Sum Of The Dharma

some of the dharma

Jack Kerouac

Penguin Books

1999

Review by Rory A.A. Hinton

Nineteen years ago I was on the road and needed change for the bus. I only had a $20.00 bill in my pocket. I looked around and noticed I was near a used bookstore. I walked into the store thinking that I could break the bill by buying a book. A book on the shelf near the front of the store window caught my attention. It was some of the dharma by Jack Kerouac. It was large and heavy, at least compared to Dharma Bums. Because it was used I got it for half the retail price. When I handed the cashier the bill I asked if they could break down the change into coins. “The bus?” she asked. “The bus” I said, smiling sheepishly. I left the store and waited for the bus. It was raining. When it arrived I walked on, settled into my seat, and carefully took the book out of the wet bag. I opened it to the first page and read the following words of dedication: "I love Allen Ginsberg - Let that be recorded in heaven's unchangeable heart - " (Jack Kerouac). Priceless.

Feuerbach's Essence

By Rory A.A. Hinton

The Essence Of Christianity is nothing but a footnote to Metaphysics. When Feuerbach states that he differs from those philosophers "who pluck out their eyes that they may see better; for my thought I require the senses, especially sight," he is echoing Aristotle: "All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is in the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight."
     To therefore claim with Feuerbach that theology is anthropology is simply another way of saying with Aristotle that the essence of a thing is found within the thing itself: the soul of the eye is seeing. This is why Heidegger states that you cannot have Being without human beings. And this is why Rahner echos Heidegger by arguing that to carry out Feuerbach's program of reformulating dogmatic theology into theological anthropology does not necessarily mean that God gets reduced to man,  because "to turn toward man is to discover the place where mystery is inscribed in the world." Ecce Homo is merely the means 
     Not all philosophy is but footnotes to Plato. Feuerbach’s Essence is the exceptional exception.

Sources

Aristotle. Metaphysics. Princeton University Press. 1991.
Karl Rahner. Foundations Of Christian Faith. Crossroad. 1982.

Ludwig Feuerbach. The Essence Of Christianity. Dover. 2008.

Martin Heidegger. Being And Time. Blackwell Publishers. 1962.
Thomas Sheehan. The Dream Of Karl Rahner. The New York Review Of Books. February 4, 1982.

The Heidegger Files

By Rory A.A. Hinton

Sein Und Zeit - Signed First Edition

"It is rather the darkest of all." (Martin Heidegger)

I recently finished binge watching The X-Files on Netflix. It took me two weeks to get through it. Xbox Gold rewarded my obsessive effort with a virtual trophy. Nice. What started out as a way to spend some spare time ended up as a nostalgic indulgence.
     My late father introduced me to the show when it first aired twenty three years ago. Watching it was one of the few things we did together. He later confessed to me that his commitment to it had less to do with his interest in science fiction, and more to do with his love of Gillian Anderson. Like father, like son.

YES

   










   





     He did, however, tell me that the X-Files were real files. I wanted to believe. So I did. Instilling in me the belief that the show was more science than fiction, that Mulder and Scully were actually dramatizing real events cataloged in top secret government files, has been the inspiration behind my ever evolving reconnaissance mission to seek the truth out there, wherever and whatever it might be: "Supposing truth is a woman - what then?" (Friedrich Nietzsche).
     The tenth episode of the seventh season of The X-Files is entitled "Sein Und Zeit" (Being And Time). It was written as the first of a two-part segment that reveals what happened to Mulder's sister Samantha. It is one of many episodes that informs the narrative arch of the alien-conspiracy mythology.

Fox And Samantha

   












     The title of the episode intrigued me. I first read Martin Heidegger's Sein Und Zeit as an undergraduate philosophy major. It left its mark on me. Over the years I have come back to this book and read it through new eyes each time (these days they are decidedly pragmatic). Richard Rorty's summation of Heidegger's significance sums up my present attitude: "Heideggerese is Heidegger's gift to us, not Being's gift to Heidegger."
     This is a pragmatic way of saying that Heidegger's worth is in the language he has given us in Being And Time ("Heideggerese") to get things intentionally done in the world, rather than using "Platonese" to leave things ineffably undone (supposedly) elsewhere. So much the worse for Platonic onto-theology: "Christianity is Platonism for the masses." (Friedrich Nietzsche).
     One of the things I wanted to get done after I watched episode ten was to determine if (and how) Heidegger's philosophy in Sein Und Zeit influenced the writers'/producers' decision to call it what they did. I am not the first person to think about this. But all that I could find online was an acknowledgement by a serious X-Files fansite that the connection between Heidegger's book and the title of the episode was something left unanswered. At least it was asked.
     Heidegger's philosophy is a modern commentary on the ancient claim made by Heraclitus that "all is flux." What distinguishes Being And Time in the history of Western philosophy is the emphasis that it places on the word 'all'. To be in the world (being) is to continually become in a world of constant change, a world that is experienced as the indefinitely continued progress of events (time), and grounded in primordial temporality (history). So, to be in the world is to be in history (and no where else). This is true of all that is (without exception). Michel Foucault's important insight that we are all "historically condemned to history" is nothing but a footnote to Heidegger (who did not mind the condemnation).

Closure

   








   
     With this in mind, my guess about the title is that the key to understanding Mulder's "Closure" (the title of the second part of this segment) about Samantha is found in his recognition that her death is a tragic end, but that it does not occur through alien means. As he comes to terms with the recent death of his mother, this discovery about Samantha plays a central part of what it means for him to be in the world. He finds peace at this stage of the story by letting go of his conspiratorial quest for a more-than-natural answer to Samantha's human-all-too-human disappearance. Like Heidegger, he accepts his condemnation without complaint.
     "Heideggerese" has helped me gain descriptive closure over the death of my father. Writing this essay in his memory certainly makes this process easier. But such closure does not close the door on the mystery of being in the world (whether that includes the disappearance of your sister or the demise of your father). In the end we still must face the question of the Being of beings, the "darkest of all." This is the real X-File.

Albert Hinton (1934-2010)

Drawing With Light

By Rory A.A. Hinton

Kilimanjaro (Gabriel Israel)

"You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved." 
(Ansel Adams). 

Master photographer Gabriel Israel is a draughtsman. Like all great artists his drawing skills are excellent, and appeared early. His chalk drawing of a Rembrandt painting made when he was a teenager illustrates the depth of his technical talent. The same can also be said of his early Michelangelo reproductions. That he describes the act of photography as "light drawing" is therefore not without significance. "That's what I do," Gabriel says. "Drawing with light. For me it's like art. You capture something, like a painting." He knows whereof he speaks.

Rembrandt Chalk Drawing (Gabriel Israel)

Street Scene, Venice, Italy (Gaby Israel)

   
The High Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age are conspicuous by their influence in Gabriel's photography (at least by those who know their art history), and provide the artistic basis for his romantically realist philosophy of art. If philosophy begins in wonder (as Aristotle says), then so does photography, at least the kind that Gabriel has perfected through his body of work.

Art is a selective recreation of reality based on an artist's value judgements. The monetary value that collectors have rightly seen in Gabriel's recreations is rooted in his values as an artist. When I asked him to sum up his work in one word Gabriel immediately said "passion" (without hesitation). It is the passion beneath, between, and behind Gabriel's photographic acts that makes his pictures not only well worth the taking, but also well worth the partaking in by those of us who are as serious about collecting great art as we are about confronting the reason why it matters.

The philosopher and the photographer do the same thing, but they do it in different ways: they recognize wonder in nature and try to give expression to it, in words and in images. What does this Aristotelian wonder consist in? Gabriel sheds light on the significance of this question by answering it in his drawings. They contain captured moments of absolute clarity. To encounter them is to have the silence of that attentive moment drown out the noise of the attenuating multitude. They help us feel rather than think by respecting and conveying the passion of lived-experience. In Gabriel the philosopher and photographer become one: to truly feel is to truly see. What is the eye that sees but is never itself seen? The answer to this koan is in the seeing (for the soul of the eye is seeing).

Lower Antelope Canyon Crystal Ball (Gaby Israel)

Gabriel is a romantic. His romance consists in his technical ability to draw us in and make us wonder at the existence of the real world, frame by frame. To illustrate this point, He showed me a series of pictures he took of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Ontario. "They get you thinking," he said. I asked him what he meant. "It's the power of this building," he answered, "the strong diagonal, the metal, the cold of the material." One picture in particular demonstrates what he means by the building's power. "The spiral tower has to be there," he said. "That is reality." He then drew my attention to the reflection in the window of the building. "The reflection looks like a painting." He then fell silent and let the picture do the talking.

Reflecting Dali, Royal Ontario Museum (Gaby Israel)

        

Gabriel is disciplined enough to capture light as it draws it's natural patterns, without getting in its way. "My job is to focus on the composition," he said. And like his High Renaissance master, Gabriel is able to envision the "David" in every shot he takes. But it's not as if he does not have an active role to play giving compositional expression to his visions.

Gabriel knows that photography has grown as an art form, in no small measure due to the rise of modern technology. Given his penchant for the technical side of his craft (he has mastered the tools of his trade), it should come as no surprise to find out that his background is in engineering.

He earned his BSc degree at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Industrial and Management Engineering. Since that time he has honed his technical skills in health care (where he produced the first Picture Archiving and Communicating (PAC) system for the imaging division in hospital operating rooms in Israel), in IT (where he held numerous Director and Vice Presidential roles in large corporations, from financial, client, and technology services to product management), in education (where he taught international professionals in the IT and financial sectors at a top Canadian university, along with his ongoing role as a photography instructor to a small group of talented and dedicated students), and through the creation and maintenance of his own full service IT consultancy company. As an artist he is a living example of Andy Warhol's claim that good art is good business.

This background informs why he champions digital photography, and how technology serves, not hinders, his art. "I think that back in the day, you clicked and that was it. Now, you click, but it is only when you press Save that you are finished." Between the Click and the Save you are able, through programs like Lightroom, to add more shadows and light until you feel your composition is finished.

The issue is not whether to manipulate a photograph. Manipulating a photograph is like drawing a picture. The trick is knowing when to stop. Less is more when it comes to manipulating High Dynamic Range (the ratio of light to dark in a photograph). Like great cooking, so great shooting: keep the essence of the natural ingredients and what they provide to the dish (a pinch of salt, a pinch of shadow). In this sense Gabriel has mastered the trick of his trade.

Hawaii Mountain (Gaby Israel)

Gabriel is also a realist. It's what forces him to shy away from manipulating a photograph beyond its natural subject matter. This subject matter matters to him. He respects it for a reason. It serves a personal purpose.

Photography begins in wonder, but it does not stop there. Gabriel is aware that the wonder that draws you in will eventually demand something of you. That is the point of great art. It changes lives by inspiring us to live with the same passion and integrity that created it. And I suggest that it is this demand that every person senses when they look at his art with the same amount of passion that produced it. His drawings are personal reminders that creating and collecting art is never shut off from the reality within which both activities take place. Gabriel's art is not value neutral. You cannot walk away from meditating on "Street Scene" or "Quebec Road" without sensing the serious generosity of his work: generous in its beauty, but serious in its call to live beautifully.

Collecting Gabriel's photography matters because its all in the value (both financial and personal). His values as an artist open up the space for us to confront the wonder of existence, the wonder that there is something rather than nothing, to contemplate the fact that we are alive rather than dead, and to create a life worth living in attentive response to the essence he has captured in his photographs.

A clue to what this means (for artist and collector alike) is found in what he finds most valuable in one of his modern influences. While he recognizes Ansel Adams' technical mastery (Gabriel explained to me how Adams produced one of his famous landscape pictures by using a red filter on black and white, which changed the blue into a very dark blue, thereby turning it into a dark grey in contrast with the mountains he shot), for Gabriel this is not what makes Adams so valuable as an artist.

"I love how Ansel Adams was able to get the people in his pictures to do what they did in order for him to get the shot," he told me. It was Adams' ability to relate to people and integrate them into his work that is the great inspiration. It is the story behind the picture that Gabriel picks up on, and derives inspiration from in turn.

I began this review with a photograph that Gabriel took of Mount Kilimanjaro. There is a story behind this shot. In order to take it he had to climb Kilimanjaro. This is no small achievement. He told me that it was one of the most, if not the most, significant milestones in his life, but for more reasons than one. Part of the motivation for him was to raise money for the MukiBaum Foundation (an organization that helps children and adults with mental disabilities). Gabriel produced a photobook of his journey and sold it at their annual gala in a silent auction. All of the proceeds of the sale when to the foundation.

"Lady In The Wind", Lower Antelope Canyon (Gaby Israel)

Apart from Adams, comparisons to Peter Lik and Gerhard Richter come readily to mind. I am thinking not only about the obvious artistic quality of Gabriel's work in relation to theirs. I am also thinking as a collector. his light drawings are Lik-like in what I call their wall power (they are an interior decorator's dream), and Richter-like in their large-scale and vibrantly hued abstract character. This two-fold likeness makes his photographs very easy to live with.

Abstract Triptych on wall (Gaby Israel)

   
It takes more than just knowing about a camera's ISO, aperture, and shutter speed that goes into making a great photograph. The camera is merely a translation device for art. Adams was right when he spoke about what the act of photography is really about. You bring to this act all of the pictures you have seen, all of the books you have read, all of the music you have heard, and all of the people you have loved. In the light of Gabriel Israel's passionate drawings, I would add one more thing to Adams' list. Gabriel teaches us that to turn the act of photography into the act of art, an art that is "born as the echo of God's laughter, the art that creates that fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood," you must bring to it the most important thing of all: the life you have lived. 

Gabriel Israel

Sources

Gabriel Israel. Click here to access Gaby's website.

Gabriel Israel. Click here to access Gabriel's work.
Judd Tully. "The Ascent Of Gerhard Richter." ART + AUCTION. June, 2012.
Milan Kundera. The Art Of The Novel. Grove Press Inc. 1988.

Putting Beauty In Its Place

By Rory A.A. Hinton

The Martyr Of Beauty - 2012

"It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any more, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist." (Theodor Adorno)

The paintings of Xiao Guo Hui are a playful response to the modern idea that beauty is not the raison d'être of art. Beginning in the 1860s avant-garde artists made beauty a martyr for its cause by sacrificing it upon the altar of subjective experience. This singular act dismantled the idea that beauty is synonymous with artistic excellence, an idea that had been slowly evolving for over half a millennium (beginning with Plato's Republic and rising to its zenith in the art of the Christian religion). Nietzsche's claim that "Christianity is Platonism for the masses" sums up this history decisively. With the modern rejection of this ancient ideal, it was no longer art for art's sake, but art for artist's sake.
     Artists like Charles Baudelaire humanized art in the process, making it less ethereal and more visceral. By focusing their attention on the human subject, they made beauty truly belong to the eye of the beholder. So, when Xiao says that he does not want his work to be "seen apart, but rather for people to see themselves within it," he is echoing an old idea that the subject-matter of art is the only object-matter that matters. Nothing is "beautiful" apart from what our eyes consider to be beautiful things (breasts on a platter, no less).
     Baudelaire asks “What is pure art according to the modern idea?” His answer is instructive, and sums up how best to think of his work and what followed in its wake: “[Art] is to create a suggestive magic, containing at the same time the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself.” Modern art is as romantic as it is real, as external as it is expressive, and as suggestive as it is subjective. Modern art is magic.
     This turn to the subject as the object of concern freed us to practice what Xiao calls "inventive thought and discernment." However, Xiao's insightful response to this story of martyrdom is to playfully argue through his discerning brush that while the modern avant-garde were right to reject beauty as the criterion of art, they were wrong to think that beauty was not an essential component of human life. Xiao knows it is. His paintings show that life has beauty because it is ugly, grotesque, macabre, deviant, pathological, and horrifying. 'Beauty' is a relative term. Winner's Game as Guantanamo Bay.

Winner's Game - 2011

       
     By putting beauty in its place among every other aspect of our experience, Xiao makes it possible for each of us to figure out how to live a beautiful life on our own terms (the only terms that matter). How is this done?
     The first step is to follow Xiao's historically sensitive lead in affirming beauty's modern displacement. Consider Edouard Manet's "beautiful" Olympia. It is rightly regarded among art historians as the first real modern painting. Why? It hints at the fact that such relative beauty has within it the seeds of its own subjective destruction. Notice the black cat at the right side of the canvas. If anything represents the harbinger of the disaster that is to befall the beautiful Olympia, it is this femme feline.
     For there will come a time when beauty's attendants won't notice her any longer, nor send her flowers, nor position her lying languidly on her bed as she stretches her sweet anatomy. She will no longer be art's darling. In The Martyr Of Beauty Xiao bears witness to the fact that this lost time has already come and gone. Beauty is not so picturesque as Olympia, nor should she be. Rather she is now sprawled out on an operating table like a cadaver waiting for an autopsy. Everyone else does everything but notice her (and rightly so), whether it is engaging in the play of sexual innuendo, or the work of necrotic analysis. Beauty is dead. Long live the beautiful.

Olympia - 1863

     This death should give us serious pause. If beauty is no longer art's reason for being, it cannot be used as the basis for determining what is a work of art from what is not. Xiao's work cannot be understood apart from this fact. If you look long enough at his paintings a curious sense of estrangement begins to demand your attention. This demand can be expressed in the form of a question: What makes The Martyr Of Beauty, or Winner's Game, or Unclothe Hercules art? Can we look at these paintings and find within them what we need to answer this question? Does Xiao's work wear its artistic essence on its canvased sleeve? In the post-Warhol era the answer to these last two questions is a decisive "No."
     What made Andy Warhol's Brillo Box so important in the history of modern art is that it was the culmination of art finally coming into critical consciousness. This "sculpture" raised within itself the question of what it is. Clearly in this case you can't point to further Brillo Boxes to determine which one is a sculpture and which one is merely a shipping container. In the Stable Gallery show of Warhol's work in 1964 art finally exhausted its own resources to define itself. Art raised the question of its own essence (Is the Brillo Box art?), but was incapable of answering it. At this point art and reality were indiscernible.
     "It has always been taken for granted that one could distinguish works of art from other things by mere inspection," Arthur Danto writes. "Now we know that this straightforward way of learning cannot work, and that the meaning of art cannot be taught by examples." How can it be taught? We need philosophy to answer this question.



     What makes Xiao's work important, and well worth collecting, is that it hints at a philosophy of play as the way to teach the meaning of art. "I am fascinated by play for I believe that only in play is our true nature revealed," Xiao writes. "I like to create a limitless playground where [the viewer's] imagination is free to envision endless possibilities and personal reflections." Painting is Xiao's playground of the imagination. It is only through a life of play that we can begin to figure out what makes life beautiful.
     Consider the card game as an example of what it means to play. This game runs as a theme through Xiao's work like a narrative spine. The card game in this context functions as a metaphor for the job of statistics: the taming of chance. To live a beautiful life is to tame chance. Of course one way to tame chance is to stack the deck. Even the mighty Hercules stands no chance against lady luck when she is both player and dealer. In the game of life we pay our money and we take our chances (especially when it comes to sex and romance). Xiao's The Martyr Of Beauty, Winner's Game, and Unclothe Hercules respect chance enough to play with it, and chance respects this play by allowing herself to be tamed by him and through them, at least until we are taught that art is getting away with surviving in style.

Unclothe Hercules - 2015

        I began this essay by stating that Xiao's work is a playful response to modern art. This is not the response. It is a response. In fact, it is my response to what I take to be Xiao's response. It is the product of my attempt to be inventive and discerning. This is as it should be. 

     I usually interview the artists I write about before I start an essay. But in this case talking to Xiao was not necessary. In talking to him I would only be confirming what I have already gathered from his paintings. By not talking to him I honor and respect his work. Even if I did talk to him about his paintings he would not be able to talk about them. Not really. Why? Because he does not fully understand one painting he has produced. No one does. Not even someone like Dali, who claimed that the reason why he never understood one of his paintings is because he only creates enigmas. 

Sources

Andy Warhol. The Philosophy Of Andy Warhol. Harcourt. 1975.
Arthur C. Danto. Beyond The Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective. The Noonday Press. 1992.

Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds). Modern Art And Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Harper & Row, 1987.

Frank Pavich. Jodorowsky's Dune. Sony Pictures Classics. 2013.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good And Evil. Oxford Paperbacks. 2003. 

Peter Gay. Modernism - The Lure Of Heresy: From Baudelaire To Beckett And Beyond. Norton, 2008.

Plato. The Republic. Penguin. 1987. 

Theodor Adorno. Aesthetic Theory. University of Minnesota Press. 1998.

Xiao Guo Hui. Exhibition Catalogue.

© Christopher Cutts Gallery, 2015

Not So Mad Men

Rothko
Jacob Baal-Teshuva
Taschen
2003

Review by Rory A.A. Hinton

Rothko

The following quote from Rothko is worth the price of the book. It indicates just how divided the Abstract Expressionists were over the notion of worth. When it comes to the dividing line between creativity and commerce, you are either a Mark Rothko or a Barnett Newman. Rothko ended up on the right side of art history. His healthy bourgeois existence made the message of Pop Art possible: American capitalism is an artistic achievement. His art is as commercial as it is fine.

"After Rothko's art was declared to be a good investment by no less a financial authority than Forbes magazine, the relationship between Rothko and his uncompromising colleagues Still and Newman only worsened further in the mid-1950s. They accused Rothko of harboring an unhealthy yearning for a bourgeois existence, and finally stamped him as a traitor." 

Not So Mad Men

Sources
Jacob Baal-Teshuva. Rothko. Taschen. 2003. 

Chart Recognition

By Rory A.A. Hinton

Art is ...

Gekko's Nod To Warhol

My years as a fine art dealer led to my career as a futures trader. The art of the deal convinced me that the money I made meant more to me than the fine art did. This made me love art more, and for the right reason. Warhol's claim that art is what you can get away with helped me understand that by trading dealing for hedging as a way to make my living, I was merely moving from one artistic market to another. I was not leaving art behind, I was just doing art differently. Art dealing and futures trading are nothing but related ways to get away with sum things. Gekko knows.

My father knew too. He traded stocks. After he died my mother told me that he ran a stock trading club for his fellow employees at IBM where he worked as a mechanical engineer. This made retrospective sense since as a kid I remember him taking notes while reading stock market reports after dinner. He was preparing for something, obviously. I once asked him what the market was about. With an omniscient grin on his face he replied that it was "all about psychology." He was exaggerating, but he made it easier for my young eyes to see the charts he examined as the patterned psychological product of supply and demand decisions between buyers and sellers (guided by fear, greed, and ignorance). To recognize a chart is to recognize the patterns it presents.

Japanese-Canadian abstract artist Kazuo Nakamura (1926-2002) made the remarkable claim that the artist and the scientist do the same thing but in different ways: they recognize patterns in nature. A universal pattern that symmetrically exists in nature makes it possible for string painters and string theorists alike to equally contribute toward our collective understanding of the universe (Nakamura's string paintings predate string theory by at least fifty years). This leads Nakamura to conclude that art is nothing but "the total activity of man." This totality includes trading. 

Nakamura Meets The Nasdaq

Traders who analyse market charts for a living are doing the same thing as physicists, painters, and even psychiatrists (since the market is "psychological" by definition). Chart analysis is nothing but the activity of recognizing patterns in nature. In this economic case they are supply and demand patterns created by individuals without and within financial institutions. What made me see my work in aesthetic terms was the realization that charting is part of Nakamura's total activity of the human species. This too is art.

My trading platform has drawing tools. Each morning before the market opens, I draw. I bring up the chart for the asset class I trade and draw lines and shapes on it (horizontal, vertical, diagonal, circular and rectangular). I draw lines indicating the Globex highs and lows from the previous evening of trading, lines showing the trading highs and lows of the previous day, lines pointing to the price at which my asset class closed the day before, and the present day opening price when the market opens. This graphical information helps me recognize the supply and demand zones I use to make trades (whether short or long depending on market trends). Here is a minimalist sample from the S&P 500 (my almost empty canvas, as it were, before I mess it up):

Abstract Chart

   







   




I can't draw, not really. But I can trace. The tracings I create for a living contribute toward the total activity of the human species. They also chart capitalist patterns of human consumption in a way that must be understood in artistic terms. Of course, the art dealer in me thinks I should cash in on the art of chart recognition by creating a new abstract chart market (chart art). And the artist in me agrees. I am an abstract chartist.

Sources
Andy Warhol. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001.
Ihor Holubizky. Kazuo Nakamura: The Method Of Nature. The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2001.
Oliver Stone. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. 20th Century Fox. 2010. 
Richard William Hill. Kazuo Nakamura: A Human Measure. Art Gallery Of Ontario, 2004.