John Lindland: Artist
I watched the best minds of my generation become advertising executives and manipulative wordsmiths.
I watched doctors unethically prescribe pills to the general population while swearing hypocritical oaths to drug companies.
I mistakenly attempted to say what I felt at a time where “business truth and business spirituality” was repackaging the things that I loved. I sadly participated, I was not immune.”
One day I woke up and realized I was extinct.
The next day I woke up and realized you also were extinct and that
the difference and beautiful distinctions between great artists like
John Coltrane and great marketers like Lady GaGa no longer
existed.
The last nine months have been tumultuous but gratifying!
I feel photographically like the camera itself is hitting its stride. For my hand…. which touches the button, it’s been about what I don’t want to say rather than what I do. Thus by default I’m left with what I find unique and appreciate. Since I don’t want to see another 10,000 uninteresting generic digital portraits, I look for and listen to what my imagination is saying as I’m shooting. If I see sheet music in error patterns and cats in flowers then I trust that I am on art’s track.
Arts ears and eyes have been very fair to me this year, very. And I thank her/it/he--the nameless for this.
You asked for a name for this show, I say…….Voilla,
Let’s call it
“Schizophrenic Too”!
John lindland (Barcelona 2009)
Gracia Arts Project is Proud to present our 2nd opening with John Lindland.
In the 9 months since his last show he has been prolific.
For this show he is featuring a compelling combination of new mixed medium works and photographs. Art has been good to him. His new photographic works are spectacular. His mixed medium works have the touch eye of a contemporary abstract master.
John Lindland is a “Multi Medium” American Artist, which simply means that he is a Painter, Musician, and Writer who is also not afraid to use different technologies in service to his art. Lindland left America 16 years ago. He's been traveling abroad ever since. Living and working in Amsterdam, India, Prague, Berlin, Melbourne and Byron Bay Australia, from one to four years in each place, he’s been in Barcelona the last two.
2006 saw him co-produce the music for the controversial "Return of Doctor Octagon" with Kool Keith, Wire Magazine’s Top 7 Hip Hop pick for the year, and Franz Ferdinand's Top 10. The single was given the The Guardian’s (U.K.) coveted single of the week and was a British club hit. The avante garde video he co-produced for Aliens in his studio in Berlin was a Viral classic.
2007 saw remixes for Architecture In Helsinki, a temporary breakdown of his physical health, Solo Painting Classes and a tempestuous dialogue / harangue with Norway's most renown and infamous Painter, Bjarne Melgaard.
2008 is Lindland’s first gallery show in Barcelona, plus a reading fromhis new book :Tasos and Nigel: co-authored with Scottish writer Ian Sedano.
Lindland is unafraid and outspoken. “I find art babble often an excuse for lack of talent and laziness, bamboozling diatribes to make excuses and cover-ups for creativity not found in the actual work."
"My process is both basic and complicated. I respect and revere the spontaneous, abstract muse! It is primary and planless. In all mediums this is where I have always begun. Without plan, without strategy, without goal. It is my opinion that these terms, plan, strategy and goal, are co-opted American business/war terms; that even art now both tolerates and celebrates. I don’t ! "
"Regarding visual art, I start with abstract expressions of color, charcoal, oil or watercolor, and then look for or wait for an image to appear in the fragments or in the layering. From there I will use technology as needed. Photographing the paintings, re/projecting them onto themselves, painting and layering again... or printing the photograph instead of the original painting on canvas, I don't care. I choose the final medium that does justice to the image. Though I use the computer liberally, it is but a tool to serve the piece in finding it's intuitive archetype and home. The most important thing is maintaining the original spark of raw energy in each work.
Lindland says " a solo with me is like experiencing a group show, due to the freedom I allow and like to keep between the canvas's. I see no need nor reason to cajole the work into some sort of falsely cohesive "balanced normalcy". I trust the un-medicated schizophrenic in the relationships between my paintings. I celebrate their individual electricity.
Barcelona is my current creative blessing. I write for 2 to three hours in the morning, often outdoors by the sea, and then either paint, do music or swear at the stock market as I lose my savings from a far in the afternoon. I feel culturally invisible here, which has both an upside and a down. The absence of an agreed upon and dominating art theory in Barcelona is a freedom that both suits me and my work. Due to the artists that I currently have with and around me, I stay in a rich, challenging, intelligent and electric artistic dialogue, which I feel is translating directly to my work in Spain.
Links:
I watched doctors unethically prescribe pills to the general population while swearing hypocritical oaths to drug companies.
I mistakenly attempted to say what I felt at a time where “business truth and business spirituality” was repackaging the things that I loved. I sadly participated, I was not immune.”
One day I woke up and realized I was extinct.
The next day I woke up and realized you also were extinct and that
the difference and beautiful distinctions between great artists like
John Coltrane and great marketers like Lady GaGa no longer
existed.
The last nine months have been tumultuous but gratifying!
I feel photographically like the camera itself is hitting its stride. For my hand…. which touches the button, it’s been about what I don’t want to say rather than what I do. Thus by default I’m left with what I find unique and appreciate. Since I don’t want to see another 10,000 uninteresting generic digital portraits, I look for and listen to what my imagination is saying as I’m shooting. If I see sheet music in error patterns and cats in flowers then I trust that I am on art’s track.
Arts ears and eyes have been very fair to me this year, very. And I thank her/it/he--the nameless for this.
You asked for a name for this show, I say…….Voilla,
Let’s call it
“Schizophrenic Too”!
John lindland (Barcelona 2009)
Gracia Arts Project is Proud to present our 2nd opening with John Lindland.
In the 9 months since his last show he has been prolific.
For this show he is featuring a compelling combination of new mixed medium works and photographs. Art has been good to him. His new photographic works are spectacular. His mixed medium works have the touch eye of a contemporary abstract master.
John Lindland is a “Multi Medium” American Artist, which simply means that he is a Painter, Musician, and Writer who is also not afraid to use different technologies in service to his art. Lindland left America 16 years ago. He's been traveling abroad ever since. Living and working in Amsterdam, India, Prague, Berlin, Melbourne and Byron Bay Australia, from one to four years in each place, he’s been in Barcelona the last two.
2006 saw him co-produce the music for the controversial "Return of Doctor Octagon" with Kool Keith, Wire Magazine’s Top 7 Hip Hop pick for the year, and Franz Ferdinand's Top 10. The single was given the The Guardian’s (U.K.) coveted single of the week and was a British club hit. The avante garde video he co-produced for Aliens in his studio in Berlin was a Viral classic.
2007 saw remixes for Architecture In Helsinki, a temporary breakdown of his physical health, Solo Painting Classes and a tempestuous dialogue / harangue with Norway's most renown and infamous Painter, Bjarne Melgaard.
2008 is Lindland’s first gallery show in Barcelona, plus a reading fromhis new book :Tasos and Nigel: co-authored with Scottish writer Ian Sedano.
Lindland is unafraid and outspoken. “I find art babble often an excuse for lack of talent and laziness, bamboozling diatribes to make excuses and cover-ups for creativity not found in the actual work."
"My process is both basic and complicated. I respect and revere the spontaneous, abstract muse! It is primary and planless. In all mediums this is where I have always begun. Without plan, without strategy, without goal. It is my opinion that these terms, plan, strategy and goal, are co-opted American business/war terms; that even art now both tolerates and celebrates. I don’t ! "
"Regarding visual art, I start with abstract expressions of color, charcoal, oil or watercolor, and then look for or wait for an image to appear in the fragments or in the layering. From there I will use technology as needed. Photographing the paintings, re/projecting them onto themselves, painting and layering again... or printing the photograph instead of the original painting on canvas, I don't care. I choose the final medium that does justice to the image. Though I use the computer liberally, it is but a tool to serve the piece in finding it's intuitive archetype and home. The most important thing is maintaining the original spark of raw energy in each work.
Lindland says " a solo with me is like experiencing a group show, due to the freedom I allow and like to keep between the canvas's. I see no need nor reason to cajole the work into some sort of falsely cohesive "balanced normalcy". I trust the un-medicated schizophrenic in the relationships between my paintings. I celebrate their individual electricity.
Barcelona is my current creative blessing. I write for 2 to three hours in the morning, often outdoors by the sea, and then either paint, do music or swear at the stock market as I lose my savings from a far in the afternoon. I feel culturally invisible here, which has both an upside and a down. The absence of an agreed upon and dominating art theory in Barcelona is a freedom that both suits me and my work. Due to the artists that I currently have with and around me, I stay in a rich, challenging, intelligent and electric artistic dialogue, which I feel is translating directly to my work in Spain.
Links:
