The New Inspirational Movement

A statement from my internet art presentation, “Naked Dave”.
Dave Stevens died March 11, 2008.

My Naked Dave series has been a way for me to work out the anger, grief, and loss that my unfortunate relationship with Dave Stevens brought me. I was only 18 when I met him. I was not too much older than that when he fathered my child in 1978. The way he tried to bully me into getting an abortion during my pregnancy was nearly unforgivable. When I lost my baby through a miscarriage, the emotional pain I went through was so intense that I tried to block it out for several years afterward. But the psychic injury would not heal. I have been dealing with the effects this loss has had on me all my adult life. The whole situation made me despondent and depressed for many years. Dave helped me through none of this. Just knowing this person almost killed me.

In 1990, Dave began seeking me out again. He held out the possibility to me that we could reconcile and "carry on in a more positive light", as he put it. Seems we were at cross purposes. He attempted to apologize for trying to avoid his responsibilities in making me pregnant, but I wanted him to apologize for telling lies about me after it happened, the greater transgression in my eyes. Neither apology was accomplished. Instead of acknowledging the past and putting things right, he withdrew once the damage was done. Cast off the opportunity for forgiveness and reconciliation because I did not perceive that a brief embrace between us was supposed to serve for the entire apology and I was not supposed to press him for more than this. It wasn’t what happened in 1978 that inspired the series. We were young and stupid and that can be forgiven. No, it was the failed "reconciliation" of 1991 that lit the fire. I had been betrayed for the second time and I had to do something to save myself. I couldn’t walk the earth with murderous rage in my bosom and let it destroy everything around me. Naked Dave originally began as a way I could cathartically extract the poison this man brought into my life with his cowardice. Projecting his own unbearable guilt onto me and dismissing my existence by perpetrating a calumnious myth he invented that I am some kind of dangerous psychopath (like his dear friend, Bettie Page). These paintings became an entire genre of my life’s work, one that has brought me recognition. (Though, not the only recognized thing I’ve ever done with my creativity, that’s for sure…) The publication of my project brought a healing flow of empathy from others, but also vilification from comic book geeks and others too emotionally shallow to understand why I had the need to make this art and disseminate it on the web. Many missed the irony and took "The Angriest Woman in the World" dead literal as a personal vendetta as if there wasn’t enough to be angry about, just having to live as a woman in this screwed-up world. One woman’s revenge is another’s individual justice.

For many years I assumed that Dave was merely annoyed by my paintings of him but I was wrong. In recent years I discovered that he was deeply affected by what I had done. The only friend we still had in common beseeched me in an email to forgive him, but I found it impossible to do so without face to face reconciliation. In 2005, when I offered an olive branch to Dave through a go-between, he refused. True to his real nature, he claimed himself as the sole victim of this tragedy. As if my justified resentment sprang unmitigated by anything he had done, and that he bore no blame. Now that he is dead, face to face reconciliation and forgiveness between is not possible. I have to live with this reality and find the way to forgiveness without the reconciliation that I knew long ago I would never see.

My motives for this project have been the same since I started. To heal from the injury inflicted and diffuse my anger by having fun with my past pain. The issues this unfortunate relationship brought to my life, and my ability to process them through my art, still inspires me. When that changes, I will be done with this series. To aspire to make great art one must know truth, beauty, and love. My muse, as unwilling a subject as he may have been, was a muse nonetheless. The English Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a muse, Elizabeth Siddal. A recent book about her life has the following quotation from John Ruskin which took my breath away with it’s truth: "And yet Elizabeth had been loved tenderly, loved by the man and by the artist, which is to be loved twice, because painters have a tenderness for the creature that suddenly realizes for them, in an exquisite and living form, a long cherished dream, and lavish upon her a gaze that is more thoughtful, more intuitive and, to put it plainly, more charged with love than is possible for other men."

Below is a study for the last painting of the Naked Dave series. I have known since February of 2005 that Dave was ill with cancer. I was sworn to secrecy and struggled with thoughts of continuing the series altogether for this reason, but the heart sees what the conscious mind can’t bear to know. The monarchs are in the painting because the Aztecs believed they carried the souls of the dead. I started this latest painting in July 2005. I will continue to paint Dave until I am done and I can bring peace to myself.

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Reconstructed Landscapes

In a near future when human civilization is destroy by a natural disaster or by our self’s. Nature will proclaim the lost land destroy by humanity and will reconstruct their landscapes in the concrete cities, destroying what was a civilization of chaos and destruction, giving back the balance of the species. The only essence of us will be the artifacts and ruins that will tell who we were and how we lived.

http://alexoliva.4t.com/
http://gto08.blogspot.com/
http://educaralostopos.blogspot.com

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Before i get into this idea of collaboration, i thought i’d hit up the link to my bebo profile and the photo albums i’m keeping over there. i am kind of beginning to visually categorize everything in my life or trying to. I have 10 albums so far. Each one has a 48 photo limit. It’s great for creating an online portfoilio of all my artwork because i work in so many mediums. it’s fun to divide them all up and make decisions to group certain things together in an effort to decriminalize them (ie. graffiti mixed in with gallery art… he he… is it legal is it not? and who really cares in the end?). Especially after you see my card that i sent to Gavin Newsom… that’s pretty revealing, if anybody even picked up on it. I had already given him my business card at that point anyway. Where do we draw the line on all these things? What is art and what is not?

Part of my art now is collecting news stuff about anna nicole smith… her legacy… her baby. I’m just so into her story… thus, my anna nicole smith rip bebo photo album… which i worked on for a couple hours this afternoon. i had to catch up on that before i wrote down the collaboration idea #1…. the anna nicole idea i had after i saw your recent drawings, isis. to be continued…

anyhow, here’s the bebo link

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