GIVE/LOVE is Here Now!

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At a lean and mean 16 minutes, it is the perfect soundtrack for impromptu Christmas parties with your most erudite pals, or when you’re all alone. You’ll feel like mistletoe has been hung on your brain. It’s that good!

Listen to a sample of “I Can't Sleep (On Christmas Eve)” performed by the Snowman Electrical Band, from GIVE/LOVE.

I Can't Sleep (On Christmas Eve) - Snowman Electrical Band

If you haven’t already done so, send us your mailing address and we will send you a copy. For free!

California Love

I am honored to be showing some drawings in this three-person show in Oakland, California. The show was curated by Devin Satterfield, who used to run Liminal Gallery and now runs Helloakland. E.T. Groff is an amazing artists as well as co-director of the Basement Gallery in Oakland. Good company, good times. Please check it out if you can.

Poster Children

16x20 Bees and Trees posters available now in our Etsy shop! Finally! Yes!

Any Way You Want It

Bees and Trees are sending our creations out into the world and they're ending up in all sorts of crazy places. Two of our girls are now available as prints from Urban Outfitters. So if you've ever dreamed of having an angry librarian adorn your iphone or a shy nerd grace the cover of your MacBook Pro, your sweet fantasy can now become a reality.



Check them both out at the urban outfitters print shop.

High Design

Bees and Trees have made our first foray into web design. We designed and built the website for the Asheville NC band Kovacs and the Polar Bear. Visit the site and listen to their album “Loathsome Teeth.” They are breaking out new material at their shows, so get to one if you can.

Imagine a scene in which two drunk kids in a purple jeep are chasing Dave Matthews around a muddy field. Now, imagine that those kids are listening to their favorite sad song at top volume. Kovacs and the Polar Bear are performing that song.
kovacsandthepolarbear.com

And here is a site that features a picture of the feet of someone in Kovacs and the Polar Bear:
lydia see

Secrets of the Magicians Revealed

I photographed my most recent oil painting as it progressed. I thought it would be cool to chronicle the painting’s development. I’ve never painted a landscape in oil in quite this way, but this method of painting some colorful, abstract stuff and then painting a landscape over the top, is something I’ve done in gouache a few times. This painting is part of a group of new work combining two painted languages. This work refers to Romantic trends, and themes of transcendence in visual art from the mid 19th and the mid 20th century. It keeps me off the street.

Jena, over at the super cool blog Modish, just featured some of our portraits and gave us a most complimentary shout out! We really appreciate the kind words from such a well respected blog.

Go over there and check it out!

papernstitch

This month Bees and Trees will be showing on a curated site called papernstitch. It's a great site that features fine art, home goods, and even a bit of clothing. We're really excited to be showing there, so drop over and check us out!

The Ghost, The Beast, The Chief, The Hawk, (Part 2)

“LSD is the bomb.” – Sgt. Joe Friday

Justin, over at Siempre La Luna, has composed a brilliant piece of music based on “The Ghost, The Beast, The Chief, The Hawk.” Refreshingly, his composition bears exactly none of the stereotypical earmarks of “acid rock,” and as a result it captures the para-linguistic nature of the LSD experience perfectly. But it doesn’t stop there.

The Ghost, The Beast, The Chief, The Hawk

I am absolutely astounded by the way in which Justin’s composition, also entitled “The Ghost, The Beast, The Chief, The Hawk,” provides such a suitable audio aspect to an idea that I evoked visually with my mandalas. An essential dimension now exists in Justin’s composition for describing the archetypal symbology present in “The LSD Story” episode of Dragnet. Do yourself a favor and go over to Siempre La Luna and read all about the conceptual underpinnings of the music as well as the technical wherefore’s and whatnot’s of it’s composition and arrangement.

Like all of the best and most complex music, “The Ghost, The Beast, The Chief, The Hawk” rewards repeated, and detailed, listening. Genius in its conception, expert in its execution and eloquent in its evocative capabilities, “The Ghost, The Beast, The Chief, The Hawk” will likely provide you with the most transcendent experience of your day. An MP3 of this sonic gem is downloadable at Siempre La Luna.

In order to keep things in (ahem) proper perspective, and to give Jack Webb his due, here are a few words from Joe Friday. Be safe, kids.

The Ghost, The Beast, The Chief, The Hawk (Part 1.5)

After my recent revelation, I decided to make another one of these Dragnet/LSD mandalas. I figured that knowing what I was doing would help and that I could now make the work with a little more intention. I'm reasonably pleased with the outcome.

The Ghost, The Beast, The Chief, The Hawk

“ ‘C’est la vie,’ say the old folks, ‘it goes to show you never can tell.’ ” –Chuck Berry

On January 12, 1967, Jack Webb brought Dragnet blazing back to the small screen in a new incarnation, re-vamped for the times-- Dragnet 1967. The first episode was “The LSD Story,” and it is perhaps the most famous episode of Dragnet ever.



Dragnet 1967, and particularly “The LSD Story,” is part of the media acid panic of the late 1960’s. At once creating fear and mystique, there was much hysterical rhetoric around LSD. Driven into the black market, and thus the mainstream, when it was officially prohibited on the ominous date October 6, 1966, acid was hot on the cultural radar, titillating the teenagers and scaring their parents. The implications of this, and other fascinating acid conspiracies, are well examined in Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain’s book Acid Dreams.

“The LSD Story” was directed and written by Jack Webb himself (he was credited as John Randolph), and as in every Dragnet episode he portrayed Sgt. Joe Friday. Among some other pretty wild assertions in “The LSD Story” Joe Friday gives “the ghost, the beast, the chief and the hawk” as “acid freak” parlance for LSD.

The ghost, the beast, the chief, the hawk.

Those words, all having dark and/or authoritarian connotations, sound a minor key against the subject of LSD. They are a creepy counterpoint to the brightly colored and Baroque language typically associated with the acid experience. Ghost, beast, chief and hawk are effective poetic choices in this way, but they have a meaning beyond their formal aspect.

These terms have a corollary in ancient symbology as the angel (ghost), the lion (beast), the bull (chief) and the eagle (hawk). The angel, lion, bull and eagle are mentioned specifically in the Old Testament of the Bible. They are mentioned too in the book of Revelation, and they are associated with the four authors of the Gospels in the New Testament: Matthew-- the angel, Mark-- the lion, Luke-- the bull, John--the eagle.

The angel, lion, bull and eagle appear on the Tarot cards “The World” and “The Wheel”—they surround the world, and the wheel. A sphinx, such as the famous one in Giza, appears to be a morphological combination of these symbols.

The symbols are associated with the four elements (angel-water, lion-fire, bull-earth, eagle-air), and analogous to the Zodiac signs Libra, Leo, Taurus and Scorpio.

The angel, lion, bull, and eagle are used to symbolize four extreme personality types in Robert Anton Wilson’s behavior theory described in his book Prometheus Rising.

Basically, these extremely generalized personality types are created by an orientation toward one quadrant of a matrix generated by the programming of the first two neurological circuits of the mind. Circuit One operates bio-survival. An animal advances toward nurturing and safety or retreats from harm (forward and back). Circuit Two controls brain functioning on the inter-personal/political level. An animal enlarges its body to dominate, or shrinks in domination by another (up and down). A combination of that up-down, forward-back represent four very basic “directions” for a person to go when they are pulled off center, so to speak. People can be like an angry, domineering and paranoid hawk, a stubborn, truculent bull, an easy going, passive angel, a prideful, generous lion, or some combination thereof.


Again, these symbols encircle a complex subject, they lie outside of the center.

The terms ghost, beast, chief and hawk were chosen by Jack Webb to name LSD. Whether he read them somewhere, or he heard them when he infiltrated a gang of “acid freaks,” or he made them up because they sounded good is unknown, and unimportant. In “The LSD Story” they identify LSD, the terms encircle the idea of LSD.

In the past year and a half, I have occasionally made gouache works dealing with the ghost, the beast, the chief and the hawk. Always, I have made them the same way-- with the words in the four corners of radiating squares. It just felt natural to do so, and now I know why.

The Ghost, The Beast, The Chief, The Hawk, Gouache on Paper, 2009

The work is a mandala. The center from which the colorful squares radiate is blank and roughly the size of a tab of blotter acid. This representation of an acid tab, as an empty center, the silenced ego, describes a condition commonly attributed to an acid trip. The idea of LSD is framed by four terms with ancient symbolic analogs, which name, reduce and generalize their subject.

All of these connections and conclusions were drawn only after I was finishing this most recent version of this work. As Joseph Campbell’s work famously points out, ancient symbols pervade even contemporary culture. Evidently they remain potent enough to communicate directly with the subconscious.

Pop Portraiture (and a Chimp in Hippie Garb)

Ronnie Spector, Gouache on paper, 12x9in., 2009

Much of my work draws from popular culture as its source, but I don’t think about Pop Art all that much. However, it was on my mind a lot in making two very different portraits—one of Ronnie Spector, and one of a chimpanzee. I painted the portraits in gouache, my second favorite paint, as a stop-gap project between oil paintings. The two portraits represent variant relationships to Pop Art.

I used a common photograph of Ronnie Spector as the source for my portrait of her. The source material is already an iconic and pre-coded sign that stands for Ronnie Spector. I painted that sign as a monochrome further flattening the image and aligning it with the strain of Pop Art that most closely resembles mass-produced, utilitarian images and artifacts. The border of the portrait I lifted from Peter Blake’s 1968 work, “Rainbow Babe.”

Though derived from popular culture, the portrait of the chimp is more photo-based realism than Pop Art, per se, and is more in keeping with my usual way of working. The source of the portrait is Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. My technical decisions in the painting were based upon situating the chimp in space and representing it in a naturalistic way. The chimp here is elevated to iconic status though it didn’t start out that way. At least, not in the same way as Ronnie Spector.

Untitled, Gouache on paper, 12x9in., 2009

Evolution Revolution

I’m not afraid to lay it right on the line. I think Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp is funny. Really, really funny. Chimps in clothes, acting human is right up my alley, especially when the whole routine bangs and clangs with the color and noise of early 1970’s, Saturday morning psychedelia.

I decided to indulge this sophomoric side of my self with a painting of the Evolution Revolution, the “band” of chimps that occasionally “performed” on Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. I thought I might write something about how these chimps seem to display the three or four most primitive neurological circuits of the brain, as described by Dr. Timothy Leary, and what that says about being/seeming human. However, none of that stuff quite captured the spirit of the Evolution Revolution or my painting of them.

Evolution Revolution, Oil on Canvas, 32 x 42in. 2009

I made this painting in a spirit of fun, humor and adventure. While speaking to my obsession with the late 1960’s-early 1970’s media of Los Angeles, the painting represents a departure from my typical way of working in a few key respects. The palette is about twice the size of that with which I generally work. There are fourteen individual colors represented, not including white and the earth-colors I used for the under-painting. I typically paint with round brushes of varying sizes, but for “Evolution Revolution” I used only one size 12, (which is pretty big), flat brush. Also, I did a lot of painting with my left hand—I am right-handed.

Just for kicks, enjoy this video of the Evolution Revolution doing their thing. The keyboard player particularly tears things up! And you can leave the bong on the shelf. This is joyous, hilarious and confusing enough just as it is.

Now in Panavision!

Bees And Trees on Etsy

This is a panoramic photograph I (Bees) took from a scenic overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I used a Diana F+ camera on a tripod and rolled the film forward just enough before each shot to overlap the exposures and create the panoramic image.

"This is the city"

"Cops Create Hippies, Parker Center, Los Angeles," oil on canvas, 16x20in, 2009

Two of my recent paintings depict buildings in Los Angeles that have figured prominently, though inconspicuously, in cultural histories that have fascinated me since adolescence. The buildings are the Parker Center, the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Hall of Justice, which among other things, houses courts and the county coroner. The histories are the strange and morbid tales of drug fueled crime and perversion in Los Angeles after 1965.

"Hippies Create Cops, Hall of Justice, Los Angeles," oil on canvas, 16x20in, 2009

The paintings, formally and conceptually, reflect my personal fascination with Los Angeles in the late 1960’s, and also my persistent enthusiasm for holding oppositional forces in equilibrium, creating a dialog between perceived opposites. The buildings are grids rendered in neutral tones over saturated, intuitive streaks of color. Two visual language systems combine to make a whole. By presenting the Parker Center and the Hall of Justice alongside the visual cues of psychedelia I indicate the possibility of repositioning cultural information into new shapes, creating new ways to interpret stories.

Harry Morgan and Jack Webb as Officer Bill Gannon and Sgt. Joe Friday

A version of L.A. noir was played out in the media of the late 1960’s. The news coverage of the trial and conviction of the Manson Family was often dubious and exploitive. Jack Webb’s televised tributes to the LAPD, “Dragnet” and “Adam-12,” tell the story of a city fighting hard against riots, flesh peddling and murder—all of it soaked in LSD and wreaking of grass.

In this context, images of the Parker Center and the Hall of Justice represent not just the other side of colorful hippie hype, but icons of an entity, or force beyond the self. They are contemporary ritual sites every bit as mysterious and grandiose as places like Chichen Itza, or the Great Pyramid in Giza. Theories abound with regard to the divine or extra-terrestrial design of these ancient places, so palpable is the sense that these structures represent cosmic concerns. Images of such ritual sites, ancient and contemporary, the Parker Center and the Great Pyramid, are the visual counterparts to speculative tales of ideology, justice and governance.

Image copyright 1999 by Televideos.

Keep your eyes on the sky.

Bees and Trees UFO Sighting Giclee Print on Etsy.

"UFOs have been sighted in America."
-Erich Von Daniken, 1968

Eagle vs. Snake

The eagle, representative of spiritual flight, battles the snake which is representative of physical, earth-bound existence. This is the struggle of all who seek to elevate their consciousness beyond the illusory, earthly concerns.

See more at Bees and Trees on Etsy!

Miss Ecstatic 1962

Miss Ecstatic hops up quickly and nearly skips to the door. She's wearing the cultured pearls she got at her sweet 16 party last April and her brand new Haymaker Orlon sweater. "My, this outfit was a prescient choice!," she bubbles to herself. She hadn't been expecting a caller, but in Miss Ecstatic's opinion it's always a good idea to dress as if one is.

Hopefully there are still a few cucumber sandwiches in the fridge from the get-together last night...

Visit her at Bees and Trees on Etsy!