ONLY IN BROOKLYN

Imagine a relaxed afternoon on a subarctic beach in Alaska, enjoying Peruvian anchovies that are also related to tuna. Take that, kilki v tomate!

                                                         As seen at a grocery store on 86th Avenue
                                                         in Bensonhurst on 10/12/2014

Das Boot

Oil on canvas, 26" x 20". This was originally envisaged as a purely minimalist image a la the Black Square - and here's what came out in the end. Sometimes I wonder who is really at the wheel here ... As to the concept itself, try to chew on the words - slowly, meticulously, as if savoring a spoonful of caviar. D-a-s B-0-0-t! Ah, delicieux! Get your own allusions, I ain't sharing mine.

Bird Eats Fish I

Oil on canvas, 20" x 26". Following my first experiments with painting on unprimed canvas (see Fish Eats Bird, 2008, below) I have come up with an idea to make it a series - half a dozen to a dozen similarly executed images, to be tentatively known as "Good Eats". This is the next step up, and another version of same (Bird Eats Fish II) is already in the works. Stick around, and let's see what else the food chain brings.

The Coconut Head

The Coconut Head. Oil and sand on canvas, 20"x26". This was painted from a staged photo of a beat up coconut washed up on the beach in Marco Island, FL. The painting, started almost two years ago and essentially completed a year later, had been sitting on my improvised "work in progress" rack ever since while I was racking my brain for a way to at least not ruin it, if not make it better. Finally, last week I summoned courage enough to put some finishing touches on it and called it a painting. Hence the completion date.

The Blue Lip Rising

aka Vozneseniye Sinegubogo Gamadrila, for those of you who can read Russian. 19" x 26", oil on canvas. In a bizarre combination, this painting was inspired by some of the flat-colored yet amazingly expressive canvases by Joan Miro and a certain politically incorrect poem most of you Russian speakers must have recently seen on the internet. Started in the heat of the last presidential campaign and completed in early summer of 2009, this painting remains my last finished work to date, before I went to write my first novel (and then the second one, nonstop) To quote incomparable Forrest Gump, "and that's all I have to say about that."

Fish Eats Bird

20"x26", oil on unprimed canvas. This was painted in one layer and one sitting, on a rainy Sunday, under the influence of a series of Joan Miro's "anti-paintings" on unprimed canvas that I saw at a MoMA exhibition. I saw a lot of Joan Miro's work before, and I like it a lot - in my book, he's a solid Surrealist No. 2, coming right after The Great Man himself - but here I was amazed how you can achieve a pretty stunning effect using the most basic of technical means. My hands started itching right away, hence this humble effort.