Post 1: Where am I coming from?

    I find it hard to believe I have actually not done any painting at all in 17 years. My last painting was a triptych I worked on for 6 months, and that burned me out:

    I stopped painting and after a great deal of research, reading, thinking and drawing, I stored my paints and brushes and went into Sculpture. I started with a 5'2" Eve, after working out the technical details in antiqued "Blueprints". Having been trained as an engineer came in handy...

    The large pieces were mixed media mannequins: cedar, wax or bronze,  burlap, with brass hardware. I used wax quite a bit in those to model faces, hands and feet. 
    Some remained wax, like my first three (life-size) pieces: Eve, and Alexander riding Bucephale, which stands 9 ft tall

   Others were cast in bronze, as my last piece, a  Hommage to Dali called "Leda Maya de Santiago", also life-size

  I started building a concrete house in 2000, planning to continue the series of "Dummies with Souls" and have another show, I even drew the blueprint for the next life size "Sepultado":

    But it didn't happen as planned, the house took more than 3 years to complete, and IS my largest piece of Sculpture:

    I never returned to the "Dummies", and instead built my second largest piece of sculpture, a wood and fabric WW1 style airplane, the "Spirit of Tomas", which barely fit in my 22ft x 16 ft studio:

  That took about a year, the plane was inspected by the FAA and cleared for flying tests, but  because of circumstances, it never flew. 

  In the next few years, I pursued Digital Photography, Photoshop Collage, PaperMaking, Book Binding, Embossing, Web Design, Animation, and worked on my Motorbikes, before getting interested in Architectural Projection and Mapping 5 years ago or so . Since then, I have pretty much lived in front of the computer, spending 1500 hours on each one of my  three major shows.

      By April 16, 2016, having completed a 55mn animation projected on a 54 ft wide screen to accompany the live performance of Cherubini's Requiem by the Alabama Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, I was exhausted.

    Turning 70 a couple of weeks later didn't help. I was feeling over the hill, past my prime, and without purpose nor inspiration. I didn't get much accomplished through the summer. 

    Fall brought on the annual blues, and I started to wonder whether I really wanted to do another animation show for peanuts, and was even capable of putting in it what it would take to best myself... I didn't think so...

     I finally figured out I was again at a turning point, and I needed to get excited about a new project. I though I would like to paint again, but in a different way. So I immersed myself in research, as has always been my approach. Only this time, I didn't have to got to the Public Library and pore through hundreds of books, I could use the computer.

     First, I looked at all the recent Art Fairs in New York and Europe over the last couple of years, and was appalled to see that nothing had changed in the "Official Art World" since I last looked in the 80's. The Artists picked for these show seem to repeat over and over  the same things that were pioneered in the 50's and in the 70's.

    Museums, Galleries, Cutators and Collectors seem to be stuck in a time warp. I could hardly find anything I liked among the thousands of Artworks I looked at, and ended up quite depressed. The straw that really broke the camel's back was  the list of the Fourteen Most Famous Artists of 2014

   Number One is Jeff Koons with this beyond tacky "thing" :

   Number two was Andreas Gursky with this very nice aerial photograph. Very nice indeed. But number 2?

  Passing a few, number 7 was Damien Hirst with these(?!?!?!?!?!?!?) 

   Number 8 was Bansky with this Warhol rip off(there seems to be a lot of these around)

    Well guys, I will stop there, I give up, I don't understand, I really am still out of it. 

   But then again, why should I care? I have always gone my own way regardless. I just wish I could understand.