Ross Smirnoff Art: 2012

Monday, December 31, 2012

"Our so-called involvement with reality really detaches us from reality. Our preoccupations, goals, joys and sorrows, really detach us from the ultimate reality which is the irreversible march toward oblivion. Confinement is one of the worst punishments because it exposes you to nothing but waiting. Intelligence becomes our enemy when it exposes us to the truth and doesn't show us how to escape it. Therefore, the most stupid weapon, courage, is our unique and ultimate weapon. Courage is what makes us take care of our daily preoccupations as if they really mattered. Courage is an arm for the so-called defeated as joy is an arm for the so-called victorious. Buddhism, which tells us that all is illusion, still doesn't explain what this knowledge is useful for. Dress yourself in your courage as in a dirty shirt because there is no clean one at your disposal. Courage is a virtue and faith exists to justify the existence of virtues."

Gaston Chaissac

Sigmar Polke Telephone Drawing

Philip Guston Drawings

Happy New Year

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Drawing by Ross Smirnoff

Augustine Lesage

Edward James's Gardens Las Pozas

Drawing in Progress by Ross Smirnoff

And a little later...

Andre Breton- The mastermind of Surrealism

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Abbe Foure

Post-Mayan Apocalypse Drawing by Ross Smirnoff

Monday, December 24, 2012

Der Blaue Reiter Almanac

I had the great fortune of walking into a bookstore today and purchasing a copy of The Der Blaue Reiter Almanac. The first entry of this almanac is an essay written by Franz Marc entitled, "Spiritual Treasures." This essay asks a deeply disturbing and unfortunate reality that still pervades society today. Why do we value spiritual treasures so completely different than material ones? To quote Franz Marc, in this great manifesto, he proclaims, " new ideas are hard to understand only because they are unfamiliar. How often must this sentence be repeated before even one in a hundred will draw the most obvious conclusions from it? But we will not tire of repeating it, and we will tire even less of expressing the new ideas and of showing the new paintings until the days arrives when our ideas are generally accepted."