Sweet child of mine

Beating around the bush

Here Comes The Sun

Juke box hero

More speakers, more perspectives.

Beneath, between, and behind

I think the solution to this design problem is somewhere between the angular techno look of the first and the whimsical femininity of the second.

See me, feel me

Analytic cubism sought to explode a given object's form by simultaneously viewing it from different points. I think that although this abstraction results in an image that is more about the shapes, movements, and lines than the actual subject matter being referenced, it ironically presents a truer, more honest representation than any one limited view could provide.

In drawing, and in life, truth is hard to find in the balance between the ignorance of one opinion and the cacophony of disagreement. Too many points of view makes things more confusing, but often constructively, and even necessarily so.


Today I drew some speakers with this in mind. The product is essentially nonobjective. With a little context, though, and close examination, a viewer can see much more about these objects than they would be able to if I'd only drawn the back of them, for instance. Besides, I think the variety of textures this rendering provides gives the whole composition a complex, soothing harmony.

Psycho daisies

Every little thing

Starting to render it in Illustrator:

19th nervous breakdown

I'm so tired

I'm only sleeping

She's like a rainbow

Ice skaters rendered in oil pastel in the style of the fauves.

Powerman

Latest Groundwire logo, rendered on Illustrator:

Penny for your thoughts

"Modern conditions and trends of thought demand modern art for their expression."
--William Merritt Chase, 1920

It's an appealing idea that new modes of artistic expression come about not out of an individual artist's personal style, or because of a fashionable aesthetic at the time, but because they were necessary to demonstrate the ideas that they were used for. I hope, as an artist, that styles of visual art move forward as definitively as fields of science, and that they have the potential to advance the pursuit of truth and improve society as much as medicine or technology, in their own way.

Shades of grey

This kind of drawing is so different from painting and watercolor and sculpture because you slowly build tone, instead of just being able to slap on a layer at full value. It reminds me of blending crayons in elementary school, actually. The more time you take and the lighter you press with every layer, the smoother it turns out. Today I finally took my time patiently blending in the eagle's wings, but now it looks like I've got another case of the slows.

Don't fear the reaper

Big boss man

Scaled up to 18x24", and in a softer graphite (6B):

What do you get for pretending the danger's not real

Fly like an eagle

Working on a study for the eagle and goat piece. I'm still not sure what medium the final's going to be, so I'm just studying forms and composition, and practicing rendering with a dry sketch. The patron didn't specify a medium, just "whatever you think would look the most epic," so I'm thinking a black and white piece might work best, maybe ultimately in charcoal to give it more contrast. I have more experience with graphite and I think it's easier and neater to work with, but a big charcoal drawing could be a good learning experience.

Hold on loosely

Reference pictures for my latest commissioned work.

Two young lovers with nothing better to do

Still working on the groundwire logotype. Not really because I think it's getting anywhere without any coaching, but just because we're snowed in.

One bourbon, one scotch, one beer

Don't stand so close to me

I finished and cropped my third post-impressionist mark-making experiment. The subject matter is the head of a shop vac, but depiction is even less important to me here than usual. My primary goal is to create a rhythm through a digest of varied surface textures.

I like this part the best. I think the variety of mark sizes and speeds starts to give it that van Gogh feel.

Thorn tree in the garden

More work on the groundwire project:



The first two are more similar, but I think the lightbulb is kind of a cheap symbol for technology.

I feel like the third concept here has the most potential, but it still needs working through. I want to combine the images of roots, which symbolize drawing on resources, and telephone cords, which symbolize connectedness. These images are also more suited to my personal style, which tends to be more successful with curly, twisting imagery than the colder, more graphic typography. I think my greatest difficulty here is going to be neglecting the technological message, because I personally like the earthier aesthetic, and it's important with this firm to emphasize their forward-moving nature and technologically capabilities.

I also want it to be simpler. I have to find a way to boil down all those curls, but still get those branches, roots, and phone cords across. Abstraction, says Patrick Craig, is simplification for communication. He thinks this is on the opposite end of a spectrum with play. I hope not.

Hopefully it'll be more like illustration, which Greg Metcalf says is "almost necessarily distillation." At least at first glance, I thought that directly contradicted the cliche that a picture's worth a thousand words, but the more I think about it, an image can be both more communicative and more direct than a verbal message, and thus just distilled: purified, and condensed.

I wanna show you baby, that a woman can be tough

"Strength is to be celebrated, and that's done by harmonically distributing it." --Patrick Craig.

I think that's a good way of looking at compositional elements, and life.


As far as this, I'm going to finish it. It's supposed to be a post-impressionist rendering of a vacuum, using a variety of marks to reject the traditional hierarchy of focus and figure/ground relationships. It's kind of messy there in the middle, and the background just needs working through, but I think some of the mark-making is developing successfully. I looked closely at a dollar bill right before I started working, and some of the textures ended up being more influenced by etching than the thick expressionist marks of van Gogh, etc. It's almost paradoxical, but those two very different levels of control and concentration seem to come to really similar visual conclusions at times.

They say I'm crazy but it takes all my time

Typography manipulations in Adobe Illustrator:

Suck my kiss

(It's a vacuum, if you couldn't tell)

I'm a live wire

Logotypes I've got percolating:


This takes longer than I realized.