Category: Uncategorized

I haven’t been very good with the blog for the past two months.  I was working a little too much I think.  I’ve done a lot of work that I am pretty pleased with, however, and have applied to several jobs and proposed some classes.  All of this is is really good stuff.  Next week, I am proud to say, I will be meeting with the chair of the Art Department at one of the local colleges to talk about teaching an illustration class.  This would be absolutely amazing to me.  I have wanted to teach illustration since I was in undergraduate school at Syracuse learning from Steven Cerio.  He’s amazing by the way.  Absolutely amazing.

It’s been slow getting a couple of projects done with.  It took me forever to put the poster for Bard together this month, but once it was done I was really happy with it.  Here it is.  It’s Nintendo themed.

The second image today is of one of my commissions hanging in its new home.  A lot of people have responded to this type of work very positively.  Perhaps I should do more of it, but this particular piece was very much a logical process and not so much a non objective piece.  I’m not sure I can do one again without attempting to train my eyes to do so.  I guess I’ll have to give it a try.

I am very excited for the next couple of days.  I don’t have anything that I need to finish right off and I am looking forward to working on a couple of things that I have been leaving on the back burner for a while.  Be chill and I’ll be with you soon.

Peace
-Mike

I have been working two jobs.  It isn’t a lot of hours, but two days a week I’ve been working all day and then a shift most days of the week at one or the other.  I’ve been feeling a little depressed, wondering how I will get the money together for the college loans from graduate school that I have to start paying next month.  I’ve also been making a bunch of work that I’m really pleased with.  Unfortunately the work has been for last minute shows and I feel claustrophobic.  Last night I had a dream that I was stuck in the corner of a large school and that I couldn’t get out because there were too many people and I couldn’t stand it.  So this weekend, I’m going to leave for a bit.  I need a break.  The trip to New York was awesome, but far too quick to count as a break.

Here’s a bit of what I’ve been working on though, if you’re interested.

This is the newest piece that I’ve put together in the power line series.  I really am getting into it.  This imagery is really pretty interesting to me right now, but even more so I am into the way that this piece was put together.  I also wrote what is perhaps my most concise artist’s statement to date about it.

I also put together a bunch of small animal pieces for Artstream studios.  The opening is this Saturday.  I will be at a wedding in Connecticut and unable to make it, however, my friend Susan will be there and her new work is excellent.  The opening is from 5-7 in Rochester, NH.  Be there or be square.

 It’s been some pretty exciting work, but I need to stop for a weekend.  I need to regroup.  Hope you dig the work though.

Peace
-Mike

There are times when I find myself completely in tune with one set of thoughts.  The past couple weeks I have idling on an inner peace that is best described by the feeling of Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline.  His easily flowing chords and finger picking, turns in key to the minor and back to the major, all with a slight twang.  That is where I’ve been at.

I’ve been working on more power line pieces.  I think that the goal of these pieces will be to hang them interspersed with some jelly fish and phone booth pieces.  I will share that sketch sometime soon when I have a clearer idea of what it means and what I intend for it to do.

Here is the newest power line piece.

I am also attempting to put together a few small pieces for one of the galleries that I’ve worked in the past.  These pieces are very quick and more or less used as a method to get my juices flowing again, to find that passion and exuberance.  A friend of mine recently lent me a Philip Guston article where he describes his process of elation in a painting followed by despair the next morning.  It revolves around the elation of attempting to describe something in paint.  It sounds right on.  Here is one of those small pieces.

Have a good day peeps.  Enjoy the sun because it goes away for a couple months soon.

Peace
-Mike

It was a day of discovery, work, and errands.  Today I found one of the books that I lost when I moved from Minneapolis to New Hampshire.  I was so pleased that when I got home I looked up another one of those books on Amazon and purchased a used copy.  As I was purchasing this second book, I received a call to work on a t-shirt project.  The company seems legit, though I the art direction seemed relatively limiting.  It’s still a cool project though, so I will happily work on it. 

I also finished a sketch of the Crest that the Fish and Splits bowling team is looking to use for their league this season.  I am very pleased with it, although it hasn’t been tightened up yet.  I also completed another square foot of the large scale painting.  It’s taking forever, but coming out great.  I may need to get another brush, though.  I am terrible on them.

Here is the bowling logo.  I would share other images tonight, but everything is in process and I didn’t take any good images while the light was right.  I will have to wait until tomorrow.  Hopefully I finish more of those two projects before I post anyway.

The end of the evening was taken up by a Built to Spill show.  It was great.  What I took from the show was more than a love for a band’s music live, but rather an idea of what it is to become an aging artist.  Doug looked so plainly calm on stage, completely immersed in his work, but aware at all times of what he was doing.  There was a poise within him that struck me.  I hope that I can approach my work with that level of professionalism and confidence one of these days  I also hope that growing old will not hinder my ability to rock out.  I guess we’ll all see.

Peace
-Mike

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