dog – IT IN Place

Pain

alex — Sat, 10 Aug 2013 08:16:02 +0000

And after much Pain:
An Animation for Donald Johnson’s song Pain. I made over 2,000 individual images iin Photoshop in an attempt to make something like a handmade digital animation. I call the characters cogs. They aren’t cats and they aren’t dogs and they aren’t people. They are part of a narrative machine.

Song written and sung by Donald Johnson
Music arranged, played, and produced by Javier Hernandez-Miyares
Art and Animation by Alex Itin

Exit Stage Left

alex — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 16:21:52 +0000

I’m into the last notes of the video for “Pain”. The characters walk off stage a little like an old vaudeville comedy team. They are sort of based on me ex’s little dogs who are a little like a comedy team in their antics too. They’ve been running around my feet the whole time. Pain, isn’t it adorable?

Cog

alex — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:42:25 +0000

Playing with the Wakum pad to make an erased animation. Starting with the cog….. see where it goes from there.

Leopold Lion King of the Mountain

alex — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:41:12 +0000

Leopold Bloom looks like a Lion King, or Fantastic Mr. Fox depending on the ears. The dude has many faces and the dude is getting many names, but the dude abides.

Ex Requiem Mass

alex — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:32:23 +0000

This is a strange account of my life of late… nothing but the creative foment of destruction and upheaval leading one hopes to some greater clarity, order and good. My ex went down to Mexico and let, or asked me to watch her place, move the car, sign for packages, etc. I ended up quite sick and bed ridden in a midnight fever sweat of memories good and bad and the crazy sense that the dead dog was following me around the apartment. Haunting. Meanwhile the studio is nearly as broke up as my love life. Still I know the new year will come with order and a biting cold. Pax

Trouble in Purgatory

alex — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:50:35 +0000

Well I’m back on the couch and or pulling vampire all nighters at the studio. This year is like last year and like the decade before that. They say the definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior and expecting different results… Guess I know some crazy people… but joy joy the cog has arisen Christ/Phoenix-like from the blood and ashes. Viva La Cog!

Take This Waltz

alex — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:20:03 +0000

I attempted to flatten some of the creases and folds in an old canvas I grabbed out of storage. The best I could come up with was to soak the whole thing from the back and try to soften the aging acrylic paints. I danced a bit of a jig on it to help the process along and what’s funny is that you end up meeting a lot of people when you are canvas dancing on the sidewalk. They come by with their dogs. I met lots of neighbors and strangers and this is what I’ve learned: People tend to talk about their dogs more than themselves. One guy didn’t have his dog with him so he showed me photos on his cell phone. I didn’t tell them, but they just kept reminding me of my own dog and so I danced to her end if not the end of love.

Spilled Dog

alex — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:55:22 +0000

The other day I made this substitute dog to keep me company in the studio. It’s made out of a saw horse and a sand bag and wine soaked crate from out in front of the Lorimer Street liquor store and a stuffed squirrel dog toy tail. Bailey would have been 15 yesterday, if she was still with us. I made a quick drawing of her licking her paws on her last day and I’ve been working over it off and on ever since…. It’s wine soaked as well. Something about death is like a broken bottle spilling out all the good stuff and you are left with nothing buy shattered glass, or ashes.

Delicious Delores Haze

alex — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 02:34:52 +0000

A document of the week so far using a broad brush mash up montage concept. The music is from Richard Young’s Saphie and was sent to my by my friend Dan the day we put my dog down. We listened to it during the last hours of Bailey’s while lounging and time lapsing life until Sly screamed: “What is this music you are playing!? Does it have to be so FUCKING sad!?” I think I put the Beatles on. They are good for most any occasion if currated properly: Across the Universe…. was the last song she heard from S.’s iphone, while playing fetch and rolling in the grass…. but I digress.

Anyways the Poem is actually Vladimir Nabokov himself reading Humbert’s Love Poem to a rapt audience… Boy can that fucking Russian read. He sounds like Welsh poet. To think that English is maybe his third language? I found it somewhere online and there’s a clip from an Italian dubbed version of Kubrick’s Lolita with James Mason (youtube)… I was looking for Mason’s reading of the first page of the Novel. There is a recording of him that I used to have on cassette. He did it brilliantly. Titles abound: Lolita 2000, Fire, Catch A Fire, Bailey’s Building and Loan, Humbert’s Butterfly, Kubrick by Brick…. I could go on, but in the interest of brevity a shall relent.

Red writing is from Paris 1998, in a cafe, trying to remember the opening page of Lolita… and failing.

Frost Bite (The Dead)

alex — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:42:06 +0000

I’m working on a new show in Williamsburgh Brooklyn that will be a sort of survey of all the art I’ve made since the war started. Death is all around us. Sometimes we forget the dead and so I thought I’d start with my own recent loss.

I took all of Bailey’s toys and threw them on the naked white paper to start. Then I used them as brushes and mops along with my best calligraphy brushes. The central idea of the drawing came from a sketch I’ve been working on with pencil and an old white enamel fridge door. It says Welbuilt.

This is the first of maybe many large works to illustrate the themes I’ve been on since 2003, but anyway one should begin with Joyce and Mingus and so I did….Plus the snow was faintly falling and falling faintly on New York.

Fetch

alex — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:24:04 +0000

Not knowing what else to do with the passing time, We decided to put up the tree and give Bailey the best 48 hours we could. She ate steak and two bags of treats and then we took her to the park one last time before she left. She hasn’t been able to play much fetch the last two years, but It was like those stories you hear about sick musicians coming to life one last time on the stage before they die… that’s the way she played fetch… like it was the most important thing in the world….

So even though I feel like something huge has been taken away from me, I’m confident she’ll find a way to bring it back.

A Boy And His Dog

alex — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 06:09:00 +0000

We’ve set a day that I am calling Easter Monday after one of my favorite deKooning paintings. She has survived for two years with the cancer, but it now seems that there is the question of doing what is best for her. I can’t imagine her ever leaving our side by choice, but it is no good for her to live in pain. I wouldn’t wish cancer on my worst enemy.

I’ve drawn bailey a lot over the years, but I’ve never really caught her they way I would want to remember her and today I realized I only have three days to figure out how to paint her and so I set about doing some sketches.

All the time seems to be lapsing and I want to record every moment of her: It’s more like surveillance than photography. Time is the thing and the other day I was trying to take the piss out of Jim Morrison’s Poetry and Rock and Roll ambition in general, and my friend shot me doing a fake Lizard King Sermon, but now with Radio Head’s Haunting Song: Exit Music (for a film) it doesn’t seem like a joke anymore. I feel so helpless against mortality. What kind of master can’t master eternity?