Author: mightylark

I am now a professional artist.  Admittedly, I took myself seriously long before I ever made that statement, but currently I am making the money that live off from via art.  Crazy.  I never really thought this day would come, but it is here and I am excited, and eager to keep up the good luck.

This week I rearranged my studio.  Not too much has really changed from graduate school to post graduation and so I sensed that I needed to make a symbolic change.  The studio was hurting from neglect and disarray and to top it all off, I hadn’t even finished unpacking from 2 years ago when I originally moved in.  Now the space is looking more open, more utilitarian, and like an actual studio.  I even have room for a cozy studio chair, so if you see one out there, please keep me in mind.

 Check out all of those sketch books.  I have over 40 of them.  Some of the stuff is killer.  Some of the stuff is just plain awful, but I can tell how I was feeling in a heartbeat.  I can also tell you where I was when I drew certain things, what the situation was that a girl let me draw her, or what painting that sketch led to, even if the book is 10 years old.  I guess I’ve been pretty focused on art for a little bit here.  The next go around it is all macrame.

I also managed to put together the logo for Speakeasy Dining, which is a collaboration that I am working up with my former employer and fine supporter of the arts, Chef Beers.  Yes that is his name, and yes he is the life of the party.  Check it out.

The idea is focused around a food truck that features seven course meals, catered to a towns’ food and economic history.  We plan on taking a Good Humor style truck on tour throughout New England.  The first stop in Laconia, NH.  It’ll be awesome, so be sure to come and grab some incredible grub when you see ads for Speakeasy Dining in your town.

Think that’s all for right now, but there is more stuff to come in the next couple days. 
Until we meet again…

Peace
-Mike

There are about a million different things to update folks with.  My MFA defense went swimmingly.  I am now Michael W. Lewis, Jr, MFA.  Awesome.  I am more than a little bit excited.  I have also lined up a couple commissions.  I am working up some old cloud constructor pieces for a friend from an old job.  I am putting together a t-shirt design for Bard Coffee, still working on monthly posters for the TNT, and producing 2 coloring books and a dozen characters for Eco Kids branding.

A lot is going on.  Keeping track of everything is difficult, but awesome.  I am ready for this.  At the end of the summer I even get to work on a mural for the Downstreet Arts Commission in North Adams, MA.  So in essence, there are a million things going on.  I am still busy.  I don’t think I’m going to worry about quitting with this art practice like they kept saying to me when I was still in school, which I’m not anymore as of saturday.

So here’s my Congrats series.  More images to follow.  I think we’ll get back to normal and be a little less sporadic up here.  Word.

Tell the people that you love that they are awesome.  They deserve it and you will feel better too.  Really.  I mean it.  Tell them.  The world needs as much love as it can get.  It is the only way that we can ever get past all of the antagonistic garbage that creates wars and racism and the like.

I love you.
Peace
-Mike

This entire thesis semester has made me realize that I really enjoy making work.  I enjoy creating projects with so many facets that there is always something to do.  Granted, I like to take breaks like anyone else, but I do not create artwork with the intent of working a forty hour week; eventually making paintings in order to make a living but only as a job.  That sounds awful.  With that in mind, I started to think about the idea of the show post card.  It is generally a hideous object; a reproduction of a piece of work that you have spent hours on, reduced to a card that is mass produced.  It is a piece of cardboard and a series of inks used to translate what an artist has spent hours figuring.  The artist’s communication is lost.  It is a necessary evil.  Obviously people need to come to the show and in order for that to happen people need to know when the show is to begin with.

That said, while creating this project for my thesis, I have overcomplicated the entire image making process.  I want it to be complicated.  I want it to be unique, individual, and intense.  So I started to draw individual invitations to my show.  I then went around town dropping them off in various random places.  Free art, for anyone who wants it.  Find it.  Take it.  Come to the show.  It would be wonderful to meet you.

 I really enjoy these action shots.  It was fun dropping them off.  I wonder how difficult they will be to spot, if they are difficult to spot at all.  I am super pleased with this entire process.  It makes me feel as if I am finally finding my voice. 

And as a last thought:

Peace
-Mike

It has been a long week, but I’ve been meaning to update this blog for the past couple days.  So hear I am chilling out at 11 pm, listening to some Warren G and bringing some work your way.  This week I had to put together the proof copy of my thesis book, which is all good, except that I realized last Saturday that I didn’t really have any images to put IN the book.  I had to really poor it on to get some work on the walls and not just in stacks all over the studio.

I had figured out the method that would work for hanging the dowels fulls of blocks, but really wanted to clean up the construction of the backers a little bit and finagle a method of hanging multiple rows off of one hanger.  Both of these goals have been achieved after a very long four days.  I also managed to put together the proof copy of the book by about 3:30 this morning.

Here are some of the images from the installation thus far.

This work is definitely looking way more refined than it has in the past and I am super pleased about that.  I am incredibly impressed with how easy it was to put together the panels on the dowels though the blocks were definitely more of a challenge and thereby seem like more of an accomplishment.

I also received an email today with my image on the postcard for a show.  That is the first time that that has ever happened to me in a group show.  I am very pleased.  Check it out.

Pretty cool.  It is interesting to see someone use that green in this image, however.  I don’t know if I would ever use that color, and yet there it is next to my billboard.  Interesting how that works out.  But there we have it, I’m rambling again.

Peace
-Mike

Today I received the edits to my written thesis.  I was pleased to see that I didn’t sound like a complete idiot to the proofreader.  You never know what the case might be when you have been staring at something for 2 months.  I need to finish the proof copy of my Thesis book by Wednesday night.  Before I can truly finish the proof copy of the book, I also need to finish installing a little more of my work so that I can have an image or two of my actual thesis work and not just past work.  It is going to be a busy couple of days.

It has been productive, however, to be forced to work quickly, sort the work, and try to photograph it in such a way that represents the work that I have actually completed on the Thesis project.  It has been a lot of work.  It just isn’t installed as I want it to eventually be.  That said, it looks pretty good as is.  The structures are coming along as well, so maybe it won’t be too long. 

Here are a couple of the images I plan on using for the Thesis book.

The blocks are not all red, so I may need to get some blue and purple in there tomorrow.  First things first; I need to get my work up in the white cube for critique and photos.  The process is getting exciting.  Perhaps it is more exciting in the use of the word that might imply a heart attack, but exciting nonetheless.

In other news, my buddy, Caleb Charland, an excellent photographer, was featured on the Contemporary and Modern Art blog out of the UK today.  Check it out.  He is extremely talented.

The semester is almost over.  I am almost an MFA graduate.  Wish me luck, and some decent sleep.  I’m going to need it, and I know it isn’t going to come frequently.
Peace
-Mike

I’ve been listening to some pretty smooth rhymes tonight and working on figuring out a more concrete color scheme for my thesis project.  During critique on Tuesday it came to my attention that I had not spent any time figuring out why I had selected particular colors.  I’ve always prided myself on picking and choosing good color schemes, but admittedly working in a slightly more minimal color scheme has alerted me to the fact that in the past I was likely to fudge things as I went.  When painting hundreds of constituent pieces, this is probably not the optimal manner in which to work.

So while at the beach today, enjoying a “day off”, I attempted to figure out a color scheme.  While staring at the shoreline across the way, I was struck by the hazy light blue, to light red, to extremely light purple.  It occurred to me that this was an analogous color scheme and that I was really drawn to it while soaking up nature.  I made a quick note to myself in my sketchbook and determined to mix a good light purple to go with the light blue and light red blocks that I had been putting together.  Tonight I mixed the purple and I think it is really going to work.  I’m going to finish ten blocks total and then stack them against the other two colors and make sure it works.  I think also that I am going to change the color of the panels.  If I skip across the color wheel from the purple that is in the middle of my analogous scheme I reach it’s complement yellow.  I think that I am going to do a straight up ocher for the panels, as well as a shade and a tint, so I can have the exterior parts in gray scale essentially.

Check out the blocks.

Not too shabby of a color I don’t think and the ink work really pops which was the major goal.  Pretty stoked to have a plan.  I should start doing that at the beginning like everybody else one of these days.  Though it seems unlikely so I won’t dwell on it.

I also put together a promotional ad for the Bollard today.  I am really pleased to actually have advertisement in one of the local papers.  I am not very certain that this will lead to more illustration work, but I do know that if I don’t try I will definitely never get any illustration work.  So here goes nothing, I suppose.

Tell me the reference is easy to catch.  Best movie ever I think, at least of the eighties.  Badgers love Peter Gabriel though.  Little known fact.

Lastly, I was putting together some sketches the other day and then started to weave two pieces into one again.  I have been really into my sketchbooks lately.  That always leads to some work that I am pleased with.  This piece of my buddy, Ben, I think I am going to make into a completed painting.  It’s time to start thinking about making some paintings again.  This grad school thing is almost done.

Keep up folks.
peace
Mike

Last week I put together a potential cover for the 2012 Portland Buy Local guide.  Portland Buy Local is a sweet organization and I hope that they think the same of me and choose my illustration.  It was definitely a fun one to put together and another opportunity to push the pen and ink with digital color.  It is slowly starting to read more like my drawings.  The problem has always been that when I scan in my color illustrations I lose so much subtlety in color.  It has become so frustrating that I’ve just started keeping my line and coloring with Photoshop.  As the line starts to read better and better, I become more and more pleased with the new media.

This is probably the first or maybe the second illustration of this sort that seems to have completely retained the line.  The color really doesn’t seem to need to be very extravagant.  It’s all learning experience though.  I’m glad to have the opportunity to submit to some real projects while trying to figure it out.

I will be getting the documentation of my billboard from the Billboard Art Project printed tomorrow to submit to a show at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  I am very pleased, though a bit surprised that they would want the documentation of a project that I had done in the past rather than a new piece.  I guess I’ll figure out this art world eventually.  For those of you who have forgotten what that image looked like, here is a bit of a reminder.

I hope you are all doing well and that you are enjoying the very spring like weather that we seem to be having in March.  Best.

Peace
Mike

Tonight I finished the poster for the March Thursday Night Throw Down and also was officially accepted to the Unstable Systems Exhibition at the University of Wisconsin.  I am very pleased with this months’ TNT poster because it gave me the opportunity to look through a bunch of old wanted posters and replicate that sort of feel a little bit.  I also found some new sources for type which I think will come in handy when creating future posters.

The Unstable Systems show is cool because it will be my 12th state that I have exhibited in.  That makes me very excited.  I only have 38 to go now.  I want to get to 20 by the year 2013.  That may be a bit unreasonable, but you never know, do you?

Here is this months poster for the TNT.

Hope you dig it.  I also went to a dinner party tonight and realized during all of the cacophony of sound that I really don’t deal well with parties.  There is always that moment where it seems that everyone is shouting at everyone else and you are trying to pay attention to four conversations at once.  I don’t like it, so I whipped out the sketchbook and jotted this guy down.  I just thought I would share a quick example of what it is I do when nobody is paying attention.  🙂

 I hope you all have an awesome day.  If you need a band-aid for your brain, I’ll make you one.
Peace
-Mike

Disturbed would be pleased, my mother would make me soup, and I am almost ready for bed again.  I haven’t gotten much done this week.  At the beginning of the week I was busy denying the fact that I had a cold coming on, and the last couple days it has been incredibly impossible to ignore.

However, I have taken the week to do some things that I have missed out on over the past year and a half, like make friends some cd mixes ( never as cool as making mix-tapes but still pretty cool ), listening to new music and watching some old cartoons.  The break has been kind of nice, even if breathing through my mouth kind of sucks.

Here is the cover that I made for my last mix tape.

This is for my old roommate Chris.  Making mix tapes for him was always difficult because he worked in a record store forever.  It was impossible to try to find something that he hadn’t heard, and so I mixed some new BB King in with some Big Business and some Ghostface Killer.  It was a lot of fun to do, and the cover was quite the nice throwback too.

Today it was so beautiful here in Maine that when my intern asked me if I’d like her to come make me soup, I said I’d rather go for a ride.  I feel a bit too sick to be driving.  The last thing I need is to run into someone because I was sneezing.  It was amazing.  Earlier in the day I had posted on google+ that I wanted to go to Twin Lights Park.  The intern doesn’t follow my google+ page but low and behold, without saying a word, that is where she took me.  Thanks great spirit.

Here’s a cool crest from that trip.

Hopefully I can get some work done soon.  For now I think I will be limited to watching the rest of season 1 of GI Joe.  Holla Back peeps.

Peace
-Mike

It’s my 300th post.  Wow.  I didn’t even realize that it was going to be until I read next to the new blogpost button tonight.  I’m pretty pleased to have spent this much time putting this blog out there.  I’ve heard from some really cool people at times and ran into other people who aren’t so vocal online but who do read the blog and tell me what they think in person.  Thank you.

Today is Valentines Day, or at least once I drag myself to bed and then get up again it will be.  Though technically it is….  I’ve put together issue number 3 of the Pig N Pancake to pass out tomorrow as my Valentine.  I’m going to try to give one to everyone that I know.  I don’t want to snub folks.  I remember in grade school, before they made the rule that you had to get a Valentine for everyone, not receiving one from a couple people.  It stung a bit.  I’m pretty much a big softie, as you already know, so to be honest, it’s taken me a long time to be cool with the day.

I did my Coup de Grace in Valentine form for my old boss’s 6 year old today.  I absolutely love it.  It reminds me so much of my childhood.  I suppose I must be nostalgic or something, but I’m going to take now to refuse to say that is a bad thing.  Here’s an elephant for your viewing pleasure.