Tag Archives: mickey mouse

“Cazador De Sueños”, Contemporary Modern Series, No. 65

9 Oct

Cazador De Sueños 14x14

Further abandoning the sacred line and the safety of an enclosed geometric shape, I studied the formats of Neo-Expressionism and its dismissal of perfecting the ‘known object’. This is a hard concept when it comes to an icon like Mickey that does, for the most part, rely on its known shape to be considered authentic. Sure the shape can change to the aesthetic of the artist, and we’ve seen this with many artists (Ex: Keith Haring, Ron English, etc) and Mickey Mouse in the past… but formulating my own voice and aesthetic in a Neo-Expressionist fashion, without compromising the structure of the tenxtenxten regulations (the silhouette must remain the same)… well… it was just a different story.

In coming up with own voice, I decided to research through the pathways of one of the most notorious Neo-Expressionist painters, Jean-Michel Basquiat. This was somewhat of a dichotomous subject, as Basquiat’s work was mostly on sociopolitical gatherings rather than commercial commentary. Furthermore the idea of Mickey Mouse integrated as a main subject HAD to appear mentally salubrious to the viewer.

This provided a challenge.

I realized that this was a focus on aesthetic rather than actual parallel communicative content to Basquiat’s vision, and pushed further through the piece painting it as a surface level execution. This piece asks the question, how would a Neo-Expressionist painter approach the idea of visiting Disneyland and paint his or her transgressive experience?

That very question was answered in this piece.

This is called “Cazador de Sueños”, which means “Dream Hunter” in Spanish. It reflects an abstract vision of visiting Disneyland in Anaheim, California. There are areas here that relate to Disney such as “Main Street”, “Downtown”, “Parade” and “Fireworks! Ooh! Ahh! Yay! Kaboom!”, and carries familiar words associated with its brand like “Vista” on the left hand side and “Buena” on the right hand side (Buena Vista). There are two hats which say “Lost” and “Found” which represents beyond the surface level idea of a department, and more hones in on that ‘lost’ feeling we so often get in our lives, and that ‘found’ happiness we have when we visit the park. Beyond that, the central most hat with the eye represents an opened consciousness when coming to the park.. and that newfound vision of bliss we see when entering the park and enjoying all that Disneyland has to offer.

This comes as number 8 in the Contemporary Modern Series, and is number 74 in the TENxTENxTEN collection.

Advertisement

Tags: , , , , ,

“Infinite Summer”, Human Condition Series, No. 62

14 Sep

560O0103C Infinite Summer 14x14

A few months ago I was commissioned to create a piece that would imbue the idea of hope. My mind twirled 360 degrees around the moon and beyond the stars over this idea, because to me hope was such a complex emotion.

As an adult, when I envisioned the idea of hope, my mind went to the business side of things. It created stories around charts and graphs, where I would see the protagonist arrow travel through the treacherous canyons and hills of a crisis to reach the upper right corner land of ‘hopeful’ profit and productivity of the present. I felt shallow because I knew hope stretched beyond the realms of the boardroom.

I tried again and again, and began to get frustrated over the complexity of this emotion. Everything I came up with too specific and untranslatable.

And then it hit me.

Hope wasn’t complex.

Hope was quite simple.

It was the situations that proved to be complex and out of shape. It was kind of like my understanding of a higher power. I put so many situational events and interpretations of how I was supposed to believe in something greater than myself. .. that the very idea of a higher being became too overwhelming to understand because I believed it to be too complex for me to process. But that was just it. ..

It wasn’t complex..

It was quite simple.

The belief of a higher power existed, and in that understanding, the idea of it became straightforward. It was the people that made it complex. Thats kind of how hope worked for me. Having hope wasn’t neccessarily a complicated emotion.. it was the situations where I needed hope that were beyond my control and therefore made it convoluted.

I focused back on this idea when looking at the piece and closed my eyes. I took this into a color context, as I rely on the psychology of color to communicate to a color seeing world. My client wanted hope over their ailments of life so I used the following colors of blue, yellow, and green.

In looking at all these colors together and what they objectively spoke about, I realized their relation to hope and how they connected me to my past and my beginnings of how I began to first have this feeling.

Growing up in Marietta, Georgia I often felt afraid, confused, and misunderstood. As I’ve mentioned in many blogs before, I spent most of my youth sitting on my bay window at night and looking at the lights of the distant city of Atlanta grow from the top of the hill at night. I dreamed that in those lights were places that would tell me not to be afraid. I spent many nights staring for hours and romanticizing about getting out of my town and moving to a place where people understood me.

It was in this, that I had hope.

When things got incredibly bad as a child I would run out into the yard to beg whatever magical force to take me away from where I lived. I’d lay out in the lawn for hours and stare at the sun and clouds and talk to the sky to strike up a bargain for my ticket out of where I lived. I would imagine, that someone eventually would hear me, and the grass and all its army of millions of legs, … would begin to move my body down the lawn, out of my town, and past my county line.

And while the grass never moved me, I did plant the seeds to manifest my reality. .. I eventually, when the opportunity became available, left Marietta, GA*.. and I traveled all over the United States and found understanding, conquered fear, settled confusion, and found the love I so desperately sought.

In this piece, called “Infinite Summer”, I chose to use these three colors as a nostalgic amulet for hope. The blue represents the sky I used to stare at. The yellow shards represent the sun that I used to converse with. The green waves represent the grass that I prayed would transport me away from my situation. Furthermore, I found specific meanings of the color to the client (as seen below)

1. Light Ultramarine Blue [PB29 + (PW6 x 2)] is the color of protection. In Greek Mythology, it was believed that the Gods on Mt. Olympus created the sky blue to let mortals know that they were protected. It was a color to ward off evil. In our path in life where hope is over our ailments, we often need protection to keep on keepin’ on.

2. Brilliant Yellow [PY86] / Diarylide Yellow [HR-70]. This represented the vibrancy of light, and was believed in pagan times to be a direct link to the power of life.

3. Spring Green [(PG7 + (PY86 x2)] Condensed Spring Green [PG7 + PY86]. This was an objective relation to color to grass and leaves that multiple religions used to emphasize the feeling of healing and renewal.

While I have never spoken to the client as this was a piece commissioned from one of the galleries that carries my work, I hope they find hope in this creation… as I did creating it. Hope is not complex. Hope is what carries us from point A to B to N to Z and beyond. Hope is what keeps us living.

Hope is having life.

This is the 9th in the “Human Condition” series, and serves as the 71st in the TENxTENxTEN collection.

*Disclaimer: Marietta, GA is a wonderful place to many people. I must emphasize that just because I did not fare well there does not mean its a terrible place.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

“Stay Gold”, Loveless Letters Series, No. 53

18 Apr

"Stay Gold"

A few years ago I was a temp at Disney Consumer Products in Glendale, California.I was new to Los Angeles, fresh from traveling in between Seattle and San Francisco trying to find a place to call a home. I was a hopeful artist, showing in small cafes, bars,  and LBGT centers. In my head, being a painter was only ever going to be a hobby, and never and actualized profession. But, lo and behold, that one fateful day, when an administrative assistant passed my compacted cubicle and saw my paintings of drag queens of the glorious West Coast.. that my life began.

Since getting the chance to show my craft, my life has been filled with endless hours of work to prove myself. I hit the ground running from the swelling of interest, and I’ve worked hard night and day to build a foundation of work. In this time period I’ve had many rewards and accomplishes met, as well as great heartbreak and criticism. This just comes with the craft.

In saying this, I was asked in an interview a while back on how I came to be an artist, and what I found to be ‘the formula’ for staying relevant in an age of such quickening information. No longer are we subjected to a longer lasting semi-permanence through a flip of a magazine page, as we are .05 seconds of an interest before a person clicks the mouse away from our images. We are less than semi permanent, and therefore have to strive to work harder to be seen. I responded “well.. I don’t think there really is such a formula that attends to all of us as artists, I think.. personally, that everything is different for each aesthetic and person.. and really.. even when it comes down to… next Tuesday, that formula could change entirely for myself.”

I reflected back to that answer on March 22nd, 2013, when I was met with a change in my artistic course. I thought earnestly on how, exactly, at that moment, what the (or my) formula was. So, at that moment, around 3:00am I grabbed a can of spray paint, headed into the back yard of my San Francisco studio, and began to map out a formula for artists.

This, by no means, pertains to all of us, and if anything, is more of a satire of that question asked.

This piece is a ‘formula for stayin’ gold as an artist in the world’. Mickey Mouse and the surrounding background is a dense sea of percentages that equal 100% of different attributes to this plan. They are as followed

  • 1% Pop Culture Knowledge
  • 4% Color Theory
  • 2% Caffeine
  • 1% Form
  • 6% Imagination
  • 0.7% Luck
  • 3% Believing in Yourself
  • 1.1% Balance
  • 0.2% Have an Angle
  • 0.8% Fear
  • 7% Vision
  • 2.1% Good Taste!
  • 11% Marketing
  • 7% Skill
  • 2% Psychology
  • 2% Reading, Writing, Arithmetic
  • 5% Ego Wrangling
  • 0.1% A Proper Education From an Arts University
  • 3.4% The Right Kind of Paint and/or Medium
  • 2% Dimension
  • 1.7% Sociology
  • 4.2% A Really Good Review and/or PR
  • 7.7% Growth
  • 25% Handling Rejection

Inside the face is a letter

“March 22nd, 2013. 600 Block of Natoma St. SOMA District, San Francisco

I laid down a formula in gold of percentages equaling 100% of how to remain solid as an artist in the world. Granted 60% of percentages are made up… but maybe 40% of it is actually true. Every second these percentages change in front of me. They fluctuate like the tide. Some get lost in the sea, catching trains in the undercurrent to be valid in some other artist’s actualities and eyes. Across the ocean to far away lands where paint grows on trees and brushes never break and multiply by the thousands. Those sorts of things and such. The only percentages that never changes is 7% vision and 1% form. Oh yeah. And 2% caffeine. Coffee is gold for the soul”..

This is the 5th in the “Loveless Letters Series”, and 61st in the collection.

Tags: , , , , ,

“Still Life With Mountains”, Geometric Spectrum Series, No. 52

8 Apr

"Still Life With Mountains"

As I grow closer to the close of this series, my ideas on symmetry, the VERY foundation of this chapter, grows further and further away from my safety zones. I suppose I have become sentimental about the progress of my work throughout this project now that I’ve gone past 60 pieces. This is primarily because I have seen such exponential growth in my aesthetic as this project unfolds. I never knew just how far this project would take me, but when you think about it, that this is a project where you really have to think beyond your normal scope to make this face unique and different each time… well when I look back, its just incredible that it has happened.

This piece was originally going to be about the emotion of ‘Insanity’ but as this unfolded at my desk in my San Francisco studio, I realized that this vision had to be expanded for a geometric piece instead. I felt that working in anything but this pattern would be a disservice to the piece, and began to saturate the entirety of the canvas in this fashion.

This is called “Still Life with Mountains”, and is a landscape breakdown in geometric form of mountain ranges of different colors that zipper and kaleidoscope around  and inside  his face. It is a blend of chaos and calculation in a primary color scale that make up a geometric foundation for the series. This is the 9th in the “Geometric Spectrum Series” and No. 60 in the TENxTENxTEN collection

Tags: , , , , , ,

“West Coast San Francisco Soul”, Metropolitan Series, No. 50

25 Mar

"San Francisco Soul"

“Dear San Francisco,

This is my love letter to you.

I am writing this from the back porch of my apartment that cozily has tucked itself into the industrial alleyways of your South of Market District. There are helicopters purring like a thousand pussycats with wings above your head, and fire engine sirens wailing songs of concern all around your ears tonight. Your citizens, the blood cells of your being, are marching in mass droves through the veins of your streets chanting phrases for equality today.. and I am so overwhelmed at your unending capacity to give us our voices and liberty.

I came to you in the early 2000’s, with a bruised truck full of clothes and a 1G computer full of music to an apartment in the Tenderloin. I was a wanderer, a vagabond, a man with no mission other than to find a home. For my whole life I sojourned along the Eastern seaboard desperately looking for a place to call my home. From Marietta, Athens, Atlanta, Savannah, Raleigh, and Philadelphia,  I desperately and consistently threw my anchor down to find creatures much like myself to call akin to, and nothing proved itself similar to a symbiotic relationship.

But you, you my dearest friend, met me with open arms, and gave me high priced (but well worth it) shelter for an experience that defined my very being. I spent years with you, in the Tenderloin, Upper Nob Hill, and Chinatown, figuring out myself, and you in turn taught me how to be an artist. And with a 1/4 angled golden taklon brush, I began to paint your citizens, one by one.. and I became everything I ever wanted… Because you not only gave me a chance to be a human being..

But you taught me how to be great.

After all these years, with me leaving you for Seattle and Los Angeles, you’ve taken me back in your arms without malice or regret, and have again… given me such great purpose in life.

So tonight, I’ve painted what I thought best of you, without your  tchotchke’s of golden gate bridges, parks, windmills, Coit towers, Transamerican glories, and various other landmarks. But I have painted you.., as you are, in geometric bliss. A lover, a city, and my best friend.

Yours Always,

10SC”

This is the 4th in the Metropolitan Series, and 57th in the entire collection. In this piece, Mickey is the radiating city of San Francisco, a perpetual sun in a massive glow shooting a spectrum of hope. On the outskirts of this painting are lines to represent the marine layer, fog, and bay. Above his head is a speech bubble that communicates the heart, speaking on love and liberty.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Mehandi Mickey”, Around the World Series, No. 47

17 Mar

Mehandi Mickey

Mehandi (or Mehndi) is a form of Indian and Nepalese skin decoration using henna ink, lemon juice, and white sugar. Traditionally the use of Mehandi is for weddings and festivals such as Diwali, Bhaidooj, Teej, Karva Chauth, etc. Most commonly these designs are found on the hands and feet because of the lack of melanin in the skin in these areas. The idea of Mehandi is of a Vedic custom, and is an art form representing the “awakening of inner light”

This piece is entitled “Mehandi Mickey”, and falls into the “Around the World Series” representing India. In this painting, I infused designs from traditional mid twentieth century Mehandi design books that were intended for ceremonial use. Historically the symbols in this piece translate the following

  1. Flowers: Joy and happiness
  2. Leaves and Vines: Devotion, perseverance, vitality
  3. Flowers from the Fishes Mouth: Love at first sight
  4. Checkerboard: Moments and memories of joy.
  5. Eyes: Symbols to ward off ‘the evil eye”
  6. Zig-Zags: Abundance and wealth
  7. Peacock: Beauty

Also, there is two Mickey Mouse hats speaking in speech bubbles the symbols of flowers translating the ‘joy and happiness’ that Mickey Mouse creates.

Each sector of this piece has colors that connect with each other. The background is red with black drawings with white accents. The border of Mickey has a black background with white drawings with red accents. The face contains a white background with red drawings with black accents. This represents the common thread of intertwined continuity, representing that our character is not alone, but connected to every person, place, and thing in this world.

Hidden in this piece are also words in Sanskrit for love, happiness, and Mickey Mouse.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

“Topsy Turvy”, Extra Series, No. XX

30 Dec

Topsy Turvy

Disorientation is the feeling I experience the most in regards to “The Human Condition Series”. I’ve been confused for a large portion of my life as understanding and keeping the information of things learned has always slipped my grasp as a kid. My brain had the hardest time retaining facts and information when I was young, and I always felt like I was spinning in this upside down spiraling void whenever asked to repeat, recite, or simply remember anything.

I used to think that inside everyone’s body was a house. Inside your feet were the basement and rec room, the legs were the study and exercise rooms, the stomach was the kitchen and dining room, the chest was the living room, and the brain was your own bedroom of sorts. Everyday I’d walk around staring at people trying to figure out what their house looked like from the inside, and automatically would associate their personality to the state of their house. The wacky would have funky houses, the prim and proper would have cookie cutter duplexes, and sad and disheveled would have empty and lost rooms awaiting furniture.

Looking inside my own self, I imagined that all the furniture was on the ceiling, and that magazines, coffee cups, and random flotsam and jetsam floated about the room with no gravity, aimlessly clinking into each other with no means of ever settling. All the paintings were backwards, and everything was in a consistent state of how I liked to describe to people as “upside-down-ness”. I suppose this was some kind of coping mechanism to relate to the world that I had attention deficit hyperactive disorder,  and had severe learning disabilities in both math and science.

When teachers would ask “Why can’t you understand this?” or “Why aren’t you retaining this information”, I could only reply that everything in my head was “Topsy Turvy”, and/or more specifically “That none of my furniture is on the floor in my head”, to which would promptly get me sent to the school shrink for my metaphors (which was common). I think for a lot of my life growing up in the microcosm of the school system in Georgia, my ability to relate to people on an educational level, let alone, a social level, was met with great obstacles, due to my inability to retain information. I was always in this state of confusion due to the mass amount of information being fed to me on a daily basis. In essence my imagination was a deterrent to me understanding anything, and therefore became my worst enemy.

With that being said, I was always “TOPSY TURVY”.

I was heavily insecure about this, even after being retested in my senior year and being rebranded as intelligent, heck.. EVEN after becoming an algebra tutor to my peers in college. .. I still had this lingering aftertaste of being inadequate and slow to the world. That feeling of confusion, being overwhelmed, backwards, upside-down.. still floated around softly in my skull tepidly whispering its potential of return. Occasionally in my late twenties and thirties working in business/corporate, I’d be reminded of its ghost, and I’d give it little refuge for establishing itself in my head.

It wasn’t until I fully realized that this confusion, this disorientation, … was more of a sensation from stifling my imagination and creative abilities. When I was discovered as an artist, my ideas emptied out of my head like a burst dam. .. YEARS AND YEARS of dreaming, thinking, drawing, sketching, … previous actions which were hinderances to my learning development, were suddenly rewarded by my quirky and weird thought processes. I wasn’t a failure. I wasn’t slow. In fact, there was nothing wrong with me at all. I just happened to be a human being meant for different things, things that required different thought patterns and different approaches. I was an artist. That was really it in the end.

This piece is called “Topsy Turvy” which is the essential mainframe to confusion and ‘upside-down-ness’. For some of us, this backwards feeling can be quite unsettling, BUT for us creative folks, the idea of changing things around… thinking outside the box, and putting the ‘triangle peg in the square shape” … can be the very RARE quality that makes us catalysts for others to dream, think beyond the scope, and ultimately see and create beautiful things.

Tags: , , , ,

“Rain City Blues”, Human Condition Series, No. 42

28 Nov

Despair was such a hard feeling to bring into the “Human Condition” series. I thought about it for weeks, trying to figure out how I could essentially communicate this emotion without changing the smile on Mickey’s face. Sure I could use a different expression, but that would derail the entire point of the TENxTENxTEN collection. I decided to return to where I met the most obstacles in my life, and purchased tickets to Seattle, Washington.

When I had announced that I was returning to Washington to research despair, I was met with many comments over my choice by Seattle locals who found it slightly offensive that I chose THEIR town to research this feeling. I should mention that Seattle was not a city of despair, but a city where I personally found despair. These feelings emanated from the consequences of bad decisions I had made in that town, and mixed deep with the relentless rain and lack of sunshine that the Pacific Northwest was most famous for. I was unprepared for the present at that time, and slothed back and forth for 18 months (2006 – 2008) through the muddy torrential downpours, miserable from regret of leaving San Francisco and that lovely apartment I had off of 8th street in the SOMA district. I had left back to San Francisco burnt from the inability to adapt to Seattle, and carried with me a list of addiction issues, and personality problems. I was … in essence, a very sad and troubled fellow, and what I carried with me weighed me further down in my downward spiral, until my ultimate crash and burn event in Los Angeles a year later.

Upon returning to Seattle in a far more sober state that when I lived there, and I was able to revisit the feeling of despair from a rear view mirror. I did not experience despair, but remembered the experience of despair, and in doing so, was able to forge a painting based based off this emotion. This painting is built off of elements of Seattle, Washington. First I worn down the canvas by dragging it across the sidewalk down Broadway Avenue in Capitol Hill. I then infused black gouache with coffee grinds from the coffee houses of Vivace, Stumptown Roasters, and Roy Street to create the base of Mickey’s face. The background was later used with coffee, ink from pressed flowers, gouache, and rainwater I had captured in a pickle jar from the weekends downpour. I lined Mickey’s face with elements of soft sharp lines to emphasize a feeling of cracking, and drew lines of rain dripping in straight linear lines in the background.

With these elements I forged a portraiture of despair. Despair to me was never at best, dramatic. Despair did not move to destroy, it was not made of anger. Despair while insidious, moved like molasses. It was quiet and slow and sat uncomfortably like a distant ache. It was not sharp. It did not destroy me, It taught me to be better, to get better, and to desire greener pastures. It taught me to acknowledge my rock bottom, so I could move upwards to the top. Despair was an opaque and multidimensional teacher, and Seattle was my classroom.

Some would consider my visit to Seattle a bit ironic, considering I experienced nothing but joy and requited love from the visit.. but considering the state of my consistent sobriety, and my acknowledgement that Seattle is and WAS a beautiful city that I had miserable experiences is .. well … its not very ironic at all, but a testament to my growth as a human being.

This piece is called “Rain City Blues”, and is filed under the “Human Condition” series. This is the 47th piece of the TENxTENxTEN collection

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Vertigo, Vertigoing, Vertigone”, Geometric Spectrum Series, No. 41

20 Nov

 

It had been months since I had worked on something geometric. My head was overwhelmed with New York City and all the Mickey heads were blooming into other directions.My brain was operating in this attention deficit direction and my imagination was pointing into a million directions like an exploding octopus. At this point Disney Fine Art had established the core categories of the project, and I became focused on making some kind of headway into the other divisions. I began to shy away from the “Geometric Spectrum” part of the series because I felt in some way, that returning back to the basics would have felt defeatist in some sense.

I’ve come to learn, with all projects, no matter how short the timeframe, that returning back to the basics, can somehow reset the soul and settle the brain. I thought about Neoplasticism and its core operations of being, and how simplicity isn’t necessarily simple, and how geometric work, even at its primal executions, were still beautiful and relative.

I sat with this Mickey for a while, trying not to rehash the same elements of the series, and tried to push the idea of “Geometric Spectrum” further. The beauty about the elements of shapes is that they hone on the most fundamental and easily understood aspects of our surface feelings. Staring into a simple shape can evoke the most basic of emotions and for some of us, that brings the feeling of safety of recognizing how we feel about the art we see. In this piece, I created circles circling outwards, and played on light and darkness to give not just a feeling of dimension, but a feeling of depth and direction. I titled this “Vertigo, Vertigoing, Vertigone” for the shapes imbues a sense of soft confusion and warm dizziness. The background elements are red to emphasize a feeling of quiet madness, while Mickey radiates a light coolness, that emphasizes calmness and brings the viewer into a form of solace. This is number 46 in the series.

 

Tags: , , , , , , ,

“Abstract Space Invaders”, Contemporary Modern Series, No. 39

17 Nov

 

While viewing the Yayoi Kusama retrospective and the “Fireflies on the Water” exhibit at The Whitney Museum in NYC, I had a chance to view their 2nd floor collection entitled “Signs and Symbols”. In this room I got to see one of my favorite art pieces of all time called “Laughing Boy Rolling” by Steve Wheeler. Mesmerized, I spent 45 minutes walking back in forth in front of this painting, while simultaneously gazing here and there at work of Ted Faiers that hung nearby. I was in heaven primarily because I was seeing for the first time the original works of a rare art movement.

Steve Wheeler was an abstract expressionist that belonged to the sub group called the ‘Indian Space Painters’. While the term is contemporarily deemed politically incorrect, and rightfully so, this subgroup actually paid a positive homage to the cultural style and heritage of Native American art. Steve Wheeler, while born in Slovakia, immigrated to America as a young infant by his parents who were searching for a better life. They resided in New Salem, Pennsylvania, where his father worked as a coal miner in the town. At 16, Wheeler found himself working in his father’s footsteps in the same mines, and claims to have found his calling deep in the dark tunnels of his toiling labor. It was here that Wheeler heard the voice of an oracle deep in the mines telling him of his destiny to be an artist. Steve, now determined to reach this lofty goal, continued to work in the daytime as a coal miner, and educated himself at night as an artist in his small attic bedroom. He then later moved to New York City, and dedicated the first half of his life to being a painter. Wheeler’s executions were geometrically sound and flawless, often going above and beyond in complexity of most cubist abstract expressionists at that time. His attention to detail combined with his clever merging of his influence of Northwest Native American art aesthetic made him a rising star within the small group of Indian Space Painters. He was known as an eccentric, often labeled as arrogant and sometimes even belligerent, but nonetheless a genuis. Wheeler spent the 2nd half of his life as a recluse and for 40 years until his death, he did not paint.

I’m gathering that my obsession over Steve Wheeler had half to do with his incredibly complex and detail oriented work, and half to do with his life and his behavior. The 45 minutes I spent grazing like an obsessed buffoon in front of his work was mostly due to my imaginings of him creating his pieces. I wondered what was going on in his head as he was creating this particular painting. and more importantly, how he felt when he completed it.

I flew back home to my studio in Los Feliz, and mulled around my drafting table for hours. I spent days drafting and redrafting my direction of this movement, consistently focusing and refocusing on my attempt to infuse Northwest Native American elements into an abstract expressionist piece. This is what emerged.

This piece is titled “Abstract Space Invaders” in homage to Steve Wheeler and what I’d like to politically correctly called the “Native American Space Painters”. This is number 44 out of the collection and ties into the Contemporary Modern Series.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →