Author: mightylark

I have spent so much time in the past ten years completely upset that I cook to make money.  I have wanted to make money off of my paintings and my paintings alone.  People hear that you cook and they say things like “Don’t stop painting though” or “I hope you continue, you’re really good.”  I am a stubborn cuss and these conversations drive me up the wall.  I haven’t stopped yet and you can’t stop me.  My hand is swollen and burned.  I worked at the fry shack early today and again later at the deli job that I just picked up.  I think I will be working both jobs until the fry shack closes.  I tried to convince myself today after the second job that I was going to go home and go to bed, but as I was sitting here at home I thought, “I want to work on that piece I started, the colors aren’t right yet.”  And so I did.  I love this Power Lines series.  I love working with the wood paint and sand paper.  Most of all, I love how after a day of cooking all I want to do is make a painting.  It is almost as if I get work done with a greater urgency when I am working for someone else.  I want to figure out what that is about, because I don’t think that I will have to cook forever.  I will make it.  How do I keep that sense of urgency if I do make it, however.

A question that I will save for another day, because now that I have finished my painting, it is time for bed.  I really am tired.  I guess this means that I worked three separate jobs today.  Woot.  You can call me the machine.  I’m feeling good about myself.  Keep up.

Peace
-Mike

I started a part time job to help make ends meet a little; so that I could actually spend more time on pieces that I want to work on and be less dependent on some illustration work which doesn’t do anything for me.  Essentially, I want to be able to say no to some projects, which you can’t do if you are struggling to get by.  The job is plenty okay.  It’s just in a restaurant, but it’s busy, so the times goes quickly.  I am good at it.  Folks seem impressed that I can do a Saturday night already, however, I think I’ve been cooking longer than almost all of the people that do work there.

What this does for me is create some time for a couple new projects that I am really excited for.  I began working on a series of power line paintings the other day.  Power lines are fascinating me not only for the shapes that they make against the sky, but also because of their name, which sounds like a very literal joke to me.  Someone has power and is delivering your allotment of said power to you.  I am especially interested in the power lines in the country though, as it seems to be the only thing connecting one property to the next.  Somehow I think this is going to work in with my large scale tractor drawing.  Here are the first two.

I like the pink piece a whole bunch.  This may be because it is pink.  I don’t know.  Everyone seems to know what I like before I do.  My roommate actually told me that my favorite color to work with was pink.  I couldn’t deny it, but I had never really thought about it.  I wonder why?  Any ideas?

Hope you are all having a pleasant Sunday.  I’ll get back to you with some more work later this week.  Also if you are in the Laconia area of New Hampshire on Saturday night, you should make some time to stop by the Studio for my closing event featuring Grandmaster Chef Beers and the Furious Seven Course dinner.

Catch you soon.
-Peace
Mike

I am very pleased to be working on Bard Coffee’s new t-shirts.  Yesterday I emailed the owner of the shop with my revised design and he loved it.  This is going to be great.  I am very excited to both help out my favorite coffee shop in town and to see my work on t-shirts.  So so cool.  Here is an image of the proposed design.

Also coming up on the horizon is a proposal for a project in one of the major spaces here in Portland.  I am really looking for an excuse to do a gigantic cross hatched drawing and for some reason I cannot get the idea of doing a life sized tractor as this potential image.  The process is about using up time and space, mimicking the farmer’s market in bringing the rural inside the urban.  It reminds me of home and makes me question the concepts of organic farming and natural food stores.

So here we go, more projects, more ideas, ever trying to move forward.  I feel like a small caricature of our economy.  Keep up.  It’s going to get better.

Peace
-Mike

This is my first August post.  I have spent the last two weeks doing the social part of the artists’ life and starting new projects.  Last week I spent two days at the Kah Bang festival in Bangor, ME, where my friend Julie K Gray had some incredible work up.  I met some fantastic people, made a few connections, and had a lot of fun providing support for one of my best friends.  I also had an opening in Laconia, NH at The Studio which was the kick-off of Speakeasy Dining, the unveiling of what amounted to the largest painting I had ever finished, and a Walter Mitty music show.  Since last week, I have been mulling over a new project, doing the legwork on a project whose final results I know not of, and slowly trying to finish this large scale commission that it now feels like I have been working on forever.  Socially I have been grasping at straws trying to figure out why I feel a little off.  Last night I forced myself to be quiet and work.  I am not sure that that is what I want, but it may be what I need. 

Enough of the painting of the interior of my head though.  Lets get to the nitty gritty. 
The following are three photos of the installation I did at the studio.  This was by far the most people that I have drawn in the past ten years or so.  I really got into the floating heads and a couple of the hands.  Bodies still kind of bore me.  

 Here is the whole panoramic view of the piece, though there are some better photos of it up on my tumblr page re-blogged from my friend Matthew Best.  That link is over here.  I make absolutely no qualms about being an awful photographer.  I am just far too impatient to manage it. 

 The following image is a detail of the large commissioned piece that I have been working on for the better part of two months now.   It is coming along quite well I think.  I am slowly getting to a point with a paint brush where I can create some of the same differentiation in s forms that I can with a bic pen.  This is great because the black paint is immediately recognizable as a dark on wood panel.  It also helps me increase the size of the smaller Vertical Series Panels.  If you do not recall what those looked like, you can see some in my More Partitions post or in the Billboards post.

 The full Vertical piece pictured above is the next step in the series of Square foot pieces that I was doing by joining several vertically composed pieces of wood next to each other.  The same adding and subtraction is being used, but this time on one panel.  I am not sure that I love this piece yet, but it is getting there, and since the entire series is about that adding and subtraction that happens naturally in painting, I do not feel married to anything depicted in the image anyway.

Lastly, I’ve been producing more blocks.  I am keeping them in sets of monochrome colors.  I have big plans for these, but I am not quite ready to share yet.  Lets just say that I am happy that my thesis taught me how it was possible to hang them, but that my thesis did not get at many of the compositional areas of spaces that I was interested in addressing with them.

There will be more to come soon.  I am in a good spot right now.  After a two month period where art felt like a job that was grueling and thankless, I am starting to feel the pull of the studio and solitude again.  I have lived my life trying to reenact various dreams that I have had.  Sometimes when I fall short of these dreams, I begin to wander and lost track of what it is that I do.  Hopefully I am done wandering for a bit here again.

Talk to y’all soon.
Peace
-Mike

Three days ago I was wondering what on earth I was going to show this coming Sunday.  Now I think I’m in pretty good shape.  If I can crank out the color on one more totem piece and do two more iconic pieces, I will have 11 or 12 pieces.  I am supposed to split the wall with a woman that I went to under graduate school with as well, so 12 pieces seems like it will be plenty.  I was really pleased to come up with the group of six iconic pieces.  A former teacher who always speaks to me about my work keeps telling me that it, my work, is all about the characters.  Today I asked my friend Sam about the falling mouse character and he started to tell me what he thinks it is all about.  I am not sure that either of these individuals is completely correct, but it does seem fair enough that there is something to the statement that everything that is in me goes into the production of those characters.  So in essence, what I’m getting at here is that the iconic pieces with the characters is almost like a holy pilgrimage for me.  Pardon me if you find that sacrilegious, I mean it more as a discovery of self which is always a guided journey.

Here is the most up to date collection of the totems.

I am very pleased with all of them.  They completely tell a story of who I am, with some very careful nods to the northwest Indian culture whose totems I am most interested in.  Read it from top to bottom.  Let me know if you can figure out what they mean.

Here are the iconic pieces as well.  You can fill in the blanks on these stories much like you can with an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary.

 I am very impressed with how these pieces are coming out.  They seem much stronger than I had originally anticipated them being.  I think when I am through with these six I may try to do another series of them and focus on one character in particular. 

That’s it for now.
Peace
-Mike

Last night while playing cards with my friend Ed, I realized that I needed to do some work to accompany the totem pieces that were a bit larger.  It really doesn’t make a difference if you make 12 pieces and they are all tiny.  They will still not fill a whole wall.  It also occurred to me that each of the totems reads as a character by itself, not so much a group of characters telling its story.  Rather the story is the character.  I wanted to call more attention to a couple of the characters so I decided to pull one out from each totem and create a more iconic image of each of these stories. 

Here are two that I started putting together today.

I like how grouping these two sets of images starts a dialogue between two different methods of telling religious stories.  The Christian Bible is full of tales that pictorially are represented with iconic images of Christ.  Whereas it seems that multiple icons in other religions are used to depict stories.  They seem to stand as a whole.  I’m not incredibly sure, but I realize now that I want to start researching these methods of display a little bit more.  This project seems like a good place to start.

Hope you dig.
Peace
-Mike

I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about the coast and the sea.  I have lived on the ocean for approximately 7 years now.  At least I have been on a bay which has ocean water for 7 years, that is.  I’ve spent four years in Casco Bay and 3 years in Elliott Bay.  Both Seattle, WA and Portland, ME are places which are very close to my heart.  I do not know that I will stay here in Portland forever, but that is not to say that I don’t have an affinity for the area.  I remember, when I was little, taking a trip with my father to Lake Ontario.  As the sun set, my father stood staring off into the Abyss, like there was something calling to him or mesmerizing him.  When I got a little older, I started to stare off into the distance of the water trying to figure out what he saw and what he heard.  I don’t know that I figured out what he was after, but it wasn’t long until the sound of the waves and the feel of the surf’s crash started to take root in my brain and in my body.  We are all water and we are all tiny.  Never is it so obvious as when you are standing on the shore of a large body of water.

The towns that I live in, therefore, need to be close to or on the water anymore.  Today, as I was creating totems which tell my own life stories and mythology, it only seemed appropriate to make a totem to the two cities that I love.  There is not so much a nautical reference in the piece, but there is the idea of steadiness coupled with that which changes.  Here is that totem:

More specifically involving the ocean towns that I love, is the second project that I have started which I would like to share today.  I have long wanted to create a pop up gallery on a ship.  Currently a friend of mine, Anne Bryant, is sailing about on her vessel the Mimi Rose.  I suggested the other day that we do a small portable pop up gallery and to my delight she liked and encouraged the idea.  So today I set about looking up nautical terms and trying to think of a name for a small gallery.  I looked through some old school illustrated seafaring maps. 

I decided upon the term Mizzenmast because in reading I have always been attracted to the sound of the word.  Also, it is not the main mast, but the second mast.  It made sense to me that since this is not a mainstream art event, but an event living in the substrata of the art world.  This is going to be a great project.  I have already enlisted my friends Anne Buckwalter and Pilar Nadal to submit and look to have several other great additions to the show.  All of the work will be in miniature and clearly portable.  Here is the first rendition of the logo.

It is great to have a little momentum back.  It is great to be working with some awesome people.  Here’s hoping we can keep bring some interesting stuff your way and that maybe you can jump aboard the Mimi Rose sometime soon and see some art.  Keep up.

Peace
-Mike

I am a momentum guy.  If I have a lot of momentum and things are going well; people are asking for more stuff, few revisions, lots of different ideas, then I work so much better.  I get more done and I am happier with myself and the work that I am producing.  The ridiculous thing is that I nearly always get stuck on the big projects.  Work that is time intensive or that requires a lot of sketches and meetings makes me lose momentum.  When I lose momentum I start to question why I am doing any work to begin with.  I really need to start working out a schedule that leaves time for the open and more spontaneous works.  It is the only way that I will ever be able to remain stable.  I need balance and a secretary.  Does anyone want to be my secretary?  I’ll pay you in…..something awesome.

Anyway, I put together two totem pieces today in preparation for my little show at Bard Coffee coming this weekend.  By finishing up these two guys, I am now stoked to wake up tomorrow too.  See how simple a creature I am.  Life is rad.  Here be:

 I also love working on longer rectangles and warped pieces.  It was good to end my day this way.  Much love peeps.

Peace
-Mike

It pains me to say that I will not be making a mural in North Adams, MA.  Contracts didn’t match proposals and I just can’t afford a residency situation currently.  Perhaps someday I will be able to work under those circumstances, but for now, paying my bills and feeding myself seem more important than being able to have an extended stay to make a piece of artwork.  However, like so many other things, when you lose one opportunity you gain another.  Within moments of cancelling the mural I received an email from Diana Matoso from DS Way Community in England.  She’s producing a community through artwork and crafts made from our re-used refuse.  Her site shares ways in which we can re-use materials which are commonly thrown out.   We have been talking about doing some collaboration, which would be amazing.  I can’t wait to get my work overseas a bit.

I was also offered the opportunity to make a different mural in the city of Laconia, NH next summer.  I just had a meeting this morning with the owner of Bard Coffee in Portland and we are moving forward with the t-shirt designs that I had been putting together.  It is going to be great to see my work on t-shirts around town. 

I’m also putting together a few small pieces this week to hang in that same coffee shop.  It’s going to have to be one of those quick groups of pieces as time keeps escaping me.  Today I believe that I am finishing up the last project for Eco Kids that I will have for a while.  I’ve been working on a set of stickers.  I only have one left to finish.  Here is a small sample of the 26 that I have put together.

The large scale commission that I have been working on is also coming out well.  It is a slow process cross hatching work that is the size of an entire wall.  I wonder how Robert Motherwell’s work would have looked if he had cross hatched it instead.  Perhaps that would be an interesting project to attempt.  Re-creating someone’s work that was so dependent on blacks in a manner where blacks are so time intensive to develop.  Here is a sample of that piece.

Last but not least for today, I have been working on a new piece for a fellow who I made one commission for earlier this year.  The second piece is quite different and really seems like a blast from the past in painting style as well.  I think that I am leaning more towards working like this in the near future.  I may be mixing some of the characters in and working those out the same way.

There’s a lot of good going on here.  I’m really grateful to be able to turn down a project that I thought was going to be amazing and still have work to do.  This is turning into a great ride.  Thanks for coming along.

Peace
-Mike

It’s July.  It’s been hot.  Not super hot; I live in Portland, ME.  It is hotter, pretty much everywhere than it is here.  Perhaps not, but it has been super warm.  I’ve determined that introspection is the mother of second guessing.  I’ve also determined that being amongst people, even talking to said people, doesn’t necessarily equate to being an extrovert.  In fact, I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase: “alone in a crowd.”  To sit and draw and reflect on the people around you, even to give them pictures, to smile and joke, to laugh uproariously, this isn’t really being an extrovert.  If you want to know what I think, steal a sketchbook.  Everything that I am is in my sketchbooks.  Everything I understand, and everything that I can’t wrap my head around.  It’s in the sketchbook.  When I have a bad week, it’s in there, disguised as cute furry creatures loving one another, one magnificent world of coping.  It’s all so small, trivial.  Thoughts built upon thoughts.  None of them take up much space, but when you add page to page, day after day, it starts to build up, and you realize that you are a sum of billions of moments in this life, positive and negative, all added to each other and making you, for the better or for the worse. 

I bring this up because I realize that when I take work from the intimate arena of a sketchbook to a mural or a large installation it is like amplifying my thoughts.  The introvert becomes the extrovert in one fell swoop.  What is it too, to see thoughts amplified at this scale?  Is it egotistical?  I wonder what this desire to see my work so large is.  It is probably in reaction to feeling ignored as a kid.  Well if that’s it, “Ignore this!”

This project has been pretty great.  I have been going through some awkward social business this week and it has been incredibly cathartic learning to cross hatch with a paint brush.  Cross hatching to me is like feeling the crash of the surf; an ebb and a flow where in the ultimate rhythm of life is felt.
Heaven essentially.

Peace
-Mike