Author: mightylark

I got out of the pizza shop early tonight, which is awesome for two reasons.
1.) It was dead and no one really needed to be there.
2.) The entire time I had been there I was thinking about the video that I’m putting together of me working on a small painting.

Of course that led to me coming home, setting up the camera and putting in some blocks of color for an under painting. I am loving this horticulture and robotics angle. This tropism piece is pretty much my favorite idea of all of them.

Keep checking back too. One of these days I am going to have my video up and you can check out my stop motion work. I think it will be nice to do a few shots in actual speed so that people can get a feel for how quickly I usually work. Wet into wet baby.

Props to Sharon Gold, and good bye to November 08……

And so today, I did something that I haven’t done in a long while, and to an extent that I have never done. I sent a real written proposal to a gallery, with a specific show planned out. I have certainly submitted to galleries before, but almost never with a certain show in mind, and absolutely never with the show planned out prior to submitting.

I usually roll too open ended for that. But today, I was specific (thanks for the help Ivy), and I am quite pleased with that.

Check out the sketches for my idea:

The proposal was for a gallery on main street in Portland, Me. This is roughly what their front window would look like if they let my crazy brain take it over. The close up will let you see a little more clearly what we’re getting at here.

The finished piece will be a news story, broken up over several tv frames that show a massive wave about to obliterate a dome. It could be the Superdome in NOLA or maybe not. You decide. Either way, this is one of the most in your face ideas I have had in a while, and I am incredibly pleased.

Now I’m going to go have another cup of coffee.
Peace.

Three of them to be exact. It was so nice today drinking a coffee (3 actually) and hanging out with Beth, then casually walking over to my board and rocking out an underpainting today.

The events that led to this under painting are all pretty awesome. First off Markos from my job cut me two panels the other night while I was closing up, so I had two perfectly sized boards for the Blue Bottle show. Then Ivy came over to visit and we worked out our next book a little bit. While we were working we rammed through a bunch of my old sketchbooks and I saw a robot sketch that was pretty rad but way underdeveloped.

So this morning I copied what was in the sketch to board and started to work on composition, because that is where the development was really lacking. I added some screws to give the piece some space and really push the composition into something that I have been avoiding for a while. Most of my pieces come off as so flat and in a single plain.

The drawing came together nicely and I started to lay out the under painting as a value study. So far I am quite pleased….

This piece also allows me to get back a little into the Asian Art thing that I was playing with for a little while. Good things. Good things.

Also last week I titled a blog post with horticulture….and then didn’t put up the horticulture sketch because of a blogger mishap….so here you go.

I’m 90% certain that this will end up being the other piece that I do on the boards that Markos shaped for me. I dig the light from the chest as a comparison to solar light. I thinking I am starting to really feel for my new generation of robots here.

Last week one of my sketches was also included in the Free Fridayz blog from Fecal Face, an artist and gallery web site based out of San Francisco. It can be seen in the list here. Check it out and let me know if you can find mine….. This test will be graded.

I leave you with a photo of my kitty though, who was hanging out in my drawer with my paints today. He’s pretty much the coolest.

Wish him well. He cut his paw later today. Later cats (no pun intended)!

I’ve been pretty busy lately. I have to admit. And where I thought things would start to slow down and I could just take it easy, I turned out incorrect. I had promised a co-worker that I would put a piece together for him a month ago. I believe I told him I could finish it in a week, which to be honest is probably a proper amount of time, except that I have been trying to get sketches and pieces together for the Blue Bottle show so that some of the work can go up on the website in advance of the actual show.

So far I think I just have the piece done for the postcard of that show, but at least I have four or five others started so more will be coming soon. I decided to post an in prog image of the piece that I have been doing for my co-worker, because it is a rare landscape, and not looking too bad so far either.

I don’t know if you can tell from this image but that seriously takes up one corner of my porch. I think the largest piece I’ve worked on since college was three or four feet high. This is eight feet long, and I do not have brushes big enough to work on it. But like I say, so far so good. Gotta finish it tonight though, since the guy is coming over early tomorrow morning to take it away.

Gotta change that Island…….

I also decided to post a couple more in progress pieces. On the eleventh I posted a sketch and a drawing on a board, and then I stared at the piece for a while and painted over, and drew in and painted over some more, and now I have this…..

I’m pretty excited about the three little rockets in the piece instead of legs. I really am amped on a flying stereo. Thank you Beth for that little suggestion.

I have a couple more images that I will upload soon, but blogger seems to be having issues, so they will have to wait. Check back to see the sketches that I have ready from the Blue Bottle show.

Peace

Yesterday, I had an entire day free to myself, to work on art and start busting out some pieces and really get going on my show, which by the way, I am waiting on confirmation but I believe that I will be featured on the small wall at the Hive Gallery one month next year as well.

But anyhow, that was a complete aside. I was sitting around yesterday trying to be creative, which is the number one way in all of the world to not be creative, and thought to myself, maybe it is snowing in the notch. Ha. It’s snowing in the notch in June. So I picked up my someday brother in law and we drove to Littleton and hashed out ideas. Let me tell you. If you need ideas about robots take the guy who has been reading sci-fi for all of the years that you’ve lived. Steve is a wealth of robot ideas.

So I came back, belly filled, Thank you Porfido’s, and my head full of ideas, thanks Stephen…..

So here’s the first round of sketches on my robot horticulturist…..

It was a cool idea, but I knew drawing it out that the composition wasn’t quite there, so when I started to do it up on the board I would have to make some adjustments. So I decided to try looking up a little bit and started with this on the board.

And here it is. I think the composition ended up much more interesting than the original. What do you think of the shears hand and the watering hand?

Later.

I am not always in the mood for hip hop. I listen to such a variety of music while I am drawing and painting, but I find that when I am in the mood for hip hop, I am usually also in the mood to start multiple things……Or as my buddy Paul would put it “to go off”

So today was one of those days, chillin’ in the studio listening to some good tunes and just cranking through the issues…

I woke up today with a start, realizing that I need to get half of my show for the Blue Bottle done by December, which is remarkably closer in time proximity than it was the last time that I thought to myself “I really need to get going on this show”. So I started off the day anxiously transferring this sketch to a board….becoming anything but jazzed on the drawing and trying to then make it work.

So in the end I ditched the jam box and the head in the middle of the body, etc. Perhaps it would be easier just to look at it….

And this made me much happier. Obviously we are still talking pretty much under painting here, but this is what you get when you do the drawing phases on your final. I am so amped to be using a cassette in this piece. And yes, for those of you wondering, I was thinking about Soundwave when I drew it out.

After I had some color down on this one though, I just started to go, and I ended up laying out the drawing and starting the under painting on another piece as well. And this is where you can tell that I was listening to hip hop as well.

This is just the upper left corner, but hey, I only got a little bit done on it. I think I’m going to keep the very bold palette when I go into the finish on this one though. The near compliments are making me drool a little…..

Keep on keeping on. I’ll have some more stuff up soon.

Today Beth and I had a long talk, and it kind of was just a kick in the butt. We talked about grad school and the purpose of artwork and what makes things art. With some of this wandering about in my head, I started out angry and down on my work. But I was able to ditch this and move on….looking for new projects and looking for something with more purpose to work on.

I started to think of one of my favorite sketches of all time. The “Good Life” featured a long stemmed plant with a brain shaped leaf emerging from a broken television. It occurred to me that this would be a very intriguing image to see in 3-d, which made me think of putting together a proposal for a bigger show, with actual television sets, gutted and holding plants.

I started to sketch out the ideas this afternoon.

I found a web site with a bunch of old television sets on it. This set I believe was an RCA from the fifties. I like the image of the bonsai tree especially break free of the tv. It’s a sort of an ultimate calm breaking free of a coordinated chaos.

This set looked really cool. It had a handle on top to carry it about.

I’m pretty excited about this new show. I’ll be posting some random sketches for it in the next few weeks as well as some of the sketches for the Blue Bottle show which is drawing ever more near……

Toodles!

So today was Monday and I got up checked my email, hung out with Beth and started up the day real slow. Went for a coffee at Monte Alto, took the long way home and started painting at maybe 11 or 11:30. It was a good morning, and I was and am still doing awesome.

I started working on a piece that I have had waiting in the wings since about a week after I had solidified my show with Blue Bottle next spring. The drawing was always pretty much there but the paint that I had put down just wasn’t getting me yet, but today that all started to change. I threw some cad yellow medium on my pallette and started to work with some orange today. Real orange to go with the pink from the other day…and then when all was said and done I started to bring my line back into the piece and well….I’m happy with it.

Check it out.

I also finished a sketchbook that I’ve been working with for a while today. the last drawing is an exciting one, because I finally figured out what one of my robots looks like from the bottom.

There it is. Cheers! I don’t know why people say cheers as good bye, I’m hoping that whoever is reading this is actually having a cocktail or a glass of wine or something so that the comment cheers makes sense. Otherwise I guess I’ll assume that it is a toast to life.

cheers

Pronunciation: ˈchirz

Function: interjection

Date: 1919

—used as a toast

that’s it. Toast to life. Cheers!

First I’m going to start off today with a little interior decorating lesson. Or not. This is a wall out of my studio that i thought you might like to see though. That would be a mass of finger puppets ready to swarm a robot painting by Beth Page….

Moving on….

I started to draw a piece out about two months ago when I couldn’t sleep because I was holed up doing web design and I hadn’t seen the sun in a week except for that light that was diffused by the windows of a pizza shop and through the windows of my brother-in-law’s back porch. At the time I started to throw some paint down and couldn’t do any more and went to sleep. The next day I woke up and thought that it completely sucked but was a good idea. The drawing just wasn’t there.

So then the studio make-over. I know I keep harping on this but if Beth hadn’t have moved my studio around and into the kitchen I think I would still be sitting around wondering why I didn’t feel creative.

Anyway, I picked up the bird and tree drawing again the other day after having looked at some Egon Schiele, and I started to draw the tree out like it was more important than the bird in the cage, and it started to work. Then today I started to bang it out and now it is, at least for now, done. (It may need a little more, but I’m going to sit with it and see)

Here it is. Let me know what you think….

Just as a note though, this is from a digital camera. I wasn’t feeling the scanner tonight, so the color isn’t as dead on as it would be, but you get the idea….

I also started the big bird house and telephone piece that has been sitting on my easel for weeks the other day. This is going to be awesome when it is done, and I think I am going to enter it into a juried show and win like a billion bucks and a solo show in California. We’ll see. There are only about one million other artists in the states doing work in a similar vein to mine…Not that I don’t think I’m as good because I am, but any given day……

Well until next time….
I swear my cat didn’t roll in ultramarine blue tonight!!

The other day I posted an in progress piece which I am titling “And I Create the Mountains”. It marks the first time in a little while that I have pulled together a new tone in my palette, and I think it lends itself well to the painting.

Also I tried to push the angles in this piece and avoid the overall static feel that I have been stumbling into of late with my pieces. All in all, I think this is a good step in the right direction, and I find myself incredibly excited to get back into the studio again tomorrow.

Don’t look now folks but I think the fire is rekindled….

With any luck we’ll have a halloween post coming up too. Thanks for stopping by, and be sure to let me know what you think of the new piece.

– Mike