Arte De Timo

Author: admin

  • Comic Books


    At one point in my life I wanted to be a comic book artist. I know I used to draw a lot, but I’ve never really bothered keep track of what I drew or when. Now that I see this old sketch book my mom found, I remember drawing all this, and all the hopes and dreams I had when I was making them. I’m not exactly sure when I did these, but based on the last two, they were done in the years leading up to high school.

    I sense a strange mix of geekiness, artistry, angst and anger in all this. I am sure my early self, the one that drew all these, would have be mortified to see my current self sticking them up on the web like this. I’m glad I’m not that kid anymore, and can look back on these drawings without the embarrassment I had in my youth. Talk about a Napoleon Dynamite, “Lyger” moment here.

    It is amazing what some old drawings can stir up in ye ole’ noggin. There is so much buried down in my psyche that I don’t often access, yet is still present and influential in my personality.

  • Music and Memories

    I just heard a song from Nirvana on that internet music site, and it brought back a few memories of the first time I heard them. This will definitely date me, as does most musical preferences for people, but maybe you’ll relate.

    I was a Sophomore in high school and one of my friends let me listen to it on his portable CD player. For whatever reason, late in Spring, the idea came up to drive up to the mountains for a day of skiing. I don’t remember who brought it up, but my parents offered to drive. We woke up at 5am, one Saturday morning, and 3 of my friends came along. I had known these guys since 1st grade. We went to grammar school together and then to the same high school. By this point, though, we had started to drift apart, so it was one of those throw back trips that we all seem to need.

    High school does that to kids. When we are all confronted with becoming adults, we are forced to look in ourselves and realize, or maybe decide who we will be. We start forming the sort of lives we want to lead. The four of us hadn’t hung out much for months, and hadn’t done anything like this for a year at least. That trip to the mountains would be our last outing together. We had just become too different.

    For one day though, we shared some good times, and some songs on a CD player. The day of skiing was memorable for sure, too. The highlight of the day was the first run down an intermediate slope. The two of us who had skied before were a little shaky, yet we tried to give the other two some help. At the top, once we got of the lift, we were all surprised to see one of the newbies, tear off down the slope. I thought he had played us about not knowing how to sky. The other guy who knew how to sky went down after him to find out. I stayed up to help the fourth down.

    When we got to the bottom, there was a great story of how he really hadn’t known how to sky, and just figured pointing them straight downhill would be simple enough. Fortunately he didn’t hit anyone, but he did crash in the middle of a bunch of people, and sprayed snow all over some lady. He also got yelled at for going too fast, and nearly killing someone. It was all good fun.

    On the way home we piled into my dad’s Chevy extended cab and headed home. About 20 minutes into the 3 hour drive the CD player came out, and surprisingly it got passed around. We all got a chance to really listen to Nirvana.

    Like I said, we had been drifting apart and now belonged to slightly different crowds, but the music made us all connect. There were no issues sharing and being quite while the others listened. We were sharing something important, something special. It felt good knowing we all were on the same page and felt the same way about this guy wailing away. It wasn’t so much that the music was good, but that it was our music. It was and for our generation. My parents didn’t know what we were listening to. The radio station hadn’t started playing it. Courtney Love hadn’t started defiling her husband’s music. Before all that, and Cobain’s demise, Nirvana was grunge for us gen-Xers. He wasn’t a genius, or a master, as his suicide has suggested to some. The music was just a representation of a certain sentiment at our given time.

    So much music is that way, and every generation seems to have moments of clarity and voice, along with every individual. There is nothing particularly meaningful in that point, but its fun to be reminded of our youthful discoveries once in a while.

  • Reclaimed Wood Stool

    I’ve been working on this for a while. It’s gone through three iterations, and then the long process of finishing it. The base is Douglas Fir 4×4’s and 4×6’s (even with hidden nails that killed my jointer blades.) The top is White Oak with Claro Walnut tenons. The finish on the bottom is a dark shellac in 4 coats, and the top is finished with Polysure, an Eco-friendly polyurethane. I worked with the natural irregularities and rough surfaces of the wood to develop the asymmetric design. The different woods and finishes create contrasts that are carried into the varying organic and angular lines.

  • Time

    It has been 10 years to the month since I last worked a nine-to-five job and sat in a cubical day in and day out. It seems like it was only a few years ago, yet it is starting to fade. It was such a pinnacle moment in my life. It scares me to know that it is so far away and obsolete, now.

    Since then, I have done a few interesting things, like traveling, working at NASA on a very cool project called SOFIA, going to grad school to earn my MFA, and most importantly raising my son. In these last ten years, I have also made decisions that have slowly eaten away at the opportunities I worked to create for myself. They aren’t what you would expect though. I didn’t get into anything seedy or indulge in a vice. I have, conversely, cleaned my life up, but I am starting to realize that I am now on the wrong side of society.

    Where did it all start to go wrong? I think the first sign of my downward slide was when I gave up soda. It wasn’t much at the time but proved to be a gateway. That was right around the time I left my legendary first and only “real” job as a professional services engineer. Coincidence?

    The next move in my downfall was to give up cable TV. Way back, after I started in that one and only job, I had ordered cable when I knew I would have a regular salary. When the AT&T guy didn’t show up twice, I said screw it. I told myself I would never order cable again. I am now hooked to the internet 24/7, but at least I am typing out my own thoughts most of the time, and not sucking up hours and hours of TV like I used to when I was a teenager.

    A year or two later I was hooked on organic food. This was before Michael Pollen was even close to being in the public eye. I’m not totally sure, but I also think this was before there was even a corporate, I mean government, USDA organic standard. I remember talking to my brother-in-law about it whenever we would get a chance to see each other. It was new and sort of revolutionary back then. A rebellious move, but I only wish I knew what it would lead to.

    Now, I buy organic cotton clothing, compost all our scraps, have a garden, can fruits, have no gaming system, live as a vegetarian, and drive a Prius. How far I strayed.

    Over these years, I let my sports religiosity drift, too. As a kid I had a huge sports card collection, and would pour over the box scores each and every day. I played soccer, but I followed the main stream sports without question. At some point over the last ten years, though, I became a fervent “alternative” sports practitioner and dropped my fanhood. Can you believe it? I used to love the Sharks, Giants, Niners, and even the A’s, but if you asked me, now, to name a player on any of those teams, I couldn’t do it.

    I’ve gone to a different major sporting event each of the last few years since my son was born, from hockey, to baseball and now football, in an attempt to maybe rekindle something. With my son growing up, I don’t want to deny him a chance at a normal life, so I feel it is my obligation to teach him how to play all these sports, and take him to professional games. I have to tell you though, at each and every pro game we have gone to, I have felt out of place, bored, and a little scared of the fans. At the football game, I intensely felt all three.

    At first, I thought all this movement away from the main stream had to do with being a parent or a stay-at-home husband. I guessed it was all the kids songs and late nights reading Thomas the Train, or singing the ABC’s, but it went back further than that.

    I started to blame all the artists I got involved with in grad school. They are a deviously “Unamerican” crowd after all, but again I think the seeds were planted long before my MFA program.

    As far as I can tell, my current predicament began forming all the way back in grade school. I was told I would be “somebody who could make a difference.” It doesn’t sound like much, but to a wide-eyed sensitive boy like myself, that was a very dangerous idea to suggest. It was license to be myself, act responsibly, and make decisions based on my conscience (built up to seek social justice by those same teachers.) Going through high school the pattern was there, yet no one saw it in time to confront it.

    I made decisions based on what I thought was right and wrong, and tried to not hurt or judge anyone, including my parents or family. As a result, I didn’t drink or smoke. I didn’t stay out late without telling my parents. I respected my teachers and wanted to learn, even though it was fairly boring. As a result, by the time I graduated, I had a job, a graduating GPA in the high 3’s, and one friend who wasn’t anywhere near my age. I was going to a good college, and I actually believed I would get somewhere important through being smart and doing the right thing.

    Fast forward to today, and you can guess how out of touch I am, and how few people I interacted with, never mind friends. I am shut in my house doing chores, playing games with my amazing son, and without a job prospect or even much of a career path. I am an artist. Yikes! I kid myself by thinking that my artwork is relevant, and that I will have more time in coming years to get it out there for the world to soak up, but we all know that my work isn’t relevant, I won’t have more time, and no one will ever really care much for what I do. Without my wife’s grace, who knows what sort of depressing suit I would be.

    I am on the outside after all, and time is not on my side. I am out of touch with the common experience, and therefore my timelines are off. My work talks to a different cultural site (if it even goes beyond my head,) and as a result little of what I make is useful or meaningful to anyone.

    Beyond the basic question of how I will make a living in this type of life, there is a deeper question here. It is the question that I am getting at under my jest. How close to the cultural center does a person need to be for work to be valued? I am not truly an outsider; I speak the common language, I have the same middle class background and interests, but I am also not capable of being in the here-and-now. Being current is what cultural producers/employers/curators/etc. seek. Being in the here and now is what normalcy requires, and what sanity is based on is it not?

    How far afield can a person stray before they become lost from society, I wonder?

  • The Game of Cars


    My wife, son, and I have gotten into the habit of playing all sorts of road-trip games when we get into the car, even when we are just going to the market. My son really likes vehicles of all shapes and sizes, and for the last couple years, no matter how hard we try to entertain ourselves with other things, we seem to revert to playing car games. We play all sorts of games from Road Trip bingo and license plate games, to card games and a modern version of Slug-bug (without the hitting) involving hybrids and electric cars. It’s all cars all the time.

    Anyone with kids knows, too, that when you play a game, listen to a song, or read a kid’s book long enough or enough times, it gets stuck in your head. Now, everywhere we go, whether we are playing a game, or with even with our son, my wife and I are always counting up Prii and looking out for new electric and hybrid cars models we haven’t seen before. We’ve both caught ourselves more than once, alone, yelling “Chevy Volt,” or “Nissan Leaf,” as we drive along to a meeting or work.

    We’ve also started taking pictures of them on occasion. Here are a few. One is from a trip through Davis, CA. One is a two-for in San Francisco, and the other is from my wife, down the street on a walk. Are we nuts?

  • Towel Rack


    I thought this was cute of us. Its a thrift store enamel strainer turned into a small and interesting towel rack. Handles will also be good to hang hangers, and the whole thing will hang dry big towels well.

  • A crazy idea…

    Social liberals have been pushing for same-sex marriage and for overturning Citizens United, (corporations are people) for quite a while now, without a whole lot of success. I had an idea that would turn everything on its head, and address many of the issues with these stances.

    What if, instead of awarding inclusive rights to specific people, or excluding rights from non-individual groups, we treat everyone and all legal entities the same. Lets make everyone part of a corporation. No more marriages, unions, sole proprietorships, partnerships or families. Lets make all legal entities the same, a corporation. A corporation would consist of zero or more people and share the same tax burden and criminal responsibility that corporations do now. Voting would be turned over to your corporation, which would have as many votes as its constituent people. Criminal punishment would be similarly dolled out to the corporation as a whole, with every member responsible for serving it.

    Other complicated laws that would go away include inheritance, shared property, parental custody, and insurance. All sorts of stuff would be made very simple.

    Of course anyone who wants to remain an individual could be a corporation of one, but families in any number or form could become tight communes with shared property, insurance, and legal protections. Small groups could then belong to larger corporations as umbrella structures, just like current corporate monopolies do now.

    The point of a corporation is protect its owners from liability and to make normal business risk more manageable. What makes it hard to swallow about how they function now, is that while people don’t have any of those protections in life, a corporation’s owners, in their wealth, get all sorts of protections and tax benefits. At the core of letting corporations spread into the realm of people-hood is that its unfair since real people aren’t allowed the same tax and legal benefits.

    My proposal isn’t to cripple the economy that provides us with our current lifestyle by limiting corporations, but instead just extends the governmental control, tax breaks, legal shelters, and influence that corporations have back to the the common person.

  • Looking Up


    A self portrait, after not doing self portraits for quite a while.

  • Eco Friendly Bed – Cool Packaging!


    This is how our new bed looked in our room when I brought it down from the truck.


    Here is how it looked out of the box and unpacked.

    Did I mention this is a Queen size full spring coil mattress?

    We decided to go with this Keetsa bed, because it was surprisingly comfortable, reasonably cheap, has a very long 12 year full guarantee, and uses all organic cotton, bio-foam, is recyclable, and the packaging is pretty ingenious and Eco-friendly.

    Here is a little vid of it poofing up. Just like a camp pad, only bigger. I’ll post back in a couple months to see if it gives us good nights of sleep.

  • “It’s The Shinning, Boy!”

    While digging through a pile of canvases and old paintings of mine, I found this one. I had a period in my early 20’s where I explored different forms of expression. The canvas already had some paint on it when I got it as a twenty-something year old. I added my own ideas to it, and this is where it ended up. You can see I was already commenting on media and society even back then.

    Take guess where the quote comes from.

    The image seems to be forming a symbolic tension between the noisy background and the framed foreground/top layer. The gray frame, figure, and red gradient are applied thinly on top of the textured background, and really play off of the surface quality of the existing painted canvas. The central gray figure sticks its tongue out, tonally in line with the quote that is stenciled at the bottom. It’s snarky and sharp, but applied like graffiti on top of what was already there. Yet, stylistically the background is the part that is chaotic like graffiti, not the top layer of imagery. I was playing with how media fills the role of both a frame and a commentary, but only in a superficial way. Even in its commentary the mediastic content can’t get too far out of the noise from witch it comes.

    Finding this old painting, and looking at it critically has reminded me of something a colleague of mine, DC Spensley, said once in a conversation a couple of years ago. He was explaining how he went into the home of a photographer friend that had passed away, and realized that all his friend’s work had instantly become junk. It was all left behind with little value, and was headed for the dump. DC proclaimed that as artists, all the material work we do just becomes junk at some point. That is unless we become wildly famous, which is as likely as winning the lottery. DC’s solution was to restart his art career as a digital/new media artist. I give him credit for coming to terms with that sifted paradigm.

    DC had a compelling point, as smug and stinging as it was. In the post-medium, post-studio, post-modern(?) world where we live, the practice of making art is removed from a sense of categorical belonging. There is no way to tell where an art practice fits in the world just by viewing/participating/feeling it. As the Modern movement of last century made art autonomous from ideas like craft, kitsch and “life,” again there is a notion that art is apart and above traditional places of origin and display. All work becomes site specific with context providing the complete frame for a practice, not just a superfluous curiosity. Craft activities like knitting and paper folding, and digital creations like games and VR’s are political and meaningful in that within an art setting, they comment on the social institutions of art. It is a return to the belief that art transcends the world from which it comes, even as it is existentially tied to it for meaning. I’ve heard this shift called Alter-Modernism. DC’s proclamation has a sense of that to be sure.

    In this discussion, I wonder how shifting valuation systems will play out in the art world. What happens to art in a world with a perplexing duality between scarcity of resources and an over-abundance of creative acts. How will the paradigm shift to accommodate resource heavy, material-based arts, and those who simply just create more bits in the digital abyss. Even as context is key, and our post-isms allow for it all, it still seems like the schisms between the veins of the art world are too large to allow for any sort of coherent discourse.

    I, for one, always feel as though I am missing something in art conversations. (I haven’t flexed my art critical muscles for a while, so I am sure I am right now.) My underlying feeling that I never will be able to follow contemporary discourse is daunting. As an artist it becomes difficult to talk to other artists except in an oversimplified way, providing artists’ names to somehow provide examples of any point made (something I am extraordinarily bad at). Without a common history or common language, we all remain foreign to each other. Imposing any such history or language, though, just ends up stinking to Modernism.