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It has been a busy week.  I spent Monday and Tuesday helping friends move into their new homes and Wednesday through today trying to catch up.  Wednesday night I put together several drawings and yesterday I put together a couple colored drawings and lined up a commission.  I also worked on The Cloud Constructors pieces a bit more.  I should have those done by next weekend.

Last night I was exhausted from working all day and peeved to be alone so I went to bed early.  I was not thinking that I would wake up at 4 am, but I did.  I got up and started to work on a couple more images like the ones in the Vertical Series.  I need to start thinking like that again anyway as my Mural in North Adams is to be created in that fashion.  I pulled together a pretty good piece this morning which I had started the drawing on ages ago and one featuring a Bulldog that I have been working with recently.  He is going to show up in a new comic idea that I have been kicking around with a friend of mine.  It has been really busy.  I think I might go play for a bit later this afternoon and then hit the hay early again.

These first five images are available over on my Etsy page.  They are all bagged in a Transparent archival bag and 4 3/4″ by 6″.  The most expensive is 30 bucks.  You can see those here.  Free shipping and an extra little something with each package.

Here are the two that I did this morning.  One is still available but the bird piece has already sold.  Absolutely awesome if you ask me.

I am really happy with both of these pieces, though the first is probably my favorite piece of late.  I love those two colors next to one another and I have been wanting to draw a good telephone pole and booth combination for some time.

Hope you all have an awesome weekend.  Thanks for reading.
Peace
-Mike

I was reading through twitter posts today as I am prone to do, and a friend had stated that posting after today is sort of a blank bullet of a blog post if you want anyone to read.  It’s funny.  I’ve been blogging for six years and never really thought about how to get better readership, when people might read, and who this could be for other than me.  Perhaps now is the time to start thinking about such things.

I’m posting today to inform folks that I am creating a small series of drawings for The Studio in Laconia, NH.  The drawings will be 4 X 6 inches, bagged and matted.  Sounds like a delectable treat, no.  To be had for a slick forty bucks.  Here are a couple of the images that I intend to use.

 I decided to keep this series fairly old school.  I miss drawing the birds quite a bit and I thought that it would be a nice break from the graduate school academic work.  That said, I had some fairly concrete ideas in mind when I began drawing these anyway. 

 

Today a friend of mine asked me how I go about blogging, whether it is on a schedule, my frequency and goals.  I didn’t have a very clear answer to any of it.  I’ve always kind of done this thing at night, when I am through with my work day.  When I am excited about work I blog; I want to share, see what people think, open up the gates that create the boundary between someone completely engaged in a project and the outside world.  Learn.

When I got home from hanging out with my friend, I had dinner, cleaned up and started working on an illustration project that I had worked on all day.  It is a pretty good project.  For all intents and purposes I really like it.  I have been given pretty well free reign and that is amazing, but I got tired after dinner.  I managed to finish one sketch and during the middle of Billy Bragg and Wilco determined to take a nap.  It was a far longer nap than usual.  Usually I manage about a half hour.  This was more like an hour and a half.  When I woke up I felt very groggy and sick of illustration.  I putzed through one more page for this book and started to think about how it was too early to go to bed.  I picked up the commission that I had been working on and looked at it and thought, “I’ll push a little paint until I can’t do this anymore.”

Four hours later I looked at the clock, realizing that I needed to start getting ready for bed.  I used up the rest of the paint on my palette on a scrap of wood in studio, looked at the painting I had been working on, and realized everything that I’ve been missing the entire time I was in graduate school, what the answer to Pilar’s question was, and what I need to do to keep myself motivated.

When I started blogging in 2006, I was so excited about my work that I would get home late at night and my girlfriend at the time would be asleep already.  I would want to share my piece.  I was so excited that I couldn’t think about sleeping yet.  I still felt jazzed about the painting.  Tonight I have that, and on a night that I thought I had no energy.  That’s the answer though.  I started blogging at the end of nights that I had put my all into a painting.  The adrenaline always needs a moment to calm down, and writing a couple paragraphs helps me process what I did and settle a little into the relaxation that is my house, or in my present circumstances, my bedroom.

Here is what I was working on tonight.  I am so pleased with it.

It’s a lot of old school, but I think there is a bit of the last two years in there too.  I can’t quite explain it.  I was thinking about different things while working this out.  I was pondering what it meant to others.  I don’t really know the answers to anything, but I’m thinking about it.  I think that that influences what it looks like anyway.  I’m excited.  I need to get to sleep.  Thank you for reading.

Peace
-Mike

Today was really a pretty great day.  The weather was beautiful.  I got ice cream with one of my best friends and sushi with another.  I also got a lot of work done.  I cannot share everything that I am working on at this time, as some of the work is specific to my client, and the contract will not allow for it.  That aside, I still got quite a bit done on the project.  You’ll just have to trust me on that one.

That wasn’t the only thing that I worked on though.  I also worked quite a bit on the commissioned diptych today and in my final throes of effort managed to pull a piece together for a little show that I am doing with a friend from undergrad in July.  Wow.  One piece done over a month in advance.  Life is good.

Check out the commission.

I cannot keep the colors this graphic, as the work that was commissioned fit a bit more to a neutral blue color scheme, but I thought that I would work some colors by scumbling in this piece.  It should help me to maintain a bit more push and pull than some of my older neutrally schemed work.  Either way, I absolutely love where this piece is headed thus far.

Here is the totem that I put together in the last couple hours.

My friend and I have decided to do some work focusing on different religious beliefs and contemporary imagery.  I am tackling a series of totem poles.  They follow an autobiographical order in attempt to abide by the same rules as totem poles in Native cultures.

Hope you dig the stuff peeps.
Peace
-Mike

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