Another Year Has Come to a Close!!! Thank You 2014!

What a Year what a year what a year!  This was probably my most focused year to date!  When I established the production calendar for 2014 I was a bit nervous to be honest, anxious in a healthy way though.  I found myself saying "Holy shit can I really do this?  Can I really handle this entire chain of events and stay sane with a job and my AA program and all in between?"  But it was a healthy thought, a positive forward looking sort of nervousness, an affirmation that I was meant to take this challenge and push forward!  And sure enough, it all happened, and more that came down the pipe out of the blue, and honestly I have to say I fucking rocked it (Hahaha)!  I definitely hit my limit, and it is good to know ones limits for sure.  Needless to say, I will be in NYC in 2015, and Coby Kennedy and I are coming for you (hahaha)! Blade Runner Steez!

As I grow and change and move and progress and love and live, coming to understand ones self and ones strengths, ones weaknesses, ones limitations and once fierce powerful drive, to find those things that keep us going, to find those things we need to let go of, to find those relationships that hurt and those that help and nurture us is really at this point in my development what life is all about.  It is this process of seeking that is LIFE to me.  It is not how many shows I can do, it is not how many instagram followers one has, it is not how many things one can pile on and accomplish, it is not praise, it is not critique, it is not money, it is not recognition, it is not affirmations of love and working through loss; it is all of those things, it is every piece of the cosmic puzzle, it is the SEEKING that all of those elements are a part of, that creates the road map and the experiences and signs and guides and milestones and failures and successes and insights that one can truly manifest and become knowing of their own energy so as to continue seeking as a part of all things.  We are all a part of all things in the universe, we are all connected constantly whether we realize it our not. It is how when I seek, when I concentrate inward my spiritual center can be found amidst and working through all of these things.  It is simply to be aware, to be positive, to be seeking, and simply BE.

I have to say, the spiritual practice that I have come to find as the cornerstone of my life has really expanded and been investigated, and really is what saw me through this year and made me come to find what true happiness is.  I can honestly say, this year I found what happiness truly is to me at this point.  I had an awesome partner in this journey, my friend Jen, that I was fortunate enough to have come along for what we ended up calling TTT or Transcendental Taco Tuesday, where we explored some new heights and complexities and simplicities in exploring the world within our selves that is a gateway to the universe and all of its different dimensions and planes of existence.  Needless to say, I say some visions, saw intricacies and portals, guides and animal friends, pure energy and the elements of creation and destruction and all that is everything and nothing.  We also ate some incredible tacos and talked about life and the universe and contemplated our places in it all to an extent I have never really experienced with another person.

I experienced pure love like I have never felt before as I grew and learned and felt and loved with Julie Moon (the illest Piano player ever btw) and saw another person in recovery climb up out of the ego and the fear that is addiction and alcoholism, through trauma and pain, to find herself and help me find myself, and in the process find ourselves together.  We experienced new heights in understanding, compassion, exploration of ourselves and each other. We found what acceptance, patience, intimacy, chemistry, attraction, arousal, sexual exploration and openness, respect, willingness, compassion and an utter devotion to one another's creative evolution and freedom, to understanding that we have to be happy with ourselves in order to love one another, to what respecting and truly loving another human being for who they are on all levels truly means. She is in Korea right now living out her own dream of seeking, and playing music, and re-investigating her homeland and confronting so many things that she needs closure and clarity and growth from.  She is a force of nature and continues to be a magnetic energy everywhere she goes.

I drove across the country with an amazingly talented young tattooer and artist name Carolyn.  We shared an intimate two weeks that people do not often get to experience.  Intimate in the fact that neither of us had ever driven cross country and we established some incredible memories and a real friendship in the process.  We got to see  some family in Austin Texas as we hung with Terry Addison, saw Bob MaCready in Houston, Nathaniel and his amazing restaurant Boucherie in NOLA, hung with my mom and ate BBQ in NC and more. We ate our way across the nation and brought an incredible happening to New York City, building with Superchief and making life long bonds!  And a huge thanks to John and Lizz for their hospitality and friendship!  We will never forget that damn trip, or South of the Border!  I further got to know Joel and Rhea St. Julien and there amazing daughter Olive as Joel and I made soundscapes and connected our creative minds on multiple projects.  I appreciate that I have such an amazing family everywhere I go now!

Eric Araujo, one of my best buds that I met in SF, connected me with the amazing people at BRIC arts in Brooklyn for the opportunity of a life time to work with some incredible people during the winter vortex!  Julie Kim and the Littlefield crew flew me out yet again to paint on of the best large scale paintings I have ever done. There were the great people at the Shooting Gallery that helped me realize the biggest show I have ever done with "Pilgrimage". "Champagne Tigers" at LeQuivive, hanging out at Old Crow with Sean and Evan and Victor, talking about the world with Dre and Bleu Cheese with Chris Burch.  I went on a couple trips to LA where I got hang out with Stephanie Inagaki, meet Andrew Kline from CMHHTD and Strife, and finally explore the city with an open mind and heart which made me finally love that place! Spent some killer times with Salem OFA! I reconnected with Joseph Gross, and was so incredibly happy to see him thriving and doing great things with his gallery.  We have continued to build and I am super happy to announce that I have a solo show with Joseph Gross Gallery in October of 2015!  Joey is a intensely positive force in this world and will continue to do amazing things!

I experienced the most amazing send off I could have ever had with Rachel Ralph and John Trippe at Fecal Face as I closed out 8 years of living in the Bay Area with my solo show at FFDG, "No Destination".  Lale Shafaghi helped spread the word and vision of my artwork to the big world we are a part of as we built a friendship.  As things wrapped up, I came to an end of over 4 years of working with the best people on earth at Clean Water Action, a place that showed me that people do care about others and have a desire to work hard for a cause that aims to help others and the world as a whole.  We had a lot of fun, and that job helped me grow up into sobriety and work hard with a sense of purpose.  It also goes without saying that every moment I spent with my AA peoples in Oakland and SF and my rad Sponsor Bucky were great and vital to my development as a human being.  Timmy the Optimist kept popping up with  a lot energy and a great vision of things to come.  Manley Tantuico and his amazing family facilitated the biggest commission I have ever done.  They showed me a lot of compassion, friendship, and treated me like family every step of the way (and we have some designs for some things to come in the next couple years!).  Birthdays, break ups, hook ups, sign up sheets, late night calls, early morning flights, babies being born, people getting married, Fed EX, memories worked through, new pain, new pleasure, new love, old habits broken, new habits made, great food eaten, its all life, and it's all important and amazing!

I sit here in Durham, NC, in the house I grew up in writing this, seeking, living, and loving the fact that I have been given this time in this world on this planet with all of you to keep moving forward and to be grateful for all of it.  The good the bad the ugly and amazing... Everything is everything.  My friend Jen and I will be living in the same place again soon and will continue our TTT vision quest. May Julie Moon continue to make the world feel deeply with her music and build amazing new heights as a person and my partner.  May Chris Burch keep climbing the way he is meant to, opening the eyes of all that come into contact with him.  May Alfonso Cosio Monique Delauney keep tying the Bay Area art world together and supporting the arts passionately and with all the energy they put out there in the world. May Dana James keep moving up to the sky tattooing amazing work and being the prophetic voice and compassionate person he is.  May Rachel Ralph keep bringing intricate and beautiful conversations that involve all of us with FFDG.  And may I continue moving to NYC, one of the places that raised me up to the man I am today, and where I shall call home again and continue seeking.  To all those I didn't mention, you know that you are as important as anyone else in this world!  May everyone have a full 2015 and continue to grow and evolve and change!!!  We All Do This Together! Thanks to everyone for making the Unstoppable Tomorrow one that I am incredibly happy to be a part of. -JFA III 12/31/2014

Ahhhhhhhh, Friday.

Ahhhhhhh Friday.  As an artist that does in fact work for a non profit org as well (fighting the good fight for the future of our drinking water no doubt), Friday's still do hold a special place in my heart.  I love Friday.  Tonight I even have rather wonderful plans after work and I think it is going to be a late night.  What can I say, life is good.  So as I have been working on pieces for my Fecal Face solo show in the studio, my commission piece for an awesome collector of mine, planning my east coast journey in the winter and much much more, I found myself thinking back to some nostalgic moments in the past few years and wanting to look at some things that I hold dear memories of.  I have always thought phrases like "throwback Thursdays" and "Flashback Friday" were corny, but nonetheless I am kind of having a flashback Friday.  Here are some photos of some great moments in the past few years. Thanks to everyone out there for all the support, those that have brought negativity which made me grow stronger, and to those who work hard and make the world a better place to be.  Thank you all. -JFA III 07/25/2014

Street Conversations

UPDATE TIME!!!! Cool, so life keeps winding on and getting more and more awesome.  I would like to thank everyone at Superchief, everyone at BRIC Arts, everyone at Littlefield, everyone at Shooting Gallery/White Walls, everyone at Fecal Face, and everyone at LeQuivive for what will, by the end of it, have been a seriously accomplished year of art making and growing.  So first things first, this Thursday, Superchief NYC is having a massive group show, seriously, massive!  I can't be there, I wish I could, but if you are in NYC and you can be there then you better be there.  Nuff said, here is the flyer and info!

Yeah it opens this Thursday night and is going to be wild.

So in other news, I have begun making new work rather diligently.  A lot of the experiences I had in Okonuin Graveyard on Koyasan Mountain in Japan, the meditations I experienced in Kyoto, Nara, here in the Bay, visions I have had, are coming up in my practice and it feels amazing.  The premise of the exhibition is that the people in the Pilgrimage from my Shooting Gallery show, the tribe of Unstoppable Tomorrow that is seeking a new positive future, wake up one day on their journey to find they have all shared a collective dream.  A dream of universal truths, a dream of visionary colors, textures, nostalgic imagery, future past visions of places and paths, sounds, images of rebirth of cyclical destruction into creation, of signs, guides, the past into the future.

The first major meditation I had in Kyoto last year was proof to me that collective spiritual resonance exists and that anyone who had meditated and crossed the dimensional threshold in the temple of Tenryu-ji has seen a universal sort of vision or imagery there.  An intense materialization in the mind and spirit and body of forms and movement, of the essence and basics of the flow of energy and its way of weaving our human forms from this physical "reality" through levels and landscapes encompassing pure energy and beyond.  So what more fitting way to explore Unstoppable Tomorrow further than through a state that is beyond logic and this physical world.  The saga has been concerned with actions and lives in the here and now, not with the ethereal or specifically illustrating the spiritual, the visionary, the guided world of the unconscious and the visualizations that collectively lead it.

The work has an air of nostalgic tranquility, explosive aurally representational flow, entering a calm and almost magically blanketed future past.  It will feature rough drawings on paper, diamond like found wood deconstructionist abstractions, paintings focusing on the figurative and organic abstraction, another round of even more explorative strangely shaped pieces, on bringing color back into the equation, on the erotic (blatant and subtle), on creation, on reuse and respect, on lovemaking, evoking guidance through minimalism and pure color and the way in which it carries tracers and trajectories through life, and much much more.  I spent hours in the studio yesterday working with found pieces that I have had for a while, creating this gateway back to my experience in Japan, back to the dream like memories of my childhood in Durham and New York City, back to a place that wraps me in almost hallucinatory vision of spirits, and points in time, and shape and color, and moving textures and patterns.  While exploring these nostalgic moments in the present through my process I found myself realizing that this is also carrying me into the future, as if to say "you will go back to Okonuin, you will see Southeast Asia, you will find places in New York and LA where these environments that you are reliving will embrace you like a cool moss blanket and give you love and inspiration."  The show will be at Fecal Face this coming October.  It will narrate this collective dream in a lot of different media and will at the same time give insight to the journey which my inner workings have developed through over time, specifically in the last year and a half.  Not all of it will be explainable even for me, but it will all make sense as an experience.  This comes at a time that I am really reaching inward to know my path as begin to transition back to the East Coast for a while.

This show is as much a step in Unstoppable Tomorrow as it is in a continued exploration of process and just letting go of my idea of a "willed plan" and letting the magic happen in the studio as I go about fleshing out the original ideas.  It is a celebration of my unconscious guiding my conscious hand and feeling, intuitively coming to solutions that once cause chaos in my mind, and explorations of these images, sounds, visions, dreamscapes that I have locked in my psyche.  It is as much therapeutic in practice as it is thoughtful.  Street Conversations, talking with my surroundings, letting the effect of my being in its natural state, knowing that I am a part of all things and not simply one thing apart from it all.  It's about me with the world not against it, always and forever. Knowing that each action and each movement needs to be felt and needs to be streamlined with my path, and if it isn't that is okay, as long as I can stop and pay attention to my guides my gut and the way which the universe needs me to move.  The tribe of the Pilgrimage wakes up from this dream, this conversation with the streets and paths and plants and trees and sounds and breeze and rain and everything and knows that they are on their path, that the path is the way and the way is life.  That it is not the outcome but the process that makes each next step in the evolution, in the present and in hindsight, so amazing. I will be having street conversations until the day I die.

The Last Week of "Pilgrimage" at Shooting Gallery SF! Closes June 7th, 2014.

Hello hello!  First off : "Pilgrimage" is up for ONE MORE WEEK!  Until this Saturday June 7th!  So if you haven't seen it go check it out.  I have been so wrapped up in life since the show opened that I haven't had a chance to sit down and be in touch with you all, my apologies.  I went to LA this past weekend to begin connecting and to see some old NYC friends that I work with and have known for some time, that are doing great things.  The future is shaping up nicely!  I am grateful for this life of mine for sure, and LA and I have some things to look forward to.

So about three weeks ago we saw the opening of my solo show "Pilgrimage" at San Francisco's famous Shooting Gallery on Geary street.  The opening was a success, and we have been fortunate enough to get some amazing press from it all!  Press including my friend and awesome writer Goldmine Sachs over at Impose Magazine did a really fun interview with me, as did one of my favorite people Tracy Jones at the Microscopic Giant, the awesome and uber talented Lale' Shafaghi at Juxtapoz Magazine gave a great preview piece, Zach Tutor and his widely loved Supersonic Electronic blog gave us some support a Fecal Face round table interview will be coming out this week, and lastly Kimberly Chun from 96 Hours did a really awesome interview with me that came out in print as well as online in 96 Hours.

The response has been unbelievable, the opening was awesome, and I have been getting tons of inquiries and new conversations have blossomed out of it.  Really proud of this one!  I still have some photos to process and get from Shooting Gallery of some of the work but the majority of it is viewable in the PILGRIMAGE Section of the Portfolio on this site, as well as on the Shooting Gallery SF site (Where you can also find information on sales and purchasing).

So amidst all of the things that life brings, amidst the non stop flow of energy and thoughts and experiences, I am very very happy that this show was realized with Shooting Gallery.  The space was simply perfect for it, the people there were a pleasure to work with, and this exhibition truly did embody a "Pilgrimage" for myself.  The events that took place in its initial conceptualization, the journey I went through with life, love, pain, joy, progress, and time during its execution, and the final result have all brought me to a new place within myself and my relationship with all things around me.

A true sense of balance, fulfillment, acceptance and the yearning to continue seeking, to strive on and continue moving forward, has really overcome me.  I am having really beautiful visions in my meditations, I happened upon a Koyasan temple at random in LA (Buddhist Twilight Zone Sounds haha), and my eyes are very open as is my being. I am excited to embark on everything from here on out.  The past four years of making art in the Bay Area have really helped to shape my path and to bring me to center with an open mind and a watchful eye to see where my next guide may be.  Fecal Face Gallery solo is in the Fall, and then who knows, who knows where I will go.  Maybe LA, maybe back to NC, maybe NYC for a reunion with my home.  But the one thing I can take away from this experience is this, I am doing exactly what I was put on this earth and in this universe in this form to do, and I am overwhelmingly grateful for the path I am on.  John Felix Arnold III 06/02/2014

Saturday, May 10th, Pilgrimage @ Shooting Gallery SF

I am beside my self.  It has been about a years worth of a journey.  Hot off of the heels of the "Excorrigia : The Scourge" Solo show at Superchief in NYC I just had with Superchief, I present to you the other side.  The opposite side of existence and the journey forward.  I present "Pilgrimage" at the uber famous San Francisco staple, Shooting Gallery!  I have partnered with Paxton Gate on this amazing show.

They have supplied me with bones, skulls, and really awesome news, they have officially procured a taxidermy warthog that will be part of the central sculptural installation piece of the show! We are already getting all sorts of press for the show, including an awesome interview piece from Sjimon Gompers at Impose Magazine, Tracy Jones at The Microscopic Giant, and the show is in print as part of the hot picks of the week in the SFWeekly as well as on their website.

The opening is going to be killer, there are other openings in the White Walls/Shooting Gallery complex the same night that are all going to be incredible.  Here are some images of work to look forward to seeing in person in the show.  I am in the home stretch and tomorrow will see the final realization of a lot of hard work and love for what I do.

Pilgrimage, May 10, 2014

So Much is On the Way...

I am happily getting ready for three major happenings in my life right now.  All are art exhibitions.  First I will be a part of the BRIC Arts "Art Into Music" Exhibition in Brooklyn, NY opening February 19th.  I will scavenging and materials and building a site specific installation in the exhibition space at the new museum complex that will incorporate a stage for performances and listening stations to listen to each of the contributing artists play lists that inspire them.  Mega Cool!

Then its back to Oakland for three weeks as I prepare for my cross country trip to NYC and my solo exhibition Excorrigia / The Scourge at Superchief Gallery opening on April 3rd.

Fuujin : Mixed Media on Wood Panel : 18"x24"

And then finally it is back to the Bay once again to finish up the Shooting Gallery solo Pilgrimage which I am happy to now announce will also mark the beginning of a new partnership with the amazing Paxton Gate.  A number of pieces will feature bones and items sourced from Paxton Gate to help to realize the vision of Pilgrimage and continue to a partnership will into the future!!! This is going to be an amazing year!

See Through the Sun : Mixed Media on Found Object : 2014

Full Circle

   New Astroknot drawing 2013, for Shooting Gallery solo show in 2014 Life is a trip you guys and gals.  Three years ago pretty much to date I was sitting exactly where I am right now working on my website, getting ready for a couple big shows coming up in the spring exactly as I am right now.  I was sober at the time, but a couple relapses away from real sobriety as some would say.  I was digging my heels in and grinding my teeth and typing furiously at press emails and blog posts and copying and pasting show descriptions in art site calendars like FecalFace.com and Impose magazine.

Panels for my exhibition at the SFMOMA Artist Gallery 2013

I was still a virgin to Hi-Fructose and Juxtapoz and was with my girlfriend (now ex-girl) at the time who lived a block from the cafe on Mason & Washington that I am typing from.  I had opened Unstoppable Tomorrow Vol.1 at Old Crow with Chris Burch and D Young V not 20 days before, and was freaking out as my show Past From the Blast was coming up at Queens Nails in just two months.  Life felt electric and on fire, and as I sit here typing this for you to read it still feels electric and on fire, a bit more so now to be honest.  The intensity is different, the short term gratification has given way to long term hustle and a much bigger vision and state of mind, which coincidentally demands a much deeper, and fully sustaining sort of internal electric source and fuel for a much hotter and longer lasting fire.

Piece for Unstoppable Tomorrow Vol.1 in the works...2010

The world and the gods have been good to me as I have continued to dig in my heels, hoist up my sleeves, make, write, draw, copulate, glue, talk, laugh, cry, hunker down, take little breaks, get excited and continue to explore this epic world we live in together.  It really blows me away at how funny this moment is and how special it is as French lounge music plays in the background and the cable car dings and roars by with its San Francisco history soundtrack following it everywhere it moves.

Skull and handle bars detail from The Great Debate Sculpture in the studio 2012

I am really lucky and really grateful to have made it past that moment three years ago.   It proved to be very much a major hurtle, a major proving ground for where my life would go.  I had fought and surrendered my way to a new type of life so different than the one I had become accustomed to for so many years, and it really was those events in 2010 and 2011 and the people who remained in my life and the new ones who became a part of it that shaped the path for where I am going now.

Flyer for Unstoppable Tomorrow Vol.1 2010

I have never had disdain for the holidays, and I am lucky for that.  So as I sit here and sun is going down and I can here the kids outside and the parents in the Chinatown meets Jackson Heights area of San Francisco, I can only imagine how many stories I am surrounded by.  All those stories give me energy.  All those stories to build the fabric of what so many of us create from.  Bus drivers, business women, art school kids, swaggy street kids, skateboarders, old chinese ladies with 20 plastic produce and dim sum filled bags, the crazy man on the block with the cart of hoarded newspapers, yuppies, tourists, wanna be thugs, real gangsters sitting in their blacked out Mercedes' with the windows down dragon tattoos wrapping around their arms with cigarettes in their mouths, new parents pushing strollers, old parents of every race with their grown up kids in town for the Holidays, they all pass through leaving freeze frames of motion and character in my mind.

Past From the Blast 2011

This post goes out to the ether.  To the powers at work outside of our tangible vision that make the movements of the universe ebb and flow.  To all the artists in the Bay and New York and Japan, to the South, Europe and beyond. The world is happening all over all the time.  I am glad this moment in the massive fabric of time has happened for me where I can suddenly have a sort of deja vu memory trip.  A moment where I can sit in the same place I was three years ago fighting for my life in a very different pair of shoes, and where I gathered my energy for a great Hadouken and went for it.

Makenzi James from a modeling shoot for painting reference images 2013

It feels good to sit here right now and look back on all that has happened in the last three years and be thankful as Christmas is approaching that I have the capacity to work hard and stay creative and dig deep within myself to contribute what I can to this world of ours.  Much love to everyone! IPD, 57, RTS, The Basement, Screwed Arts, Doppel, and every one that is busting that ass and making it happen. #makeworkson

Bright on Time Collaborative installation piece with Koutaro Ooyama of Doppel at Spes-Lab 2013

Gotta Make the Donuts.

With two solo shows in back to back months, April and May, between NYC and SF I have my work cut out for me right now.  And I happily accept the challenge.  The show in New York in April at Superchief will investigate and concern itself more with the actual Astroknots that wreaked havoc amongst our society around the year 2120 and the subsequent show in May at Shooting Gallery, Pilgrimage, will illustrate and engage the tribe in the post reset world I have been following with each show as they move onto to "greener pastures" and forward as survivors in this new chaotic world.  I am psyched to say the least.                               All Around and Inside Out : 4'x2' : Mixed Media on Wood Panel

These two shows mark a massive milestone for me as one of them bookends the beginning of the saga and personifies and explores the actual creatures of destruction and their tumultuos effect on the people, places and things that were in their path as they rolled and throttled their ways across the landscape of earth.  These creatures very much mimic much of what I see as the environmental and economic implications of what humanity has done to the world and its effect on the fragile society that has been erected to this point.

                     To See is to Believe : 4'x2' : Mixed Media on Wood Panel                      With No Name : 25"x16" : Mixed Media on Wood Panel

And then Pilgrimage suddenly takes the ongoing story of the same group of survivors I have been utilizing since Unstoppable Tomorrow Vol. 1 at Old Crow in 2010, to a new and massively developmental phase of their existence.  This can be seen through a lot of new experimentation with my pieces, new color palettes, a lot of simplification in placement and effect, and the rebirth of found object pieces that are meant to feel like actual archaeological remnants from this tribe that will lead into the central interactive prayer installation.  The narrative "graphic Novel" element that the audience will be surrounded by will be a mixture of new colors, new ways of signifying different entities, emotions, happenings, and growth.  There will be very literal story telling narrative portraiture, found object relics, very abstract and non representational pieces that give off far more feeling and emotion than literal, figurative works can, and more... and a whole new abstract sound epic inside of the installation (which will this time be housed inside of a structure as of now, this may change).  Oh, there will also be some "Triangle Magic" within the exhibition...

                            Untitled : 4'x3' : Mixed Media on Wood Panel

                                    Windside Out : 4'x3' : Mixed Media on Wood Panel

                          Strike Down Upon Thee : 4'x3' Mixed Media on Wood Panel

                      Reclamation : 30"x14" : Mixed Media on Fabricated Wood Panel

                         Sketch for the New Birth drawing/mixed media series

                             Sketch For New Birth Drawing/Mixed Media series

Oh and New York was awesome you guys.  Stay Tuned.

And on this Day to Come, January 16th, 2013, I Celebrate Another Year on This Earth! IPD!

So there are these things called "the promises" in this arena of study I am engaged in that are spoken of often and are a guideline that people work toward. Some may call "the promises" simply a better life in whatever way and shape it comes to you.  A better life that one can be thankful for, can appreciate every atom of, and one that is fulfilling and enthralling because the one experiencing it is willing to put forth the work it takes to change things, be willing to accept the world as it comes, and do what it takes to better themselves and seek a future of productivity and appreciation for all things.  At the age of 32 I am beginning to understand, or comprehend some semblance of this search, this journey for these promises.  

2012 was the best year I have ever had, I mean that.  I, for the first time in my life, felt what it meant to see years of hard work reach people, communicate on many platforms with people all over the world, create a better living situation for myself, and in turn afford me opportunities to continue to grow and learn and love the world I am a part of.  Throughout 2012 I felt like a Phoenix finally exploding out of the grime and filth and sludge, the chaos and friction and anxiety and self hate, the self imposed fears and restrictions and bars that I had to evolve out of in order to get the perspective on my place in the world I have now.  Suddenly things made sense, and the knowledge that so many things will never make sense became something I could swallow.  I didn't have to wake up paralyzed by anxiety and fear of life everyday.  The ability to be okay with the world no matter how one thinks it "should" be reconciled, to have ideas and opinions but be able to love life regardless of "if" those ideas and opinions matter or not and simply let life be what it is no matter the outcome is perhaps the biggest "promise" of all.

It is the difference between breathing or suffocating, loving or hating, being enveloped by fear of the unknown or embracing the unknown because it is what we are born from.  And it took over a quarter of a century to have this way of seeing beaten, massaged, sliced, explained, recommended and finally born into my psyche.  On the Wu-Tang albums I grew up listening to they call this "knowledge of self God".  Thank you RZA and the rest for setting a young framework for generations to be influenced by.

So this all brings me here.  It isn't even about me, but for intensive purposes I am the one writing this as I turn to a year further in the development of my spirit in the universe, as my body gets one year closer to its end.  I really feel that the end of the physical will only be the beginning of a higher stage, but I will do the very best I can with this life  as it is all I know and as I work toward a relationship with all things.  I feel my physical being, every inch ounce hair fiber cell tingle.  Getting older has been amazing thus far.

I have work up at the Shooting Gallery in SF right now as part of their Winter Group Show and I am honored to be a part of their movement in the art world as it helps to define, reinterpret, investigate, and communicate with the world we are a part of.  I have work up at LOAKL Gallery in Oakland as well, and I am proud to be a part of the early stages of Ken Harman's new addition to the Bay Area art world as well as he will continue to thrive and spread amazing things to so many people.  I will be in a group show at Ocean Avenue Tattoo in SF with my good friend SALEM on January 26th.  In March I will be a part of a group show curated by Michael Cuffe who runs Warholian.  Then it is off to Japan for a Month long residency at Spes-Lab in Tokyo.

And then in June the first installment of a year long program I have at the SFMOMA opens with three more series of work in the SFMOMA space going up each three months until June 2014. I will finally be having a huge solo show in the Fall of 2013 that will be my last big exhibition of the year and coincide with the second (fall) program I am installing at the SFMOMA.  All of this is really happening now, and if not for every bit of life I have survived on this planet leading up to now, none of it would be happening.  I am more grateful now for the life my parents created that I have become than I ever knew was possible. Many more updates to come very soon!  -John Felix Arnold III, 01/15/2013  IPD FOR LIFE!