art by benjamin harubin. text and art copyright benjamin harubin. posted in no particular order, from 1976 to the present. i have the capability to print the strictly digital works up to 40" with archival materials. some restrictions may apply.
contact email is bharubin provided by gmail with a com thrown in there for good measure. and a @, too.

click on pics to giganticize. dimensions are listed in order: horizontal, vertical, depth.











Saturday, December 22, 2012

bloodroot vision

"What I say, George, 3X is true"
or
"geometry of bloodroot vision"
31" x 25"
acrylic, marker, grease pencil on paper on canvas on plywood

this is like one of those time travel dreams where you look into the mirror and see that there's a hole in your head (in addition to the usual ones).  
when you look closer, you see that there is a supermarket inside and you're looking down into it from a very high ceiling.  the shelves are stocked with jars filled with sea slugs, which are mating, except they can't reach each other.        
they begin to penis fence with their own reflections in the glass.  
you realize that you must free them before they stab themselves to death, so you must find the valve that lets seawater in and then open all the jars, but there's a fierce wereweasel roaming the aisles, looking for anything to eat other than sea slugs, with their undulating excrescences filled with foul tasting irritants.  
just then, a glowing wormhole bubble appears above you, disgorging intelligent reptilian anteaters from earth's distant past that are seeking a decent cheeseburger.  The expanding bubble of scaly limbs pushes you down through a point that intersects the path of the charging wereweasel, especially the hard pointy bits that surround its stinking mouth hole...




speaking of alien technology,
we have it right here on earth, surrounding us.
the pace of scientific/mathematical/informational technology is growing ever faster.
there's more new understanding of physical laws and interactions (not to mention the gizmos on the shelf) than any one person can ever comprehend-
 and it's getting worse.
when you find a eyeball lying around in the woods, do you a) call the police, b) try to see what you can get for it in a pawn shop or c) look for its designer?
why do you need a creator person that during a boring week creates ad hoc knockoffs of itself?  where will it all end?  (what I'd like to know is when did it all begin- when we figure out what happened in the first x femtoseconds after the big bang, will that suffice? -or do we then have to find out how The Simulators implanted the evidence for a such a beginning?)  ...wait...

isn't the universe itself (including us mound builders) big and spooky enough?

do you really need government scientists reverse engineering crashed UFO's or secret interstellar treaties that stipulate the dissemination of "contact" propaganda to prepare the humans for subjugation?

not that I'm saying intelligent extraterrestrial contact has not or will not occur.
but maybe any intelligence evolving to galactic standards would basically have no interest in other species, realizing that true weirdness (and true wealth) surrounds all of us, everywhere, and that one could never exhaust the possibilities of existence in even a puddle.  if you were, like, god, why would you really mess around with the planets?


so what does this have to do with killing dragons?










especially rubber ones that propagate indiscriminately...?










and what does all that have to do with the painting?








oh yeah, i'm glad you asked about that.   this one is a type of extended automatic drawing.   it started life some years back as a kind of doodle done with magic marker on a large white paper shopping bag.  recently the drawing resurfaced, whereupon it was bonded to a canvas stretched on a plywood frame.  then i added color with acrylic paint and contours with china (grease) pencils.   with these tools, i used the neural procedure of pareidolia to bring shapes into focus.  so to speak.  give birth to monsters.
since the original paper was quite thin (a plain white shopping mall type bag) you can see (click to embigify) wrinkles that occurred when the paper was bonded to the canvas (with acrylic medium).  you can also see some faint bleeding from the old marker drawing.  all these "random" elements are one of my principle enjoyments in making art.  i see my role more as an explorer of a strange land than as an autocratic designer.  although it is in the tension between these two things (accident vs. design or meaning vs. raw sensory data) that things get interesting.  so when you kill dragons, birth is given to all sorts of dramatic characters (including more dragons) that live their own lives nearly apart from the central drama.

ach, i could go on...






































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