Thursday, July 15, 2010



So it's been a while. But I'm back with some (mostly) finished work that I'm pretty jazzed about. These are the finished peices of the sketches I posted months and months ago... they're all cut out paper, painted and layered... it's quite a process, but I'm really happy with the results. Sorry for the crappy pics.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

New Work



Here's a little process shot of my next two pieces... these are final, full size drawings that I am going to now trace out my shapes from, completely paste over with newspaper, gesso and matte medium, and build the faces back over top out of cut out newspaper that has been prepared with the same materials, then to paint over top of that with acrylic paint and matte medium. It's a long and involved process, but one that achieves some interesting results, and I'm pretty sure I can make some stunning work if I really push this as far as it can go.

Experimentation





I've expressed frustration and disappointment with my work in previous posts, particularly with my process. I was unsatisfied both with the results I was getting as well as with the work itself; I wasn't motivated to produce work, but seemed rather to force myself through... to just get it done because it had to be done, not because I was excited to do it. This is partially a result of the pressures of school, and was certainly an important lesson for me to learn. However it is being out of school, away from the pressures and the constant demand for more work, that has taught me the most important lesson, and it is something my teachers had been saying the whole time I was at school. Everybody's approach to art is different. Even in the simplest things, like how you hold a pencil, there is a tremendous variety of possibility. So the important thing is simply to become very proficient at what you do, without worrying too much about "the right way" or "the wrong way"; those things don't really exist. The right way is really whatever works for you, whatever satisfies your creative desires, as well as the constraints of the project you happen to be working on.

In light of this discovery, I have been drawing a lot more, thinking a little less, and just trying to figure out what I like to do, and to get really good at that. And so, here's a little peak at my most recently completed piece. There is no big idea behind this, just a cool drawing from my sketchbook that I turned into one big experimental media piece, working out some of the kinks in a particular process I've been working on. Turned out pretty cool, but I definitely could have planned it a little more thoroughly...


Wednesday, October 14, 2009






Here are some other pieces from school that I'm pretty happy with, they were done for my narrative class with Blair Drawson (an excellent professor and a truly amazing illustrator). The assignment was simply to create our own narrative of any sort and to illustrate it. I chose the theme of duality and wrote some poetry - sentences that just bounced off each other in interesting ways, attempting to address some of the concerns of life in the modern world. This was also a much more natural process of working for me, and once again involved bold, simple drawings and the creation of a textured, collaged, painted surface to work on.

This piece is for a group show with a bunch of my fellow Sheridan Illustration grads. The idea was to create a deck of cards each designed by a different illustrator, with no limits or guidelines as to content. I was given the King of Clubs, and decided to do a piece about modern royalty.
So it's been five months since I graduated and I haven't been able to get much of anything done. I've done a lot of drawing/sketching, and a whole lot of thinking, but not much in the work department.

It's not for lack of trying.

I've really been struggling over how, why, and what I do in my process in order to create a piece. Looking at the work that I've done over the past couple years in college, while proud of how far I've come and all that I've learned, I am unsatisfied with the pieces themselves. They seem too restrained to appropriately convey the ideas I am attempting to represent, or my own passion and intensity about these ideas. What's more is that when I think of this summer - the prolonged, frustrating, fruitless search for the perfect idea, the perfect little sketch that would be worthy of actually painting... and it mirrors, in a prolonged fashion, the same process I went through time after time at school, and which led to the creation of pieces that I am ultimately unhappy with.

As I look back at my work from school, the time when I was truly just doing what I wanted to do, no strings attached, was in my third year life drawing class. We were encouraged to experiment with media and mark-making, and to attempt to create some kind of narrative or idea within the piece (the course was called "illustrative drawing and painting")

I would spend hours creating these prepared backgrounds to paint on, and just get lost in the creation of these textured, colorful, interesting, intuitive pieces. I often got nervous about drawing/painting on top of these surfaces, as they were already so cool.

It didn't take days and weeks of contemplation to create something beautiful, something that satisfied both my urge to create a "finished" piece, as well as something that represented myself in a much more honest fashion. The drawings themselves were each done in a three hour class; they are far from perfect - they could have been pushed further, planned better, etc. This was me just doing what I do, without worrying about all the extraneous factors. I am an artist and I wish to create art - and I believe that it is through the process itself that I will be able to find and create meaning. I know what I like to do and now it's time to do it.

So anyway here are some pictures of these inspirational life drawings from my third year.










Friday, April 17, 2009

Visual Dialogue





These were all done for my Visual Dialogue class. It was all about attempting to push visual communication as far as we could, in addition to dealing with some "controversial" content, pushing the boundaries of what we would typically be allowed to do. The first and second images from the top were based on the sins of wrath and greed, and the bottom two were "social awareness" images, based on corporate exploitation. I suppose because of the weird concepts that were encouraged in class, my drawings got a little weird there for a bit. It produced some interesting results though.