I’m rapidly running out of production time for The Good Life, which I’m sure will be good. Last week I wrapped up a handful of digital images; this weekend I completed a couple more, but out of a mixture of giddy glee and gibbering anxiety I started a few more. Ive refined the digital painting techniques I tossed into the pot a couple months back, and that’s good. But as I educated my eye, my standards have risen, and a few images just won’t make the cut.

I’ve learned about a variety of visual pleasures that were new to me: the crispetty, crunchetty joy of highly sharpened cactus flesh; the gritty poof of dust; the utterly, digitally flat bed of pure, saturated color; the allure of a photograph that just became a painting.

I’ve also rediscovered some old visual pleasures, as well. My penchant for dimestore paperback novels of the ‘60s featuring BW photos with flat glazed of stained-glass color atop them, for example. Or the horror of Helmut Newton’s work from the ‘80s; the many joys of early Interview magazine; my unadulterated fanboy love of the Memphis Group, and the scraps of awesome 80s French punk illustrators I found in Raw, back in the day. You hadda be there.

Though of course you didn’t, actually, because pop and fashion have resurrected almost all of those influences these days. Their fresh digital zombies are tottering through everything, everywhere—for a limited time only.

More later, art lovers… see you at the show.