material

      I examined the figure in various poses with adjustments occuring in scale and proximity. It was fun to paint the little waves and tufts of clouds from a beach scene in the late afternoon. The ocean in the warm southern parts of the country creates a different atmosphere than the crisp and chilling wave crashes of the north. I wanted to capture this humid and fertile sense, with beach-goers lounging languidly in the sandbar. The constant motion of the waves becomes pronounced and playfully thrilling, once the waters are surrounding you. It is something I never noticed when walking along the beach before, because the water was too cold to dip into.

      I enjoyed painting this box of donuts in a realism style. I love to blend the optical effects of photorealism with some flat surface work and traditional stylistic looseness. Working in oil is so flexible, and I'm free to explore something utterly mundane yet thrillingly modern. Painting desserts is always inspired by Wayne Thiebaud. It's lovely to get to use the soft pink color to contrast with the warm creaminess of the cardboard pastry box. It's tempting to work the shadows even more dramatically.

      This of course is in homage to the Instagram age of social media personal sharing, where every image is perfectly squared and set along its own alignments. I applied the acrylic paints in thick angular planes, focusing on the shapes. But the meaning isn't really a commentary on the quality of images shared, or whether it's considered oversharing or too much information. Rather, I made the painting as a way to explore the idea itself, the platform as a medium for artists who already practice in another material medium. Many artists use the medium in their own unique ways, whether to promote their practice as a brand or simply to showcase more instantaneously the works which don't make it into another type of archive, such as a gallery show or catalogue, and how exciting that is.

      Here is a traditional watercolor painting with both ink and wash. I don't paint with watercolors as much, so there is a tentative precision you can see often interpreted as comptemplative. It is, but I confess as a digital artist there are also so many other possibilities for how I might "use" this piece. For example, as a base drawing, it can be transformed by technology into computer-generated paint layers, as sometimes seen in Photoshop. Taking it further, the flattened print can then be placed as a background for an animation, or along the lines of a single-panel comic strip. It is something I think about often as I paint or draw, that there might be some other end for my work. What it takes away from painting historically seems to enrich the quality of an artist's intrinsic state.

      Trained as a painter, I took this off its supports, which I built from scratch wood. The canvas seen this way feels to be ripped out of its frame, quite literally. It hasn't to do with conceptual objects intentionally, yet to describe the sweeping strokes and purposefully limited palette that formed this painting still seems to leave out its context. I need to somehow reconcile the work in all its entirety, without surrendering the importance of what I've done to the nature of redefinition by an audience perception.

      This is a painting about painting. I wanted to challenge the definition of painting, while assuredly operating in the painting studio doing anything but paint. The tools to build a dimensional box are all present already for painting. Besides referencing Cornell's assemblages, I added an element of humor along with a blocky frivolous whimsy that is both functional and serious. One way to explain it is as with parts of the human psyche. The Id energy is present from birth, and the Ego corresponds to all the parts, while relating back to reality. The Superego maintains an overall regulating function like the conscience to be good. Taken in this way, the painting is a transparent window of parts that fits into its own order.

      The way to make an infinity mirror isn't difficult. But spending effort to cut the lengths of wood at the proper angles, and even more complex the delicate two way reflective sheets in order to make an illusion of endless depth is rewarding in a similar way to painting. My expectation is concentrated towards total acceptance of my work, and I don't need to try and help my audience understand how it was done, or to represent a deeper idea with sentient expressiveness. Working with light in a literal way is a common theme I turn to for mediating between technology usage or avoidance in a fine art practice.

      A major component of the digital arts is inevitably becoming enamoured with microcontrollers and their fun potential. However, to truly make any use of them, one needs to overcome a steep learning curve in codes and wiring, which has little to do with arts. There are many creative applications for these essentially tiny computers. In my own exploration, I fell back on the thing's visual quality, encapsulated information on a circuit board, with all the minutiae and chaos of a working universe.

      There is an amazing street artist turned fine artist named Deck Two from Paris. Or maybe he is now a fine artist turned street artist. It's not just the use of glow paint that inspired me, but the way he sees the entanglement of city thoroughfares with unconventional perspectives. It makes sense that a physical city could be captured in this way by drafts. It's not that I see a circuitboard the same, but that I feel a similar immensity in its living potential, hard and impassible it may seem.

      This is a play on words, light saber. So much culture is informed by media, yet artists love to ignore it. Maybe my focus is still uncentered. I worked this simple idea without trying to make it more than it is. There is somewhat the taboo of referring directly to a personal pleasure in a public way. But without making the piece more profound than what it really is, I found it interesting to touch on the shared archive of emotions, while adding my own particular and recognizable spin.

      We had a live model come and sit for a class of painters. It was quite the event. I absolutely loved putting my painting skills to work in this way. It pushed me to really soak in every inch of the canvas as a space for expression. Additionally, there is a blue cart in the painting, which is what we used there everyday. The school colors were green and yellow, and there is a bit of that. At the model's feet, I painted the exposed section of drop cloth since we weren't in the habit of signing our works. At the back you can see areas of window and recycled frames, larger than life.

      I think it's a sad state many countless paintings of students end up trashed due to storage limitations and shortage of creative space. Contemporary artists all have the options of digital record-keeping, and I've many days wondered whether keeping a photo archive of my paintings contributes to the tendency to lose track of the original object. Yet to question it is also entering into a philosophical territory where my practice could shift into a conceptual register, and potentially stay that way. Drawing in sketchbook is one way to overcome these woes. It's nice that I can even imagine a human figure completely from scratch.

      I realized that this ancient practice of drawing sitting humans has gotten away from recording who the sitter was. I suppose the art atelier and group school has always existed too so in a way there were lots of models who remained anonymous, but there's also a fine tradition of portraiture as one path for the professional painter. It's a balance between contextualizing this practice, and simply drawing. Socially opportunities can open up when fellow artists sit for each other.

      One of my earliest figure drawings here. I remember the intensity I memorized the craggly lines around the body, combined with the proportions chart we looked at, ratio of one torso equals three heads, etc. But the amount of viewing put onto paper was a minimal markings of ink, and this economy of expression lays the foundation of all later works. So that now when I think about drawing a person or group of people, it is with quick and truncated acts. Whether I snap a photo of public crowds for reference, or sneak some looks at someone across a discussion table, a lot of the so-called rules of painting are made and adhered to based on artists' own self-confidence with handling these fleeting moments of creative opportunity.

      I used to live next door to a property that had chickens and sunflowers. Some of the flowers would grow taller than the picket fence, and some of the chickens would peck about my front door early in the mornings. There were always bikes and hammocks over there, though I never went over for visits. One day a tent appeared in the front yard, and I thought to myself how lively was this quiet urban community. I used a special clay-coated board which absorbs the inkwash beautifully. In a way, the tent evoked a sense of experience and proximity to experience.

      Part of the university is built around a cemetary which is owned by the city. Many students cut through there, as a matter of course. Art students liked to use it. I was no different. There isn't much to say about it. Some of the small headstones were centuries old. After a while, all the usual sites for drawing or exploring just blended in everything else. Maybe this is creative boredom. Still, the towering trees and sweet-scented sappy air contribute particularly for dabbing in watercolors. I used a textured cold press paper.

      I made a series of paintings where the size of the canvas was always the same shape. Each third measured one square foot, and I used each square foot section to express a unique iteration on a recurring theme. Just as an alphabet is considered modular, I called these my modular paintings. In this piece, you can see I took liberties with the light of my refrigerator at night. All of the scenes are carefully arranged, just as a formal photography set or animation reel would be. I think it worked to show the variations of scene as conduits for focus and blur, light and dark, time passing while staying still.

      Once a skater, always a skater. It's no big secret that skateboarding contains its own culture. Even after age and injury, the lifestyle and sense of humor that can only come from falling again and again off a narrow piece of wood on wheels, tends to stay with the practitioner. For the sake of remembering my days on end with this stylized physical artform, I painted this piece with an eye on its meaning, not only from a personal perspective, but as it would be regarded in time. Overcoming boundaries and innovating through patterns of flow and balancing acts.

Unfinished sketch from the park:

      I like the way these street reflectors shine as forgotten and roughed-up jewels. As a painter, I look for colors, and it depends on how I live and where I'm looking. Biking everyday to the painting studios, I often looked to the pavement. After a rain, the small cobble was slick and sleek. The contrast of the cracked road made for a practice of realist illusion, and the unique framing of my low-key viewpoint allowed me to smear across a sharp edging of heavy chroma.

      I adore the infinite possibilites within various shades of ink-wash. The contrast of black against lighter and lighter increments of gray adds layers of texture and depth to the flatness of a singular tone.

      This painting is really special. It reveals a section of Hermann Park, central to the bustling and family-friendly Houston arts district. I noticed the two taller trees right away. Growing up here, I'd sometimes make it out this far into town. There is a subtle quality of cultural clarity that comes attached to a city's art centers, not defined within the uniform security of the suburbs. Yet a painter longs for nature, and rarely thinks of these pockets of public greenery as a true space for getting lost in reflection. I wanted to find a balance between the painter's attraction to wild places and the modern reality of the creative situation. My emotion comes through in the tightly controlled nuances of green, executed today as more of a choice than a result of convenience, perhaps as seen in past works as intentional.

      It is the job of every painter to at some point turn to a discovery of time. The concept of time looms heavily for some, more-so than others. In my treatemnt of the subject, I thought how apt it would be to express it personally as a finished tube of toothpaste. For not only does it take a significant passage of time to complete, but in reaching the end one does feel an undeniable feeling of accomplishment. It is both unassuming and entirely surmountable, a simple life achievement, multitudes of which make up an entire lifetime.

Here you may see a glimpse of my preparing:

      Beautiful washes of thinned oil paints with the brighter layers subdued beneath the muted cool purple. Flashes of lime and neon peak around the outer limits of the grounding, and seem to illuminate through the solid core of the painting. At the center of the foreground rests my subject, a mini kombucha pumpkin or otherwise a sugar pumpkin. The painting is unassuming yet full of complexity. It doesn't lack paint, yet it hungers with jittery energy for the slabs of buttery impasto seen elsewhere.

      Carrots hung on a clothesline, is there any other way? Here you can see the paint still shiny wet. The bold baby carrots were from the Farmer's Market, a required stop for each and every itinerant still life painter.

      I helped some neighbors move while studying painting in Colorado. It didn't have much to do with painting, but they had some fresh-grown squash from the garden, and it was just one of those things. They insisted I take one, and so I did.

      In the same quaint Colorado suburb, there were loads of crab apple trees--sour, sweet, and tart. Sometimes people would come in with sacks full of them. I really enjoyed my study of natural still lifes, working directly from the earth.

      At school in Colorado, I heard about the theater shooting in the nearby town of Aurora. Around that time, an old building was under construction, and the offices were being updated. I answered a call for art for the new office, for which my painting of dawn clouds was accepted. I didn't mean to, but as I got into the swing of painting the layers of luscious and creamy-cotton clouds, the overall formation took shape like a gun. Rather than try to change anything, I indexed this surprising expressive development with some quick thinking, and named the piece Aurora. Immortal goddess of the dawn.

      I selected the portabella for still life study and conveniently picked up a habanero pepper, which I'd never seen before. It's quite spicy they say, and I feel the rare golden sheen of its prim pod to be a warning.

      A friend's son was having trouble adjusting to sharing his room with his new baby brother. I couldn't resist and made this painting to hang in the new room. I experimented with feathering the edges for a scratchy grainy out-of-focus effect.

      I painted this pastoral scene with a fine-tipped ink-pen and small tubes of watercolor. The paper is textured, and I tried adding the layers of transparent paint over dampened and dried washes. The particular waterfall was named Ponytail Falls. There were a series of linked falls in the area called the Horsetail Falls area. One of the splendors of living in the Pacific Northwest region is the easy access to hiking trails that snake up into the Cascade Mountains, and are interconnected by the various waterfalls. Painting the crisp white water was a challenge. It is cold year-round, and the waters exceedingly suited for wild pink salmon.

      Water-media exploration of patterns.

      Inkwash of the neighbor's rose-bush, fallow in winter.

      Outdoor freestanding sculpture I made from chicken wire, plaster, and floral greenery.

      Small canvas on wheels, each about 1 in. The painting rolls freely, bearing symbols.

      In Colorado, I met a man who lived in a Westfalia. He traveled in it, too, his home.