IF YOU WANT TO SEE THIS POST WITH IMAGES VISIT MEIN WELT
don't even bother to read this . even because it is very embassing to me . but i must to post anyway . i must to , soon or later , be fair with my early influences that works on me still today , every single day , good or bad , made me be what i am .
there was me in a strange country in 2007 eating my beakfast , brown bread with sauerkraut with brown bread and more sauerkraut , listening the Jon Specer Blues Explosion's album i got fron a nice girl that studied cinema , when i see by the side of the cd, pen , pencil and paper .
with one hand holding the bread and other drawing i did this little scketch . i thought i had put this into the trash , but when i arrived here in Sao Paulo was among my stuff deep in my backpack .
ok , it isn't a good drawing even more when you compare with the photo . but what made me wonder is that in my entire life this was just the second time i drawed observing an albums cover . the first time was just in 2005 when i did a self portrait and painted the "Die Die my Darling - Misfits , by the side of it .
curious considering that my early influences were exactaly the cover of albuns i used to listen and the Chiclete com Banana magazine ( buble gum with banana ) ...
in 1986 my country was coming out fron a heavy dictatorship , and all intelecuals ( in Brasil you're just considered intelectual if you have "left" ideals , if not , you're considered idiot ) , artists , musicians , news papers .... were screaming socialist speechs and " the truth of the poors "by a very twisted and disgusting idea of democracy that is as elitist today as the dictatorship . it sucked so much , was the most obvious boring moment a nation could experiment .
1986 there was me , 11 years old walking down the street having 10 erections a day , listening Ramones when i saw the cover of the first number of a magazine with a illustration of Duck Donald in a punk look and doing drugs saying " pato que pariu " in a horrible translation it is like " duck you " a pun for fuck you .
Chiclete com Banana was the most anarquist and self destructive magazine of the world ever , it was about Angeli 's cartoons , acid humor ant-politic but against everything . the perfection .
i read this magazine fron 11 to 18 years old , when the it stoped to be published ...
the biggest influence it had on my life wans't about atittude or humor , i would get this anyway , but very early Angeli made me believe how important was to develop your own style ( here i posted a cover of the magazine with Angeli's self portrait ) .
in a world where all the kids used to listen virtuous guitar players of metal and blues , i was listening punk rock , skinhead OI , and the indie rock of that time , musicians that barely knew how to hold a guitar , but played this with more feeling than the genious that played one thousand of notes per second . i was a fan of a cartunist that had a vagabound drawing but was able to make it happens and was impossible to do not recognise his style .
i hated mtv because my favorite bands didn't even have video clips , so i used to spend hours in my bed just looking to the cover of the albuns and listening it . i had my particular genious-heros , as Raymond Pettibon , even today when someone asks me to make a list of my biggest influences , among Rembrandt , Lucien Freud , Giacometti , Frans Halls , Richard Serra , Eduard Much , Velasquez , Beuys , ..... isn't rare to include Raymond Petibon , he made several covers for SST bands as Minutemen and Black Flag , i am not sure about gossips , but i think he was the brother of the Black Flag's leader ... i had it all , and i thought he was the best in the world ever !! hahah!!
for many years i just had 2 t-shirts , one white of the Toy Dolls ( i am a toy doll , do you remember this post about Michelangelo and the Dutch painters of the 17th centure ? ) and one black of "Let's Start a War " the Exploited classic . this Exploited cover was one of the biggest influences about painting in my life , observing and living with it for years , i learned lots of things about light , space .... and i believe that today isn't so hard to look at this cover and understand how it gets into my work .
Ramones : for my entire life i have listened everyday , yes , even today . everything about Ramones is perfect , even the covers of the albuns , and many years ago i made a painting using the rest of paint fron other work , the name of it is Sabado ( saturday ) , i intended to use a Ramone character as a self reference in a Saturday night , alone and miserable , while the rest of the city was having fun , yes , i don't like this painting , but i keep it . don't know why , and the Ramone character seens more like a mexican guy asking for job than a punk rocker ... maybe this is the reason i still keep , makes me laugh .
one cover that changed my life for ever was the Sonic Youth's : Sister . i was 13 years old when i got this album . and after hours listening and looking to this cover i got more and more intrigued about the girl on it . who was she ? why is she there , i mean , this cover had lots of good images , but all stoped to exist when i looked to this girl's portrait . she wasn't even pretty , but strong , definitive .
one day on a end of year party of my father's company , a guy asked me to go to his car pick up something , when i got there i found a Richard Avedon's book with the title : In the American West . and guess who was staring at me ? the Sonic Youth's girl . " what the hell is she doing here on this car , what book is this ?" i started to "discover" the book page by page ... and page by page i got fascinated by it . the images were so strong , raw , sofisticated , direct , intriguing , it was more punk than all the punk moviment's images . sundely the photo of the girl on Sonic Youth's album seemed to be so silly and boring with all those colorful interventions , so weak comparing with the original . i could write for hours about this . it definetly changed my life .
other thing it made me remember is that today i paint as i wished almost 10 years ago , 10 years ago i painted as i wished 20 years ago ..... i am living as i had imagined when i was a kid , this pathetic life i have today was my dream when i was 11 years old . if i traveled in time and appeared to myself with 11 showing my work and telling a couple of hundreds of storys , the little me would say : oh my God , i am my hero !! kids are stupidy . even because after the world have turned thousands of times i am pretty much the same . at that time i used to listen Ramones everyday and spanking a monkey trying imagine how is a real experience with a real woman .... now i listen Ramones everyday and spank a monkey trying to remember how was a real experience with a real woman .... next reecarnation , when i get teenager , i am going to try to imagine myself milionary with lots of biggboobed blodes jumping around me .
the monastic life of a painter .
in the future i am thinking about to make posts about my influences , i decided to start by the very beguining . this one .
i forgot to say one thing : when i get milionarie i am going to buid a chapel for The Ramones !!
