Reflections On My Space Series.

I’m about three quarters of the way through the Space Series, gods and goddesses against nebula backgrounds. A philosopher friend commented that they reminded him of the premortal gods, the Protogenoi. They were the first generation of divine beings in Greek mythology, fundamental forces of nature and existence, preceding the Titans and Olympians. They represented the forces of chaos, night, and deep elemental power. The mythology conveyed they were the first beings to emerge from chaos, the void or gap at the beginning of time, representing the fundamental forces of existence. I’ve done 14 out of 20 life-size works. Every canvas is 64x48".

I can say with certainty that though that description fits, they were simply created from my imagination with real life friends and models posing and using astrophotos from Tomas Dobrovodsky and NASA.

The series was also born out of my love for evolutionary art historical advancements such as the ancient Greeks, Italian Renaissance, Rembrandt, and the French impressionists combined with my love of creating and advancing color and light theories, celebrating unique moments as ends in themselves, the body as a philosophical, sensual, and passionate mode of expression.

Some key points:

Ancient Greece made some of the greatest evolutions in art, developing the science of proportions, truthful observations of reality and the human figure, observing the interplay of relaxed and tense muscles within the same figure, the shifts in weight that result in the famous "S" curve through the center of the human body.¹

Their realism is a metaphor for that reality is knowable, and their proportions a metaphor for a balance of life in all things, and amazingly, the proportions result in a profound sense of physical beauty. Proportions are also a metaphor for beautiful elegant solutions to problems.

These theories were lost, or destroyed by design, in the middle dark ages—roughly 300 AD to 1400 AD. I look at Christianity through an artistic lens, its dark ages were undoubtedly a horrible blot on human advancement in arts. Working medieval artists couldn't draw or paint for shit, they didn't observe reality, horribly distorted their figures, and reversed the perspective of things, mocking reality. The inability to master human proportions makes the whole realm of positive emotions and beauty impossible. The rub here is their results were a celebration of incompetence. The nasty element was that the church propagated ugliness, distortion, and schizophrenia (in the sense of a break with perception of reality) all under the guise of divinity. WTF!

An archaeologist friend that specialized in the Byzantine era claimed that the artists weren't incompetent but did the distortions on purpose to symbolize the church's spiritual dimension. A viewpoint that doesn't hold water, not comprehending that in all fields the uplifting sublime and elegant solutions are thousands of times more difficult to achieve, while ugliness can come about by any turdlayer. The folly was that this promotion of anti-beauty, anti-reason, anti-perception, and anti-balance resulted in slamming the door shut on true geniuses. The evil Inquisitions would have terrified brilliant artists. They would have quickly assessed that if they chose art the price they would pay would be the penalties of death, imprisonment, or banishment.

The middle ages set art back by a millennium, and needless to say, I rejected it as a perfect example of what not to do.

The Renaissance took up the mantle of humanist proportions and added to the artist’s skill profound anatomical knowledge based on real-life autopsies. Its amazing theories of perspective and reclaiming human proportions would look and feel real and add superb dynamism to their artworks.

On a huge problem that the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance never managed to solve was how to buck the hideous commissioned art archetype. Commissions are artistic soul destroyers, no matter the rationale artists use to convince themselves that painting a patron’s dog is the highlight of their artistic lives. For all their unique genius, da Vinci and Michelangelo never escaped that commission trap, which both artists felt intensely bitter about. Da Vinci engaged in kissassery to gain commissions, then, in passive-aggressive petulance, rarely brought the commissions to completion. Of course, it is possible he entered them in good faith but became paralyzed by the reality of patron nudges. To friends, Michelangelo wondered what the hell he was doing painting the Sistine Chapel:

"I am not in the right place—I am not a painter." ²

Imagine the fortitude that it takes to outrightly dismiss commissions, when even both Michelangelo and da Vinci couldn't buck them. Commissions were used by the Vatican and other world leaders to yoke great artists, likely as a PsyOp, a psychological power play. I figured this out early in my career and because of my unconditional love for art, I would not prostitute my soul.

Commissions aside, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to those artists who developed proportion, anatomy, form, and perspective. This grounded me in fundamentals early on, though I was not taught it, I developed by first-hand observations, testing, and from analyzing the successes made by my all-time favorite artists. By rejecting their mistakes I saved myself from pain, dead ends, failures, and bitterness. I saved my soul by rejecting commissions and only painting from love.

The next huge innovation in art: was the light and color theory of daylight by Claude Monet. I am not speaking of his explicitly stating color theories, rather he validated them through his paintings. His universality is that most people can recognize the fresh daylight colors in his paintings.

In painting those light and color vibrations directly from life, he and many of the other French Impressionists mastered their fresh "impressions," unfortunately they didn’t master the skills of painting the human figure. This was an important puzzle for me to resolve: how to integrate fresh alive color and light and realistic human figures.

Since I was a teenager not only did I make paintings and drawings from direct perception, when I would embark on a major work I would immerse myself into the meaning of the subject matter's content. Asking myself, "Out of all the millions of emotions and impressions I have, what subject matter is the most worthy one?"

Though it was a natural query for me, the question led me to Aristotle’s brilliant concept of eudaemonia, a sense of happiness or flourishing experienced as an end in itself, not a step to something else.³

My freshman year I studied Pre-Socratic thought in a Philosophy 401 senior class. Fortunately, the teacher was sympathetic, he knew I was majoring in fine art and that I was on a tennis scholarship. He asked me why I wanted to take his class, I replied "I needed an elective and I looked at the entire undergrad catalog and your class was the most interesting."

I didn't know about Aristotle's concept of happiness, eudaemonia, until decades later, even though my artwork had and still does embrace this spirit, the spirit of contemplative happiness. But I must have picked it up by some kind of osmosis. I recall reading Rand's The Romantic Manifesto in my early 20s, and she explains that art is not a didactic field. Rather, art projects a stance towards life as an end in itself. Later, I would find out from reading Aristotle that she was paraphrasing him. I was also extremely attracted to her allegories of ancient Greek myths in Atlas Shrugged, that expressed a spiritual, god-like humanism. It was nothing like the dry and boring atheist manifestos.

After five decades of painting full-time, pushing the boundaries of color and light theory, using body language as a tool to express emotional and philosophical worldviews, drawing observations from real life, and embracing the sacredness of the individual, I embarked on the Space Series.⁴

Its key themes are that the individual human is the metaphorical center of the universe, celebrating beauty as an elegant balance in all things, and notably a symbol of self-esteem. The metaphors of transparent shadows as a foil to the concreteness of the lit areas convey that transparency is an awareness of our darker selves, and amplifies that we are the stuff of the universe, but it is the light that defines us. The background setting of the nebulae as an otherworldly context drives home the godlikeness of humanity at its best. Far from alienating, I think human gods and goddesses serve as symbolic icons to remind us of how magnificent it is that we are all born human, and not some form of insignificant non-cognitive gnat species.

Having rejected commissions as viable artistic practice, the Space Series is born 100% out of my unconditional love of art. So far the 14 complete works represent two years of a self-funded labor of love.

I don’t believe in humility as it is antithetical to self-esteem and ownership of one's spirit.

I don’t believe in self-sacrifice as it is antithetical to self-realization.

I don’t believe in being a tool or a vehicle for any higher power, or even a higher power; we are not gnats. Though it is understandable the enormous responsibility to honor the magical potential of being human.

It is a fucking magnificent marvel and an honor to be born human, and higher still to embrace our individualism.

It is amazing that we have the awareness of emotions, thoughts, and sensory perception. And that we have the imagination to imagine future possibilities.

If we only get the right blueprint, we can make existence a magnificent experience.

Like with the dark ages, one sad aspect of this last ¾ century is that we have all been under the dark shadow of an evil PsyOp by the CIA and the deep state to kill all authentic art values that were one of the pillars key of our human evolution. The psychological nihilism is so evil it makes the dark ages look like a picnic. No human endeavor in the history of humankind has attempted and succeeded in eradicating the unique and incredible way humans evolve, namely cognitive potential and awareness. Postmodern art was not organic but orchestrated to kill our minds, hearts, and souls. Some people think this was done solely for control over others by destroying their self-esteem, clarity, and purpose. Though I think a more powerful agenda is that these evil people are projecting their putrid souls and they would rather kill all of humanity than face themselves.⁵

I can't believe how fortunate I have been not only to escape but to offer the light, my Space Series, showing the way out of the darkest aesthetic period in all of humanity.⁶

1. Chapter 22, Polyclitus’s Canon of Proportions

2. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Letter to Giovanni da Pistoia, c. 1509, quoted in Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo: Artist, Sculptor, Architect, Engineer (Princeton University Press, 1943), Vol. 1, p. 345.

3. The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Ethics of Aristotle. Note search “happiness” rather than eudaemonia or eudaimonia. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8438/pg8438-images.html#chap01

4. I share my aesthetic theories as some of the art tutorials in my book, The Art Studio Companion, and in my book, Newberry Color Theory.

5. CIA Weaponizing Abstract Art and Its Fallout: Corrupting Media, Foundations, Art Institutions, Reputations, and Artists
https://newberryarchive.wordpress.com/2021/01/31/cia-weaponizing-abstract-art-and-its-fallout/

6. The Space Series So Far: https://newberryarchive.wordpress.com/2024/01/12/my-space-series-so-far/