autumn harvest, pt 1

autumn is here and i couldn't be more beaming about it. there's no season i'm more captivated by. fake plastic costumes and dirty little candies aside,  the crisp scent and mysticism of the fall is beyond comparison.

here are some prints that i thought captured some quintessential essence of fall. not all are specifically autumnal, but they have some imbued persona that reminds me of the season. elements of the festive, astral, ghoulish, feasting and, for some reason, i equate dirty fondling men with the fall as well. and i was listening to Kronos Quartet at the time, and that seems to permeate everything with brilliance ~ and i purposefully neglected a few images i would prefer to save for future (goya and gorey most certainly!)

this is part 1!

 

 

  

  

 

  

  

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

my soviet colors

i've got a wealth of reference images i've been meaning to post but don't quite know where to start. rather than pother around longer, i'll just go with the most recent.

i dug up some fantastic russian prints ~ a really raw, primitive elegance to these. they were initially thought provokers for a flyer; but i am just stinkyshit at the way it came out. i didnt even do any sort of drawing or traditional prinitng for it. time constraints. just photoshop manipulation of an old etching. i'm really yearning for more of an experience when i make things, not just pixel glare. so im not showing it. it's such an obnoxious product of the recent image search!

these are amazing.

this one doesn't follow the black and red print form. but it's just gorgeous in it's bleached out coloring

 

black lightning

i did a flyer today for a friends band, gully. i really couldn't figure out what kind of visual to draw, and in all honesty, my type of inking wouldn't have represented the music well in the slightest. so i hipstered it. as quick and fun as it was to play with some graphic elements (and there were alot of variations before the lightning) i much prefer it in the minimalist typeset phase.

*i did have the text as nice pastel tones against the black which i liked a bit more, but color costs money! fists at you, kinkos

interlude

a somewhat slow time in studio at the moment, but unlike most times in the past, i really don't mind. i've realized in order to really get somewhere fruitful i need to start setting my goals and priorities in order. so right now i'm making coffee.

* and of course, an edit. i should really plan these posts before i delve into them. tonight we had a party on the rooftop of my building for one of my friends and studio mates, lisa pixley! a spread of plush blankets, charcoal grill, wine, setting sun and crisp fall breeze: and beautiful. beautiful food. honey filled goat cheeses, nectarine pork loins, grilled fresh corn with basil butter...god i love my metabolism. i didn't know it was her birthday until i spotted them setting up, so i came down early and did this quick one for her. with enough time for the champagne and cake after :) simple, but i hope she appreciates it! and mabye knocks a month of my studio rent off *ahem*

lisa's demun

i'm hoping to pull a figure out of this messy whirl when its done being all swarthy

scraps

ribot

* i had some life drawing images here, but they looked silly. so they are gone. silliness. just browsing through some images and came across this beauty by Theodule Augustin Ribot, one of my favorite, if more obscure, artists. Like his predecessor Jusepe Ribera, he used a form of Tenebrae, which is essentially a heightened sense of ciaroscuro (just with more gritty detail then over exposure).

i did a master copy of this for fun in my senior year. the feet were a wet dream to paint. oh, memories!!

if you look up Tenebrae at all, you'll get a sense of the religious intonations as well...and that can set the stage for my surely never to be finished graphic novel of the same name. albino worshippers of the white whale! inquisition! spice trade! biritsh names! pagan wine dance! correct punctuation! it's got it all. and you will probably never see it @_@
ok

saint sebastian

coven of lovin'

i didnt really now what an acerola looked like, so i went to my friend google. it's also known as a crapemyrtle.

crapemyrtle is now my favorite word ever.

self scattered

i'm in the process of trying to make room in my little studio nook...so out with the old! this is the oldest ~ one of the first sketches i did when i moved in. i tend to be disgusted with myself, so i focused on brushwork rather then detail. if you're in my studio building, chances are this thing will be in the hallway for anyone to snatch up. the frames make for good kindling.

and an onion. she withered before i even got close to finishing.

DAEDALUS

amazing show last night with CLUES at empire! i've been obsessed since i got their self titled album in april ~ really unique sound: just pure awesome. meager attendance, but that just made me feel all the more special.

my roommates are both in a local outfit here in portland, Daedalus Brahms. great Decemberist/Shins type feel. show this wednesday at the white heart! and of course they need a flyer asap. they asked me today, and want it today. dilemmas! its gorgeous out, and i am pale. but i live with them both and fear mischief. so i did this. REALLY, REALLY, QUICK.

to kill two birds, ctrl+I and poof.: December show
i hope people know what post meridiem means......

glaze

he was staring at me and needed to change. because he was ugly.
so i cropped and slathered on matte medium: and he looks so much better. i think i need to do that to my warm ups more often. it adds so much! even if insignificant in the scheme of a body of work~

the cropped version of demun grumble

grumble with implied landscape

waifish scribble *update

warm up from today, charcoal on vellum


two thumbnails i did for a potential gig poster. given just the imagery the band names conjur up, i was super psyched: lady lamb and the beekeeper, human wine, and marie stella. i was planning on doing a large ink/etching of pagan merrymakers drunkenly frollicking amidst a flattened backdrop of lamb flocks in the moment a muzzle of bees attacks. then i got a call that they wanted it the next day.

there was no way that was going to get done.

but i still want to do it. these are initial thoughts. i need to bone up on my cupids.


and two recent cafe sketches. however, now that my cheating heartbreaker has come back to her cafe job...i tend not to frequent as much.

thistles

dancing through the raindrops,
what a lovely jig he hops.

wuthering demons

been futzing about with some musical endeavours lately ~ hardly made it to the studio at all the past few weeks! but when i do rustle around in here, i've been trying to do an etching series of a 'coming of bees' concept i've seeded in my mind. but it's taking awhile. maybe i'll have something to show soon(ish).

i realize this is boring: but i find these charcoal drawings so instant and satisfying. like immediate gratification before a night of tedious sketching and frustrated painting. from yesterday. i think there's a demon in there somewhere.

herman
charcoal and acetone

CATTLE CALL

from this afternoon~ a few friends of mine recently had an idea for a simple yet unique installation at a local gallery i am affiliated with ~ fill a gumball machine full of original art pins. get one of a kind artist works for just a quarter. no sort of profit to be accrued, but i thought it sounded like a really fun and inviting concept! so i jumped right in. this is the first sheet: just quick pencil sketches for this one, but perhaps i might have some gouache or watercolor thrown in the next bunch: noone wants a boring pencil pin. yet at the same time, since i want to focus more on quantity as the exercise, i dont want to go overboard on a simple freetime project. of which freetime is essentially NIL. for higher resolution click these following images ~ although they are just sketches in any case and my favorite. i think he's a cute litle bugger. and not meant to be seen this larger either

BROODISH BARM

some quick cafe sketches from the past few mornings. i started a separate notebook finally, so the pages will be less cluttered with filthy, trivial notes. i'm thinking studio work is going to take a backburner this month ~ some potential music formations are taking place, so that is going to be the precedent for awhile! tune up and dust off the keyboards and fiddles (guitars. i lie. wish it were fiddle). but i should have a few show flyers and paintings finished up in the coming days! ~

VOLTA~

some recent sketches ~ my sketchbook is falling apart at the seams, so i opted to scan some of the pages tonight before it desigintrates. i'm mad at my sketchbook: it's not drawing the things i want it to. i've noticed recently, moreso than usual, that most of the pages are gouached out or just full of random notes and words. so these are the few with some sort of imagery. also, a side note: dont respond to craigslist missed connections. i just got my third one ~ and she is craaaazy!
my sister's boyfriend, laid up in the hospital from a motorcycle mishap: wriggly little fucker. wouldnt stay still, even with morphine!
and some images from a previous sketchbook that didnt make it in the first post:


peeg (some rough sketches for a commission i'm slowly plodding through)

PEOPLE RESTING!

for some odd reason, i am always drawn to prostrate, resting figures. some of my favorites (alot of wyeth):

lawrence alma tadema

jusepe ribera
'joseph's dream'



andrew wyeth
'spring' 'barracoon' 'adrift'

unknown
'triumph of death'

from my obscure book scans. but it's pretty awesome. i'll show a slew of these sometime~

unknown

van dyck
'lamentation'

i picked this one out of the horde just because the horizontal composition really epitomizes the figure. and i guess he's resting...in a sense?

franz lenbach

unknown

(if not franz lenbach, then someone totally ripping his pose from another view)

ann gale
(from the previous post)

TROUNCING MOPPETS

i think i'm going to be influenced by daniel ochoa for awhile. not gonna try to hide it. but it was just strange timing to be exposed to his imagery a few weeks ago ~ i had been tampering with transparent figures for a bit, but after seeing his work i cant fight off the urge to delve into it in a similar fashion! these are all taken with an absurdly horrible camera, so i apologize in advance. in fact, i should probably just make a disclaimer in the header of the blog. :)

this was a quick sketch i did today in preparation for a larger piece:
transparent earth orange
vermillion
sepia
tit white

moppet

9" x 11"

couldn't get a decent piccie of the entire larger piece though ~ so for now just a crop of the full image (just so i dont compromise myself). but i'm ridiculously excited about it! a friend gave me this huge slab of mdf the other day to use as a support in my studio. i tried hanging it, but it was too friggin heavy. so i decided to gesso it and paint it up. i didnt have a concept in mind, just using alot of linseed oil and turp to make alot of transparent lines, but i'm starting to pick out some merrymakers trouncing around a tree. thats the plan. pictures soon. i promise.
kind of.

trouncing moppets (detail)
4' x 8'

and a few unfettered odds and ends. a charcoal piece i recently masticated into a fifth of the original piece. it was a bad composition ~ so i saved the best part and tossed the rest.

aphasiac

a piece i framed for a recent private studio exhibition my building hosted. the painting is from last year, it's an oldie. but one of my first daily studies i was doing as part of a horridly timed independent study that gave me an art mental breakdown. so it bears purpose to keep. if anyone knows of more antiquated frames...lemme know

Lord Muttonsog

and a quick ink drawing for a local flyer i did in the wee hours the other night. i wish i had more advance to do something a better, but alas. i took out a unibrow and alot of nose and wrinkle lines to make it more feminine as desired. although i wish i could have done better, it's not the main poster ~ so i suppose it will be fine enough as it is. im curious what they will do with it though... BRENDA / MARIE STELLA / COYOTE EYES / BIRD IN THE RAFTERS! empire this friday night. be there!

DANIEL OCHOA

what immediately attracts me to ochoa's work is his captivating sense of gesture. through a weave of overlapping transparencies, such an intricate texture and definition of a figure is created. his use of opaque outline helps to frame the sentient form perfectly. fucking love it.

OLGA BOZNONSKA

in a similar vein to ann gale and kanevsky, boznonska creates such an encompassing element of atmosphere in her works that the figure becomes a vague, emerging entity. quite unique for commissioned portraiture. olga painted on cardboard for her desired effect: the mass of tone getting sucked up into the fibers of the support. beautiful.

CURRENT FRAGMENTS

something i've been extremely curious about in recent months has been the deterioration of historical paintings. over decades, layers of paint erode or acquire damage: revealing either a vague pentimenti or an additional layer of texture that add an exquisite atmosphere to the image. through this interest i stumbled upon the works of ann gale and alex kanevsky.

their fusion of multiple corrective layers and unique brushwork create the a similar depiction of texture. details of the figure are moved and scrutinized, emerge and recede ~ sometimes lost all together in an ether of tone.

kanevsky's work conveys a sense of contrast and movement; the figure exposed upon a brightly toned background, and details being smudged with a sense of sudden whiplash. he works mainly from photograph, so any implied, frenzied movement of the figure is result mostly from his livid energy and impatience at rendering.

gale opts for the scrutinized, long term relationship with her models. the image is modified through numerous sittings through which subtle changes in expression and mood are noted in careful detail. in each work, the artists hand and corrective stroke is notable and echoes a sense of deterioration. it teeters on the realms of pentimenti, but is it's own fascinating imagery. ( in historical terms pentimenti referes to the original sketch emerging through the erosion of the topmost corrective layers and refined image.)

sorry for the gab, i promise in future just to post images with little words to detract. i just love these artists too much not to comment!

ann gale






alex kanevsky





kanevsky currently has a show at the J CACCIOLA gallery in new york until the end of may. i'm hoping to make it, but in brutal reality, it's probably not going to happen.