E S Toledo Linked at Worldwide Gallery

Recently, I have been asked to allow the fine people at Art Gallery-Worldiwde to link up to here, for those who art seeking this type of art. Thanks very much guys!

Toss That Baby Over Here

One year when I was married, before we had kids, my wife made me a lamp for a present. She had taken a lamp we had picked up at a garage sale, a socket and shade on a board really, and turned it in to a work of art. She covered the base in faux leopard fur, attached two basketball playing cake decorations that she had turned into demons and added a plastic baby. She then adorned it with plastic beads. It was really cool and attained a place of honor in my basement studio.
I had used the lamp in a painting I had done, called "Still Life With MR T Lamp and Ukelin", but it was hard to render as it was a smaller part of the painting. So i immeduiately started on another painting focusing solely on the lamp.
She used to bead up up lamps we purchased at garage sales and then would sell as art pieces at the vintage clothing store where we had a space. Many a night she would spend in her space with a glue gum and a tub of beads, tirelessly toiling on these lamps. And the people loved them, I believe we sold everyone we took down there. But then we had children, and all the time she had to do this was now spent on changing diapers and all the other joys that come from being a parent. This lamp is now gone but the painting remains. When I asked her back then what she called this lamp, she shrugged her shoulders, so I decided to name it.

Diverticulitis (Cornhole)

Back when I was married, my father -in-law was hospitalized with a bout of diverticulitis. For those of you unfamiliar with this, it's when digested pieces of meats and nuts collect in the folds of your colon, causing a blockage. I loved my father-in-law very much and thought him to be very wise (although we rarely agreed politically).
Also, at the time, I was in a band, we had a song that our drummer referred to as "being really hard on the ol' cornhole", so that's what the song was called. This was also the time my wife and I were hitting a lot of garage sales where I would pick up things like farm animals and other little things for reasons I didn't quite comprehend. I had an old Steelcase filing cabinet in the basement of our duplex where I would put all this stuff, sabving it for some unseen project.
I also had acquired a stock of Maruschka screen prints, which I would paint over and use for canvasses. The idea actually came from my wife. I would mix up paints for one painting and always mix too much, so I would use that up before it dried to cover up the image on the old screen print. In this case, as in the case of Mystery Friend JHK (MJK), I left part of the original to be part of my piece, the swirl of a shell.
I wanted to create the illusion of depth, which you do by overlapping images, also I used increasingly smaller critters as the plane went deeper. It was done as a joke, not at my father-in-law's expense, but just a joke on humanity. Who knows what nasty things are collecting in our colons that we are unaware of?

HERBL

In the land of Grullnidge, in the deepest darkest jungle
Two miles south of the vilage of Farflungle
Over the mountain by Ookala Rock
Lies the valley of the land of the willacok
Now no one has seen a willacik, only their hide
Some claim is just a rabbit pelt another person dyed
But that doesn't explain the part that sticks out
Where on the willacok is his dog like snout
And if it is a rabbit's pelt thentell me why does he
Have a long skinny tail where a bunny's tail is fuzzy
There is only one way at another conclusion you could arrive
And that's to catch a willacok and bring him back alive

Now, there's two kinds of willacoks, one of them is verbal

Like the one in our story who goes by the name of Herbl

Hiding in the jungle is how he spends his day

Talking to himself to scare hunters away

Herbl was camouflaged so hunters couldn't see him

Just like the pelts in the Grullnidgian Museum

So when they heard the voice but could not see the man

They would throw down their weapon, yell "Ghost!" and then they ran

It was always the willacok because nobody suspects

A beast who knows a thousand languages and a million dialects

Don't ask me hiow he knows them, but he never gets them wrong

Just like the freeblet werbler sings the same old song

"FREEBLET-WERBLER FREEBLET WERBLER"

Herbl copyright 1996 E S Toledo, story copyright 2005 K D Murphy

De-Sensitizer

This is my award winning piece of art, although one photograph cannot do it justice. I took an old television cabinet from the fifties, gutted all the innards and started from there. I had a styrofoam wig head that for some reason had a plastic face on it. then I took a rubber mask I had and glued it to the head, then taped it down and painted it flesh tone. This sat around the basement along with the tv cabinet for a week, looking spooky as you could still see the face under neath. I went to the Salvation Army and bought a plastic baby doll. The arms were ripped off and made to appear as if they were coming out the ears of the original head. The doll head was put on top of the other and it's torso came out where the mouth was. Red latex paint was liberally dripped at all contact points, then glossy Mod Podge was dumped over the whole thing. I mixed some plaster of paris and put it on the insides of the television, on one side using it to hold the

bottom of a plastic bank I had put a small blinking Christmas light under it, and on the other side I secured a small rubber skeleton in it. I slid the head(s) in on a small screen print I had painted over and towards the front is a pile of plastic Easter eggs painted flesh tone. The top of the pile has a broken open egg, with a small baby hatching out of it. There are blinking lights run along the top front, with the wiring being buried under the plaster.

Finally, I took another screen print and painted a background similar to the background on "Angry White Male"(see Archives), in fact, I believe it was the inspiration for the background of that painting. I cut it off the frame and stapled it to the back. It was a lot of work, but I entered it in the Urban Institute For Contemporary Arts Rerun Recycled art show and took second place in the artistic merit division.

television offers up images every day designed to desensitze us to the brutalness of the world. Often times, it offers up people for us to worship, adore, and celebrate, only to chew them up when they need a distraction from the atrocities of the government.

PASTORAL

I've always been taken with the artists who put a lot of detail in their work. Impressionism relies on representation to stand for detail, but I like the Masters who painted every hair on an animal, or put elaborate yet miniscule images in their work.
When I paint, I start with an old screen print that stood for cheap art in the seventies. I must cover that item before I can start my work and the way I do that is by using leftover mixed paint from another painting, bit by bit forming a layer over the original image. On this one, by accident, in the center was an image that reminded me of Salvador Dali in an officer's cap, so I set out to incorporate this in the finished painting. I always start with the background so when I put paint over it, it creates the illusion of depth. All art is based on illusion. Then I work towards the front, at the bottom adding overlapping images to create even more depth. As you draw closer in the image, more items are detailed, as you would see it naturally with your eye. So the trees in front have every leaf painted on, every blade of grass is painted on.
This used to be the magic painting when Wilbur was a baby. I would put him over my shoulder so that he faced the painting and slowly rock back and forth and in no time, he would fall asleep.

Portrait Of The Artist With His Father (From Photo)

I Painted this for my father as a gift, but when I gave it to him, not knowing much about art or shading, he complained that I made his teeth too black. I did this from a photo taken at a family reunion at his trailer, where he moved with his fourth wife. I would chase the nieces and nephews around the trailer while he sat around and argued politics with my brother while we all sat around drinking beer and grilling burgers.
When he moved to Arizona, as he packed up his car and trailer, he had to decide what he could and couldn't take with him. The trip to Arizona was for my step-mother, who had asthma and couldn't breathe the pollen laden Michigan air any more. We all sat around watching him get stressed as his wife was in the hospital and he tried to get his meager posessions in the Mazda he had at the time. He brought this painting out and thrust in my hands saying, "Here, take this, I don't have room for it, and anyway, you made my teeth too black." So I put it my car and watched my dad for what would be the last time I saw him. The following year, he had a stroke and was in the hospital. While on the operating table to have a pacemaker put in, he had a coronary and died. At least I have this painting. You can see, my dad and I were very close, and I miss him sometimes, especially after my children were born. However, if he had never passed away, I would have never had the urge to start my own family, and would never had talked my wife into having Wilbur, my first born son.

These are two digital images I created from a single photograph taken by my son with my digital camera. I then ran the image through my Print Master 16 repeatedly distorting the image incremently. When I put them in my Windows Moviemaker and run them, they appear to pulse disturbingly. I have a lot of fun with my PrintMaster16 and have created many similar images that look nothing like the origianl image.