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Funny story. I put this @christybush_public book on my xmas list because I wanted to support @bittersoutherner ‘s second foray into tabletop art books and because I grew up on college radio, and Athens is like an alt-rock mecca. A few months later @laneycontemporary put on a show of Christy’s photos and hosted an artist talk and book signing. Nice! In line Christy noted we both have the same name (I hadn’t thought of that) as she started to sign the book. To Christ… “oh shit!” she said, “I started to sign my own name.” She apologized and offered to get another book to sign but I thought, in the moment, no, no, no, this is too funny, I’ll live with a book that says “To Christ, <3 Christy”. It’ll make a funny story that way. I was being overly polite.

On the drive home I was kicking myself as I remembered Christ is the first half of Christopher. Derp, derp. But I didn’t want to turn around and walk back in there and bother everyone again, sheesh! Thankfully Laney was nice enough to schedule a closing artist talk this past week, where I asked Christy to fix our mistake. “I couldn’t figure out why you would want to keep that,” she said, “but then I guess that’s something I would have done, too.” Too polite and deferential in the moment to make a fuss over ourselves. We got the job done though! Thanks Christy, it’s still a funny story. (at Laney Contemporary) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqOK6CbLwYp/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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100 Proposals for the Drive Thru Art Box installation week three.

It’s been a busy week here at the parking lot fixture re-imagination centre. To honor local heroes past but not forgotten I offer six drawings for a memorial to the Googly-eyed bandit. Were it not for the c2018 efforts of this trend sparker we’d hardly know who Nathanael Greene even was. 100 Proposals for the DTAB runs through July 8, new work posted weekly on Thursday. For more see https://artssoutheast.org/calendar/2023/3/9/chris-moss-100-proposals-for-the-drive-thru-art-box For documentation of the whole project see https://christophermoss.biz for sales DM (at Johnson Square) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqIY1F-s-jU/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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100 Proposals for the Drive Thru Art Box The DTAB is a weird art space in Savannah. A former drive thru menu container for Krispy Chic, a South Georgia chain that seems to have served pork chops, quail, fish and fried chicken with three sides. I wasn’t here for that, I mean I was but I never noticed it while visiting in 1998, or 2000 and it was gone by the time I moved here, replaced by a now treasured pub that serves meals with a side of house made ketchup. When approached by Sulfur Studios to make something for the box I was in a “say yes to everything” kind of mood and immediately began cycling through ideas for an installation. I figured I’d maybe build a 3 dimensional hamburger and slather it in crackle paste and paint. I made several digital and gouache drawings trying to wrap my head around what this could look like. Having little experience building 7 foot hamburgers, however, made me apprehensive. Planning in this instance was more fun than executing. It dawned on me that making plans for the drive through art box could be the work. This week’s install are the initial sketches for burger face. For the next 15 weeks I will be installing six new proposals a week in the box, a total of 96 will be made as we go + 4 drawings I made preparing the box itself that won’t be installed = a nice round 100. For more see https://artssoutheast.org/calendar/2023/3/9/chris-moss-100-proposals-for-the-drive-thru-art-box For documentation of the whole project see https://christophermoss.biz and for sales DM (at Green Truck Pub) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cppht-IrV-r/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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golden years, 2023, acrylic on panel, 19 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches. 

It is hard to photograph a painting covered in interference paint, I almost always make matte paintings because I really don’t like glare. I attribute this partly to having to slowdance in front of Caravaggio (lit by a bulb that cost 500 Italian Lira for 90 seconds.) It’s a physicality thing, to take in a whole painting without having to change your position. So, then, it’s a challenge to change your position to see the whole thing better. On a small scale it’s a small ask but an ask nonetheless. 

The idea here was to photograph the “lights off” part of this painting using a tripod and long exposure to do what your eye can do in low light. We can make a camera small enough to fit anywhere but not well enough to compete with an eye. The Savannah community building nonprofit @locationgallery (locationgallery.net) is hosting a seventh anniversary party Thursday at banana magnate Samuel Zemurray’s former Savannah home. The exhibition and online auction in support of @forsythfarmersmarket program Food911 has launched, you can view available works on Location’s website. The auction moves to a live venue Thursday evening. (at Naples, Italy) https://www.instagram.com/p/Co97dITrMjL/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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I made a series of 70 some paintings in 2012 that were kind of the first iteration of these block head, emoji like paintings. I imagined they were a lost technology, invented by beings, their use and value unknown. The early 2000s were full of post apocalyptic story lines, last man on earth, stuff like that. Those earlier paintings fit that narrative but here I feel like I’m amending the story to include discovery by humanoids, who have still not figured out what this technology is or how to use it. 

strange powers, 2022, acrylic on panel, 19 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches

Strange Powers is, maybe, a moment of discovery painting, is it a mask, a strange rock, why does it resemble a tomb stone? How is the mouth eating through the head? I don’t know, I just make these things at they occur to me. (at Theodore gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CoKkzHiLwgz/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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It’s hard to explain when a painting is finished. Sometimes it’s just a subtle suggestion i’m not even consciously aware of that makes me stop. Sometimes it’s the end of the day and when I come back there’s no more work to do. With the most troublesome paintings it’s a matter of sitting with them, allowing discomfort. It’d be easy to relieve the discomfort, more difficult to set the discomfort like a gem, show it off, brag about it a little. how’s my driving, 2022, acrylic on panel. The earlier version in slide 2 was around long enough for me to photograph. the song referred to here is actually called “how am I driving” a radiohead B-sides EP from the late 90s for the song airbag, something to do with travel, I associate it with CDG airport where I purchased it. (at Charles DeGaulle Airport Paris) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn67detrXaW/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Two more weeks to catch the show at Theodore. This weekend and next. I’ll be around Saturday Feb 4th for some kind of closing party, snacks, cake, coffee, who knows? (at Theodore gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn15tlULJHi/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Ellen and Julie invited me to send something to LABspace for their big end of the year group show and I had just finished this painting I had been working on since 2014. A few weeks later Julie sent me an email, paraphrasing here: what’s up with this thing you sent? And I sent her a long, fully caffeinated, rambling story covering every detail of the painting’s existence and short history, short of who the carpenter was who made the strainer for it. To sum it up I made this smooth, weird thing and hit it with a foam roller and thick paint because I couldn’t make it smooth or uncanny enough. I was trying to make a belly but it became a head. more beautiful than barbie is up in Hillsdale until Feb 14, if you’re around stop in and say hi. (at LABspace) https://www.instagram.com/p/CnuXcrMrpTI/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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There are a handful of shapes I start with if I can’t think of anything else to draw. A horizon, an arch or a square-ish rectangle. There are only so many shapes. How many? I don’t know, it’s never occurred to me to count them. It’s a game of recombining a limited variety of shapes to mean new things. Sometimes you can get a shape to sort of shake loose all of it’s old associations so new ones can be made. moon over my hammy, 2005, oil on canvas rural rout 1 & rural rout 2, 2007, acrylic on panel rat hat, 2014 apfelschloss, 2014 enjoy by, 2014 (based on those ridiculous drawings on the sides of bourbon bottles designed to sell you on the authenticity of the contents) a drawing after rural rout, 2014 the gravity of the situation. Vic Chesnutt was a master of re-turning or re-tuning an idiom. My friend Carlos once told me that’s what I do. He didn’t mean it disrespectfully but he observed that I’m painting cliches. I’m trying to recombine old shapes into something new, but then who isn’t? 
 The title of the painting stuck even though it’s kind of a bad joke about not knowing which way to hang it. (at Theodore gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cnmer9Xr9oA/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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you know how to make me feel, 2021, acrylic on panel


I have a show up so I thought I’d try some little explainers of the work. I like ‘em better when I can’t explain ‘em so I’m not at all sure of this exercise. Supposedly I know more about these paintings than you do.

If you see something, say something. I started this with the idea that the ear could just barely touch the left margin. The next idea was the impossibly linear shadow on the face. Between those two ideas came a lot of thinking about visual cues in the media; Alex Murdauch’s beady eyes and the nobody’s home eyes of a blackout drunk, the ways skin betrays its owner & looses elasticity over time and recent photos of a Kentucky senator’s bruised hands.

Edge tension. I was first made aware of it in Milan I think. I use it a lot in drawings, especially where the subject seems aware they are a drawing.

The pencil. Henry Petroski wrote a book called “The Pencil” and it’s one of my favorite books. Over 400 page history of the stylus, recommended to me by a drawing instructor long ago, it was his way of saying success would only come from the kind of devotion to subject that Petroski had. He was right, I was unfocused. It’s also a connection to Georgia and Florida, the 19th century pencil industry relied heavily on pine from the region.

What else? You know how to make me feel. I must have been on a Harold Melvin trip that week. Indignity as comedy, tragedy, …make me feel so good.

(at Theodore gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cnj4wQPr1J7/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Christopher Moss

gets a mention in this Artsy article along with Thomas. More (about his non-abstract work) #christophermoss

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closing day for Peter Schulte’s drawing exhibition at Laney (and the curatorial project upstairs by Fuel and Lumber Company). Pictures to prove it but they don’t do justice to the work, which looks like he breathed them into existence. The inadequacy of this very blessed social medium as a vehicle for looking at art, past negotiations with Agnes Martin and turtles all the way down - all topics of the artist talk. slide 4 the incredible Katarina Riesling defying expectations (i thought these were paintings from seeing reproductions online - proving again the inadequacy of insta.) (at Laney Contemporary) https://www.instagram.com/p/CnaEDohudj-/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Armchair Philosophy

 I started this series with the idea that the work would 1. be produced serially (as all recent work since about 2006), 2. the paintings would fall into two categories a. these object paintings and b. the subject paintings. In a way these are attempts to become a machine, to make the same painting again and again, to bring seriality to a machine-like apex. They are failures at that. It’s fun to think about painting, ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶a̶b��s̶t̶r̶a̶c̶t̶,̶ especially abstract painting as a way to create a parallel world to ours, one with easily understandable boundaries and rules. Failure means that even my invented, daydream world is messy and complex and therefore of the same world as ours. I don’t have answers, I don’t even have questions, I only have paintings. https://www.instagram.com/p/CnR6gvfOr3R/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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So many things have sold out on the Postcards from the edge sale this weekend but there are still a number of great looking postcards still available. online only, sale ends today, i believe. https://www.instagram.com/p/CnKRNH1rnM8/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Based on a true story.
 Last spring Sulfur Studios put on a fantastic exhibition of work by an artist I hadn’t really heard of. Apparently I don’t spend enough time in Forsyth Park because I hear Phil Musen @cutetomatoes paints there every chance he gets. He’s a real people painter. Ridiculous, absurd, overbearing, jealous, hilarious, deft, idiotic, heartbreaking, loving, haphazard, smart people populate Musen’s world, and why wouldn’t they, it is modeled on the observed world. The exhibition got me downright bubbly, that effervescent excitement where I can’t find my words and I use my hands instead, and I demonstrated as much at Phil’s artist talk. I don’t remember exactly where I recently read someone writing on the topic of the death of viridian green. It’s largely a late 19th century color technology, if you kept it on your palate after 1960 you did so at your own demise. So important to modernism, it’s use after the manufacture of phthalocyanine would have marked your work as traditionalist, old school, a modernist in the post modern age. 
 But Phil’s show was painted almost entirely in that Victorian hue. Was he not some usurper bent on changing the tide of color history discourse? No. It turns out he just had a lot of viridian sitting around and his plan to use it all up resulted in these, roughly 55, recent paintings. 
 Excitement in the artist’s studio is a rare earth metal, hard to find in great quantity. It is dificult to maintain a steady level of excitement over even the best ideas, which makes the resultant emotional steam built up from a failed romance a kind of philosopher’s stone / fountain of the eternal. As the story goes, love, death and jealousy mark the farm hand’s way. Lucky for us the farmhand in question is good natured enough to spin a great yarn of his own tragedy. That’s art 🎭 (at Sulfur Studios) https://www.instagram.com/p/CnKPpBLrjoB/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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I don’t have a lot to say about this one. The arched portal shape becomes a head here. This came together fairly quickly from idea to execution. I used a condiment bottle to make the hair, the head was finished using a high mil plastic bag like a pastry bag. Yum. You can’t really see here but they ultimately got a nails did with UV paint too. The gallery reopens, post holiday break, on Thursday. Regular gallery hours are Thursday–Saturday 12-6 pm 373 Bway, Door/Elevator buzzer #6100 (at The Original Coney Island of Scranton) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm_zbZBLgLT/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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South in the North, North in the South This summer was an exceptional growing season for cowpeas (Vigna ungiculata, the type also produces a well-known white bean with a black eye among other varieties). I grow a few types but speckled graham is the prettiest and most productive with 10 inch pods holding 12-20 tan, purple and gray speckled beans each. Winter started with a freeze last week that knocked out lettuce, broccoli and mustard I hoped to eat with my new year soup. I probably could have saved them had I been home. Ah well, there’s still the whole second half of the cold season and anyway some survived last week. I’ll have cabbages and collards in spring. I hear eating black eye peas and greens on the first day of the new year brings luck. Some say the greens represent paper money, the beans represent coins. I guess, but there is more to historic food technologies than flimsy metaphor. The beans were cultivated in northern Africa and travelled to southeast Asia, back to the Mediterranean, south again to west Africa and over the Atlantic in the 17th Century. They travel well and a big handful can start a small farm. Brassica oleracea is cabbage, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, collards, broccolini, romanesco, kohlrabi, tree kale and that decorative purple and white cabbage looking thing that’s in every sidewalk planter in the city in winter. That technology was developed in the Mediterranean and perfected in both Asia and northern Europe. A plant with a broad phenotype and tiny seeds, a handful is enough to start a small farm. These well-travelled ingredients have roots here, sure, but even deeper roots elsewhere in multiple diasporas. It’s a way to eat history, to remember ancestors who traveled by force, and to think about shared, overlapping histories. Like art they represent human innovation, care for an idea over eons, a connection to the past & a promise to the future. 1 Jodi Hays and 2 Michi Meko from their show at Susan Inglett. 3, Eggleston. 4, Marshal mocking nauman, recalling Igbo Landing and water deity myths. 5, Bklyn favorite Rico Gaston. 6, McCarthy. 7, 8 Peter Williams. 9, a bed of dead mustard greens, 10 soaking beans.