Lasya

I was recently invited to join some incredibly talented artists and musicians at Conception III. Since it’s a group show, there’s limited wall space for my paintings and most of them won’t fit, so rather than just put one or two up, I decided to try to get some new, smaller works ready in time. I’ve had a few smaller canvasses that had been abandoned lying around, and this was one of them: an improvisation that went nowhere – originally titled “Improv in F”.

I started by flipping it, paintin the parts that I didn’t like blue, and adding a violin’s F hole. Still not much happening.

The big inspiration came when I realized that the painting needed heart.

Heart looks like an Octopus. Hmmm – this needs a tentacle.

Somehow the violin made a reappearance in the end of the tentacle. Came up with the title “Playing by Heart”.

Now the blues started to look too plain so I started messing with them. That seemed to carve out an upside-down ear shape on the left.

So I went to work on the ear, but to do that I flipped the canvas over. Now I like it better this way up. Maybe I’ll call it “Playing by Ear” instead.

…or maybe it should be the other way. I’m not sure. I guess it can go either way. When I show it tonight, I think I’ll label it both ways.

WOAH! This looks cool. Pity I can’t do this with paint.

Come check out the painting tonight at Conception III

In the summer between my junior and senior year at college I had the easiest job I’ve ever had. I was the “Gallery Guard” at the Wriston Art Center at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI. My responsibilities included using a handheld clicker to count the number of visitors, and making sure that nobody touched any of the art. Sometimes I didn’t have to reach for the clicker all day. Honestly the toughest part of the job was not falling asleep, a requirement that was made even harder by the fact that I had carried over a very comfortable armchair from a nearby frat house to the art center for myself to sit on all day. Afternoons were the hardest to get through.

First I set about devouring Tom Robbins’ entire catalog. When that was done, I went for Herman Hesse. I made it through Steppenwolf, but Siddhartha had me falling asleep every few minutes, so I needed something else to do. I decided to grab a black Sharpie and start doodling on a blank canvas.

At first the doodle was completely free-form. I wasn’t trying to create anything in particular. I remember envisioning just a big swirling black-and-white pattern. Though I was specifically trying to avoid creating a recognizable image, it didn’t take long for an image to form. At first it was just the mouth. I didn’t quite know what was going to go in the mouth so I left the inside blank and just finished doodling around it.  The form of an elephant took root because the tongue started looking like a trunk.  Eventually it ended up being a large black-and-white trippy doodle of an elephant being devoured by a mouth – and it stayed that way for around six months because I thought I was done with it.  I’ve hunted high and low for a photo of it at this stage, but even though I know I took one, I can’t find it.  Maybe I’ll update this post at some later date if I find it.

Fast forward to my final semester in college. I’ve taken forever to finish The Kiss, so I have very little time left to complete the last painting that I was required to.  Suddenly I remembered the elephant sitting against the wall in my dorm room. That was practically complete even though it didn’t yet have a drop of paint on it.  So I went to work using thin glazes of paint so I didn’t obscure too much of the detail I had put so much effort into.  The coloring was complete in a couple of hours and I submitted it as my final painting.

I named the painting “India” because everyone kept calling it Ganesha (it’s not – Ganesha is always represented with a broken tusk – my elephant has no such dental issues).  I also think that it looks more like an African Elephant than an Indian one, but…

Here’s a painting seventeen years in the making!

I stretched the canvas myself in 1995 and created what could only be described as a juvenile homage to Dali’s landscapes. It really was quite awful and I only saved it because it seemed like a waste to throw away such a massive canvas. In the early 2000s, I decided to start working on it again. The photo on the right was taken just before I started, so you can see what it looked like originally (and you can see my cat peeking out from behind it). I blanked out vast sections of it, kept some parts like the black mask, a couple of fish, the sky and the stereo, then abandoned it.

In late 2010 I started working on it again. This time I decided I needed to break it up into sections, so I used masking tape and created random sections. The sections ended up looking like a spider web. The mask became an eye. Then I shelved it again. Wish I had a photo of it from this time but I can’t find any.

Finally in late 2011, I decided to get serious about completing it. The spider web thing wasn’t really working, and at the time I was trying to pick out wood flooring, so I had wood grain on my mind and wanted to paint wood, so I turned the web into wood. I had also just finished painting hundreds of tentacles for Gorgonomcephalus, so some tentacles were laid down on the left side, which eventually turned green and became vines. I wasn’t really feeling up for painting leaves even though the vines needed something. The painting seemed to missing reds – I wanted deep, bright reds, so I added the chillies, still avoiding having to paint leaves. I liked the way the red chillies looked, started craving more red. Poured myself a glass of wine while I sat there trying to figure out how to add more red…

So the painting is finally done – many disparate elements, not really sure if it “works” to be honest, but there it is. I was struggling with a name for it so I asked my friends to suggest one. My friend Arish Dastur came up with the name “Chamber 51” – I really like the name because it doesn’t try to reference anything in the painting or tie anything together. It just adds another layer to it – pretty appropriate for a painting that just grew out of disparate ideas. Also makes me think I may be painting a few other chambers soon.

“Ultrasound” my latest painting, has been an exercise in channeling group creativity through my facebook page.  Almost every idea in it’s development was contributed by people through comments on photos of the unfinished canvas.  I often say that my best work is a result of happy accidents along the way – changes in direction that are inspired by elements of the image as I put them down on canvas.  Having others chime in on the series of Rorshach tests that span my process expands the creative input significantly.  It’s not that I’m relinquishing control, I still have final say on what gets incorporated – “I’m the Decider” 😉 – but this way I’m the curator of a much larger pool of ideas that may not necessarily be my own.  Plus, it’s always fun (and funny) to see what images are conjured up in other people’s minds when they look at something nebulous.

This is how it went. Click on the images to see the original facebook threads.

It all started with a blob.

Someone said it looked like a baseball mitt, so I hollowed it out.

Now a couple of folks saw a baby, specifically: “baby wrapped in a blanket” and “a baby in the womb”. Another person got a “sound” vibe (probably because it looked like a shell). So I went with a baby…wearing headphones.

I decided that I wanted the baby-container to echo a madonna-with-child so I manipulated it a bit.

A friend had recently bought me flowers for my apartment (not something I usually purchase for myself), so I had flowers on my mind.

More flowers…sunflowers!

The woman needed some texture.

At this point I was wondering whether I should stop before I smothered the baby. A few people said I should stop, but I wasn’t convinced. Some said I needed more in the top left, I got suggestions for “one bird and one bee” and “A butterfly would look great!”. I went to work on the butterfly, eventually deciding that I needed a second one. Now I felt it was done, all that was left was to name it.

I got a bunch of really great suggestions for the name, but in the end “Ultrasound” was the best one. Quite fitting that the process that created the painting was responsible for naming it too.

If you feel like you’d enjoy being a part of this brainstorming in the future and haven’t done so already, please “like” the Shirzad Khusrokhan Art page.

Been having a bit of an obsession with red recently. After painting a wall in my apartment burgundy, I had a bunch of leftover paint, so that’s how I began this canvas. It’s a big one – 5 feet long, 4 feet high.

It’s been a few years since I painted Sensuality and I’ve always wanted to create more works in that slimy soft style. That was the original idea with this one but I decided to go with red instead of orange as the base. The female form in Sensuality emerged after an improvisation, but for this one I decided to chalk some in from the start and work around them. As you can see from the photos I took as it was progressing, at the start the figures were much more loosely defined and distorted. But as the composition started to fill in, I began to have more fun with creating better defined female forms so I just went with it. The painting ended up racier that I had originally intended too…not that that’s a bad thing.

A couple more things I’d like to say about this painting. First of all, I’m not 100% sure that I’m done. It could be complete as it is now, but it might need a couple of finishing touches still. I like the monochrome red, but it’s hard not to feel like it’s lacking something. Also I cannot for the life of me figure out how to capture the richness of the color on film. I’ve tried a bunch of different cameras and settings and different types of lighting, but I still haven’t been able to reproduce the colors to my liking. I’ve had the same trouble with a couple of other painting where red is dominant – most notably Lasya. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

The canvas on which Atlas ended up started out as a painting called “Improv in C-minor”. Even though I did take a photograph of it, it was never complete in my mind and at one point I decided to try adding some translucent layers to it – completely ruined it, got mad at myself for messing it up and then just painted the whole thing red. That was the end of that.

The red canvas sat around for a while, then I doodled some black paint on it, and again ignored it for a couple of years. There were a few failed attempts to create something interesting with plain black on a red background, that ended up being nixed with a big black ball. Finally Atlas emerged, carrying the ball and the painting finally had a direction.

OK, so now here was Atlas carrying a big black ball. The question of what should go in the ball was posed to a few friends. My friend Leslie suggested a tree – that seemed promising, so I set to work. The green wasn’t showing up too well on the black, so I decided to chalk it out with white first, as I often do when starting to paint on a dark background. All of a sudden the branches started to look like neurons and so I began to work on a brain instead. The brain took some refining and re-working. I abandoned early attempts to make it translucent in favor of a more fleshy feel.

The name Atlas Drugged came from my neighbor at the time, Alex – they were literally the first words out of his mouth when he saw it, and it stuck.