Needles of Culture. 3500 years old Cleopatra's needle, a dash of airplane and a skyscraper, this is New York City for you /  by Mirena Rhee

Needles of Culture intersect from my point of view in Central Park.

New York City is more than a graduate school, you never graduate. All you have to do is get out of your house and you have everything you need to know about the world, if only you know to look and learn how to see.

New York City is also a teacher of the fleeting, it is a teacher of eternity, and the human condition, of the momentary, of the acquisition and subsequent discardment of objects. Whatever was in the best of shops ultimately ends up in the landfill.

New York City also teaches the value of things, a churro is $3, but 200 meters south it is $4. And the value of a homeless person is zero.

In its great galleries and museums I saw the best the world can offer, priceless works of art money can't buy.

Directly from the Red Planet /  by Mirena Rhee

Underpainting or what they used to call dead coloring paying attention to the line.

Put everything on the canvas in ochre and meanwhile figuring out how to build out different surfaces. In oil I use the mass of the paint to build out rocks, here I want to use transparent glazes because they look more 3d dimensional in acrylics.

It's counter intuitive to use subsurface scattering for rocks but I want to paint jewels encrusted gold rather than dirt and stone.

Whenever I make art I make sure it measures up to the best I've seen at the Met, and has to answer the most important questions /  by Mirena Rhee

The question number one is why, is it meaningful, is it meaningful to me enough to get the fuck out of bed to do it and to keep me up at night.

Question number two is it archival, does it have the capacity to be around for 500 years.

The third question is, will it be compelling enough once I'm long dead for somebody to pick it up and keep it around.

How the fuck do I know what looks good? Of course I know, I go to where the best art in the world hangs, I look at it, and do the same and better.

I don't know what looks good objectively. But I do know what looks good subjectively. So the fourth question is does it look good? Does the composition work? Do the colors work? If I'm no longer around to vouch for it will anyone else find anything beautiful about it?

Often times I have to work with bad materials like acrylic paints but I do know that if I use pigments that have been around for say 2000 years that no matter what they are suspended in, they will work after 500 years just the same.

People think that artists work with paints, fuck no.

I work on my art in my mind and it's done long before I start doing it.

I always laugh when the tech bros start making art, they love having AI do it cuz they don't want to take responsibility for bad art. One of the things AI doesn't know though is how to do the wrong things and break the rules. A beautiful line is always a mistake, a fluke.

Also art has nothing to do with coloring and actually colorist was used as a derogatory name. It's all about the design, the disegno. The disegno of every single line in the painting.