Art Show At The Goodfoot (Portland, OR)
I have an exhibit at at The Goodfoot! The opening was super fun and the show looks great. Art will be on display for most of February. My paintings are hanging along side the work of Nathan Turner, Brett Bowers and Eric Buchman. There’s some nice overlap in style and technique. Check out the work here: http://thegoodfoot.com/gallery/
I feel pretty accomplished with my work for the month of January. I started out with seven pieces from a show in September. That was the beginning of this series, called “Welcome To Cascadia”. In October, I finished a collaboration that Natalie Oswald, started while we were working on our mural in Tacoma. (Check out the Mural video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpXaaUTX6K4.) In January, I Built 20 panels and painted backgrounds; I finished 14 new pieces. I also carved and printed two editions of linocuts and hung a few of the Analog Owls. I even printed about 50 custom drink coasters for the evening. I’ll probably finish a few more Analog Owls to add to the show next week.
I’ll keep posting the images from this show; here’s a few from the first batch.
“Seekers”, 24×36 inches, Acrylic
“Hunter”, 24×36 inches, Acrylic
“Migration”, 24×36 inches, acrylic (check out the purple iridescent in the reflection!)
“Glow Koi”, 18×40 inches, acrylic. This is a collaboration with Natalie Oswald. We’ve done a lot of collaboration work over the years. You can see more of that here: http://natalieoswald.com/collab_picto.html. These collaborations are always influential to the way that I paint, both in approach and style.
Here’s a new version of the Koi that I made in January:
“Alder Beetle”, 24×36 inches, acrylic
I’ve had a couple evenings at home, thanks to the snow in Portland. I’ve been taking a break from painting, to rest up and clean my house after the art bomb went off. I’ve been switching it up by doing some music related stuff, setting up my audio space and mixing a long dj set. I’ve also been doing some pinhole photography and carved a lino block for the Love Of Portland show. There’s a test print in my instagram feed. (below) I’ll post some links to prints for sale soon!
Art Studio progress (One Week to Goodfoot Show)
The last couple of days are a terrific blur. I’m in various stages of production, which you can see in the photo below. I’ve got finished backgrounds, a handful of completed pieces, some that are ready for collaboration, some that are masked and ready for paint. I took the photo in the day yesterday, then spent the night painting in squids, whales, and octopi.
I’m posting progress shots as I go, via artdamaged instagram. (also, they may show up down at bottom of the page)
Art Show Progress (and Process) – Two Weeks To Go
The last week has been productive, but things are getting fun now! I started out the new pieces by layering up the panels: black primer, sanding, more primer or glazes of color, sanding, then back and forth with layers of metallics for shimmer and color shift effects. The order of the layering really affects the way the iridescent pigments react to the light. (I don’t have any of the formulas memorized; I just know something cool is likely to happen and I stop when I’m excited about it.) All of the woodgrain is painted on. I have a faux finishing tool that makes it pretty easy; the woodgrain gets layered in once or twice in the process. Once I’m happy with it, I try to make it pretty level and smooth, so it masks cleanly. This is the background layer.
For most of the images, I want this background to work as the “black” outline; why not make black complex and interesting. The aesthetic that I’m drawn to for this is sort of weathered patina with greenish and bronze or copper that’s stained and scuffed up.
Once most of my panels were layered up, I was excited to do some illustration on top, so I painted an owl with a volcano. I enjoy making variants, versions, whatever. Themes/Motifs/Series within series. I like to try all the options; I used to get stuck trying to decide the best way to finish a piece. Now I like to see them all in context and appreciate how they relate to one another. Repetition adds a weird twist to how we think about the pieces too: how original is it? Is the print on wood have value over a print on paper? We think of prints as copies sometimes. When it’s painted, is that a print or a painting? — Yeah, this is the stuff that I think about during those hours of brushing layers and sanding; it’s very contemplative and zen. Haha! (for real tho.)
This is the newest one. It’s a little guy. 12×12 inches. Acrylic on wood panel.
I cut the stencil after working the image up in photoshop, from this photo of an 8×8 print:
I printed it from this block that I carved:
I sketched the block out, while looking at this painting:
I used the 8×8 block to print 6 pieces for the Big 400 Art Show. They looked like this:
There’s some bigger versions with a similar composition, one with mt. hood, one with multiple volcanoes. I’ll share those another time.
I’ve also drawn up two new compositions and I’m working on the stencils tonight. I’ll share designs and progress tomorrow. I expect to have illustrative images going down onto the bottom layers over the weekend! My schedule has been working in the early afternoon (day job) and then napping for about three hours, then studio arting from about ten until late (bed around 5 or 6am) then about five hours of sleep for the night. It’s working alright; tho, I think I prefer to get started in the afternoon so I’m in a groove by night time.
My new images are squids and octopi…More tomorrow!
Owl Art
Ha ha! I’m laughing to myself, wondering if that title will get google hits. I know that owls are a hot item these days; I like to say that the most hipster image would be an owl with antlers and an old timey mustache. Fads come and go but some things will always be cool to me: robots, dinosaurs, plaid flannel shirts, hot rods and owls (those come to mind easily…).
When my mother was a girl, my grandfather (we called him pa-pa, but in the Carolinas that’s “paw paw” with extra twang on the second one but I can’t figure out how to spell it phonetically) was driving home (I picture his patina green 70ish Ford pickup) and a Great Horned Owl flew into the side of his truck, broke it’s neck and died. Pa-pa brought it home and my Mom was able to get a close look and has loved owls since. The poor owl dude was taken to the York County Nature Museum in Rock Hill, South Carolina. I’d like to think it’s still the same owl on display.
Mom got lots of owl presents and when people brought souvenirs back for her they were owls. We can all relate to this right? (There was a time when I got dinosaurs, smiley faces, aliens, animaniacs– and that was just since college, haha!) I guess the trick is to not become disenchanted with imagery that makes us happy, but to be choosy about the quality of the items and imagery we surround ourselves with.
I’ve always thought of owls as mom’s thing. I never really drew or painted them. They’re not easy to capture (in likeness, but probably they are sneaky in the wild too.). Their shape is amorphous and their feathers tend to be tree bark camouflage which is like painting bark and moss texture…also, I think, is challenging. So, I tend to focus on the stylized parts like swoopy feathers and extreme eyes and beak, also the shape of the larger feathers. That’s what I’ve done with this most recent batch. My only other owl art has been even more stylized or even cartoonish (like the 3D owls made out of 8-Track, Cassette, and 7″ records).
Owls became my thing when I realized that it’s my totem animal. Like i said, I always thought it was mom’s thing but then I just kept seeing them(sometimes in unlikely places) at significant moments.They’ve sat in trees near me or swooped me and screeched, glided by at eye level and turned to look at me under a full moon – usually when I’m having an epiphany of sorts. This makes sense in nature; however, it’s happened in cities too. A Great Horned Owl swooped down and screeched when I was in East Los Angeles.
So, yeah. Owls are rad. Embrace the things that you love, that make you feel good, and don’t sweat the cheesy impostors that come and go in waves of pop culture.
Here’s a few owls:
I used this photo to paint my piece for “The Bird Show”. He and his buddies were out in the yard at the last house I lived in. I can hear them in my neighborhood now but haven’t seen them. Here’s the painting:
The 8-track owls (Analog Owls) look like this:
I’ll have some of these for sale at the art show on the 30th of January at The Goodfoot in Portland.
I’m going to talk about my art show progress tomorrow. I want to share more owl photos, so I’ll share the ones related to my show. I’m excited with my new imagery and I’m going now to finish drawing a squid fighting a sperm whale!
The owl at the top, is one of my pieces for the first Big 100 show.
artdamagedportland 