Friday, August 30, 2013

Household Stills

I had 15 min. to make dinner and get dressed before I had to be there.  As I scurried around, one thing and then another caught my eye - these little vignettes around the house that meant something but I wasn't sure what.  So I grabbed my camera and captured them, promising myself that I'd explore them when I got home.  And I did.  And this is what they are...

freezer oven

 grocery jars

 vulture peeps

blank & empty

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Gettin' my alla prima on.



 Deer, oil on wallpaper, 13.5"x12", 2013

I haven't been painting as much as I'd like because life keeps happening and I have this heart-stopping fear that I'll forget how or loose the desire to want to paint and it's a thought I can't bear so I just have to stop everything, put the painting apron on, and paint a dang deer!  Whew.

What's the perfect kind of painting when one wigs out in this manner?  Alla prima.  In a nut shell, alla prima is a technique in which a painting is completed in one bang-out session. You work fast and take no prisoners.  This little dude's eyes are a bit crossed and his ears are slightly off kilter but that's just the way he is.  No touch ups, I'll keep my mitts off of him and accept him as is.

Side note:  This deer is kind of a big deal.  Below is a still shot from a stop motion film you can spy in an earlier post.



Monday, August 19, 2013

Dirty Ashtrays in the Tiki Garden


Dirty Ashtrays in the Tiki Garden is a long short story I wrote circa 2000 AD.  I was 24 years old, roughly halfway through my twenty-two year drugged-out, drunken, spring break-inspired bender.

I didn't know when I was writing it that I would be telling my future.  Or maybe I did.  Either way, it turned out to be an overly dramatized but not too far off version of how my life actually played out.  I'm 37 and sober now, revisiting the story I wrote in the midst of a riot.

This is the 2nd bound draft copy.  It hasn't been professionally edited so it is riddled with mistakes.  In general, the story itself is unbearably personal in a completely autobiographically fictitious way.

"How do I get my mitts on a copy?!" you ask.  Like a pair of maladjusted and critically endangered animals left behind by the Ark, there are two copies in existence.  One copy is forever mine and the second copy is tradable for the small but important price of a round trip plane ticket from Dallas, TX to Peoria, IL (where I will be a resident artist at Prairie Center of the Arts later this year).

The End.


Friday, August 16, 2013

Emerging From the Rabbit Hole

Emerging From the Rabbit Hole, oil, 32"x48", 2013

To fall down the rabbit hole:  a bizarre period of chaos or confusion, life being suddenly filled with strange events.  This can be an experience fueled by mind-altering drugs or just a quick and irreversible jump into oblivion (although I've found that one can only rarely exist without the other).

I jumped feet first and with complete abandon down the rabbit hole years ago, and I'm just now emerging to take the first breathes of fresh air.  I had forgotten about the existence of sunlight or maybe I never knew how to recognize it in the first place.  It was so long ago.

Emerging From the Rabbit Hole is a painting depicting my current point of the journey, recovery.  The reference image I used is based on a photo taken by a friend of Bingham Canyon Copper Mine in Utah.  Bingham has been in operation for over 100 years and is the largest man-made excavation on earth.  This is a testament to just how deep I had fallen.
In-progress...



Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Bail

An innocent doll takes off 
with a truck full of drifters...


Saturday, August 3, 2013

Real Fake

A group of animal figurines is wonderstruck 
by the discovery of real natural specimens...