The Dark Side of Blue Light

Well, if ISIS and ebola are not enough, here is a killer that is staring you in the face RIGHT NOW! Harvard Medical School claims that blue light, the light emitted by your computer, disturbs your ability to sleep, and contributes to the causation of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. 

What you can do to keep these symptoms at bay: 

Use dim red lights for night lights. Red light has the least power to shift circadian rhythm and suppress melatonin.

Avoid looking at bright screens beginning two to three hours before bed.

If you work a night shift or use a lot of electronic devices at night, consider wearing blue-blocking glasses.
Expose yourself to lots of bright light during the day, which will boost your ability to sleep at night, as well as your mood and alertness during daylight.

There is also https://justgetflux.com/. After sunset it changes your monitor to a redder, more natural temperature. 

news

SBTRKT, one of my favorite composers, just came out with a new album you can listen to for free here.  Also, I sold a painting! "Flesh of the World" sold to composer Chuck Wild, creator of Liquid Mind and old friend of my parents. What an honor!

Website update

New paintings, honors, and thoughts can be found on my website.

Eli

 We are: cosmic blood worms

 disintegrating confetti

 death alive in every moment,

human - animals, angel meat, flesh, figures on a ground of expansive, imaginary worlds,

behind and within which is an infinite field of care, time, and energy.

American Tragety Sites

Some landscapes are celebrated as sacred sites because of the stories that are told about them, whereas others are marked as horrific sites of tragedy, humiliation, and cultural shame. To the uninformed eye, both places look the same—expansive, hilly, idyllic—which attests to the notion that every landscape is not just a physical place, but is also what theologian Belden Lane calls a “storied place.”

For American Tragedy Sites, first I research the historic place, and then I sketch, take photographs, and paint it. I finish the composition in my studio by mixing the rendered landscape with a totem of other symbols and nonobjective spaces.

Through the languages of realist landscape painting and religious icon-painting, I aim to honor these shadowed lands as holy lands, and to disturb conventional distinctions between what is sacred and what is shameful.

I believe certain landscapes offer insight into how we grapple with tragedy. Some sites of cultural shame are hidden away, avoided, or “obliterated,” to use geographer Kenneth Foote’s term. These sorrow-filled sites can get lost often by hiding in plain sight. For example, guests can pass through the old Hyatt Hotel lobby in Kansas City, drink coffee and mingle, and never know about the event that happened there in 1981—”the worst structural disaster in American history!” There is no plaque, no memorial, no spot to lay flowers or light candles.  The historic event, then, is more easily forgotten.

This intentional oversight or forgetting happens all the time.  If the memory attached to the site is too painful, or too shaming, the culture will attempt to erase it by re-landscaping or by destroying records. Salem, for example, kept no official record of the small hill where nineteen victims of the witchcraft scare were executed, so today its exact location is unknown. Likewise, the fence where Matthew Shepard was killed in Laramie, Wyoming, was promptly removed and the street names were changed to confuse tourists (“Out of sight, out of mind”). In both cases, the true location of the historic event lives on only in hearsay.

But now we have GPS, and landscapes push back, and people get behind them and lobby to have them preserved. The Minidoka Japanese Internment Camp site in south central Idaho, a true national shame site, was converted into farmland and torn down as quickly as it was constructed. But activists got funding and rebuilt its barbed-wire fence and ominous watchtower, two important communicators of the daily psychological experience of the Japanese-Americans imprisoned there during WWII. A few other elements of the Minidoka landscape remain: Fujitaro Kubota’s eerie rock garden, dusty labyrinthian pathways, the scorching sun, rushing river, and desert indifference.

If for some reason the actual tragedy site is truly lost or inaccessible, a culture will construct a miniature version, a memorial across the street. In the case of Matthew Shepard’s memorial, it is a bench at the university miles away. But there are also memorial gardens, parks, museums, and trees! There are memorial trees, like the prayer tree in the center of the killing fields of the Bear River Massacre site, probably the greatest forgotten Indian massacre in American military history.  “The first and the worst,” and it’s also easily one of the most beautiful landscapes and memorials I have ever seen. The place is woven into a wide river valley in the foothills of the Rockies, swarming with wildlife, flowers, and hot springs (the Shoshoni vacationed there every winter). The tree is somewhat hidden next to others behind the official, unimpressive, monolithic memorial standing in a gravel parking lot next to a trash can. The tree’s lower half is covered in freshly made dream catchers, medicine bundles, stuffed animals, beaded necklaces, colored flags, and gem stones. Buckets full of toys and chewing tobacco hang from branches near the trunk.

Every January the surviving Shoshoni and others gather at the tree, refresh the offerings, and pray that the Warm Dance will happen again one day.

new work

here is my studio at Ucross

I'm quoted in this article on huffpo!

Ucross

 The road to my studio

 the fields behind my studio

the creek next to my studio where I swim

Ephemera

This painting won 2nd place in the River Market Regional Exhibition! Check out the online catalogue.
The head curator from the Nelson-Atkins museum of Art  was the judge. I feel good.

"Titterington’s series of sky paintings are intended to “bring the sky down, and to highlight the ever-present source of light and weather. When we open our eyes, sky provides the space and the light for seeing. Sky is openness or transparency itself, sheer luminosity. It is nature’s most elusive realm, and it provides a great metaphor for the self. As Rilke says, our inner lives are, for the most part, intensified skies.” " 

Happy Birthday Kyle

It's all in your brain. 

Scientists have found that dogs across a variety of breeds align their body axis with the Earth's magnetic field before squatting to poop. "Our analysis of the raw data ... indicates that dogs not only prefer north-south direction, but at the same time they also avoid east-west direction. It is unclear why the dogs find the planet's north-south axis more comforting."