God in the Gallery: Saturday June 26, 2010 Good Art/ Bad Art

Today I venture out to Harlem on Malcom X street with Caleb and Jayson because their art mentor Eric is a painter and I was curious what kind of paintings Eric does. I wanted to visit with them his studio and complex as we took the 1 train uptown there. We were suppose to take the 2 or 3 and didn't realize to not take the 1 train because the 1 train does not goes East unlike the other red line trains which turns. So we end up having to walk a good 15 minutes to Malcom X, but once we were there we felt welcome. Eric has two son and a lovely wife which greet us with a homemade lunch potato and bacon soup and salad. The two sons one named Elliot is a funny playful boy who refer to lemonade as "water lemonade" because he understands his mommy dilute the lemonade with water. We went downstairs and visit his studio at home where he paint often with acrylics paint on canvas. To describe Eric work it is in the category of abstraction meets distortion of figures taken from a sci-fi world context. He use often medieval etching manuscript and illuminate them into a contemporary interpretation of a compulsive and intimate story about divine revelation by a laser beam aim at the ambiguous figures' heads. He works on multi projects like an artist from drawings of intricate details and pattern that transform into an expanding amoeba. He also show us his third eye portrait drawing of a man and his related crafted third lens pair of manufactured glasses frame which relate to this theme of revelation of the third eye. I believe the third eye suppose to mean the revealing divine revelation from God behind Eric's work. This concept that in other to receive the third eye it must also destroy your identity of "self" in the process hence the metaphor of a laser beam.

Because I was visiting Eric, I didn't have much time spent with my collaboration group- Jayson and Sunny. But we manage to discuss and talk over our thoughts on our difficult word "betrayal". We talked about the definition of "betrayal" relating to people we already have relationship with and people close to us than strangers. Betrayal exist in us through our broken relationships, whether it has been friends who backstabbed us or told lies about us or our family members who hurt us. I learn today that Jayson have an incurable unknown disease called Chrome disease where your intestine have hard time digesting food. Garrett a friend from home actually have the same disease but Jayson case is worst because the doctors didn't diagnose Jayson until much later when he had surgery and loss several of his intestines. Jayson has been in the hospital for over a year and still need more surgery to fix his intestines. As much life experience Jayson had undergo over the past year, he's a mature individual and playful to be around. He can make you laugh and his love for God shows through his art work finding beauty in the most ugliest and dislike things of this world or his own created world in his sketches. Sunny open up and I saw how normal of a person she can be. Behind her cold exterior and guard she opened up to her family betrayal of her mother and family when they found out she had a life threaten illness. We didn't get a chance to get a third party opinion on the word "betrayal". Hopefully we can get some general public opinion and stories of their thoughts on the word "betrayal".

Today we venture out to Chelsea area and saw the river bank as well as dine out at an Italian restuarant called Pepe Giallo which have nice service and friendly ambient lighting. I would recommend going back there to eat on 10th avenue between 25th and 24th street. I had the fettucine chicken and mushroom alfredo sauce with bread, and dessert. Bon appetite!