Another favorite gay artist is Steven Walker......you can see more at www.stevenwalkerartist.com

The second painting is the most emotional piece I have seen to date!

New Painting of the day:

It is about the narrow path that we need to take with our food supply.......down with Monsanto.

I found Beth Ferguson while reading Arts for Change by Beverly Naidus......I liked that she is from Texas and works with puppets.
Beth Ferguson,

Founding director of Sol Design Lab

Beth is an ecological designer, public artist and social entrepreneur. She has an MFA from the University of Texas, Austin and a BA from Hampshire College (both in ecological design and social innovation). Beth has designed and toured with her SolarPump charging station at SXSW in Austin, TX, the Bay Area Maker Faire, Coachella festival in Indio, CA, the Roskilde festival in Denmark, Lollapalooza festival in Chicago and the San Jose Biennial in CA. Constant themes in her work include solutions to global warming and cultural change. She has co-produced community murals, the human-powered Cycle Circus, Austin's First Night mobile street theater, books such as Mapping our Common Ground and LoMap, youth view of lower Manhattan.

Another New painting

Finished ANOTHER painting today.

Andy Goldsworthy

For me looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. Place is found by walking, direction determined by weather and season. I take the opportunity each day offers: if it is snowing, I work in snow, at leaf-fall it will be leaves; a blown over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches.

Movement, change, light growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.

The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and the space within. The weather—rain, sun, snow, hail, calm—is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings and the way it sits tells how it came to be there. In an effort to understand why that rock is there and where it is going, I must work with it in the area in which I found it.

I have become aware of raw nature is in a state of change and how that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Often I can only follow a train of thought while a particular weather condition persists. When a change comes, the idea must alter or it will, and often does, fail. I am sometimes left stranded by a change in the weather with half-understood feelings that have to travel with me until conditions are right for them to appear. All forms are to be found in nature, and there are many qualities within any material. By exploring them I hope to understand the whole. My work needs to include the loose and disordered within the nature of material as well as the tight and regular.

At its most successful, my ‘touch’ looks into the heart of nature; most days I don’t even get close. These things are all part of the transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient—only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process complete. I cannot explain the importance to me of being part of the place, its seasons and changes. Fourteen years ago I made a line of stones in Morecambe Bay. It is still there, buried under the sand, unseen. All my work still exists in some form.

My approach to photograph is kept simple, almost routine. All work, good and bad, is documented. I use standard film, a standard lens and no filters. Each work grows, strays, decays—integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expresses in the image. Process and decay are implicit.

New Painting

I thought I would post a new painting that I finished this week. It is a small part of a much larger painting that I have been working on for a year. The larger painting is about genetically modified food.

One of my favorite Gay artists Wes Hempel

Lily Yeh

I encourage you to visit Lily Yeh's website. Here the artist's mission is to explore...

Beverly Naidus - Arts for Change

http://faculty.washington.edu/bnaidus/
Beverly Naidus has been making art about social and personal concerns for over three decades. She works in many mediums, allowing the content to determine the form. Audience participation (story telling and game playing) in response to her installations and artist’s books has been a significant part of her work for many years. Topics in her work include healing from environmental illness, body hate and fear of difference, nightmares about nuclear war and the ecological crisis and dreams for a reconstructed world. Her work has been exhibited internationally and written about in many books and articles. After many years of participating in the New York City and Los Angeles activist art worlds, she now resides on Vashon Island, WA with her husband, founder of SEEDS (www.socialecologyvashon.org), and son. She teaches art for social change in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program at the University of Washington, Tacoma. The curriculum of that program is highlighted in her recent book, Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame (New Village Press, 2009). She travels frequently to lecture, lead discussions and workshops on art for social change.
Homeland Bodhisattva is part of series of digital images entitled “Healing Deities.” This series was created as a form of visual meditation and healing, and explores how the resources within one individual can confront the environmental crisis, oppression and injustice. Homeland Bodhisattva is my response to the continuing abuse of the Palestinian peoples. This work was first created at the beginning of the Second Intifada (2000). As a person of Jewish heritage who is often filled with shame by the actions of the Israeli government, this work gave me a way to articulate my solidarity with a powerful, anonymous Palestinian woman who while witnessing the violence, claims a space for resistance to oppression and desires a peaceful resolution of the conflict. The title refers to the quest to return to a homeland and the notion all human beings are in the process of becoming a “Buddha.” The digital image was created with Painter, Photoshop and a Wacom tablet and stylus.