I take chances

Flight of The Dragons

Another one of my reconstructs

Day of the Piper

Yesterday can be summoned up as a series of adjoined events. Reading the News in the morning I came across a story about how the new progressive animal control law in Washington DC (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dc/2010/10/citys_critters_win_protections.html) has led to the city being overrun by rodents. Later in the day I was hanging out with my friend Robert and during our conversation he updated me on his mouse problem, at first happily informing me that the animals had left, until his girlfriend informed him that she found new mouse dropping last week. He was bummed, especially since he promised his niece, who recently got a mouse as a pet, that he would not harm the critter. After visiting with Robert I headed to Bobby Bath's house to work on some canvasses. After working on the bird one I decided to paint a mouse as a salute to the theme of the day. Right as I finish and start packing up, I notice something small and grey scurrying across the floor under the table

The Gift

My sister in law is a tough person to shop for, primarily because she is, and always has been, a person with the capacity to buy herself whatever she desires, unlike myself. So instead of a spending a meager sum on a trinket she wouldn't have much desire to possess, I decided to put brush to canvass. My justification is simple, one thing I have an abundance of, while most (I know) lack, is creativity.
The idea behind the painting was to capture the feeling of an old Victorian-esque reading room. My sister in law is a voracious reader, with a preference for vampire and Gothic fiction. That and her choice of wall decoration in her living-room, a fairly somber colored painting of a beach at night, provoked the idea.
The books are crookedly leaning to elicit an unreality to the picture and to prevent the canvass from being flatly divided in two. That is also why there is a part of a flower close to the crow. Busy and playfull on one side, weathered and somber on the other, but each side having a bit of the other type thing.
Of course like always the picture is sub-par, there is flash-burn at the bottom center. There was literally minutes between me finishing painting the canvass and delivering it to the birthday girl.

         

Something old, something new

This first work has drawn me for a while now, twice now I have made small changes to the small canvass, it is something about the road less traveled. The second piece I did in about 2-3 hours at Bobby Bath's house. I am not sure I like it, it seems to be slightly lacking in something. I had a great time creating it, Bobby is a much more serious artist and is much better prepared provisionally speaking. I have spray paint, 4-5 cheap, old brushes and a few tubes of black, white and some browns, he has a fully stacked shop. So I utilized the color selection.

Designs

I was recently asked to create some possible t-shirt designs for a project a friend of mine is working on. I came up with these, unfortunately I didn't think to scan most of them, so all but two are crappy phone pics. The devils are meant to be on the back of the shirt, hanging on the shoulder (devil on my back) style, the rest can fit wherever.

 

Remixing

In the last couple of years my approach to painting has developed a neurosis. I usually am slow in coming up with ideas, followed by putting those ideas on canvass as quickly as I can, but then going back to the work at a later time and either adding to it, or reworking it. It started because I prefer painting on old, used canvasses from garage sales as opposed to new ones. That progressed to incorporating the old work with my own. Currently I am trying to build on that approach, add some method to the madness. The idea behind these canvasses was to add color to some simple cartoon character work I did a few years ago.

Collaboration with Bobby Bath

Me and my friend Bobby have been intending on collaborating on some work for a while and this canvass seemed like a good opportunity. He specializes in portraits, I specialize in nothing in general, so there was a good amount of flexibility. Bobby painted the guitar player a few weeks earlier, when I saw his finished part of the canvas, it seemed to have a very "old Americana" feel to it, so I decided to build on that idea.