon about my time in Las Vegas. What a weird place this is.

Here are some paintings I've recently made.

I'm feeling a little more experimental with the painting these days... willing to paint with less worry about making everything a masterpiece. Trying to find ways and styles that work for me.

Until next time,

Adios

A Well Thought-Out Place

I've decided that one of the overarching characteristics of Swedish society... one of the 'by-words', if you will, is 'well thought-out.'

When it snows, the town of Lund sends out a fleet of miniature tractors which clear the snow from the sidewalks and salt them. Not the street, mind you... the sidewalks. Well thought-out.

Kodiak and Griselda on a freshly cleared and salted sidewalk

As I've mentioned before, pedestrians and bicyclists have the right of way at crosswalks in town, and there are a lot of crosswalks. In order to compel drivers to slow down before the crosswalk, most of these crossings have a slight little ramp in the road... analogous to a speed bump... and it is paved in brick which transmits a different and 'chunkier' feel to the driver. Well thought-out.

(I personally see a philosophical correlation between the high importance placed on the rights of pedestrians and cyclists and the democratic/socialist orientation of the country.)

On a recent visit to the police station, to get Kodiak's National ID Card, we found these orange tags. 

If you hit a wild animal on the road, but suspect you have not killed it, you are supposed to place one of these orange tags around a tree near the site of the collision. Then you go and report the incident to the police, who in turn send out a team of specially trained hunters and tracker dogs to kill the animal. And the point of all this is... to reduce unnecessary suffering of the injured animal. Well thought-out.

I mentioned all of this to our Swedish friend Krister. He, having spent his whole life here, acknowledged my observation, but also made the point that it can all feel a bit TOO well thought-out sometimes. A bit too regimented. I can easily see his point. For instance, Kodiak has a drone, which we used to fly at our property in Taos from time to time... getting beautiful views of the gorge. Here in Sweden, you need to register every drone with the government and mark it with the name of the operator. And there are various classes of drones, some of which require training to operate. I'm actually not certain whether our drone would require training or not, but I am pretty sure Kodiak is considered too young to be an operator here. The upshot of all this is that, until we jump through the various required hoops, we cannot legally fly the drone here. Also... no flying in town and no flying at night. Lots of rules. It's a far cry from the lawless cowboy town we moved from. It's easy for me to see, from a bigger perspective, how these assorted rules would make for a better and more humane society for everyone to live in. And... as an American who is used to being able to do what I feel like doing, when I feel like doing it, it can be a bit challenging. But it's a tradeoff we are willing to make. 

Kodiak has been to the emergency room twice now, both times with not-too-serious injuries that resolved themselves. But these episoded have been our first exposure to the healthcare system here, and I can report that, although it can be quite slow, the care is pretty top notch. Kodiak has had an MRI, an x-ray, and follow-up appointments with orthopedic and eye specialists. And all of that has been free. And prescription medicines are free for kids up to age 18. No real complaints yet. 

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Change of topic.

In the world of house-building, a builder (what we call in the US a 'contractor') can either...

A) Build a house for a client, in which case the cost of the building is pre-paid by the client and there is essentially no risk for the builder, or...

B) Build a house 'on spec', in which case the house is built by the builder, with his (or her) money, and only once it is finished is it put on the market to be sold. In this scenario there is considerable risk for the builder because there is no guarantee it will sell, or will sell at a good price. (Although the housing market is usually thought of as a good bet)

Most of the artwork that I have made over my career has been made in a context similar to mode A above. Whether it was for festivals or the special-effects industry, most of the work I've made has been commissioned, which is to say it has been approved and paid for before it was built. My risk has always been low. As I toiled away, working on these big sculptures, I knew the work would be shown and I knew I would be paid.

Many artists (I'm tempted to say 'most artists' but I guess I'm not really sure, so...) Many artists work in mode B. They labor in their studios making paintings or sculptures or photographs or music, powered only by their own belief in what they are doing... and when the artworks are done they put them up for sale, either through galleries or websites or social media. As they make the work they hope it will sell but they don't really know. (I suppose that if you get 'connected' with a gallery that believes in your work there is some sense of assurance, but even then there are no guarantees.)

I think a few factors have coalesced for me and are slowly forcing me from mode A into mode B, and it's scary. The factors at play are the gradual closing of opportunities to fund big sculpture, our moving across the ocean and away from our traditional sources of funding, and my burgeoning interest in making a kind of work that is better suited to smaller and more traditional pieces. So it is, in a way, like starting over... because I am not connected with a gallery and I am not known as a painter or traditional sculptor. And yet, when I consult the list I've recently made (for myself) of ideas I've had for new works over the last few months, they are all paintings or small sculptures. There is really no need to close any doors, though. If a large-sculpture commission comes my way and I can make it work in terms of time and workshop space, etc, then of course I would move forward. But it's feeling less and less like that's where my passion lies. And yes, moving into uncharted territory is scary.

But I do have that list. The one I mentioned earlier, the list of painting and sculpture ideas. And I have begun to paint again. And play with a new medium, oil pastels. And I'm set up to start working on a new small sculpture which I hope to cast in bronze at the KKV foundry. And, I had a bit of a 'clarity moment' a few weeks ago... something along the lines of "Well, you're an artist. It's what you chose to be. And the job of an artist is to make art. So do your job... make art!"

I think I'm basically on the right track. 

Small oil painting, recent

Oil pastel 'drawing'. Oil pastels are like drawing with paint... 

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And I got into the state-sponsored (free) Swedish language course, so I'm now learning Swedish. Ironically, I won't be in the class for long because it's designed only to bring students up to a basic functional level, not true fluency, and because of my self-study and proficiency for languages I am close to testing out of it.

And Christina and I are looking at houses in the countryside just outside of Lund, hoping to find something we can afford to buy. In which case, we'd be living the bicontinental dream! A house in the US and a house in Sweden! Dreamy! (Well, let's see if we can really pull that off before we all get too excited...)

And for all you motorcyclists out there reading this, my bike did not pass the initial Swedish inspection. I have to do some work to it before I can re-test. And... I thought I'd be bravely riding here all year-round, because cold weather can be dealt with with the use of proper clothing. What I didn't count on is perpetually slick / snowy / icy roads. (See the first two photos in this post, above.)

Well, as Porky Pig says... That's All Folks!

Finally here?

I think it's time to write a new blog post.

Should I talk about STUFF? (As in: our weird attachment to possessions)

Should it be a travelogue? I've done a hell of a lot of traveling lately.

Should I share my continuing observations about Sweden?

Yes. I'll do all of that.

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Stuff

Stuff. Possessions. Belongings. Way back in the beginning of July, Christina and I packed a 20-foot container full of the best of our stuff... to be sent to Sweden. We worked out the timing of our air travel so that we would arrive within a few days of our stuff. After all, we didn't want to be away from our stuff for too long. And then our container was delayed, so... we didn't have our stuff. So we had to buy more stuff to try to fill up our house with stuff (which is exactly what we didn't want to have to do - it's the reason we sent over a container). But we didn't want to buy too much stuff, because we had more stuff coming in the container. Finally, our container full of stuff arrived. We were so excited because we missed our stuff. As we unloaded it, it was suddenly clear that we had brought a LOT of stuff. Actually, we thought, it was kind of nice to live without so much stuff, wasn't it? And in the following days, as we unpacked all that stuff, we thought: Why did we even bring this stuff? It was an overwhelming amount of stuff and a lot of it seemed like crap!

Now, a few months on, it's actually nice to have all our stuff. It makes this place feel a little more like home. I'm pretty sure we squandered that very brief opportunity to live the minimalist lives of ascetics.

The comedian George Carlin famously said that homes were just covers for our stuff, and I think he was right. People accumulate a lot of stuff. We sure have.

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Travelogue

During the pandemic I went for two years without getting on an airplane, but I've been making up for it lately. In September I was in Taos for two weeks, then back home to Lund for a bit. Then Christina and I went to England for a week, then back here for a bit. Then a week in Portugal, then back here for a bit. Then a week in Gotland, then back here for... hopefully more than a bit. 

I already talked about my trip to Taos, which was unexpectedly fun.

Then, England. Christina and I joined our friends Cedar, Brian, and Terril...

... back in Chatsworth to take down the Flybrary. I got to drive a van for a week on the left (wrong!) side of the road, which was fun. We had a chance to go through the Chatsworth House (castle, palace, royal residence, whatever...) one more time, which was totally worth it. That place is amazing. Just look at this bedroom....

We even had a free day to explore Manchester (I have to say I was disappointed that Manchester was not one big shrine to Joy Division!)

A week later we all found ourselves in Portugal, where we re-built the Flybrary on the property of its proud new owner. Yes, that's right, a 30-year old tech entrepreneur purchased Christina's sculpture and we installed it for him at his ranch south of Lisbon. 

I got to drive the forklifts, which I enjoy.

It rained a lot while we were there and the mud proved to be an incredible adversary. So much so, in fact, that the crane required to put up the bird truss (which is the top part of the sculpture) could not come onto the property. So in a sense the mud won. The sculpture is incomplete and we need to return in the spring to finish it.

There was an interesting cast of characters assembled at the ranch during our stay, including other artists, videographers, and digital nomads. (I think if I were a young person today, I'd be pretty tempted by the digital nomad lifestyle.) Once we'd finally washed off the mud we all assembled for a group photo.

Then we had a day to check out Lisbon, which is a charming and picturesque city.

After saying goodbye to our pals, and spending a few days back at home in Lund, Christina and Kodiak and my mother and I went for a week-long vacation to the Swedish island of Gotland. Gotland is the largest island in the Baltic and has had an interesting history full of battles and bloodshed. It has changed hands many times in the last 1000 years, mostly between the Swedes, Danes, and Russians. Even now there is a large Swedish military presence on Gotland, as the general belief seems to be that Russia still poses a threat there.  Gotland even had its own civil war... Gotlanders against Gotlanders! And it's really not THAT big. 

Gotland is well-endowed with wild and beautiful nature, which reminded us a bit of New Mexico. 

At the northern tip of Gotland is another, much smaller, island called Fårö. Fårö is interesting for being even more wild and remote.

An old building on Fårö

And a few of Fårö's Rauks. A Rauk is a limestone tower left standing after the softer stone around it has eroded away. That one in the foreground is over 30 feet tall. Gotland and Fårö have lots of them.

Fårö was also a very important place for the Swedish film maker Ingmar Bergman. He shot seven films there, bought a house there where he lived at the end of his life, and died there. We visited the Ingmar Bergman museum on the island. I've never seen any of his films, but I have now set my sights on one called Persona. The Swedish 200 crown banknote features Rauks on one side and Bergman on the other.

And now we're back. It's nice to not have to go anywhere for a while. I have a sculpture showing at a festival in Chile in a few weeks, but I'm not going. It's nice to not have to go. 

But... it's Face Forward, a very finicky sculpture. What could possibly go wrong?

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Et cetera

I continue to be intrigued but ultimately baffled by the Swedish aversion to looking at other people. The teenage daughter of an American couple we know here jokingly put it this way: "Must not make eye contact!"

I've noticed that young children here are actually quite keen on making eye contact, as you would expect. (A particularly memorable incident involved a little girl who was riding her bicycle in a daring and confident way, and when she noticed me looking at her and smiling, she totally loved it. She kept looking back at me to be sure I was still watching her show off. This was only one of several similar episodes.) So when do kids stop wanting to be engaged with others in this way? And why? 

I guess the bottom line is that I think this tendency to be insular and disengaged with other people is sort of... sad. 

I continue to generate new theories about this insular reluctance to engaging with others, but they are just theories. I've come up with quite a few by now, but I have no idea which ones are valid and which aren't. My newest theory is: when people look at each other, they are looking for... something. Some connection, some engagement, some excitement, some satisfaction of curiosity. Maybe people here are so perfectly satisfied with their lives... their perfect jobs and perfect partners and perfect homes that they aren't looking for anything. To me, that sounds like a shutting-down of curiosity, a shrinking of the horizons... but what do I know? 

Just another theory.

Sweden is, when compared with many other places (such as, for example, New York City, or Japan, or India, or Spain, or Mexico, or Italy), a visually austere place. It's not visually rich. It's not dense. It's sparse. It's plain. Could the lack of interesting things to look at in the man-made environment somehow be linked to the aversion that people have to looking at each other? 

I find it fascinating that Northern and Southern Europe line up so perfectly well at opposite ends of the spectrum on so many parameters. 

This is totally unscientific and a gross generalization, but I do think I'm on to something here...

I have quite a few other brewing thoughts and observations about being in Sweden, mostly centered around the kinds of sacrifices one is expected to make in service to living in a place in which the good of the many supercedes the liberties of the individual, and how - as an American - that can be a hard pill to swallow. But these are half-baked ideas which need time to mature, hopefully in time for a future blog post. 

It's not very sexy to write about, but... Kodiak continues to have a hard time adjusting to being here. Christina and I are both struggling in our own ways as well.  We miss our friends and our shop and Taos. Moving is a big fucking disruption. There's a lot to juggle. It's hard, and don't let anyone convince you otherwise. 

It's that time of year, again, to submit ideas to Burning Man. And I think I'm going to do it, again.

Why, you ask, would I do such a thing? Why would I put so much work into a proposal which will likely be rejected, given Burning Man's recent track record of rejecting my ideas as well as their reluctance to fund overseas projects because of high costs?

Well, two reasons I guess.

One, there just aren't that many opportunities to fund big sculpture that I know about. Burning Man offers a nice opportunity to artists to help make an idea into a reality, and put it in front of lots of eyes. 

And two, I believe in my idea. I want to build it. My idea this year is a little bit of a throwback to earlier themes and techniques (incorporating kinetic mechanisms for the first time in a while), but also an embracing of new ideas. I think it would be an awesome sculpture. So... fuck it, why not apply?

In any case, it's always a good idea to work on fleshing out your ideas, and these proposals force me to draw and think and sometimes sculpt. 

I've been working on my motorcycle - preparing it for inspection by the Swedish traffic authorities - and riding it a bit as the weather allows. Fun.

And in about 2 weeks I have a meeting to assess my current Swedish language skills, which is the first step in enrolling in free, state-sponsored Swedish classes. Fun? I don't know about that. But I am excited, actually. 

Hej då