Gojira (Breaking Bad) 2019

oil, aluminum, and fluorescent spray enamel on canvas 12” x 12”

Why? Cuz he’s cute.

Also, because I am American. I know Godzilla/Gojira is a metaphor for my country’s atomic and napalm attacks on Japanese cities. Striking with off-the-chart violence, conflagration without consideration, irradiating indiscriminately, and wiping out city blocks with a swish of his tail.

My reference is the 1954 Japanese release of “Gojira”, not the 1956 American release, “Godzilla, The King of Monsters!”, with Perry Mason cut into it.

Overall, both movies are low quality cinema with sodden dialogue, poor plotting, and character development. However when Katsumi Tezuka in the rubber suit starts stomping through the beautifully modeled miniature city, the movie lives. It hits my heart, I am empathetic. I know what he’s talking about.

The desperate mother cowering on the sidewalk soothing her too many kids with, “Now we will join Daddy!” –— heartbreaking.

The monster towering over the buildings —- terrifying.

The nod to King Kong in the train demolition scene —- cinematographically satisfying.

In 2019, I made a dozen or so Gojira paintings.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/p0ps/albums/72157712253708776/

I wanted to have some small size and Pop Art-like paintings to show at monthly “Bar Basic Art Nights”. These events were one-night-only exhibitions that filled a tall concrete interior wall with small paintings heavy with movie and cartoon subjects at Basic Bar & Pizza. It was a popular East Village San Diego gathering of mostly young artists. I went there at age 75. They didn’t card me.

Over a year or more, I showed a few different Gojira portraits at the monthly events, nights hosted by Optimist Volts, a playful sculptor whose art materials are almost always deconstructed spray paint cans and at other nights hosted by Johnny Tran, Director of Thumbprint Gallery, La Jolla.

My Gojira paintings were accepted well by the crowd, They were offered at pocket-change prices and I sold one.

Those nights were for shouting over loud music to other artists and for dancing. I didn’t drink beer and I didn’t like the pizza. I had to catch the last bus home at 10pm.

A couple of years later, three of my Gojira paintings were curated by Amber Zora into her “POP SMOKE: A VETERAN ART EXHIBITION” August 2022 - January, 2023 at Oceanside Museum of Art.

Some fellow veterans didn’t appreciate Gojira’s inclusion but Amber liked Godzilla and the atomic metaphor. All in fun, I thought. But, I understood the horror.

Now, it’s 2026 and Sonya Sparks has curated my “Breaking Bad” Gojira into the Pop Art Show at her essential venue, Sparks Gallery in San Diego’s Gas Light District.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/art-party-at-sparks-pop-art-tickets-1983208313452?aff=oddtdtcreator

I will be there at 4:15 PM for the VIP Gallery Tour and will stay as long as the party is fun. Again, I’ll be catching the last northbound bus at 10pm.

**********************************

aerial units, for example, “Magyar’s Birds”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/414th_Unmanned_Strike_Aviation_Brigade

The drones are piloted by Ukrainian soldiers in underground bunkers. They operate the aerial drone with a video game-like-controller, a small post held between their thumb and first finger while watching a laptop screen displaying a live video of what the drone sees. They steer the quad-copters through three dimensional space. They’ll fly the drone right up into the invader’s face, then trigger a kaboom.

The last image before the drone explodes is often the face of the Russian soldier. A final portrait. This is a new development in photography, the point of view of a deadly weapon.

I print out screen captures of published videos from these drones. I paste the prints in a sketchbook and on facing pages, I draw from the print using a Chinese calligraphy brush and black ink.

The Ukrainians threw out the Russian colonial government after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. It took twenty-four years of socio-political struggle for the Ukrainian people to make their country independent and democratic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidan_Nezalezhnosti

The dictator, Vladimir Putin (Vlad the Inhaler) is attempting to make Ukraine part of Russia.

I’m not a party to this war. As a citizen of a democracy, politically, I side with the Ukrainians. I’d like to see independent Ukraine survive and thrive.

Emotionally, I side with the combat soldiers: the Ukrainian drone operators and the Russian invaders. Both doing a nasty job for their own reasons.

The drawings I make from printed out screen captures are both for the soldier in the video and the operator watching the screen.

At the Oceanside Museum of Art Artist Alliance, “Coffee and Conversation” gathering this past Sunday, July 19th, Kaz presented his Court of AI muses and encouraged us to use them to better understand our art process and optimize our explanatory language about it.

I’ve known Kaz a little bit over the past few years. I’ve talked with him at openings. A few years ago, I enjoyed his participation on a panel of experts discussing the use of AI image making tools for artists.

When he speaks, I feel my brain popping. I enjoy the ideas and unexpected perspectives coming from a maths educated thinker. I welcome them and find him delightful.

This “Court of Muses” he explained, is a court of eight archetype personalities representing basic points of view on art and creative processes.

He explains it all in detail here:

KAZ MAŚLANKA

The Court of Ahmoomha Will See You Now

In this post, I’m constructing an introduction to the court. I’m very satisfied with my process and the artwork I am producing. I am, also, interested in points of view from entities unlike myself.

I’ll report here how it goes.

I’m showing the Court three versions of my latest painted triptych. It is the forty-first triptych completed and it is posted with the others of the DEMOGRAPHICS cycle, here:

DEMOGRAPHICS Triptychs and a few Quadtychs

I’d like to hear from the Court how they see the work and how they may see the work progressing to a fourth version.

The first version of my work in question (DEMOGRAPHICS 38) is a basic digital photo collage using the common DEMOGRAPHICS or nuGhostDance layout design for triptychs in this cycle.

In my post The subject. The paint. The viewer. which announced my Artist Talk last Saturday, June 20th this year 2026, at Techne Art Center, Oceanside, I described my overall subject design for the DEMOGRAPHICS cycle in the following manner.

“As references for the DEMOGRAPHICS paintings, I made photo collage studies which feature front-facing figures made from photographs of clothed people from around the world. I universalized them by collaging them into mixed gendered and mixed cultural humans. I set these figures in environments made from panoramic photos of urban, suburban, and rural locations.

The universalizing of the figures is achieved by dividing photos of people into quadrants, then recombining the quadrants into new figures, typically, with two female and two male quadrants –– like our biological grandparents. A symbolic representation of the biological and cultural multitudes each of us contain.

This basic template for DEMOGRAPHICS is triptychs where four figures appear. One figure each on the two outside panels plus half figures on the inside edge of those panels. The center panels have a half figure on each vertical edge. When placed contiguously, the three panels form a triptych showing four figures.”

The connection represented here is of our human need to be completed by others.

The second step of developing the images for this project is also digital.

Here I integrate a pattern into the first photo collage. I describe this type of pattern in my post Reflections at PHES Gallery.

“This pattern was extracted from the last second of transmission from a video screen being powered off. This particular screen was on a Ukrainian First Person View (FPV) Drone as it exploded on a Russian target. These patterns have been widely observed for decades in common Television screens and generally called, “snow”. Cosmologists know these patterns are a collection of The Last Scattering of photons from the creation of the Universe”

I use this image as the reference for oil painting on three sheets of 22” x 30” printmaking paper, making a 66” x 30” triptych.

This painted triptych is destined to be used in a wide row of other triptychs and single panels to creating an horizontal installation stretching from corner to corner on any wall given over to an exhibition of work from my DEMOGRAPHICS cycle.

I seek exhibitions of works from this cycle which may extend past any stationary viewer’s peripheral vision and give viewers a continuous image experience as they walk along the width of the wall.

At completion, the DEMOGRAPHIC cycle will contain one hundred triptychs or three hundred paintings or five hundred fifty linear feet of painting.

I’d like the court to consider these three versions of this specific triptych, react to the nature and development of the enclosed images and predict or suggest what a fourth version may bring to the overall DEMOGRAPHICS cycle.

Thank you for your kind attention to this artwork.

I will report on Court’s reactions.

**********************************************************************

This is the Court’s response:

*From the Correspondent’s Desk of the Court of Ahmoomha*
*Sent in reply to the offering of Steve Harlow, received with full attention*

---

Dear Mr. Harlow,

Your letter has arrived at the Court, and I have read it with the care it deserves. Three versions of a single triptych — the forty-first in a cycle of one hundred — sent from afar for the Court’s consideration. The muses do not receive such offerings lightly, and I can tell you already that your letter has stirred the chambers here with some vigor.

Allow me to orient you briefly to the nature of this Court, for you deserve to know whose voices will reach you in return. The Court of Ahmoomha is presided over by eight muses — each a sovereign of a particular aesthetic territory, each convinced with total certainty that her territory is the only one that matters. They are not here to flatter you. They are here to see your work as you have not yet seen it, and to tell you so with varying degrees of ceremony and very little mercy.

Your work sits, as I shall explain, in contested ground — and where it is contested, the muses fight. Where it is not, the appropriate voice leads alone.

I have set your offering before them. Here is what came back.

---

**COCO COMPLEXIA** — *speaking first, as is her right, for these are designed images whose power lands through the senses*

Mr. Harlow, you have sent me three acts of the same drama, and I will tell you which one I find most interesting before I tell you what none of them have yet dared to do.

The first version — the photo collage — is your skeleton. It is the armature. It shows me your architecture of decisions with admirable clarity: the quadrant-swap logic producing figures of biological multiplicity, the panoramic ground anchoring them in shared earth, the triptych structure with its half-figures at the edges completing themselves only through adjacency. This is genuine conceptual architecture. The idea of the figure assembled from four grandparents — two female quadrants, two male, a symbolic genome of cultural mixing — is not decoration. It is the load-bearing idea of the whole cycle. The composition insists, structurally, on what the theme declares: that the self is completed only by the presence of others. I read this in the panels. The half-figures at the seams are not a layout convention — they are the argument. A figure that exists only when placed beside its neighbor is not a metaphor for human completion; it *is* human completion, performed in the hanging of the work.

So far, so serious.

Now. Version two introduces the television snow — the Last Scattering, the relic radiation of the universe’s first light made visible as noise on an obsolete screen. This is where I become genuinely interested, and where I want to press you hard. The pattern is integrated *into* the first collage, you say. But in the image I read before me, I am not certain it is integrated — I am uncertain whether it has been woven into the image or laid over it. There is a difference as wide as the universe you are invoking. A veil over a scene tells me you know about cosmic background radiation. A structure that *replaces* certain visual frequencies — that allows the figures to breathe through the ancient light — tells me you have understood that these people are *made of it*. They were not placed inside the universe’s first light. They *are* its continuation. The integration, if it remains a layer, is still at the level of the statement. I want it at the level of the flesh.

Version three — which in the image I see as three separated, heavily worked panels, denser, more painterly in their surface quality — is where you begin to approach what the cycle needs from you. The figures here are less legible as figures and more present as matter. The cosmological and the human are beginning to interpenetrate rather than coexist. This is the direction.

What a fourth version might bring: the dissolution must go further. The human figure at this scale of ambition — one hundred triptychs, five hundred fifty linear feet — cannot remain a person you recognize. The quadrant logic should begin to produce not a *mixed person* but a *field of personhood*, something that reads as figure from ten feet and as cosmos from three. You are building a wall of humanity. At a certain point, the individual figure is the wrong unit of meaning. The right unit is the crowd, the species, the smear of biology across time. Version four should ask what happens when the quadrant logic is applied not just within a figure but *between* figures — when the four people in a single triptych begin to bleed their quadrants into each other’s space, so that the triptych itself becomes one body made of four, rather than four bodies arranged in one triptych.

That is the logical conclusion of your own argument, Mr. Harlow, pressed to its proper scale. You have built the idea. Now build it to the wall.

As for titles — you have named the cycle DEMOGRAPHICS, which is serviceable and clear. For this forty-first triptych specifically, since no individual title has been offered, I would suggest you might turn over:

*”The Grandmother Equation”* — for the quadrant logic made explicit and personal
*”Last Scattering (Self-Portrait)”* — for the merger of cosmic origin and human identity
*”Completed by Adjacency”* — for the structural argument the hanging makes

Take any of these or none.

---

**MONIKA WILD** — *entering from the side, uninvited by the work’s coordinates but unable to keep entirely silent on one matter*

Coco has said a great deal about architecture and decisions, as she always does, and I will say only this, Mr. Harlow: the third version — the one where the surface is most worked, most dense, most broken — is the one that begins to look like something made rather than assembled. I do not claim it for myself. These are digital images and they belong to Coco’s territory, and she knows that I know that, and she is already preparing her rebuttal to a criticism I haven’t fully voiced.

But the question I would put to you, without claiming to answer it: when this work is *printed and mounted* — when it finally takes its body in the world — what is that body made of? Canvas? Aluminum? The surface is not an afterthought in a work of this ambition. Coco can design you a structure of decisions all she likes. At the moment the ink hits the substrate, someone will have to answer for the physical fact of five hundred fifty linear feet. That someone should be a decision you have made, not one made for you by the printer.

I say no more. The rest is Coco’s.

---

**HYPATIA KOG** — *speaking precisely, and with no warmth for what Coco just celebrated*

I am going to say something that will sound like praise and is not.

The cosmological integration — the television snow as Last Scattering, the relic radiation of the universe’s formation embedded in images of contemporary human figures — is, as a *proposition*, genuinely interesting. The idea that human faces are continuous with the physics of the universe’s first moments is not trivial. There is real conceptual structure there: that what we call “noise” on an obsolete screen is in fact signal from an event thirteen billion years prior, and that embedding this signal in images of human beings makes a claim about what a human being *is* in the largest possible frame — a local organization of ancient light.

That proposition lives in Coco’s territory, and Coco will dress it in sensory architecture and be pleased with herself. I am less pleased, and here is why.

The proposition, as submitted, is explained in the letter and visible in the image only as a texture. The logic of *why* this particular pattern — why this cosmological register rather than any other — is not answered by the work itself. It is answered by the letter. That is not a trivial concern. A work that requires its own explanatory letter to make its deepest argument has not yet made its argument in the visual field. The Last Scattering is, in the image, indistinguishable from decorative interference. The intellectual structure — this human face is a concentration of ancient light, and the ancient light surrounds it to say so — does not read from the image without the letter.

A fourth version should ask: how do I make the cosmological claim *structurally visible*, without text, without explanation? One approach: if the Last Scattering pattern genuinely increases in density toward the edges of each panel — if the figures emerge from and return to the ancient noise rather than being overlaid by it — then the claim is made spatially. The figure is born from the field and will return to it. That is a sentence the image can speak without the letter’s help.

Coco would tell you this is an architectural question she has already answered. She has not. She has named the direction. The architecture itself remains to be built.

And I will add — because no one else here will say it clearly — that the structural logic of one hundred triptychs running to the edge of peripheral vision is not, by itself, an aesthetic achievement. Scale is not argument. Five hundred fifty feet of the same proposition, repeated one hundred times, is one hundred redundant statements of a proposition that should have been made once with total clarity. The fourth version should earn the scale by deepening the individual unit, not by assuming the accumulation does the work. Accumulation is easy. Inevitability is rare.

---

*A pause in the correspondence. The chambers grow quieter for a moment.*

---

Mr. Harlow, I return to close this letter and carry the Court’s voices faithfully to you — which means I will not reconcile what you have just read, because it cannot honestly be reconciled.

Coco believes the direction is toward the dissolution of the figure into the field, the quadrant logic extended between figures as well as within them, the crowd becoming the unit rather than the person. This is a vision of your cycle at its most expansive.

Hypatia believes the direction is toward structural clarity — that the cosmological argument must become visually self-sufficient, legible in the image alone, and that the scale of the cycle earns nothing until the individual unit earns everything. This is a demand that the proposition be tightened before it is multiplied.

These are not two valid perspectives that you may comfortably weigh. They are in real tension. To follow Coco’s counsel is to expand and risk decorative dissolution. To follow Hypatia’s counsel is to tighten and risk that tightness becoming a different kind of work than the one you are building. Monika, from her position outside this territory, has placed a question before you about the physical substrate that neither Coco nor Hypatia will answer, because neither of them gets their hands dirty — and you will need to answer it before the work takes its body on the wall.

You are forty-one triptychs into one hundred. The Court’s view is that you are not yet at the ceiling of what this cycle is reaching for. The question of whether the fourth version finds that ceiling is now yours to carry.

Thank you for sending this from afar. The Court does not receive cycles of this ambition often, and it is grateful for the weight of what you have submitted.

With ceremony and respect,

**Gethauros**
*Servant of the Court of Ahmoomha*
*Correspondence Division*

“Nu Ghost Dance 36” was made on my studio desktop computer and uploaded to Flickr in March, 2022, part of 100 digital photo collage triptychs I created between April, 2021 and July 2022.

The collages were made to be the basis for painting studies I use as reference images for paintings in my project I titled, “DEMOGRAPHICS”.

I’ve described the DEMOGRAPHICS project here

and here.

Currently I’ve completed one half the paintings for the overall project, in other words, 50 triptychs or 150 paintings.

My practice has been to integrate a pattern into the basic collage to complicate the image to help develop more interesting paintings.

In #36 I integrated a dispersal pattern into the collage image. This pattern was extracted from the last second of transmission from a video screen being powered off. This particular screen was on a Ukrainian First Person View (FPV) Drone as it exploded on a Russian target. These patterns have been widely observed for decades in common Television screens and generally called, “snow”. Cosmologists know these patterns are a collection of The Last Scattering of photons from the creation of the Universe. (I described this more fully in a previous post, “Paint What You See”).

When I applied the pattern to the basic collage image it dispersed into what you see below.

This suits my vision, so I painted it. Resulting in the triptych, “DEMOGRAPHICS 36 (Molecular)” below.

The paintings are oil on three sheets of printmaking paper 22” X 30” each, making the triptych dimensions 66” X 30” overall.

For Oceanside Museum of Art’s Artist Alliance exhibit, “Reflections” at Phes Gallery, Carlsbad, I mounted high resolution ink-jet prints of the digital collage studies on wood panels, making the triptych pictured below.

This triptych of 8” X 10” panels is 24” X 10” overall and will be exhibited in the small, but mighty PHES Gallery shown here.

PHES Gallery

2633 State St, Carlsbad, CA 92008

REFLECTIONS

July 16 - August 28, 2026

“The Last Scattering pattern, the cosmological snow is not merely a texture — it is the oldest image in the universe, the photonic record of the moment matter and light separated. To layer that over assembled human figures is a conceptual move of real ambition. Harlow is writing his composite people onto the first photograph, the universe’s own record of its moment of becoming visible. This is the correct scale for what he is attempting. The universality of his figures, the biological multitudes each of us contain — these find their proper horizon in cosmological time.”

—- Coco Complexia, Court of Ahmoomha

Saturday June 20th 2pm Techne Art Center 1609 Ord Way Oceanside California

I will be speaking on the paintings and collage prints from my DEMOGRAPHICS cycle installed in the upstairs “L” shaped hallway at Techne.

As with any paintings, these have three main qualities: first is their subject, second is how they are painted, and the third is how they are seen by a viewer.

The Subject ––

As references for the DEMOGRAPHICS paintings, I made photo collage studies which feature front-facing figures made from photographs of clothed people from around the world. I universalized them by collaging them into mixed gendered and mixed cultural humans. I set these figures in environments made from panoramic photos of urban, suburban, and rural locations.

The universalizing of the figures is achieved by dividing photos of people into quadrants, then recombining the quadrants into new figures, typically, with two female and two male quadrants –– like our biological grandparents. A symbolic representation of the biological and cultural multitudes each of us contain.

This basic template for DEMOGRAPHICS is triptychs where four figures appear. One figure each on the two outside panels plus half figures on the inside edge of those panels. The center panels have a half figure on each vertical edge. When placed contiguously, the three panels form a triptych showing four figures.

A few groupings in the DEMOGRAPHICS cycle are quadtychs instead of triptychs. These show five figures.

In installation, two end panels may be hung together without a center panel. This arrangement creates a diptych showing three figures.

The subject of DEMOGRAPHICS is appreciation of humans in their environments.

How I paint –––

The purpose of paintings with recurring layouts is to allow for improvisational variations on the theme. The DEMOGRAPHICS cycle allows me to produce over 300 separate variations. Since there are so many, I feel free on each one to paint unique solutions.

I like to paint the surface of the object in the painting and allow its boundary edges to be formed by where I stop painting it, rather than outlining it. I like to paint the shapes from their insides out. Also, I prefer to paint any naturally occurring lines as shapes.

Outlines create a false clarity. Boundary lines don’t exist in nature.

I want the painted ground to be as important as the figure. There is no background in my paintings, only foreground.

I paint forward, applying paint where I have not yet painted, I must strengthen any weak stroke by painting strong strokes next to it. I don’t allow myself to scrape off or cover over weak strokes.

I paint to completion, one panel at a time. I start the painting with a projection of the study and continue improvisational painting while referencing a printed copy or a digital tablet display of the study.

It is very important to me that the environments surrounding the figures be painted as thoroughly as the figures. This represents my basic vision that we and everything around us are made of the same stuff.

The viewer–

Painting communicates when a viewer sees it. DEMOGRAPHICS paintings prompt the viewer to form complete figures from parts, to distinguish the figures from the ground. Because any viewer sees both what is before their eyes and what is within their vision, all viewers see paintings uniquely. The “real” art is images formed in the viewers’ minds.

David moved to Los Angeles in 1964, the year I left L.A. Six years older than me, I’ve watched his work over the decades and enjoyed most of his output. I especially like him for the various ways he’s combined photography with paint, using camera as the painter’s tools as they were originally intended.

In memory of Hockney, I present my digital painting …

Read more

Art of Now: Pushing Boundaries

My talk was very different from the notes for it I posted here several days ago.

This gif animation came up as the first slide:

https://www.deviantart.com/p0ps/art/Portrait-of-a-Soldier-1317893991

When I saw it come up, I said, “I planned this to be the last slide, but let’s start here at the end.” I claimed this to be the “real Art of Now.”

It is an animation I made from screenshots of a video posted on Magyar Telegram

It is the final photograph of a Russian soldier who bravely faces his end by attempting to shot an incoming drone with his rifle. He either misses or he hits it at close range, in either case, it explodes in his face and he is kaputed, flatlined, unalived. The drone’s final transmission is video “snow.” That snow captures the remnants of “The Big Bang,” origin of our universe, what we used to call “microwave background radiation” and what Cosmologists now refer to as “the surface of the last scattering.”

With comments and questions from the audience, I spoke of the trauma faced by the drone operator and everyone responsible for equipping, training, and sending young people into positions with the instruction to kill.

I also explained the frustration with Russia sending soldiers into Ukraine to kill. I rather helplessly and rhetorically asked from the Ukrainian point of view, “What else can you do, but try to stop them?”

My talk covered a few points about my artistic vision of seeing figures immersed in equally significant oceans of atmosphere.

Near the end, talking about my painting practice, I said, “When I see my painting as so raw and clunky that I'm embarrassed to have anyone look at it, I understand it to be at its best.”

I remember concluding with, “This is a crazy world. I didn’t ask to be in it.” This got a hearty laugh.

I didn’t show any of the following example paintings important to my appreciation of Art History. I didn’t make any of the statements below that I posted here before the talk:

Painting has been a means to honor, remember, to illustrate important people and events, painting has always been communicative.

Pre-Columbian Indigenous warriors painted on their shields pictogram representations of their victories in battle, painted on their dwellings signs of their klans.

Pre-Cookian Aboriginal painters mapped their neighborhood in the stars.

Painters throughout the ancient Euro-Asian and African continents painted to honor and visually explain their lives.

Every human species painted.

Myself, an elder, in 21st Century San Diego, identify as a painter in the tradition of hundreds of thousands generations of people who painted before me, while my Art School education focused on the painting of the last few hundred generations of collected Euro-American artists. My self-guided study focuses on the past six or seven generations of painters since 1850, the approximate date of the modern cultural conditions I’m experiencing: mass media, instant electronic communication, fast travel, general middle-class education, and paintings as consumer products.

Governmental, Royal, Aristocratic patrons still commission art production, but significantly in this modern era, painters self-fund their individualistic art-making.

Of the hundreds of thousands of painters in the modern era, I take guidance from the paintings of a narrow band of well-known painters from Europe and post-colonial America exemplified by Monet,

Van Gogh,

Cezanne,

Munch,

Bellows,

Pollock,

Park,

Mitchell,

Bacon,

Warhol,

Francis,

Basquiat,

(with apologies to the several others I forgot to mention, but are in my heart).

Living artists I watch as peers are:

Hockney,

Marshall,

Salle,

Ghenie,

Fadojutimi

(again, apologies to those I missed).

Local artists I admire and enjoy include:

Ellen Dieter,

& Sylvia Fernandez.

My painting is always Expressionistic, Figurative, and taking lessons from Abstraction.

In the 19th Century painting seems to have been popular as a visual medium, although print-making (primarily engraving and lithography) spread the painters’ artworks beyond the first-hand viewing of the actual paint.

Photography was a strong visual medium upstart and by the turn of the 20th Century took over, both in still images and especially popular moving images.

The 20th Century was the triumph of cinema as the leading visual art-form. Photography, Cinematography, and Videography lead as the most influential forms of art-making through the turn of the 21st Century.

Then the skills needed to produce art for the large Cinema screen and the smaller home television screen turned to the production of art for the even smaller smartphone screen.

While it is still essential to fully experience a painting live in a studio, or public exhibition — now, the most common experience of paintings is on the personal screen of our phones.

While the cinema experience has never been richer with IMax, 3D, 70mm, HFR, Et al., we experience many more moving pictures on TicToc, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, etc.

The primary media experience of paintings in “The Art of Now” may be the vertical iPhone videos we shoot in the gallery and message to friends or post to social media.

Should we be sad? Or, possibly, glad?

Never has visual art reached more people even though it reaches them in these filtered transmissions.

Paintings in their physical form are events. They are unique media, both short and long form. Live, we may decide whether we are interested in a painting at a glance, but, when we decide we are interested, it becomes long-form media. If we live with it, either in our homes or offices or through repeated viewings in museums, paintings we like continue telling us ever more subtle stories over hours or years of viewing.

However, today, we most often only know that a painting exists if we see a photo of it on our phone. Or perhaps we see an exhibition announcement on our phone, attend the show and discover a painting we like there.

Of the three submitted, the one chosen is the most light-hearted one.

It and the others reference faces in Francis Bacon paintings. Which face, I can’t say. I did several preliminary drawings of various faces and lost track of which was from what paintings.

In my rendering, this one has a whimsical mushroom nose dissolving into a spiraling confusion where the mouth would be.

The first Francis Bacon painting I saw was in a 1968 Art History class at Sonoma State University, it was a slide of one of his Popes with it’s mouth open .

Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X

Is he screaming? Is he submitting to a dental exam? Is he in pain or just amazed? These questions intrigued me, but even more impressive to me were the lines and smears from vertical scraping that created a sort of screen between the surface and the face. I guess I liked that effect quite a bit, because I’ve been painting faces and figures seen through patterned, active surfaces since.

In Francis’ paintings there is a feeling of horror, terror, or fear which titillates me (it is only paint, you know).

As I learned of his life, poor Francis had much to be fearful of, as most of us have.

He was an adult and painting during WWII and no saw, as we all did, the photojournalism published after the horrific events. The evidence of mass-murder in the German camps and the American bombing of Japan. He was grown and able to express through his art his reactions to reality.

I was young, just beginning to understand the world I was in. These images were just one part of what I learned about where I was growing up, having been placed in this situation by my parents’ desire to be normal and birth children as society expected.

No one asked me about being part of this crazy, dangerous world.

Mock killing and real violence was a big part of children’s games in my neighborhood on Pescadero Avenue in South Gate, California. War, hate, and death were around us all as I came of age in the 1950s.

Becoming an adult in the 1960s, I desired to find resolution for society’s awful legacies of mistreatments. This led myself and others to cocoon ourselves in drug-induced fantasies of peace and harmonies.

Continuing to be battered through the decades by useless wars, political corruption, popular intolerance, and environmental poisoning, I’m now in my eighties, living in a retirement community in the greater San Diego Bay area.

I have the above painting, of lord knows why, accepted into an exhibit of Contemporary Art called “Art of Now: Pushing Boundaries.”

As I write this, I’m planning to go to the Opening Reception at 5pm tonight for the show at Union Hall Gallery, 24th & Broadway, Golden Hill, San Diego, California. The group show drawn from artists of all ages throughout California will remain viewable by the public until June 28, 2026.

The San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild presents

The Art of Now: Pushing Boundaries, curated by Max Presneill of The Torrance Art Museum.

Exhibition Dates: June 5–28, 2026, and online through August 5, 2026.

​Opening Reception:

Saturday, June 6, 5–9 PM.
Gallery Hours: 11 AM -6 PM Wednesday- Sunday

​Location: Union Hall Gallery at 2323 Broadway #201, San Diego, CA 92102

Access the show online:

This latest show curated by Charles Thomas, the New York-based, bi-coastal artist and owner of the largest, most beautiful gallery in the San Diego area includes my work and I am thrilled.

Techne Art Center

1609 Ord Way

Oceanside, California.

Opening: May 30th, 5 - 8pm.

Exhibit continues through August 1, 2026 (Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 1 - 6pm)

I have lined the walls of the upstairs “L” shaped hallway with eighteen of my most recent paintings on paper.

A few examples of the paintings:

One wall I lined with twenty two ink-jet prints of photo collages designed as reference images for future DEMOGRAPHICS paintings.

A few examples of the prints:

In addition, this triptych on canvasses, “DEMOGRAPHICS 63 (Flower Stall),” is hung just outside the hallway.

Please come to the opening reception May 30th, 5 - 8pm at Techne Art Center.

Or see the show during June and July, this summer.

Let me know when you visit, I’d like to meet you there.

Map to Techne, Oceanside, California

Video of me taking my paintings and prints to Techne Art Center and installing them.

Cameras: Ruth Parson, Heather Hudak, and Steve Harlow.

Editing: Steve Harlow.

Music made in GarageBand by Steve Harlow.

Steve Harlow

Instagram @steveharlowart

Flicker p0psharlow

YouTube @SteveHarlow

Tumblr tumblp0ps

The triptych chosen is loosely painted from a photo collage. There are four standing figures in front of a flower stall with blurred pedestrians.

Four universalized humans are made from public domain photographs. Each figure contains four parts symbolizing our two female and two male grandparents.

The pattern brings the composition together.

In the black areas of the pattern, colors of the collage are reversed to flatten the image space.

The cycle of paintings I call DEMOGRAPHICS contemplate our position within the life of Earth. We are products of genetic inheritance and quantum interactions reaching back to the beginning of time. We are interdependent and formed by the cultures that engage us. We are in rural and urban environments, we are like and unlike everyone.

My paintings are expressed in gesture and color, suggesting and representing our participation in the dance of universal life. They are secular prayers for Truth, Justice, and Understanding.

San Diego Mesa College

7250 Mesa College Drive, San Diego, CA.

Opening Wednesday, November 12 - 4 PM to 7 PM.

Exhibit on view November 10 - December 16.
Curated by the Museum Studies class, the exhibit features my triptych,

“DEMOGRAPHICS 28 (Tijuana Kids).”

oil on paper 66” x 30”

I painted this from my digital collage.

I made the study by combining three layers:

I’m like, “So, ‘painter’ is something I could be when I grow up?”

Are these huge patterned paintings what is great? If I made paintings like this, would they be great?

With a cigarette hanging out his mouth, he looks like one of the fathers in my neighborhood but he has a rebellious amount of paint on his clothes.

I found that Jackson had gone to Manual Arts High School, same as my Dad.

By myself in our garage, I tried making a drip painting with some awful brown house paint on a flattened cardboard box. Right away I could see that for me to paint this way would require lots of paint, good colors and a larger surface. My mother was furious when she saw spilled paint on the floor, I had to scrub it up.

For me, painting like Jackson would have to come later.

I come from 1940’s Abstract Expressionism. When I was six years old in 1949, I painted like Jackson Pollack, who I saw in Life Magazine: gestural, patterned, abstract. When I didn’t have paint, I drew like a kid: figurative, narrative.

My Dad was a photography hobbyist. He demonstrated image composition. I assisted him in the darkroom and in studio lighting, primarily for portraits.

When I was nine years of age, in 1953, I began regularly visiting L.A. Museum of Art, before it became LACMA, studying the contemporary painting exhibits.

My painting became figurative after seeing The San Francisco School in 1957 at LACMA. 

In high school, while continuing to do well in Art classes, I got involved with the school’s Theater Department. I designed sets and lighting, programs and advertising.

Outside of school, I painted and drew from life and from photographs.

At college I was an abstract painter and a life drawer. I continued these two practices after graduation until I was about 34, I stopped drawing from live models. From this point on I exclusively paint from photo references.

Contemporary influences:

Armsrock

Judith Supine

Jadé Fadojutimi

Adrian Ghenie

Historical influences:

Botticelli

Caravaggio

Delacroix

Monet

Matisse

Bellows

DeKooning

Bacon

Park

Rauschenberg 

Francis

Basquiat

Saturday, September 7th 4 - 7 pm Opening Reception

M:  chuckthomas@techneartcenter.com

T:   917-972-1752

Hours:

Thursday 1-6pm

Friday 1-6pm

Saturday 1-6pm

​

 1609 Ord Way

Oceanside, CA 92056

Gallery website

Somewhat later, maybe ’52 or 3, a neighbor friend my age taught me to grab tight my folded legs as I sat on the grass, pulling my knees to my chest, forcing panting breaths until I collapsed unconscious on my back. As I regained consciousness, my vision was filled with flashing intricate patterns like 3D wire forms, kaleidoscopic colors. The powerful show dimmed and was gone in a minute.

Cosmologists refer to a "surface of last scattering" when the photons last hit matter; after that, the universe was too big.

At some point, photons ceased to scatter at all and began to propagate freely through the Universe. These photons reach present-day observers as the cosmic microwave background radiation. This radiation appears to come from a spherical surface around the observer. This surface is what is called the last scattering surface or "The Surface of the Last Scattering.”

My painting, “Downtown” is featured in this exciting show, MORE DISRUPTION: REPRESENTATIONAL ART IN FLUX, June 8–September 15, 2024 at Oceanside Museum of Art, curated by John Seed, Aleah Chapin, and Timothy Robert Smith.

Digital collage based on Alyssa Monks (American b. 1977) "I Said No" (2016)

Alyssa Monks lives and paints in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her work was recently featured in the television series, "The Americans" (FX) throughout its 2018 sixth and final season. I first saw her work after listening to her interview on John Dalton's podcast, "Gently Does It." I looked for her work on the web and found that they are realistic, finely detailed portraits with interference patterns running across them, from water, steam, partially occluded glass. Her oil painting technique is masterful, she could paint straight-ahead photo-real portraits all day long, but she makes her work more difficult and interesting by working from photos of models partially obscured. In this one she has the subject in a shower seen through beaded, steamy glass, and then she layers on a pattern of tree branches, vines, leaves. Since my collages and paintings are currently consisting of layered patterning, I was intrigued by her work. She's using double images of landscape and figure not based on one reality, therefore more representative of lived life where our visual and mental imagery converse.

She says she needs to be “...as realistic as possible. It has to be specific and believable. It's about seeing differently, more carefully, more presently what is here, no matter how strange it is.”

“I strive to create a moment in a painting where the viewer can see or feel themselves, to connect with it as though it is about them, personally.”

"I always drew from my personal experiences in my paintings. I always work very intuitively and with a sincerity that might seem vulnerable, but making work isn’t about being vulnerable; it is about speaking directly to the viewer’s vulnerability without stepping too hard on their discomfort. Just a little tension can be very effective."

Adding to the collage mix is

Alex Katz (American b. 1927) "Iris 2" (2019)

Only a small amount of Alex Katz' beautiful color shows up in this collage. This is a recent painting of his, made when he 92. It’s a clear beauty. The finished oil painting is fresh, like a preliminary sketch and also solid, complete. The colors are brilliantly selected. The composition sits perfectly in the frame of the picture, perfectly still, even though it seems any slight breeze would bend the irises. Katz's work since the 1960s has always looked deceptively simple. His compositions always contain large areas of flat, yet rich and meaningful, colors. He has said, "In the end, content doesn't matter. What matters is style." His subjects have been his wife, himself, his friends, fashionable clothing, and now, in his very old age, it's "simple" flowers. All those subjects were stylishly represented. Elegantly simple. Masterfully minimal. He likes to paint big. This painting is "overhead," taller than a human, wider than a human with both arms outstretched. The flowers are something like ten times life size. Not your Grandma's floral painting. These are magnified flowers, examined specimens, and more importantly, painted subjects, interlocked with their flat, painted background. Any one of color shape could not exist without the other color shapes. America's greatest living painter? Between Jasper Johns and Alex Katz, I think I'm voting for Alex.

Nigel Cooke (British b. 1973) "Midnight (water)" (2020)

This drawing done in 2020 during lockdown was exhibited at Pace Gallery online as "a move to the abstract." Looking at his previous work which is mostly figurative, sometimes fantastical, and all with a high degree of finish, it seems to me that these shapes, this type of line and composition was always in the work, that these drawings are what has always been beneath his paintings--this time without the figurative, without the high finish. Cooke began making these new large-scale drawings—composed of dark hues of blue and black—after twilight while in isolation at his studio in Canterbury, UK last March and April. As an artist, Cooke shares that he is “naturally self-isolating,” but has taken this extra step of working at night to “fall out of step with the schedule of the local world one extra degree,” a state which “feels more recognizable as the usual conditions for art making.”

Jade Fadojutimi (British b.1993) "A Dwelling of Absence" (2017)

I first heard Jade on Talk Art where the two silly host boys have a good time saying her name in unison. She sounded lively and relatable. A fresh young talent. Then I looked up her paintings and was I impressed! I felt like I could happily fall into any one of them. Energetic, muscular—terrific pallet, they looked the way I would've wanted my abstracts of the 1970s to look. Not to say hers are nostalgic, not at all. Her work looks, to me, new—the gestures, the complexity all very 21st Century. She's making paintings I'd travel far to see. I'd expect to be entranced by facing them at scale. ICA Miami, opening in November 2021 will be her first US museum exhibition. Miami? Well, we'll see.

All together this week's collage is stripped bare, like a preliminary drawing for Alyssa Monk's painting. But if you notice the directions and texture of the lines that form the subject in the collaged image are not those that you'd ever find in a sketch. And the touches of color may seem to be a wasteful use of such lavish source paintings, but I think they add just the right amount of color and texture to the collage.

Archive

Digital collage based on Paul Cézanne (French 1839 – 1906) "Mont Sainte Victoire" (1902)

Cézanne bought a property just north of Aix, on the hill Les Lauves, and built a studio in 1902. The property had a large view of Aix and the vast surrounding plains, including Mont Sainte-Victoire. This was where he completed most of his late period paintings. Cézanne didn't seek to represent nature traditionally, but rather to express the permanent nature beneath the surface. Cézanne’s thick brushstrokes created the elements of the paintings as geometric shapes. The subject matter was almost unrecognizable within the brushstrokes. For Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire embodied grandeur and enduring nature. He was convinced that each new painting would offer some new insight into another facet of the mountain’s meaning or character.

This collage includes:

Matthew Wong (Chinese-Canadian 1984 – 2019) "Figure in a Night Landscape" (2017)

The artist’s breakout moment came with a thrilling solo show at Karma in New York in 2018 that consisted of large-scale oil landscapes in a vaguely Post-Impressionist mode, built with flat planes of loose and vital color. Wong was a quicksilver talent, who created gripping, idiosyncratic scenes, which he sometimes populated with a solitary figure. It seemed that Matthew Wong had gone on a walkabout into the mind via nature that yielded fresh perspectives, muses, and visions of another world. Wong said that he worked by instinct, without preparatory drawings, and that he came up with ideas by daydreaming, watching movies, and taking walks. “I’m going with my gut, but often times, my gut also cancels itself out and I keep painting over an image with a totally different image, and work like this can go on for months before a single surface is resolved.”

Adrian Ghenie (Romanian b. 1977) "Dada is Dead" (2009)

Several years ago, Ruth texted me from SFMOMA about a great painting by a young artist she was looking at. I was able to go there and see it and I agreed, it was great and the artist was young. It was the best new painting I had seen. This is the one, of course. It's a skillfully depicted, cinematic scene of the corner of an empty room with a brilliant wolf standing on the floor, and a ghostly human presence floated up to the ceiling. The painting is based on a photo of a Dada exhibition, "First International Dada-Fair" which was held in the Galerie Buchard, Berlin in summer 1920. Prominent in the photo, is a suspended figure with the head of a pig and wearing an officer's uniform. Also in the photo, were people obeying gravity seated at tables. Ghenie eliminated the people, kept the dummy on the ceiling, put in the wolf, and did a fine job of painting it. The scene looks alive, but “damaged.”

Mark Bradford (American b. 1961) "Helter Skelter" (2007)

Recently I saw this overwhelming, 34' long whale of a collage at the Broad Museum. It took 40 shots stitched together in panorama-making software for me to photograph it. Eli Broad had purchased it at auction. This description is from the Auction house, "Working in the lineage of the Dadaists and the Nouveau Réalisme movement, Bradford has honed a refined technique of décollage, a process defined by cutting, tearing away or otherwise removing, pieces of an original image. Limiting his palette to the range of colours that occur in his materials, Bradford builds his intricate compositions in quick bursts over a prolonged period of time. Working intuitively without a preparatory drawing, he repeatedly covers the canvas with signage, posters, discarded advertising, and other materials peeled off billboards, plus layers of thick-and thin-gauge twine all encased in clear acrylic gel medium, He sands back to construct a dense network of lines. By cutting, tearing, and scraping through the layers, Bradford reveals the underlying strata of visual material that ties the work both conceptually and physically to the economies of place and social structures of Los Angeles."

Oliver Lee Jackson (American b. 1935) "Painting (5.12.11)" (2011)

From his San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art 2017 solo exhibit, "Oliver Jackson’s works are tightly composed structures where figural images float in pulsating fields of line, color, and applied materials. Jackson is a master of color, which he uses to create effects of dimension, illumination, volume, and space. Though Jackson’s compositions are filled with figurative forms, they are not narrative works. Instead, he offers the viewer an experience that is dynamic and evocative."

Claude Monet (1840 -1926) "Impression, Sunrise" (1873)

Excerpted from claude-monet.com, From the 15th April to 15th May 1874 Monet exhibited his work together with Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, and some other thirty artists. They organized their exhibition on their own as they were usually rejected at the Paris Salon. Most visitors were disgusted and even outraged over such a graffiti. Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" enjoyed the most attention and some visitors even claimed that they were absolutely unable to recognize what was shown at all. The technique is very 'sketchy' and would have been seen as a preliminary study for a painting rather than a finished work suitable for exhibition. (Monet himself saw the work as unfinished, and it was for that reason that he adopted the title 'Impression' to distinguish it from such works as his other view of Le Havre in the same exhibition, though this too lacks the finish than expected.) In this work, Monet stripped away the details to a bare minimum: the dockyards in tile background are merely suggested by a few brushstrokes as are the boats in the foreground. The whole represents the artist's swift attempt to capture a fleeting moment. The highly visible, near-abstract technique, compels almost more attention than the subject-matter itself, a notion then wholly alien to viewers.