Chris Simonite's Cubo-Weirdism Blog! A Blog about Chris Simonite's Art by Chris Simonite. Who the Hell else?

I’m not gonna lie, writing a weekly blog about your own art is hard. What the hell do you write about without sounding narcissistic or self-indulgent? But they say if I want to sell art online I have to keep doing it. So today I’ll write about politics again, just because it’s on everyone’s mind. Well, most everyone’s, I assume. Anyway, as we all know, Donald Trump is leaving. He lost. He’s outta there. To paraphrase Lady MacBeth: “out damned Trump”! And good riddance to him.   The thing about Trump is, watching him over the last [...]

  Last week I wrote about how I’m failing the Bechdel Test by painting very few female characters in my series of pop-culture characters painted in a style inspired by George Condo’s concept of Artificial Realism/Pshychological Cubism. The uncomfortable fact is, this style follows in traditions originated by Georges Braque as well as– wait for it–Pablo Picasso. To be honest I wasn’t thinking too much of the baggage that Picasso brings to this kind of work when I began, although I was very aware of it. I started to do this as an experiment to see what combining realism with Picasso/Condo style abstraction [...]

  Answer: paint more women. Before I clarify, allow me to explain. The Bechdel test is a concept that tells you if women are properly represented in fiction such as books, movies and TV. To pass the test there must be at least two women having a conversation about something other than a man. Apparently only half of all movies pass the test. Technically, I suppose my paintings don’t qualify for the test because there are no conversations involved. But if I keep the concept in mind, I’m definitely failing. For the past year and a bit I’ve been doing paintings of characters [...]

You see what I did there? This is my 8th blog post and I’ve managed to get “Hell” into every title! Well, okay not the first one. But I did get “damn” in that one! Anyway, I guess it’s tradition now, so I’ll stop mentioning it. (Insert your own smiley emoji here—this blog is too formal for me to put one in!) So I wasn’t planning to write about titling again, but a couple of comments from Instagram and Facebook got me thinking about it further. As I said last week I’ve been giving my paintings relatively boring titles so as to [...]

  Last week I mentioned how I am inclined to give my paintings funny titles, but I’ve been resisting that lately. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ve seem my painting of Elizabeth II with a part corgi face. Of course, I wanted that to have a funny title, but I did some research and gave it a ridiculously long title, because she has ridiculously long titles! Click here to see the painting and the title. Which I think is just—well—kinda funny! After doing the painting of good ‘ol Liz, I did a one of Danaerus Targaryan. George RR Martin, no doubt using real [...]