Abocado from Mexico

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 I know. Avocado is misspelled, but I'm enjoying remembrance of a long lost friend I left behind in Dallas. When she grew comfortable enough with me to get engrossed in conversation, her accent would get a little heavier. Sometimes she called me 'Alvert.'
This picture is one of my few still lifes and that avocado, although I didn't know it at the time, is most likely Mexican. This I learned years later in Dallas when I walked by a proudly Mexican coworker, who was busy carving into one about this size and I says, "I can't find avocados that big anywhere!" and he says, "Go to a Mexican grocery store."
But that doesn't really explain this one, which I found in P'gould back in '79.
Oil on a 16x20" canvas that was originally on a commercial panel. For some reason I don't exactly recall - probably dampness partially dislodging it - I tried to steam it off of the cardboard. Which I was sort of successful at, but not entirely. It still has some glue and bits of cardboard stuck to the back, and that vertical line in the upper right corner is where I tore it in the process. I did manage to get it stapled to stretchers though.

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Early Oils (70's)

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Interior with Blue Window

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14x10" oil on canvas panel, 1977, the year I grokked the gestalt of composition. Had a small easel on the kitchen table.

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80's Landscapes

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 All local stuff. This first sketch was made back behind the old junior high, Thompson St. I think.

And here's the old Hunt St. woods, shortly before they cut it down and built houses.

I lived here one summer, out on 49 south...

...stepped out back, past the hay bale there, to make this little 11x14" oil, which I sold off the wall of a cafe on Main St. in Jonesboro. For 30 bucks. Lady said it matched her sofa.

Whew. I just almost went into a dead panic, looking for this next one to get the size, and I couldn't find it! Checked every stack 2 or 3 times looked over the walls - where I already knew it wasn't - 2 or 3 times, began to remind myself of that old "definition" of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; finally looked where I was pretty sure it wouldn't be, in a box I used when I moved in here, there it was. I never really finished unpacking.
So, it's a 21x17" oil on canvas, en plein air I did out near Walcott, according to a note I made on the back, on July 7, 1982.

This is a studio piece made from taped together photos I took out by Oak Grove, also in '82. Oil on canvas, I think about 14x18". It won an award at the Greene County Fair the next year, and it's hanging on my Mom's living room wall.

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A. Decker Art

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I used to have almost all my drawing and painting posted on blogs such as this, but that situation went belly up and it's all gone. I don't get to be at the computer nearly as much as I did in those days, but I want to get my art out there at least as much as this so I'm gonna post some of it back up here every time I get online, starting now. Whether I have time to say stuff about it or not...

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PESUGIHAN - Nyupang Pocong @Sawangan Of Darknes (Depok)

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Sublimation

small pencil sketch from cropped photo, 'cause I wanted to see a big picture here

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Nothing personal...

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I had me a right ponder on the throne this morning. The value of conceptual knowledge. Would we sense what's good to eat and what would kill us without conceptual knowledge? Could pure senses tell the difference? Moot point since everything coming in through the senses is filtered and translated by already existing knowledge. That's what tells us there's a thing separate from us at all. Manifest reality - or nature, if you will - is not nice, or mean, or indifferent. It doesn't produce pscilocybin shrooms to thrill us, nor Deadly Nightshades to kill us. It doesn't extend one life a century and end another in minutes because of who they were. When I die, it won't be about me. It happens whether you're ready or not. If death is impersonal, doesn't it follow that life is?

 1/21/16

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Corporate Espionage (muah-ha-haaa!)

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Back in the 80s I worked in a rice processing plant. Cameras weren't allowed but one day, since I had the top floor mostly to myself, I saw fit to smuggle in a little instamatic (a type of camera so old that spellcheck thinks it's not even a word). It was small, fit in a jacket pocket with ease.
My job up there on the "cooking floor" was pretty easy, and slow, so I was always wandering around out on the roof (5 stories/80 feet up) taking in the views.
Here are a few of them, plus an oil sketch I did some years later from this one.

Added sort of as an afterthought, this is a 20x24" oil on canvas I did from sketches I made out on the roof one other day.

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