Only a day left to vote for my design on Threadless!

So far, my design "Phony Fancy Jenkins" has the highest score yet of any design I've submitted to Threadless. That's excellent, excellent news, but I can always use more help to get this published. If you've not yet voted for it, I would greatly appreciate your vote. If you have already voted, I would l-o-v-e it if you would share the link to my shirt with anyone you think might want to see this shirt see the light of day!



Thanks so much!

Phony Fancy Jenkins

My newest Threadless design "Phony Fancy Jenkins," is up for voting! Please take a minute to give me a vote of $5 and help it get printed on Threadless!



PREESH

Some new stuff on the horizon

First, to the tangibles:

I have a new design up in my Society 6 shop! It's an odd sort of reclaimed image from one of my favorite chapters in art history: ukiyo-e, a.k.a. Japanese Woodblock Printing.

The origin of this image is a classic ukiyo-e print "Lightning Beneath the Summit" or "Rainstorm Beneath the Summit" by the great master Hokusai, originally printed between 1826 and 1833.

Bada bing bada boom!

The next item in the queue is a crazy shirt design I've been working on in my seculsion. It's primed, ready, and submitted to Threadless for voting. I'll make an announcement on here once it gets approved and voting begins, but why not give y'all a preview of it in the meantime? It's another in my series of completely bizarre, obsessively drawn, possibly off-putting designs and I call it "Phony Fancy Jenkins".

I've definitely gotten my chops on the wacom drawing this little devil. I have not been the most confident in my abilities with a wacom versus my skill with actual pen and paper, but after about a week of drawing this craziness, I'm pretty comfy. Plus it beats the hell out of drawing on paper, scanning, cleaning, adjusting levels, stitching separately scanned sections together, etc, etc.


Finally... courtesy of Young, Foxy & Free

SO EXCITED!

COMING REAL SOON!

Sam Flax'n

Tomorrow I'll be doing a live painting at Sam Flax's Atlanta location as part of their 30 Artists in 30 Days event (facebook event page). Here's a calendar of the artists participating--->

On March 31st, each painting created during the first 30 days of March will be auctioned off to support the One Love Generation, a 501c3 non-profit organization empowering youth to inspire positive social change through art, service and awareness.

I'm very pleased to be participating in this event. However, given my afflicted status of present and the limited time I'll have to paint, I've had to engage a little more planning for this painting. I've also had to keep my design very simple to allow plenty of time for color mixing and painting. Here's a sneaky peek:

"Window Rear" pixel sketch

 

I had originally planned to use an image of a window, but decided to alter the color of the design to depict the back of a canvas, stretcher bars and all. Any art history geeks will recognize the obvious nod to Roy Lichtenstein's series of stretcher frames, which I find absolutely hilarious and marvelously clever.

Please do come by tomorrow if you're in the Atlanta area and say hello! I'll be the immobilized guy with the beard painting the canvas back on the canvas front.

Society 6'n

Several years ago, at the end of a dissatisfyingly unproductive day, I sat down at my computer and honked out a quick sketch of an owl. By quick i mean maybe an hour or two, because the sucker was made of crazy patterns and odd details. I named him, oddly, Owlie:

h00t

 A little while later, I decided Owlie needed a home and a background, so I drew the background and housed him in the illustrator playground known as Society 6. He kinda languished there for a while, but...

This past week I received an email from Society 6 informing me of their selection of Owlie for inclusion in their public store! Essentially Owlie will be a good deal easier to find for the casual online browser in the Society 6 shop. Presently, I'm offering Owlie as a framed art print, stretched canvas, iPhone case/skin, iPod skin, and greeting card; props to Society 6 for making the variety of iterations quite easy to apply one's designs to!

Owlie as an iPhone case.
He's growing up... I'm so proud!

Seeing as how my shop would likely get increased traffic over time, I decided to take some time to produce a few more designs for my S6 account. I started a collage a few days ago for myself, based on a portion of the large collage I described near the end of last week's post. There was a chunk of window visible with the sun peeking just around the post and for whatever reason it made me think of a face. I set to elaborating on this spark and created a very strange image that is a little whimsical and dreamy as well as mildly menacing and nightmarish. I call it Don:

"Don" 2012

I think Don comes from whatever shreds of cabin fever I may be experiencing, though I do declare I've been plenty busy working on things new and old so if I have any cabin fever it is only felt on a subconscious level. He's an odd one, but I don't think he means any harm.

The first thing I think of when I look at Don is one of my favorite paintings by Rene Magritte, "The Human Condition". Magritte's exploration with illusionism, paintings as windows, paintings about paintings, and paintings about windows about painting as a window are very pertinent to my own current interests in pixel imagery, given the ubiquity of "windows", whether of the Microsoft type or the Apple iPad type, in our daily lives.

This past Wednesday I had a check up about my broken foot. My doctor brought the xrays in an iPad. Myself being not especially familiar with iPads, I had a brief but strong impression of being in the future. It was a little weird, weirder than the bolts and metal plates in my foot, even.

 The next image I constructed for Society 6 was a colorful update of my Ex Voto para Nuestra Senora de San Juan de los Lagos. I was all about putting her at the center of some dazzling, very pink, explosion of color. I spruced up the clouds behind the Virgin by bending the lighter areas closer to the yellow of the lit clouds, which had the wonderful effect of making the shadows in the clouds read like purple. Yay color theory!!!

DAMOS INFINITA GRACIAS

My first drafts are never my best (whose are?!?), and I am a firm believer in making something, sleeping on it, and reacting to it at first sight the next day, repeating the process until I cannot think of anything more to do with an image. That is how I define the illusive term "finished" throughout my art practice: the point where my brain finally submits in the arm wrestling match of creativity, outdone by the refined image or object. It works!


You can check out my Society 6 shop here, here, or here. It's totally up to you, no one will judge you :)

The Human Centerpiece, and other new work

Hey all, here's a story of a show I was in a few months back.

I was invited by Atlanta's Beep Beep Gallery to participate ALCHEMY, a show described by the gallery as:

" A group show consisting of work created on or applied to wood triangles. These triangles were hand-cut by Beep Beep and are in 3 sizes: small, medium, and large. These works will then be displayed in a series of patterns and arranged throughout the gallery, the ultimate alignment of which will distill into either an Elixir of Life, The Universal Solvent, or if our energies are properly harnessed, piles and piles of gold."

The show was definitely golden, essentially constituting a who's-who of young Atlanta artists, including Dorothy Stucki, Sam Parker, Allen Taylor, Kelly Cloninger, Sanithna Phansavanh, Kelly McKernan, Mike Germon, Chelsea Raflo, PLF, Sean Abrahams, Emily Maxwell, Jason Travis, Brandi Supra, Joy Phrasavath, Romy Aura Maloon, Jason Kofke, Chris Chambers and more. The place was packed out like crazy!

I grabbed a large and a small triangle, filed the edges smooth, and set to work. For the smaller triangle, I set up a transfer of an image of Mount Fuji: 

"Rainstorm Below the Summit" 2011

The main piece I created for the show is a continuation of my digital work. I decided to make something very crass, erotic, and dense:

"The Human Centerpiece" 2011

My favorite part has got to be Mickey Mouse engaging the posterior of a faceless, polka dot dress-wearing young lady:

#1 among my luckiest, happiest accidents in all of these collages

The "SKEET SKEET SKEET" guy on the left edge of the triangle shooting semen out of his shotgun gets a very honorable mention, too. I think that graphic provided the impetus for the entire project, really.

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Much more recently I've been working on a huge collage for Young Foxy and Free's Spring issue. It's the most labor-intense collage yet, and I'm prouder and prouder of it the more I work on it. While I can't show you the whole thing, I will show you a section:

About 1/6 of the total collage. It's nuts!

I'm especially fond of this odd creature I created early in the process, the Alien Goose of Love, which I assembled, abandoned, and then revived after a time. What I like best about him is his wackiness:

"The Alien Goose of Love" 2012

My openess to bring more disparate parts together in these collages is exciting because for me it signals a gradual unification of my pixel work and my intense, hand drawn, non-pixel work.

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While mending my broken foot, I've largely been restricted my output to sketching in my sketchpad and collaging on the computer, which has given me ample opportunity to pursue a series of collages I've been thinking about for a little while. I call them the Atomic Marilyns, and they're part of a larger project centering on Marilyn Monroe that Iv'e been working on in preparation for a solo show in August. This particular set of collages is very much influenced by a Dali painting I saw at the High around this time last year during their spectacular Dali show:

Salvador Dali "The Maximum Speed of Raphael's Madonna" 1954

Here's one of the first dozen Atomic Marilyns I've made:

"Gold Marilyn 01" 2012

The idea of the overwhelming amount of nothingness comprising matter has always fascinated me, as has the overwhelming amount of nothingness comprising life. Furthermore, when one's life becomes an almost-possession of the public, how much more is that life-nothingness magnified or even amplified? This thought just occurred to me, but it makes the Atomic Marilyns all the more attractive as a project. Existentialism, celebrity, life, death, and, as always, the problem of seeing!

Have an excellent weekend, whichever day you may read this on!

Back from teh dedz

Hey all. I'm back.

As usual, I've been busy working on tons of various projects and images. Back towards the end of December, I once again participated in MINT Gallery's annual postcard pin up show. For one of my pieces, I decided to emulate one of my friends and favorite Atlanta artists, Jason Kofke:

"For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be"

Most recently, I've been selected to participate in the International Teletext Art Festival. If you don't know what teletext is, then just click...riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.... HERE.

I had a lot of fun learning the teletext program Cebratext. You want to talk about an old interface? Holy crap, it was a memorable stroll back to the lowlands of Windows 3.1/95ish like whoa. Not to mention buggy as hell, but that might've been a result of not running such an old program in compatibility mode... It's also interesting how limited were not only the color palette, but also the capacity for assigning colors. It was very much like an odd synthesis of letterpress and MS Paint. Challenging, esoteric, and very fun.

Anyhow, given my recent fascinations with exploring the idea of 2-dimensional surfaces as screens, as well as the fact that the teletext art was going to be broadcast to people's televisions (August 3rd and 4th, Helsinki readers!), I figured I'd give my images corresponding treatments:

Left: "Help" Right: "Glass"  2012  Cebratext designs 2012

And then I broke the shit out of my left foot and have been incapacitated since. Huzzah!

But really, I've had to restructure my working habits since I broke my foot, so no painting for a little while. It sucks because I was working on stuff for a show in March AND a show in April, but fortunately those shows are merely postponed, not cancelled. I'm really excited to show you guys what I've been working on for those, but for the time being I'll have to step on it.

 I'll be mostly drawing small drawings and working on computer stuff. New shirt designs, maybe some new stuff for the Society 6 shop. I also provided some insight for a recent article written by Katherine Concepcion for Atlanta art blog BurnAway, so go check that out!

I also started a tumblr somewhere along the way:
http://press-start-to-begin.tumblr.com/