Someone once asked each FADER editor to paint a self-portrait and, unsurprisingly, each one of the finished works looked like the same smeary pile of acrylic crap. Okay that never happened but if it did they would. Point being, it is not easy being a painter, so when someone is willing to paint a self-portrait that looks as awesome as Matthew Chambers' does and names it “Self Portrait With More Difficult Shirt to Paint," we applaud it. We won't buy it because we are poor, but someone should. And someone else should buy the other paintings in Chambers' new show at Rental Gallery in New York, which will only be up for a few more days before Brendan Fowler aka BARR's show which opens on October 24th. None of us have art history degrees here, but it doesn't take years of study to know a good painting of two dogs in an ice cream cone from a bad one. We've spent a lot of time looking through the varied works of the exhibit, titled An Activity So Pure, and feel comfortable saying without qualification that there is not another artist alive today who can paint a bottle and glass of Stella Artois and have it make us think of anything other than getting drunk. Specifically, it makes us think about why we chose music writing instead of the glamorous life of an artist, but what can you do. An Activity So Pure runs through this Saturday. (via SG&T)