Outside the Lines 8

I am taking part in an exhibition at the Bath House Gallery in Dallas from June 7th-28th called Outside the Lines 8. This exhibition was juried by 3 local art professors and one gallery owner. The Outside the Lines exhibition is focused on artwork that is outside the mainstream of art. There is an opening reception on June 7th from 7-9 pm.

Night Sky Over Reykjavik

I have wanted to create a piece of art based on Iceland since we visited there in 2005. This piece is attempting to reconstruct parts of the city of Reykjavik and the sea bordering the city based on my memories 2 years after being there. There is a theory that each memory is reconstructed anew the moment you remember it from various symbols in your mind. This is my take on that theory.

Taking shapes, pieces, colors, experience, the feeling of the crisp clean air, the marriage of nature and architecture that is Reykjavik, the memories I have of breathing in the salty sea air with every step down her clean cold streets. No matter where I was in Reykjavik, I was constantly reminded of the mountains, the sea and the arctic sky above bordering the top of the world.

I changed the position of the city a bit, taking the main street and pushing it closer to the sea, moving Mt. Esja over a bit and turning the puffin island of Akurey into a man-made object. Nature and architecture seems so inter-related in Reykjavik I made an incoming cloud into the same material the city’s buildings are made of. The pink glow on the horizon gives a hint of the daytime reality the rest of the world is experiencing. You feel as if you’ve found a geographical hiding place away from daylight as the sun focuses on the lower latitudes.

I’ve had a growing interest in night based artwork. It seems at night colors and shapes become more intense as they pop out of the darkness.

Not Art

I recently signed an online petition against someone who calls themselves an artist ( but is not). This person (who I will not name) starved a puppy in a gallery and called it art. He is set to do it again this year. You can sign the online petition asking the gallery not to do this again.

Killing any living being is not art. It is cruelty, torture and murder for the entertainment of apathetic individuals. There have been other individuals who call themselves artists who kill in a gallery setting and try to pass it off as art in the past (I will not go into the details). To me art is a creation that reflects or represents some aspect of reality, conscious or unconscious. Killing is a reality, it is not a reflection or representation, it is not art, and when you witness the murder of another being through torture or any other means you are witnessing a reality. The reality of another's pain for your pleasure, again (this is the last time I'll say this) this is not art, and any violent individual who does this is not an artist.

Artist a day

I was the artist of the day for a website called Artistaday.com today. I was very happy to see that, put a smile on my face, and I loved reading the comments people left. I encourage any artist to submit their work to this site, its a great way to see other artists and get some exposure.

This is not Gordon

The relationship between humanity and technology is interesting when you consider that the material we are working with in its raw form is non-existent to our eyes. What we see on the screen is a “translation” of the real material inside the computer. The bright pixels that form pictures, letters and numbers are not really the actual information that we spend hours of every day working, with but an elaborate translation to human symbols. Years ago people worked with there hands and created the product, they could hold the actual result in there hands, today we type on keys, and the actual product is something we never see, the actual product is a translation. Kind of like everything you “see” around you is not external but translated information. Anyway, the title is funny, while I was painting this painting Nikki kept asking me if that was Gordon I was painting (a friend of ours at the time). I kept saying it wasn’t and Nikki insisted that it was, so I titled the painting so that I could win the argument, even though I think Nikki was right, it probably is Gordon!

NYC

In the painting NYC, I combine ancient characters (Centaurs, Snake of Eden) abstract forms, and modern day characters (Lady of Liberty), and combine them to present a story of our modern day as if viewed from the distant future. I create the city of NY as a living, warm, breathing creature aware of its own existence.

The Lady of Liberty is deep in thought and rests quietly on a building, smelling a flower. Probably reflecting on her city, the changes it has gone through and contemplating with gentle indifference its future.

The centaurs are taxicabs, taking the citizens of this city to different locations as red blood cells take oxygen to different destinations throughout the body. One of the centaurs is playing the violin. Some of the taxi driver in NY have very interesting stories and talents. One taxi driver we talked to was a wood carver from Romania that worked in Vlad the Impaler's (person the original vampire legend is based on) castle.

In the outdoor restaurant scene, I show both the servant and the aristocrat with abstract faces, for that is the way each typically views the other. Each person in the servant work class seeing just another aristocrat, and each aristocrat seeing just another servant, both groups drawing from and displaying the same attitude towards the other.

I also show a homeless person green, sick and lying near floating wine. Some of the homeless you see in big cities can really touch an emotional chord within you if you look without apathy. I also have a guy looking up the stairs with a green arrow pointing. The green arrow is influenced by an exhibition of Francis Bacon I saw in Ft. Worth. There is also a guy who is part elephant walking the streets, much like the herds of people you see roaming the concrete maze of NYC.

One of the central figures shows a man with an apple, the sidewalk is grabbing his ankle and a snake is heading towards him, like a spider going after a bug trapped in her web. NY tempts some people into biting the apple of knowledge, changing ones view on the world and kicking them out of their respective paradise of blissful ignorance.

Persephone's Part Time Waitressing Job in Hades

This is my new painting titled Persephone's Part Time Waitressing Job in Hades. I created this painting for an exhibition at the BathHouse Gallery called Verse and Reverse.
The painting shows Persephone, the daughter of Demeter (the bringer of seasons) and Zeus, who was abducted by Hades and brought to live in the underworld for half of each year. Persephone is shown waitressing at a diner in Hades, serving a slice of lemon and a bowl of seahorse soup, with one of the seahorses rising up from his fate to look at Persephone accusingly. The waitress wears an orchid in her pocket, still an admirer of flowers even after being abducted while picking them many years ago.
The story I was given for the Verse and Reverse show was by a writer named Stephen Paul Feagans. The story itself is about a couple's car breaking down in a small town and coming across a Cadillac in a museum given to one of the locals by Elvis. There is a part in the story where the couple is talking to a waitress in a diner, I took that one scene and developed on it adding my own associations into this subject matter.

Video for Verse and Reverse art reception

Pictures from Verse and Reverse Reception

Me and the writer I collaborated with, Stephen Paul Feagans

Zoe peaking out from Daddy's legs (bottom half of the previous photo taken with writer)

One of the biggest compliments I can have is when a child likes my artwork. Their view on art is untarnished by our insubstantial, culturally-biased, arbitrary "rules" of art

View of the White Rock Lake behind the gallery

3 drawings about 3 places

The first of these is a drawing of Sedona, Arizona. I drew this from our hotel balcony when we stayed there in 2007. The view shows the green valley, the river, the birds flying around and the orange rocky peaks towering over the patchwork of green. I also drew a shadow with 3 heads to represent myself, my wife and our daughter walking in the valley.

The drawing above is of a section of Dallas I use to hang out in a lot called Deep Ellum. Deep Ellum has a lot of clubs, bars, tattoo parlors and so on. I drew the scene as if it were the year 1992 since that represents a year I was always down there.


The last of these 3 drawings is of New York City. This shows a typical midday pedestrian scene. Even though the subway entrance sign says 4th street, the image I based this on was midtown, at 34th and 8th ave near where I used to work.

(You can click on any of the images to see a more detailed view.)

Upcoming Exhibition

I am currently creating a new piece of art for an exhibition at the Bathhouse Gallery in Dallas called Verse and Reverse. I like the idea of the show, artists submit a piece of existing artwork that a writer will write a poem or short story about. That same writer will give a story to the artist so they can do a piece of artwork on it. There are 8 artists and 8 writers participating in this show.

Right now I'm working on the artwork for the short story I was given. I picked out a very small segment of the story, just one line, to do the piece on. The writer is going to write a short story about the painting Dinner With Bacchus Giraffe. I'm looking forward to reading his interpretation of the painting.

The show runs March 15th - April 12th, the reception is March 15th from 7-9.

Asleep

In 2001 we (me, my wife and a friend) took a trip to Japan. While there I drew my wife taking a nap. I'm not sure which city we were in at the time, I think Hakone.


The first drawing I made of her asleep was while we were on our honeymoon in Paris. This is probably my favorite drawing Ive ever done. I like the landscape quality. It seems like the pillow is a mountainside and her hair is a forest or meadow, falling down into a ravine behind her arm. The space under her shirt sleeve reminds me of a cave. It seems that the earth itself could awake from her nap, slowly opening her eternal eyes. To me this drawing sparks the association of Gaia, mother earth and the manifestation of that in my beautiful wife sleeping (after a long days walk through the Louvre).

I really enjoy these drawings of Nikki sleeping, I plan on doing a series of these.

Sun, Tree, Home

We try to escape nature by building an artificial world around us, yet we are making this artificial world out of nature itself. This artwork is about cycles and the relationship of materials. On my website I describe this painting as the relation between our sun, the earth, and what we use of the earth and call "man-made". Sounds a bit vague, right? I'll explain through the symbols on the painting.

The sun provides the light and energy to Earth and without it we wouldn't be here, it is essential to us and in a way has help to build us and all of our fellow earthlings. It takes a beam of light from the sun about 8 minutes to travel to Earth's surface. In the painting you can see the wiggly, swirling vibrations coming down the stairs from the window showing the Sun. After the sunlight reaches the Earth it is "used" by pretty much every living thing, such as a tree. An Oak tree, for example, can live up to around 600 years old. Thats 600 years of sunlight and water. Man will use an Oak tree for construction, essentially harvesting the tree that the Sun and Earth have created. We use trees and other substances natural to Earth to make our creations, such as buildings (trees, rock, sand) roads, and various consumer objects. The straight lined shapes (man-constructed) intertwine and are hard to distinguish from the more organic swirling shapes (natural) in this painting.

We call these objects we construct "man-made", but we are using the material of Earth and Sun to make these objects. So these things are being constructed by man, but not made by man. Just as a society of ants will construct very complicated dwellings out of the Earth around them, we humans also construct very complicated dwellings out of the Earth around us. The complexity and use of these constructions are relative to the one who judges.

There is a quote from Carl Sagan thats sums it up best...“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”

Untitled

With this drawing (and a couple of others completed around the same time) I wanted to try something a bit different so I painted different shades of yellow on drawing paper then drew my wife on top of that. I like the outcome, it gives it a certain cloud like atmosphere. I also like the expression of curiosity I capture on my wifes face, it seems like she was studying me as I was drawing her.

With the line style I use in this and other drawings I'm trying to capture the idea of constant change that is always going on around us. Nothing is ever still, not even a rock. You have the movement of Nikki before she sat down for me to draw her, the movement afterwards, the small movements imperceptible to the eye, the vibrations and movements on an anatomical level, and the myriad of movements inside her body.

I plan on continuing with the ideas and techniques used in this drawing on future pieces.

Female Flatworm Amazon Guardian

Female Flatworm Amazon Guardian completed in 1999 is a vertical diptych. I first completed the bottom half in a very clean style around 1994 or so. In 1999 I added the top half or 'head' of the painting. I also create a rough, worn look to the painting to convey a certain wear and tear (I'll explain the analogy further down), along with small inner-drawings throughout the character's body and head.

The idea of this painting is about women, and the role woman have played and been subjected to all throughout history including our own present day. Women throughout history in various cultures have been the victims of oppression and violence, yet still are the archetypes of grace and beauty. The bottom half is a display of the female form, the part artist and poets have always glorified, the part men usually focus on. The top half of the painting acts as a peephole, showing a glimpse of the part of women that has been subject to oppression and abuse, offering a look at the collective mirror that time has a hold of, as in the book The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I've included a sketch on the female figure's body of a young boy listening to a father, as the father passes on the idiotic idea of mans dominance of woman, of subjecting them to harsh treatment, making them feel like second class citizens. Men pass on this illogical idea of a woman’s inequality to boys, mostly through example. Western religions perpetrate this absurd idea, which is why the father in the small sketch has a halo over his head. I also show an illustration on the woman’s head of a young lady coming to this realization, of her imposed inequality. Even today, here in the US I see men treating their girlfriends or wives not as a partner but as a type of subtle servant.

The Amazon guardian in the artwork stands as a symbol for the courage, the will and timeless persistence that woman throughout history have kept, that idea in the back of their mind (and sometimes right in the front for everyone to see), that they are not second class, they are not servants to be belittled, but they are the mothers of humanity, the archetypes of beauty and grace, despite some mens actions of arrogance and ignorance.

I sold this to a great person in New Mexico who has bought a number of my paintings.