The Criss Museum of  Contemporary Art  

Our artists come from varying backgrounds and locations all over the world; this shows in the myriad styles and media used to express their passions.

If you  buy a print here at the Criss you have the option to also receive an 9 x 12 inch limited edition (#1/5) print signed and hand embellished on paper... shipped to your RL home!  Just contact filthy fluno inworld or filthyfluno@gmail.com with your shipping information.

Thanks for checking out my art!

Please have a look at the New York Times' March 8th Magazine that featured me and other Sl artists.   You can learn sooo much from this article!!

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/09/news/08flunot.php

"I've been making art from my imagination for as long as I can remember. I create symbols, textures, imagery, text and composition that merge into something cohesive enough to tell a story. It's also important for me to embrace and celebrate the qualities of whichever medium I'm using. My spontaneous approach to the surface comes from my heart, instinct, and disregard for making “mistakes.” I believe that the paints can tell their own stories if you let them speak and not control them too much. Controlled amnesia is a term I like to describe how I most often go about making art. I need to have just enough spontaneous reaction to my marks and gestures, almost as if I forgot what I did 5 seconds ago. I often use glossy and flat black lines to fragment and organize my compositions. Highlights and reflections will change to reveal more imagery as one's body moves around the paintings. I find much inspiration from the people, places and cultures I discover in online virtual worlds. "

"When I'm not logged into a computer or in my studio making art, I enjoy discovering inspiration in nature by hiking with my dog... especially in the snow. I'm influenced by artists like Kandinski, Dove, Bacon, Klein and Matisse.
In most of my current work, I'm expressing that we live in troubled and fragmented times. This fact contrasts and magnifies the good times, which I believe society must forever cling to.  Even in my more colorful "up beat" pieces, I try to use strange perspectives, textures, and text to promote darker interpretations. "

"When I'm creating a piece specifically inspired from virtual online worlds and people, I implement images and symbols of “the grid” which is commonly referred to as the network of computers that combine to make up continuous flow of information for an online world to exist. I also commonly use graffiti in these pieces to commemorate specific virtual locations, events, and avatar names. Even within the virtual world drawings, I incorporate real life imagery that may speak about or symbolize current events around me. Similarly, I apply current virtual world happenings into real life inspired artworks. I'm forever trying to learn more about art, painting, drawing, and myself.  I live in Tyngsboro Massachusetts with my wife Anya and dog Monkey."

Jeffrey Lipsky (aka Filthy Fluno)  was born and raised in the Boston area of the US.  He graduated from Montserrat College of Art in 1999 with a BFA in Fine Arts and concentration in  Education. Lipsky's most  recent body of work focuses on pastel drawings and paintings about people, places, and events from the virtual reality community of Second Life.  He makes the RL originals and limited editions reproductions availabe at his gallery on Artropolis, the island he owns and manages, and at select galleries across the metaverse. 

Lipsky also recently opened the RL CounterpART Gallery in Lowell, MA in the US. The gallery is dedicated to mixed reality exhibitions of contemporary art, new media and live events.  Visit http://www.counterpartgallery.com.

When you buy Filthy Fluno's counterpART, you also can get a real life  paper edition sent to your RL mailbox.  Just IM Filthy Fluno inworld or send your address to filthyfluno@gmail.com.

Come to Filthy's Joint in SL!
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WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Slatenight.com
“His pastel and charcoal drawings show a fiery spirit and quickness that is truly infectious… It is easy to see the painterly influences of Kandinsky in the rhythm of [Fluno’s] colors, Rembrandt in the luminosity of the work and Paul Klee in the playfulness and sheer delight in the process.” -

Bridging Two Worlds by Richard Minsky of Slartmagazine.com
“If blurring the lines between alternate realities is an art, then Jeffrey Lipsky (Filthy Fluno) has mastered it. But that is not what makes his work interesting. He has combined narrative painting with elements of biomorphic surrealism, symbolism, comics and graffiti.”?“The tradition of narrative painting in America goes back to Colonial times, when landscape painting was a documentary art. If a farmer had 4 buildings, 12 pigs and 8 cows, they would all be in the scene, which was a portrait of the farm. In today’s version, Lipsky (Filthy) meets his client in Second Life®, finds out about the interests and activities of the avatar, and incorporates images that represent these into a drawing, often in pastel and charcoal on paper. His drawing may be lyrical or grating, straightforward or fragmented, depending on how the artist interprets his subject. The style reflects many influences, from Tanguy, Matta, Arp and Gorky to Marinetti, Duchamp  Feininger, Picasso and Basquiat.”

A Crossover Artistby Kathleen Pierce of the Lowell Sun
“TYNGSBORO - He hasn't been in Art News, Vanity Fair or on Oprah, but wherever artist Filthy Fluno (Jeffrey Lipsky) goes, people flock. With a big afro and snaggletooth, his swagger and style are so over the top that he could rival Andy Warhol. He is the three-inch avatar of Jeff Lipsky and he lives in Second Life. The virtual reality Web site, launched in 2003, has given 10 million people a new way to express themselves. And guys like Lipsky, an artist in RL (real life), are using it to their advantage.”?

EXHIBITIONS
   
Solo Exhibits
CountpART Gallery, Lowell MA, March – May 2008
Private Exhibition, London England, April  2008
Hello Beautiful Salon, Williamsberg, Brooklyn NY Feb 2008
Private Exhibition, Chicago, IL. Jan 2008
The Revolving Museum, Lowell, MA  Sept 2007
The Piper Gallery, Lexington, MA  August 2007
Le Manoir des Essarts,   Normandy  France.  July 2007
Jacques-Jeanneney Gallery, Pusaiye, France.  July 2007
Big Car Gallery, Indianapolis, IN. June 2007
Gallery 555, Porto, Portugal. April 2007
“SL Portraits” Aho Museum, New Media Campus.  July 2006

Group Exhibits
“Prize Show” A.L.L Gallery  Lowell MA. June 2008
“Crater Bay Area” San Jose ICA. San Jose, CA. June – Aug 2008
“Crater New York” Location 1. SOHO New York. Sept 2007
“Concerning Spirituality."  Sound Installation with Joyce Zimmerman   New Bedford Museum of Fine Art. New Bedford MA. April 2000
"Arty Sound Pipes"  Sound Installation.  Cabot Street Gallery Montserrat College of Art. Beverly, MA. June 1999

PUBLICATIONS
Artnet.com
Artinfo.com
The Brooklyn Rail
Boston Globe
The Lowell Sun
Step Inside Design Magazine
SLART Magazine
Slang Life Magazine
Best of Second Life Magazine
SLNN Next Magazine
The Official Guide to Second Life Vol 2

Visit his website at www.jeffreylipskyarts.com

CharlesEdouard Aboma is a Canadian artist and architect. He co-owns Gallery Kirro with Danish artist Kirle Adamski.

As an architect Charles specialised in "holistic architecture" for many years. He brings his love of life and creative passion to his art as artisitic explorations of life, in all of its mystery, complexity, paradox and beauty.

Charles designed and built the new Gallery Kirro over a period of about one week in January 2010.

Charles has sketched and painted off and on for many years. Much of his recent work  features his own digitally processed and manipulated hand-drawings.  Charles also writes lyrics, composes music, and plays the guitar. Some of his lyrics are featured as "poems" in SL.

In August 2009 Charles began an ambitious project to create an average of one piece of art per day for the next calendar year. Entitled "365", this project already includes about 50 pieces. "365" is frequently updated and can be viewed online in Gallery Kirro.

After serving as a roustabout on oil rigs in the Persian Gulf, Renault Cluny determined that sweating in sweltering heat was not to his liking, so, destined to coast through life in the simplest way possible, he landed in a BFA program in the American deep south. Here, after a brief infatuation with raw oyster bars and bad music and only after serving three days in the Key West jail for disorderly conduct after he pulled a stripper off the stage and demanded she put her clothes back on, Renault developed his painting style; Post-painterly, neo-fascist, bluegrass expressionism, with just the right touch of vanilla.

After being run out of Florida on a rail, he conived his way into an MFA program at a major urban university in the heartland of America. While there, he drank enough bad beer and took so many drugs they were going to take his liver for medical research in payment for his textbooks, but it was later determined he couldn't live without it and the organ was so shot the University found absolutley no value in it.

Once he fooled all of them by citing the opening act of Merchant of Venice for his orals, they gave him the damned MFA and asked that he never set foot on their campus again. This was when a major, midwestern university offered him a teaching position and allowed him to collect money for debauchery and womanizing that would have made Jackson Pollack shiver. They actually paid him for this.

While maintaining a studio in the heart of the major urban center of the universtiy where he taught, Renault slept with nearly every coed enrolled in the School of Visual Arts and was hard at work on the Theatre Department when the dean's office caught wind and said he was cutting in on the dean's action.  Naturally tenure was not granted because Ren couldn't come up with the $10,000 in grease money required. It was a sad time for the visual arts.

Hailed by such art critics as Robert Hughes  who said, "baffling", about Cluny's work and the German artist Joseph Beuys who could only say, "hochesnudel" after living through one of the artist's parties, Cluny lives on in these paintings. Usually found hanging around the Incantations Spa in Inca because he can't find any place else to sleep, Ren is happy to answer any questions you may have about his extensive body of work and to tell you about his plans for an upcoming book on the history of Amway.