Author: mightylark

It’s Friday morning and I am still feeling a bit off schedule and tired.  This is most definitely because I traveled to Massachusetts on Tuesday night to participate in a live painting event with fellow artist Monkey Chow at the Treat Yo Self – Holiday Edition hosted by The Great Scott.  It was a pleasant trip.  I rode the bus to and from Boston.  On the trip down I laid out the drawings for two pieces to complete at the event.  Drawing on the bus in the dark proves to still be one of the more peaceful activities that I have experienced.

Painting in public is a strange experience.  I was grateful to be painting with Aaron (Monkey Chow) as well as being able to spend the majority of one of my greatest arts inspirations, my friend Billy Griffin.  Billy ambled about talking about art, San Francisco and his new foray into being a New Englander again, all while delivering adult beverages and grabbing me water for my paints.  It was truly excellent to see him.  However, people watching you paint is a strange case.  At first I found my motions to be a little tentative.  Then I found myself saying, “This is what you do, so lets just do it.”  The interesting thing about that was that I started to feel almost arrogant in my motions.  As the night wore on, I realized that it was just another space to paint in though.  I became pretty involved in my two paintings and just worked. 

My interactions with people were varied.  When young people like my work and get excited, talking about drawing and loving art, I inevitably give them something.  I can’t help it.  I love that raw excitement about what folks think is cool.  It’s better than selling a million pieces.  Having enough money to live is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but someone showing you how genuinely excited they are with your work gives it validity small green pieces of paper, which ignore their own lack of financial backing, can never provide.

Here are a couple images from the night.  Please pardon the photo quality from my flip phone.

 I really liked these two pieces.  It was a good experience to feel how involved I could be with something while surrounded by a distracting situation.  You will notice in the last picture my friend Aaron painting.  His work came out awesome.  As was fitting, people really loved his stuff.

Wednesday morning Aaron dropped me at 1369 Coffee House on Mass Ave, where I sat and pondered the hipster crowd I had just observed, what to give my little sister for Christmas, and made plans to meet with my friend Eric at the ICA in Boston.  After jumping off the T, I exited the street right next to this mural that Os Gemeos put up.  The joy that I felt upon seeing this piece made me as positive as ever that art is what I live.  I guess the ICA was cool too.  I’m only kidding.  I think I will follow up with some thoughts on what I saw at the museum in another Holiday weekend post.

Enjoy your weekend folks.  Sometimes the enjoyment of our holidays is all about the capacity to remain in a quality mood in the preparation stages.  Should y’all be in Portland and need a last minute something, give me a buzz.  I’ve got a pretty good inventory still even after the holiday sales.

Until next time.
Peace
-Mike

Sometimes I have trouble with large projects.  I lose interest.  They take a long time.  I think of new ideas and I want to work on something else.  I find myself in studio wrestling with my own consciousness.  I must keep working on x-y-z project.  I must keep going with what I am going on.  This piece was a change in that I felt compelled to work on it from the get go, but then the fellow who commissioned it from me told me to take my time, and then it got put on the back burner and as such, it has taken me until the fellow has now asked me if he will get it soon for me to get back into it.  Now I’m into it again and it feels pretty good.  The mark making still doesn’t translate well from small bic pen cross hatched pieces to larger pieces done with a brush.  Also the brushes do not stand up well to being drawn with for more than 3 or 4 days.  The point does not hold up.  I may need to purchase more expensive cross hatching brushes or approach this type of piece from a completely different angle in the future.  We shall see.

Here is what I have so far.  I intend to finish it by the middle of next week.  Sorry for the late night picture phone quality photo.  Better photos to come.

In all reality I should be able to finish this panel tomorrow and hopefully the final panel between Saturday night and Sunday.  Then next Tuesday I will be in Boston for Treat Yo Self, live painting.  I have no idea how that will go, but it’s exciting either way.

Portland I love you   (but you’re bringing me down.)
Peace
-Mike

Tonight is the MeCA Holiday Sale.  I’ve been making work that I claim is for the Holiday Sale for the past month and a half or so.  I never feel as if I have enough stuff, but as I was filled with anxiety trying to figure out if I was ready last night, I laid out all of my work and counted again.  I have nearly 70 pieces for sale as well as a number of prints.  It’s been a productive month or so.

This will be the first time that I am offering a number of quality prints along with originals.  I am interested to see how this affects my sales.  Will I sell a reduced number of originals and more prints?  Will the prints sell at all?  I have no idea.

Amongst the prints are several pieces from old shows that I have really enjoyed. 

This was always one of my favorites.  I have 8 by 10 inch prints available.  The colors came out spot on, which has always been my worry in the past.  I am also including a print of The Feeder:

This was probably the most intricate piece from that era of my making.   The piece has been sold so it seemed only logical to give the work a new life.  This is one of the major reasons that I am excited about doing some prints.

I will not be charging much for them.  You can get them for 8 to 15 dollars depending on the image.  If they do not sell, I will make them available on my Etsy page as well.  Wish me luck.  It’s been a lot of work getting to this point.

Peace
-Mike

When I was in undergraduate school studying illustration, I used to tell my friend Mandy that if you’re feeling down you should draw a monkey.  I haven’t drawn monkeys in years.  I don’t know why, but at the same time, I use the cartoon characters that I do draw to achieve the same thing.  Sometimes I just lose gas, work too long, or get too moody to produce and then I need to choose whether to make something cute or to go read a book.  Tonight I tried to make something cute.

What do you think?

I had these two guys in mind as they were the creatures that I used in the Bard Coffee window illustration that I made this week.  I really like them, although the bear in the window looks fatter, and I think is thereby a little cuter.  Maybe I’ll try to make a different one and see if the size of his mid-section is directly proportional to his cuteness. 

Until then.
Peace
-Mike

My schedule has changed at the day job.  It has become the morning job.  I start work Monday through Thursday at 7:30 in the morning.  I realize that this is actually a normal time to be starting work, but after years of working late into the other end of the morning, or going out to play a bit after working late, it has been a difficult transition.  This has been particularly frustrating with the upcoming Holiday Sale at MeCA which I was counting on to pull in some serious dough.  As is usually the case however, I spent a couple days stressing out about the amount of stuff I had and then actually counted said stuff, finding that I had plenty of work to show.

The drops series has been very good to me.  I am really starting to piece together some paintings.  I wouldn’t call these pop surrealist or low brow or any other movement I’ve attempted to fit into.  I feel like they are exactly what I am; melancholy and a bit child like.

I’ve also been toying with some phrases and making word related pieces.  I haven’t finished very many but I have a couple pretty good ideas.  Unfortunately these depend a bit more on my poetic abilities which are, well, lacking in comparison to some very good friends of mine.  I am very proud of this piece however.

Lastly, I figured out what some of my obsession with structure was within my MFA studio work.  I started a new piece and was able to start putting away my thesis.  I actually didn’t make the connection between cleaning up studio and putting it away and figuring out one of the keys to its inception until just now, but it makes sense suddenly.  It is done now.

Here is the new piece dealing with some of the same issues.  I’ll explain some other day when I have more time.

It has a ways to go, but that’s the joy of doing what I do.  Life is getting really busy again.  Keep up.  Keep your head up.  Stay true.  These are the things we all have to do.  Much love to you all.

Peace
-Mike

For the most part this was a very productive week.  I have two days in Portland and then it is off to New York state to see my folks.  I’ll be traveling with my art school buddy, Ed.  It will be nice to take a break, though I wish that I could have gotten more done with this series of work before I left.  I suppose I’ll have a little time in the next two days though.  We’ll see.  I am not usually too productive on the days that I work in the deli.

This week was notable especially for noticing the similarities between commonly used subject matter.  I always think of my work in terms of different series, but of late I have been cross-pollinating these different subject matters in order to  arrive at a different set of imagery.  It’s been good not only in developing new compositions but also in realizing all of these subjects are really driving at.  It was a very good week all around.

Here is some of the yield.

I think that my body of work is really starting to make a jump in quality.  There is something about reacting to prior actions and size and spacial restraints that really gets you thinking like an artist.  I am very pleased with the results.  As my friend Ed said today, “You’ve really been working.”  I had wanted to get 200 pieces done in October and November.  Admittedly that is a ridiculous clip which is preposterous to keep up with, but I can say that I have finished over 40 pieces thus far, which isn’t so bad.

Hope all is well with you.  I’ll be back soon.
Peace
-Mike

Sometimes you just understand things better, you see better, draw better, perform better and generally live better.  You feel on fire.  You feel like the thoughts that you were on the verge of unveiling are all coming out at the same time.  You see the connection between disparate ideas as clear as day.  You develop and you grow.  All of these feelings seem to follow a slew of bad ideas, misunderstanding and trouble seeing the big picture.  You find yourself struggling through these moments to reach the moments of clarity.  It’s as if you are on a drug that pitches you manically from the super high to the super low. 

I have been riding the high for the last day and a half.  I have shut myself off from the world.  I have had epiphanies.  I’ve slept very little.  I have made some work that I am pleased with.  There are new opportunities in these pieces and that makes me very happy.

I am looking forward to this weekend.  I’m going to make soup and eat bread, work on more paintings and listen to new music.  If I manage to make it out of my house I am going to go see the Man With the Iron Fists finally.  If I don’t, then I will listen to some more Wu-Tang than I was planning on.

I hope you are all riding your highs.  I have to try to come down.  Kitten time.

Peace
-Mike

I was so upset for the majority of the day.  I think I started off on the wrong foot when I was trying to work on the animation that I’ve had in my head and couldn’t get it to work with the animating plugins in Photoshop CS3.  I looked at my clock and realized that I was going to be late to work.  That was it.  I was cranky pants for the next 9 hours and that’s all that it took.  I never did figure out the issues with my animation, but I did get home from work in a very cranky mood, ready to make something new.  I started to look at the stills that I had drawn out from the animation and realized that there was something more in the drops than I was getting into.  I drew out one with the idea of painting the drops at the forefront of my mind, worked up the colors and was somewhat pleased with the results.

I had promised a friend I would meet him around five.  He was hanging out with a photographer friend.  They were talking some serious shop.  I do not know this jive language and soon became bored.  I started to think about this piece some more and as soon as I reached home again started thinking about cleaner color and less line work.  I came up with these two revisions.

I have been doing quick drawings which depend on painting in the negative space for so long that it seems odd to paint in the positive space again.  However, by working with that flat space for so long I’ve determined that I really enjoy the colors flat and have carried that flat treatment over to these positive filled pieces as well.

While working on the last two, I realized that my bad mood was dissipating.  I called my father and listened to him chat while I drew and eventually painted the second piece.  By the time I was done on the phone I had realized that what I really needed was to spend some time on my work today, to push myself to do something slightly different, and to accept that you don’t always have to follow through with good ideas.  I put on Peggy Honeywell and let the soothing banjo and alto voice carry me into a blogging and social state.

I hope you dig the work.  I’m very excited with the possibilities of crossing this with the last several series.  Hopefully it yields something interesting.

Peace
-Mike

This week I had a serious breakdown.  I felt completely burnt out.  The idea that I could take a break didn’t really occur to me.  Nor did the idea that maybe I was expelling too much effort in one direction when perhaps I should consider a more balanced method of attack.  My roommate spent a few hours trying to convince me to make my work travel down the prints and greeting cards route, while my friend Ben suggested that I make more conceptual decisions with my work.  Really, I keep coming back to the idea that the two bodies of work are separate entities.  I make creatures and illustrations which are cute and inhibit the ideas within my more conceptual work.  Eventually the two will coexist in the same evironment, but I have an entire lifetime to figure out that dilemma.

For now I consider myself fortunate to have a number of different projects to keep me occupied.  Somewhere in the past couple days I realized that it is better to have a couple things to work out in your studio and creative practice than to have it all figured out.  Having something to work toward keeps the process fresh. 

After the talk with my roommate I looked up prices for making Giclee prints of my work, something which I think that I will do after figuring out the real costs.  I enjoy the idea that an image doesn’t need to be killed off after it is sold.  However, I do not think that I can ever exist only on attempting to sell prints.  As it is though, I will be offering signed prints of this image for a ten dollar fee through my Etsy store or if you prefer to just contact me at mike at lewisacrylic dot com. 

The original is still available as well through the Etsy store for roughly twice that.  I find it interesting to attempt to price work.  I do not feel justified to charge extraneous amounts for work that I produce incessantly.  I think that thus far at least my work has been produced at such a prolific rate that to charge much more for it would be inconsistent with my views on work to profit relationships.  I’d be interested in hearing what others may have to say about that.

I’ve also been producing new images in the Vertical Series as well.  I do not think that I will ever attempt to make prints of these.  The concepts that drive this work depend upon multiplicity, but my own multiplicity of production, not a fabricated production.  Reproductions would inhibit the idea of these images I feel.

Today I also met with a friend who is commissioning a large scale rendition of a work produced in the same manner that my thesis was produced.  This is very exciting not only because I have get to do a large scale work for someone but also because I get to work out the issues that I discovered while working on my thesis six months ago.  I couldn’t justify attempt to re-envision the piece without some financial motivation, but now that I have that, I am so excited to work on this new work.  I will share the sketches from that piece soon, once I have everything a little more finalized as to placement.

lastly, the conversation with my roommate touched upon how worthless it is to show in galleries, which was immediately contradicted by an email from The Hive Gallery who is having a recycled cd art show.  I couldn’t help but make something for this show.  I was just too excited about the idea and whipped this piece out last night as a result.

It amused me to reference a discman in my image for the Recycled CD show.  I will be sending that piece out on Tuesday.  Things are coming together again.  The upswing is always so nice, and while the rock bottoms in my mood that I experience grow harder and harder to deal with, the time that these rock bottoms last decreases each time that I get them now.  There is a lot to look forward to, a lot of work to make, and a lot of opportunities if I am just looking for them. 

Here’s looking out.
Peace
-Mike

In the past I have tried to keep this blog and the notes in my sketchbook separate.  I always thought that what I mentioned in my books was too much information for the public to be ascertaining from my work, however in the past several weeks while looking at Keith Haring’s journal entries, I’ve realized that some of these notes might really help me get closer to the truths that I’m after.  If people are more aware of the truths that I am after, they may understand my work better, and they may also be able to more adeptly make comments and observations via this medium.  Essentially, I am wondering if I am more open with my process, if this blog could become a more valuable resource for readers to understand, influence, and be involved with the work.

I have two major projects on my mind.  One of these is the vertical series which I posted a good deal of last night.  The other is a piece that is similar to the piece that I did for my thesis work back in May.  A fellow who frequents the same coffee shop as I do has commissioned a work from me that is similar to that piece.  The Vertical Series on the other hand, I wish to cater to the Portland Museum of Art’s Biennial.  It would be spectacular for me to get into a museum show at this point in my artistic career.  I would really like to make a success of that.

While sitting in Bard the other day I started to reason out what I thought the connection between the public viewing my artwork and me making my artwork was.  This quickly got me sidetracked as I am always interested in the channels of communication.  I wrote “it is always the people, always about the connection.  Solidifying the connection”, and then I referred to a Hooray for Earth song lyric, “if a wire connects between two houses does that really mean we’re all connected?”  I am very curious about this connection, where it fails, where it succeeds.  Who finds this blog?  Who reads it and who just looks at the pictures?  Who, when sitting in front of my work, gets what I am thinking?  Does anyone? 

I will go into further depth with some more examples later tonight, but for now I must be getting ready for work.  I will leave you with the initial sketch that I have drawn out for Mr Packard’s commission.

I hope this week finds you well.  It’s back to the grind for me and I’m ready for it.
Peace
-Mike