Mechanical Cloud

Sometimes the best way to jumpstart yourself is to simply let a doodle keep going until it congeals into something new. This is "Mechanical Cloud" (11X14, micron pen on paper). I find myself doing these more and more lately. It's a little tough getting these shots on here, because i don't have a scanner so they have to be photographed and then uploaded.

Zen Dudes Poster/ Roger Corman Revivalist

This is probably the first useful implementation of photoshop/illustrator for me in a while. It's amazing how much more you learn when there is a point towhat you are doing. The sea monster is taken from a Roger Corman poster for a movie called 'Creature from the Haunted Sea.' The fonts I found on fontspace.com, and I got a bunch of brushes from bittbox. I forgot Conors last name so I improvised 'with the drums' and gave everyone else an alias to make it even.

I have a lot of shots from Nantucket, MA, but these two are my favorites.

Damian Hirsch

The colorful divisions on the face are the result of Photoshop experimentation. Damian Hirsch is the artist who actually made this object. It's called 'For the Love of God' and its made of platinum and encrusted completely with diamonds. My design here is called 'Damian Hirsch.'

Self Portrait, October 08

This is what my skull looks like.

Untitled

This drawing is the base for my new painting. i'm kind of coming from the other side in terms of creative approach in comparison to Monster(October), which was completely improvised. So far I'm using only titanium white and black india ink.

This is a piece I did for someone for their daughters graduation. She really liked frogs, so I used an image of a tree frog to make this 'King of the Pond.' It's sized 10X10 and was done in acrylic.

Backwards Composing

More than a year of painting by accident. Composing shapes from root shapes and working from a bottom layer in a preexisting but invisible architecture. You could say this was reverse engineered, or reverse imagined. Most of the inspiration came from music, primarily Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's first album, but many others as well. Original structure came in the form of randomness; Splashing sulfuric smelling jars of red on the middle, testing new screen prints of orchids in odd places, testing a liquitex pouring medium, experimenting with an ink called Union Aerotex, letting shapes form, observing the results, then directing the hand in generality towards an unknown end. There were suen decisions and carfully calculated moves. I must have at least eight complete layers of paint, all of which are still visible. Every time the work came near completion, there would be a vision of something else or a mistake would be caught and so for sixteen months I worked. Sometimes the frustration would take over and the whole thing would be put away or turned to face the wall or somehow destroyed. In the end, I worked in a nine hour session and swore not only to never work on it again, but that i would not sleep until I could be comfortable with it as being done.
It was named Monster after it was finished. For all of its improvisational nature, the content was imbedded in a subconscious way over time. There was no point where I said "this means this" and so there is a high amount of subjectivity in its actual meaning, which I like. If you want a hint though, observe the crude nature of the forms, the lack of real planes, the childish illustrations, and the color usages. Those were at the forefront of my mind in nearly all of the sessions once the work had sufficiently snowballed.