PRIMER
My work isn’t cryptic… to me. But I get to see the elements I used to create the piece. And I know my intent. And there is intent.
It should be so pretty that you get a constellation of feelings. I want you to spend a little time looking at these guys because - for you - I believe all my intent does get through to you. Your mind takes its minutes, hours, months, maybe years and synthesizes it into understanding, depth and strength for you. You will make a choice someday in the future that is made in part by what you see today. Each one of these images is a powerful magic spell that is intended to make the world a better place in the future. Through you.
If you want to know what each spell is for and how it was crafted and why, keep reading. I can’t actually tell you the spell - can’t “spell’ it out for you, but I can give you all the elements, all the “letters”.
I would never expect ANYONE to immediately see all the references in these images.
American generations had a common cultural vocabulary until about halfway through the Millennials. We don’t any more. We used to be able to ALL refer to Mr. Rogers, the multiplication table, cursive, the same idiomatic phrases, an understanding of LP records or at least their newer version - CDs, 25 episode series, the 6 o’clock news, Saturday morning cartoons, and facts. People magazine used to have multi-page articles in finer print. We have culturally disassociated.
And that doesn’t mean that we are doomed; time and entropy fuck with everyone. No exceptions. There might be a plague somewhere in production in some bat or bird or lab that just kills evil people and leaves the rest of us to inherit the Earth. But for now there’s just so much mercury and trash in the water, too much microplastics accumulating in our kids and everything that was normal, like food, has become either extremely pricey, or extremely cheap and addictive.
All this combines to create a world that offers a lot of incredible writing, music, art, philosophy and incredible difficulty in synthesizing it. So few of us are educated well (I am not particularly well educated), interested (I am resentfully interested), have the time and energy, ability to appreciate, mental health, focus and skills to WANT to take on a challenge of understanding art, science, history… and wow- doesn’t that just dumb down the world of the humanities into a nearly featureless landscape. It is starting to have all the character of an Oprah Winfrey bookshelf. 4,500 years of collective human exploration, research and effort to understand and share - maybe the universe’s only eyes looking at itself and reflecting being confined and limited to what amounts to a Walmart book section nobody is in unless they have to be.
So my work is a challenge to that.
Look at these beautiful men.
Why do they turn you on so much?
Why do you feel kind of hungry looking at them?
You want to feel them? Or be them? Why?
You should know the answers to these questions. AI can’t answer these questions for you - not correctly. Don’t trust unhuman things to fulfill human needs.
The image on the cover is called Red H.
This is the photograph of Holden I chose to work from.
H=Holden. Holden is this sweet-drifting-around-Europe twenty-something guy i drew because he reminded me of who I was meant to be but couldn’t be at his age because of crippling SUD. Because of undiagnosed ADHD. CPSD. All the acronyms that probably won’t be in fashion in a couple years. But these are today’s versions.
This is my simple graphite sketch of Holden.
He is the vision I had of me when I first thought of who I wanted to be when I grew up. Strong, beautiful, adventurous. On an adventure.
When making “RED H” I realized something. He needed to be RED. For a very powerful reason he had to be RED. Not any red. The red of blood that has not been drawn, not exposed to the air to be degraded, blood working as it is supposed to be working.
There are two real planes of this image and they are intentionally misaligned. Holden is in the forefront. The clouds are unrelated to him and at a warped angle. See… Holden’s shoulder is not cut off - he is standing in the doorway of the universe, about to walk through.
I will try to write more blog posts about the images in the book in the next few months. Every image in this book has a similar story. Most actually are two images working together to cast that spell I was talking about. And all the images in the book work together.
Selected pages to illustrate how they are meant to work together. The large version of the book has 60 images. All have a partner, but 4 of them don’t face each other.
The book is about defiance. About anger at reductive thinking and labels. It’s about resilience in the face of an assault on our intelligence and capacity that is being waged on us day in and day out. It’s about radically accepting our flaws and inabilities to measure up and be some ideal that ultimately is meaningless. But it as also about loving and appreciating beauty and sexiness and warmth and having all that on OUR side. Not against us or used against us in any way. None of these beautiful men wish us harm - these pages, these sketches let you know they adore us and reflect us.
We are living in a perilous time. Who knows what is next? I thought we’d be happier and more abundant because we have the technology and we have the capacity. But en masse, we seem to just always want to court hell. The political will to live a kind life is lacking.
And it’s the evilest of the world that is waging this war on complexity and humanness. We can be many things at once and therefore have real conversations, maintain our individuality, and bond in that reality that we are so much more than an American or a European or a scientist or a doctor or an actor or a gay man or a straight man or a liberal or a conservative or whatever label we get slapped on us to make us some sort of commodity. This book is a story of being actual human beings, these smart great apes that have a real history and a real life that doesn’t have to be tethered to any form of toxicity that is conformity and reductiveness. We don’t have to fall in line with the jack boots. We really have to get back to the garden.
The book comes in three versions:
The intended version - highest quality paper (you could cut out and frame any of the images and they are as good as any print I make) - and 12’ x 12’. That is $200.
Here is the link: https://www.blurb.com/b/12928475-lyons-men-v-4
The (more) affordable version - slightly different selection of images, but excellent quality, not quite framable paper, but just fine for a coffee table., 10” wide by 8” tall, and that is $85.
Here is the link for that one: https://www.blurb.com/b/12904610-lyons-men-volume-4
And because I am a human being who has had many times in my life where I wanted something but could not justify getting it and who realizes books like this are hard to afford, I am offering a digital version of this that is a very high quality PDF for $15. If you cannot or don’t want to spend that much money on a book, please support my work by buying the Digital Version.
Here is the link for that. Just click on “Instant PDF Version”: https://www.blurb.com/b/12928475-lyons-men-v-4