Oil Painting "Yatta (やった)"

        
Oil on panel, 32" x 48" titled "Yatta (やった)".
I very much enjoyed painting this. Pia and I are watching Heroes and I think it is my third time going through the seasons. I remember the feeling that I had when I watched for the first time. The feeling that the world was changing, or rather that something is 
happening to humanity, evolution. This is one of the first paintings I've done from a TV show character. I used a screenshot as reference material. From the Heroes Wiki: Hiro Nakamura arrives in Times Square after teleporting to New York City from Tokyo, Japan.

Oil Painting "Conversations With The Dead Men-Massed Minds"

 Oil on gypsum panel. 48" x 60" 

Completed on May 17th, 2013.

 The concept for this painting was inspired by some ideas that I read about in a science
fiction series by Frederik Pohl, when I was 12. The Gateway series describes several interesting
future technologies which allow people's minds to be uploaded into machine storage. These
machine stored intelligences live in a digital virtual reality. The uploading of one's

consciousness into digital form can be considered a kind of afterlife or immortality,
therefore these uploaded personalities are known as "the Dead Men" or the Massed Minds.
       In the story, some people carry the uploaded minds of their ancestors around
with them in portable devices and use them for advice and consultation. They are also
used to learn from.

       I have thought about these ideas many times while listening to podcast
lectures and audiobooks. It is just like listening to "The Dead Men", learning
from uploaded thoughts of people who lived in the past.
      For the past several years I have been listening to lectures, interviews,
 and audiobooks on my ipod while I paint and work. It is an amazing medium
for education and I have learned so many things that I would never had the
time or patience to read about. many people talk about the reading of
books as if it is the only legitimate source knowledge. I rarely have time
to read and feel as if it is becoming unnecessary to spend hours reading
books due to the choices that technology allows. When I am listening
to lectures by some dead people such as Terence Mckenna, I feel as if
he is in the room, sharing his thoughts expanding my views even though
the man died in '2000'. Millions of hours of these peoples' ideas and
personalities are not lost, but instead are free to be copied, downloaded
and learned form in the form of podcasts and videos. This adds immense
wealth to the collective mind of humanity.

"Exodus from the Absurdity of Culture"

Oil on panel, 43" x 58" (big)
This painting was Very meaningful for me personally, to create. The model (Mike) and I 
have been friends for many years and actually met while riding freight trains in southern 
California. It was a time of homelessness, cheap 40 ounce bottles of Malt Liquor and 
aimless wandering. Neither one of us live that lifestyle anymore but the process of 
recovery (or what ever you want to call it) has been almost more about unraveling the 
cultural untruths than it has been about actually climbing out of economic poverty and 
substance abuse. Those, of course are only symptoms. I symbolize this idea in the 
painting by showing the absurdity of religion (the big banana in the sky).
The figure is turning his back on this religious, cultural absurdity. Even though he is
tired and worn out from it or perhaps from battling with it, there is a certain calm in the
exhaustion. And even though he seems to escape the scene, isn't it on him? He bears 
the marks of culture, he has gotten it on him. The tattoos are just as much cultural as 
anything else. Even by trying to fight culture, we are only making more of it. Whether 
this is good or bad is for each person to decide, themselves.
And if he is escaping, then where is he escaping to? The pose reminds me of the 
moment when you are hopping a freight train and you pull yourself up the ladder to 
climb aboard. Except this thing he is climbing into has the look of some futuristic thing. 
Some place that we (the audience) are in.
In a way, this painting is also multi-media because in real life I have tattooed Mike 
over the years, so it is the full art experience.

And here is a photo of the artist (me on the left), the model (Mike) and the painting.

Spellcheck By Ismist Memeworks.

Artist Bio for Shot in the Dark Cafe, May 2013

Artist Bio for Shot in the Dark Cafe, May 2013

I was born in San Francisco, CA in 1978. I have been living and working as an artist in Tucson AZ for the past 16 years. 

"With the kinds of problems facing the world....if the expansion if consciousness does not loom large in the human future, then what kind of future is it going to be???" --- Terence Mckenna ---

    

And it is clear to me that the spreading of memes will be the primary catalyst for the salvation of the species. As an artist and thinker, my basic function is the acquisition, processing and spreading of memes. If I am doing any of these things, then I am doing art. The artist is the rudder of humanity whose job it is to direct the corse of civilization, to guide the flow of culture. I was shocked to read this paraphrased idea in the introduction to a humanities textbook when I was about 20. Arrogance? Megolomaniacal? No. The march towards greater consciousness is inevitable and it's responsibility rests on the shoulders of no individual (luckily). But it can be helped along by each thoughtful mind adding into the stream.

    The ideas of great thinkers of the past are many but there is still so much to do. To use art of every medium to translate, sift and reconfigure the data. To make them accessible to every kind of mind. To cast light on analogies and connections that had not been seen before. Technology will  enable and create new forms of media that will uncover new insights, in an unending feedback loop of creativity and information.

Neil A. Collins

neilcollinsartist@gmail.com