Some of My Favorite Painters

So, these are some of my favorite artists. They're all really well known and there aren't any big secrets here. Christopher Wool. Lives In New York, just pushing it to the limit -- abstract paintings and I love his silk screening techniques and the way that looks. There's Charlene Von Heyl. German artists also in New York and they're married. Also pushing it. I love the playfulness and vocabulary. There's Arshile Gorky. Who committed suicide after he discovered his wife was having an affair with Mata, his hero. Really tragic. Hung himself. There's Sigmar Polk. Huge influence on everybody and me included. Took a ton of acid and lived in communes when he was younger. Acerbic humor in his paintings. It is just the max. There's Albert Oehlin which you could probably say is Polke's protege. Also a tremendous sense of humor in his work and very, very creative. There's Joanne Greenbaum, an abstract painter in New York. I don't know a lot about her but I just love her work. It's so simple. And Very, very direct… playful vocabulary and bright primary colors. Laura Owens, California artist. Also deconstructing abstraction.Chris Martin. A Williamsburg painter and love the simplicity of his work, and the playfulness there. So that's about it, really…. Oh, and I forgot Michael Majorus. A bit of a tragedy there. Died in a plane crash really young. I don't even think he was 35. A figure from the 90s taking a very popular kind of commercial imagery and using that as vocabulary in his work, really interesting painter.

Popeye Laverda Mirage 1200 Super Bike

Popeye Laverda Mirage

200 x 150 cm mixed media on Fabriano paper.

Forest Gnome and Cupid

“Forest Gnome with Cupid”. The gnome is the blue/fuchsia raster dot figure that's smiling. 

Love's Not Love

‘‘Love's not Love’’ and ‘‘Love's Love”.

From Wally Wood’s, L'll Abner.

Galería Esther Montoriol with Pere Llobera, JUJA. June to September 2020. 

JUJA Paintings Pere Llobera & Syd Mostow

Collaborative painting show with Pere Llobera. We decided to work the same format, 2 × 1.5 meter paper works on a similar theme. That was in 2020, at Galería Esther Montoriol in Barcelona.

4 Happy Bunnies

‘‘4 Happy Bunnies”. The flames coming out of their butts isn't about eating beans. Or farting. They are jetting through the sky. They control cosmic energy. They are really free. Frolicking up and away.         

“3 Happy Bunnies”

Hanging our show. Pere Llobera, Syd Mostow, at Galería Esther Montoriol. 2020

Leaders Aren't Made, They are Created

''Leaders Aren't Made, They’re Created''
The beaver is receiving special powers—superpowers, by the fairy.  A fearless leader, or just a beaver on a tree trunk. Can beavers grift?
200 × 150 cm, 79’’ x 59’’, painted drawing (is that even possible?) on Fabriano paper, 2018. 

Installation View Expo at Atelier Cora Egger, Barcelona

"Love's Not Love” at Atelier Cora Egger, June 6, 2019, Barcelona.

The theme of the show deals loosely with the theme of love in: carnal love, lost love, promised love; and the related themes of gender, power, morbidity, sexism, and pornography. This was the first time I had shown my work in a solo show in a long time. The work was new, and the timing of the show couldn't have been better. Thanks, Cora!

This was one of the first raster gnomes I painted. They are all the same theme and subject. A landscape, central gnome in the foreground. A knife in one hand, a bleeding heart in the other. 

I was invited to a small group show at Cora's space a few months earlier. She offered me the space to do a solo show. Lots of artists and friends that I hadn't seen for a long time came out to the opening. That felt good. 

Wood Gnome

The first rastered gnome I did, based on an animated ONCE pixel board ad (ONCE is a Spanish foundation for the blind). The original image was taken from a pixel board animation for Xmas lottery tickets. It was a simple animation of Santa's elves running along. I’d see it every day in the tunnel leading to the Ferrocarriles (Catalan commuter train).  

200 × 150 cm, 79 × 59’’ mixed media on Fabriano paper, 2019.

Beavers R Cute

“Beavers “R” Cute”. They are. And furry too. 
200 × 150 cm, 79 × 59’’ painted drawing on Fabriano paper, 2018.

Titian

Based on "Mars Venus and Cupid" by Titian. 

The original Titian is such a powerful painting. My dear friend Toni Serra, R.I.P. suggested the image. So I painted it. 

Oh my Ears, my Whiskers 1

First in a series, “Oh My Ears, My Whiskers”. 40 × 50 cm, mixed media on wood. A landscape. A house. An exuberant bunny. 

Oh my Ears, my Whiskers 5

‘‘Oh My Ears, My Whiskers 5’’. 40 × 50 cm, mixed media on wood. 

Exterminating Angels

Paintings from around 1995. I used to go to a junk store around the corner from my studio in the Raval, which was called the Barrio Chino back then. City Hall (El Ayuntamiento) had tried to sanitize both name and hood after tearing-down the worst parts of the neighborhood and partially eliminating a lot of the marginal activities like prostitution and drug dealing. That still goes on, but it is nothing like it was. Anyway, I'd go to a junk shop around the corner when I was stuck in the studio and I would find stuff, like old photos and figurines. I found this cheesy kitsch cast figure of an angel with a movable head. These are the result. Exterminating Angels. The painting with the male figure is Brains from the Thunderbirds, which fits with this theme.
All these paintings are 230 x170 cm. I believe one of these paintings was shown at Galería Thomas Carsten in Barcelona in 1995—the angel with the turquoise background.

Going Abstract

I moved to NY in 1997, and I decided to change my work. Since I had decided to change my life, the change in my painting seemed logical. The move was quite radical and I started from zero in NY. I was quite well set-up in Barcelona and very comfortable there when I left. New life in NY, it seemed necessary to start fresh and leave the pop images behind and just concentrate on painting what I loved, which was abstraction. While I was still working in oil paint, that work culminated in a show in Barcelona at Galería Victor Saavedra in 2000, where I showed these and other works. Sometimes you do what you think you should do rather than doing what you feel you need to do.  Although I love abstraction, I couldn't get it right. I was always feeling like something was missing. And it was. It was the narrative, the irony, the imagery.

A FOR-REAL Painter -- the real MacCoy Rory MacBeth

2 very different paintings by the same artist Rory MacBeth. Although they deal with the same issue of authenticity and originality.

This image is of one of his amazing paintings. And it is a painting, not a piece of sterling board, although you wouldn't know it. A real challenge to our notion of reality as it is perceived, and to our expectations of how things really are and not how they just appear to be.

Rory Macbeth was once a Street Painter. We met in Barcelona in 1988. A phenomenal painter, and phenomenally talented. Now he shows all over the place aside from having been one of the organizers of Pilot, in London, an archive and showcase of unrepresented artists.