Alright fuckers...the Sub- basement is open-ish

 3870 East Highway 260 Star Valley just east of Payson a mile or two…it’ll be on the left as you come out of Payson. That’s where the Sub Basement is located.  See that black hole in the back ground? That’s where I’m slingin’ paint…the studio.

If the sign is out I’m lettin’ people in. I guess I will be open for visitors. I even made a sign…no expense spared at this den of iniquity.  Let me know if you are headed up this way and I’ll let you know definitively whether I’ll be there or not. Maybe I’ll even have normal hours at some point but for now I’m here at noon ‘til whenever. Unless I’m on the bike and then , well, I don’t know…depends on the size of the bug that crawls up my ass.

  I figure what the fuck. I’m goin’ to be locked down in the studio for the next few months and I don’t get out much, so why not invite some of you fuckers in to see what’s shakin’. It ain’t no sales pitch, or marketing strategy, I just got me a place to go nuts and it would be cool to have people ridin’ up to see some of these paintings in real life instead of just photos on the inter-web…it’s just not the same baby.

  The riding up here is perfect and the roads are just curvy fuckin’ perfectly paved gashes cuttin’ through the forests and spanning vistas.Theres a couple of bars in town and even a Strip Club with a cow mounted on the top just across the street-ish (a must see). Bring your camping gear or just ski-daddle back to the valley when you’re done. It’s only 78 miles from Phoenix for fucks sake. Got something better to do? That alone is a reason to c’mon up.

  Leave your stupid fuckin’ problems somewhere on the road ‘cause I don’t want ‘em here.  Let’s see how this works out. If it all shits the bed I can always go back to being a shut in. The weather is perfect ( high 70’s to low 80’s) so there ain’t no better time than now. Get on your sleds and take a scrape up to the pines, unless you got a thing for stop lights.  “GTP”

Fuck You ...I'll paint what I want!

I set up shop in the Sub-Basement, built a shit ton of canvases and went to work on a commision. Welp, that seemed like work so I grabbed another canvas out of the arsonal and secided to paint whatever the fuck I want and this is what came out.
  It's completely in bad taste and that's what I like about it. I pulled a few very long days and just laid into it. I love it but who the fuck wants to hang it on the wall? The neighbors will scream, your guests at you upscale dinner party will leave and it's not something I recommend your kids see.
  So I have painted what I want and ended up with a painting that most people won't hang on their wall. Fuck it, I really enjoyed it and just cranked it out, but I need to move it.
  You got the balls to hang it, I'll take the best and soonest offer of under a grand. It's exicuted just as well as the others I've done but it's completely rude and not for Mr. Average. So fuck him, I want this to hang proudly on someones wall. I find it funny as fuck that this will piss just about every art fuck in the world off and it's done in oils so it ain't goin' to be done offending people for at least one hundred years.

                                                     "Ignoring the Boundaries of Good Taste"
                                                                      30" x 40"
                                                                   Oil on canvas

                                                                SOLD!

  Make me an offer,I need the cash bad, I'll even cut you a better deal if you hang it in your living room. Make an offer, I'm once again flat broke and rent is knockin' at the door and winter's goin' to be rolling in. You're wife contacted me and said it's okay for you to buy it so don't worry. Contact me with a phone number through hamsteakdawg@gmail.com...but make it fast, I'm ready to almost give this fucker away! "GT motherfuckin' P"

Cigarettes and bug farts!

  It’s an odd fuckin’ time in my life. I’ve been doin’ this shit for a while and have always tried my damn’dest  to be what is considered a ‘truly’ successful guy of substance. Not by buying a big house or a fancy car, not at all, having enough jack to eat three times a day and buy some clothes that didn’t have holes in ‘em would be cool though. 
 I’ve beat my head against the wall for years now and keepin’ with the’ doing what I do full time’ and not getting a real job has always been a questionable decision. With not much of a steady income I’ve had to do the grand hustle just to keep me in cigarettes, road trips, motorcycle shit and building the Hamsteak into a livable form of transportation. It’s a stressful pain in the dick but I always seem to make it, usually by the skin of my teeth but making it just the same.

  I have achieved a glorious mess, nothing like I intended when I first started following this path. Coming to grips with the current outcome took some time to sink in.  It did, finally…it is what it is and I am what I am. Now I am kickin’ back filtering through it and comin’ to grips with what I have done.

  Fuck money, I ain’t goin’ to ever have shit to show for things monetarily but I’ll be dipped in shit if it ain’t all kinds of working out just the same. I ain’t livin’ in a cardboard box again and the bike is a runner now. It might not be the life of an artist as it is portrayed on the big screen or romance novels but it ain’t boring.

  Life is like eatin’ pussy. You can’t rush it, you’ll never get everything right and most of all, you got to enjoy what you’re doin because you’re goin’ to be here awhile. In both instances you got to just relax and soak it all in, there ain’t no better place to be.

  I got this whole bike thing goin’ on but I’m really a painter at heart.  Now I got all the other stuff taken care of and finally scored a studio I have no plan on leavin’ any time soon. So what is a painter to do…paint you fuck!

  Painting ain’t ever goin’ to get me anywhere but where I’m at and that’s cool, I’m sick of being pissed. I own my own mobile world and it’s completely livable, now I can finally have a cool studio. A place that is cool enough that I want to be there and just fuckin’ create shit. A shop that is cool enough that people will want to stop in and visit and if they‘re fucktards it’s not a problem…I got guns!

  Knowing that I’m not going to see any significant cash in the near future is a situation that I read as I might as well paint whatever I want then.  I now watch every penny and holding on to each one until my knuckles turn white. I blew what cash I had on figurin’ out what tools and materials I needed to make my own canvases of equal or better quality as the ones I was getting made in the valley.

  So here I am squatting on the floor with a four dollar miter saw, wood and shit just kickin’ out a canvas a day while I’m getting other shit done. Now that I know how to build ‘em and not havin’ to go through the hassle of someone else makin’ ‘em,I can have a stock pile in the arsenal to pull out whenever an idea comes to mind. It’s as liberating as shooting your boss in the head… Just one less thing to worry about.

 Models, well, I can only get ‘em via the inter-web and on there I’m scary as fuck. Somebody will drop their drawers for me and then *BLAMMO* I got a painting ready to go.

  If something deep comes of one of my paintings that’s cool,l but if not I end up painting some hot chick in a creepy environment. Either way I guarantee I’ll have fun, ‘cause I’m doin’ what I WANT to do. Fuck man that smells of ferns and moss to me!

 I’ll ride the bike over, move the Hamsteak in a few days and life will be in order but that’s a few days away. I guess I’ll just paint.  “GTP”

...dead sexy

                 ....a naked stretcher is like an ugly chick. They look better wrapped in canvas!

A Pimp for the love of Pimpin'!

  For the last few years, although I enjoyed it, going to the studio has always seemed like a job. I would wake up whenever I would wake up, grab a cup of coffee and eventually make my way to whatever project I had goin’ at the time. It wasn’t bad, but it was a job. I spent a lot of time gazing out the window wishin’ I was any place else.

  Then, one lucky day, I scored my new studio. It was a slow progression getting moved and set up. I turned to a simple charcoal I was working on, opened the garage door, turned up the stereo and started pluckin’ away. A few albums later and my back was killing me. I dropped a few Aleve and went back at it.

  Hours went by, I forgot to eat or even smoke a cigarette as I made progress. I was just standin’ at the easel with a grin on my face…enjoying it. That’s when I noticed things have changed with me.

  My bike and a place to ride to have always been my focus. The bike was always is some sort of disarray so for the last ump-teen years that was where all my focus and money went towards, until lately. The bike is done and is only in maintenance mode. I try to jump on it every day and take at least an hour ride on it. All it ever needs is just a quick going over before long trips and I’m straight.

  With my focus relaxed on the two wheeled wonder I’ve had a chance to realize that I am really only a painter, that’s what I do and with the new shop, a reliable Latowski and a fully operational house that starts every morning I can start setting my focus on other things I.E. painting for paintings sake.

  Painting and the art shit in general has just been a means to an end sinse it became something with deadlines and a way to pay bills. Just like everything else, if you need to do something it becomes a job. People say “you don’t have a job, you paint pictures all day”. Well if that was the case how come you don’t do it for a living?

  I realized yesterday the way my life is currently laid out and it’s looking pretty good. I am not going to make any money at it so I might as well enjoy it. That includes painting; I have a passion for it that I haven’t had since I was going to art school in Philly. I’m jacked up on the smell of oils and the possibilities of what I can paint.

  Oil painting is expensive and there ain’t shit I can do about that. Brushes are pricey for the good ones, the paints can cut into your food money and the canvases are never lying around and cost a shit ton for good ones and half a shit ton for lousy store boughts. All this means that I just couldn’t paint whatever I wanted. I couldn’t afford to lay out a couple of hundred bucks on something I just wanted to paint for the fuck of it.

   Well I scrounged a couple of bucks together, bought some cheap wood working tools and figured out how to build really nice canvases on my own. I haven’t done it in years and was paying to have quality ones made for me. They were great when he money was fat but it’s not so I couldn’t afford the hundred plus dollars per canvas plus the fuel for the car to drive the 148 round trip to get them. Now however I am building up an arsenal of ‘em and just getting ready to go nuts. I have two commissions and two originals on the block and ready to go and I’m just going to attack ‘em because I just want to.

  I want to get back into originals so I am gearing in that direction. I would love to tell you what I have been shooting for ‘em but where’s the fun in that. But I will tell you this; I became a painter for a reason. It just took me this long to realize why…”GTP”

It lives!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAlBQ-CBYpU&feature=player_embedded#!

yea fuck it

  My life conducts itself like a fat fish slappin’ around on wet pavement. It’s stupid an apparently pointless. But I’m havin’ a good time. I might be one bi-polar, obsessive compulsive motherfucker but I haven’t had it looked at in a while.

  I never really know what the next day is goin’ to bring. Having a good day is always the goal but sometimes having a good day means dropping everything and doin’ somethin’ stupid. I always say,”…it’ll be a stress reliever...” but most times it just creates bigger stress in the aftermath.

  So you try to avoid the aftermath by stacking one life changing act of stupidity on top of another and hoping the end will just come quick. It doesn’t, but you got to keep ploddin’ along walking down main street with pencils hangin’ out of your ears and a pineapple shoved down your pants. When in doubt, go fuckin’ nuts.

  I dealt with a little of the aftermath there for a bit and no matter how asinine the actions I tried to use to shake it even came close to working…so I stopped. I just drew the canvas over the windows of the Hamsteak closed and shriveled into the darkest corner watching Battlestar Gallactica and trying to go numb. Everything sucked except for riding but you got to stop sometime. A sad reality we all have to face.

  Every time I put the kickstand down the phone would ring or a bill was do. Shit just keeps on rollin’ whether you’re in a position to handle it or not. I woke up one morning and realized there ain’t no way to go off the mental grid permanently without eating your own shit while slathered in Vegamite. I either had to get it together and handle everything when the motor cools or just call it quits and become a junkie or something.

  So I was forcin’ myself to work through another project in the Sub-Basement when suddenly (and I mean suddenly) I started having fun…with the thing I had been doing all along. Just livin’ and tryin’ to keep myself out of the rain.

  The bike is a reliable runner I can jump on and go anywhere at the drop of a hat, the Hamsteak is almost ready to start up and split even though it’s only going to my new studio (I.E. the Sub-Basement).  and I got a book comin’ out How good is my life right now. I mean really, what’s to get all ‘cryin’ like a girl ‘about. Nothing, I ain’t got it to bad at all.

  Depression breeds insecurity and I hate it for that. But what can you do? It’ll happen again but I think I’m getting better at it. I got to go, I have some fresh cheese cake I am going to fill my shoes with. I figure nothing goes with screaming lines from Tony Danza shows  like shoes that are full of cheese cake. Now … get outta my office. “GTP”

 
                                             "snot" 24" x 24" charcoal on acid free paper

Our unforgivable sin...

September Eleventh, the big one. The day everyone remembers what they were doing at the exact moment that it all started crashing down. I was too drunk to give a fuck.

   It was early in the day and I was in Florida. I heard the commotion as others gathered around the television as they looked at the images on the screen,I  felt my head pounding from the need for more whiskey and went back to bed. September Eleventh, the day I proved to myself that I was the worst kind of human. September Eleventh is the day that I slept through, I have yet to decide whether I regret it or not.

  I hadn’t had a solid shit in over a decade and was waking up just hoping to die later that day. Self absorbed and emotionless I wasn’t worth the air I was breathing. That’s where I was when all those souls screamed for mercy in New York City.

   9/11 didn’t hit me in the teeth like it did everyone else that horrible day, the realization was fed to me in a slow drip over the years, I hope I have become a better person since then, I wish the horror of this incident could be obliterated from the history books for they will never tell the truth. People were torn from the lives of those that knew them and the real reason will never be told, it has been buried deeper than the bodies of the people that perished that gray washed September day.

  For whatever reason be it religious fanaticism or political agenda thousands of people are no longer with us. They will never return, they will never play with their children, feel the warm summer air, have the voice to give advice, help put a smile on a face or bask in the glow of new found love again, they are fucking dead and we all need to ask if we feel guilty about that.

   Our guilt is fueled by the knowledge that we will never know why all this happened. Anger should the feeling that overwhelms us. The blinders were ripped from our heads that day as we all should have realized that something completely fucked was stinkin’ like a rotting calf in the air from that day forward. Trust should be a thing of the past; paranoia is now the little black dress. Paranoia is total awareness.

  I cannot really remember September Eleventh as a good American should. I can only see it as my hindsight comes more into focus over the years since I put down the bottle. I shutter when the extent of the human races ability to discard the lives of our own becomes more obvious to me, my throat fills with bile when I think that I nodded my head and went back to sleep that morning.

  Unable, to this day, to fathom the depths of our races natural ability to destroy its self I can only pray that those that were lost weren’t lost in vain. The human race needs a wakeup call, I am sorry to say that I don’t think that the horror that this day represents will be enough. Let’s do all in our power to turn these times of deceit and destruction into an era of enlightenment instead of just the time after the Towers came tumbling down. God bless the Americans because America is fucked.