I’m drawn back to introverted clarity.

[ happy feedback loop initiated ]

last night when I made this sketch it was like that.

for the first time in 10 yrs I can honestly say that I am confident with every shot of the Lethargy project, the story is solid in my mind, which basically means that I finally know what the **** it is saying.  Now I need to put it down into visuals and prove it… but every element of it makes sense to me now and it’s just awesome; everything is in balance for the first time in a long time

-sketch of still from the brilliant French film Brotherhood of the Wolf

On this day back in 1241,  a powerful Mongol attack overcame Kiev, breaching its gates after a siege and killing an estimated 48,000 of the 50,000 within; the surviving Slavs were subjugated under the Khanate of the Golden Horde.

- Soviet means “Council”.

- Thessalonian Slavonic was only a spoken language.

- ‘truth’ in Greek and Slavonic means “that which is eternal and constant, really existing, outside the created world.” as our reason perceives it. ‘Sacrament’ means a “mystery- that which transcends our senses and comes from on high” directly from God.

- In the East, Christ is shown at peace in death on the cross.

- “mystical Orthodox and rationalist Westerners”- Alexis Khomiakov

Christianity in the West was confronted from the start with human, collective, social and even legal problems, while religious thought in the East remained more circumscribed, more individual and purely spiritual, easily becoming mystical.

on the Russian Revolution:

Stenka Razin- leader of a Russian revolt in 1669 of 200,000 rebels- Cossacks, peasants and natives of Asia- captured and executed in 1671 on Red Square, Moscow

Pugachev lead another revolt a century later. He was captured and beheaded in 1775.

The French Revolution and Russian Society by Michael Strange

Decabrist or Decembrists- a limited revolutionary movement in 1825, the Nihilists in the 1860s, Slavophiles (sometimes chauvinist revolutionaries), the Russian Social-Democatic Party, founded in Minsk in 1898 (first Marxist party), the extreme ‘Occidentalists’

Georgy Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, had a last minute argument with Lenin on the even of the 1917 Revolution. Lenin denied planning to take power: if he took it, he said, it would simply be in the hope of support from the Socialist revolutions that would break out in the advanced capitalist countries. Plekhanov warned Lenin that if he seized power he would be forced, whether he liked it or not, to impose dictatorship and terrorist methods of government.

“We were mistaken. We acted as if one could build Socialism in a country where capitalism scarcely existed. Before we can achieve a Socialist society, we must rebuild capitalism.” – Lenin on the New Economic Policy.

Georgy Plekhanov, imagining a case in which the revolutionaries seized power ‘by accident’ or ‘by conspiracy’, wrote that “in those circumstances all they would be able to build would be a Socialism like the Empire of the Incas”. i.e. with an authoritarian regime. Discussing a similar eventuality, Marx had spoken of “convent Socialism” or the “Socialism of the barracks”.

In any case, the revolutionaries, like the Russian intelligencia of the turn of the century before them, had always held that an idea was valid only if it took shape in practical life, in praxis.

“A new race was created in Russia, invading every sphere of life, from the humblest job to heights of scientific research- the summit of the social scale. Stalin’s double programme of industrialization in the cities and collectivization on the land created urban jobs and rural jobless, forcing peasants to seek work in the towns whether they liked it or not- all this in only a few years.”

Early 1930′s- artists and writers were ordered to become “engineers of human souls”. In 1934 Andrei Zhdanov, the Party Secretary, defined their dogma “the method of Socialist Reform”. What artists and writers must do was to describe with “veracity” the “historically concrete character” of Socialist reality, and in particular the conditions of production, thus contributing to “the ideological transformation and the education of workers in the spirit of Socialism”.

The assortment of figure drawings in the middle were made at FEWS by members Jason Aponte, Jason Bereswill, Ivan Kaplow and myself.

on America:

 “ The growth of a taste for retrospective nostalgia accompanied the slow decline of traditional faith. When competition and enterprise were rapidly growing, Americans thought about the future; when they were flourishing, they thought about the present. Now, in the age of mergers, of giant corporations and monopolies, which reduce the scope for competition and the opportunities to be seized, they turn with regret to the golden age behind them.” – Richard Hofstadter, 1955

 on the Constitution:

It has long been said that the founding fathers based their constitution ‘on the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin’. For them too, man was “a wolf to man” and his “carnal spirit” was far removed from God.

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed both the right to rebel and equality before the law. But the great idea which preoccupied and motivated these landowners, businessmen, lawyers, planters, speculators, and bankers- these “aristocrats”- was to safeguard property, wealth and social privilege.

“ The crowd is beginning to think and reason. Poor reptiles! They warm themselves in the sun, and the next moment they will bite… The gentry is beginning to fear them.” – Gouverneur Morris

“ We have been too democratic… Let us beware of going too far to the opposite extreme.” – James Murray Mason

“ We should uphold as a principle the fact that the Government derives from the people, but oblige the people to realize that they are not fit to govern themselves.” – Jeremy Belknap

The Presidential campaign of 1896 was partly a struggle between opponents of the trusts, led by William Jennings Bryan, and their supporters, led by the successful candidate William McKinley. 

Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914

American Socialist leader Daniel de Leon- “ The ladder that humanity has climbed towards civilization is progress in working methods, more and more powerful means of production. The trust is at the top of the ladder, and around it modern social storms are raging. The middle class is trying to break it, and turn back the march of civilization. The proletariat is trying to preserve it, improve it, and open it to everyone.”

on American Literature:

 the American novel was “literature made by and for the cinema, coloured by the habit of “hot news” and the detective story… brutal, passionate, feverish and frenetic, without an ounce of refinement, literature like a blow of the fist, enjoyed despite of or because of that, according to taste. It is fast and hard: there is something healthy, lively, and strong about it which at present is found nowhere else.” – French critic

 “ There are no second acts in American lives.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896- 1940)

 Characteristically, the American writer is an asocial being who is not content merely to express his revulsion or his unease at the world around him, but lives out his rebellion and constantly pays the price in pain and solitude. So the evolution of the American novel faithfully reflects that of America’s social tensions.

 Babbitt (1922)- Sinclair Lewis.  Many of the “lost generation” saw Socialism as a hope of salvation for the society of their day.

… so I decided to make something that would compliment it.  To begin, I made these thumbnails very quickly in Photoshop, and kept referring to them for the first half of the painting process:

My sister already had the canvases and the acrylic paints, so I started with a very limited palette- white, blue, green, yellow and purple.  No primary red.  First I primed both canvases with yellowish off-white.  This is after the 2nd pass.

The next few photos show the following passes.  Eventually I realized that I needed to use only pastel colors in order for it to work.  It also became much more abstract and off-model after I started messing around with the semi-controlled dripping.  In the end, they don’t go with Rachel’s painting at all, mainly because of the limited palette.

Here are the final, dried paintings:

on Industrialization of Europe:

Pierre Joseph Proudhon, (1809), Ferdinand Lasalle (1825- killed in duel in 1864), Karl Marx (1818) Das Kapital (1867)

The French Revolution had failed because it had not organized the economy and consumption.

Proudhon was so attached to liberty as to almost be an anarchist. He sought a social dialectic which could illuminate scientifically a society on the move, in all its contradictions. It was necessary to resolve them, he thought, in order to grasp the social machinery that they implied.

Owen, Cabet, and Fourier founded the Phalansteries.

Jean Jaures was the leader of the French Socialist Party. He was assassinated in Brussels 31 July 1914.

on Existentialism:

It was its reinterpretation by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that transmitted it to the rest of the world, and especially to Latin America.

on Unity in Europe:

Charles V (1500-1558) sought hegemony in Europe; his dream was to conquer Christendom and use his authority to defend it against the infidel Muslims and the Protestant Reformation. For Charles V, the ‘imperial idea’ had its roots in the historic Spanish crusade.

“Everything leads me to believe that there cannot be a united and effective Europe without supranationality. The so-called ‘Europe of the States’ is a narrow, inadequate idea. The longer I live, the harder I shall fight against the rule of unanimity and the veto. A few weeks ago, I was at the United Nations and saw the Soviet veto at work. More recently still, I had a similar experience at Nato: on the German question and Berlin, the opposition of one government prevented Nato from taking a firm and constructive position. What is happening now at the Palais des Congres on the subject of Europe’s Common Agriculture Policy is very far from making me change my mind. In these discussions I look in vain for the spirit of Community. Everyone is defending the interests of his own farmers… If the accursed rule of unanimity were abolished, the negotiations in the Council would go much faster… We are offered a Europe of the States in the field of foreign policy. What would that do except create chaos? All the member States bar one might discuss the question of Communist China, and the one might block all decisions… So I wonder if it would be at all a good idea to give up the spirit of supranationality in these matters.” – Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian Foreign Minister, 10 January 1962

“Unity thus based on force can only provoke an explosion, once the grip of the dominant nation is relaxed. Let it be said in passing that today we have an example of that before our eyes: i.e. the States grouped round the power of Russia in the Warsaw Pact are controlled, economically as well as politically, only in the interests of Russia.”

On Humanism:

Renaissance humanism was the Middle Ages ‘not plus humanity but minus God’.- Etienne Gilson

Humanism frees and magnifies humanity, diminishing the role of God even if not completely forgetting it.

“The name humanism can be applied to an ethic based on human nobility. Turned towards both study and action, it recognizes and exalts the greatness of human genius and the power of its creations, opposing its strength to the brute force of inanimate nature. What is essential remains the individual’s effort to develop in himself or herself, through strict and methodical discipline, all human faculties, so as to lose nothing of what enlarges and enhances the human beings. ‘Reach towards the highest form of existence,’ said Goethe at the beginning of Part Two of Faust, ‘by dint of uninterrupted effort.’ Similarly, Stendhal said to Eugene Delacroix on 31 January 1850: ‘Neglect nothing that can make you great.’ Such an ethic based on human nobility requires of society a constant effort to embody the most highly perfected form of human relations: an immense feat, an immense cultural achievement, and ever greater knowledge of humanity and of the world. It lays the foundations of individual and collective morality; it establishes law and creates an economy; it produces a political system; it nourishes art and literature.” – Augustin Renaudet

latest progress.. getting there, there were some obvious problems with the initial value pass; the plan now is to finish getting the forms refined, then add photo textures and some articulation to the weapon and armor using some 3D… so after that it should look much more detailed, and also some of the design will probably become altered (most noticeably in the silhouette of the shoulder, tip of the sword)