july stuff

small medium large of july
these birds keep me inventing
and inspired.
working with minor wrist and arm pain from gaming and painting
nate told me to take salty baths

more new stuff

The Invisible Ladder 19"x24" acrylic oil and tape on paper

Control Room 4'x4' acrylic oil and tape on canvas stretched over panel

new stuff on paper

Open Window 19x24 acrylic and oil on paper

The Open Box 19x24 acrylic and tape on paper

Blue Chair, Yellow Chair and Red Chair 8.5x11 acrylic and oil on paper

Overlook 8.5x11 acrylic and oil on paper

Japanese Room 8.5x11 acrylic and oil and tape on paper

Holiday House 8.5x11 acrylic and oil on paper


the smaller paintings i made because i want to turn them into prints. do you think they'll work as prints? The top, bigger two were just me messing around...

The New Version...

Same dimensions and materials as the first version below...same crappy cell phone...however, this image seems to be better. Well, after posting the original and talking to a couple of you, I decided that I was pretty unhappy with the painting. I feel better about this version. Note: the image of the soccer player in the lower center foreground is a completely new addition...

HIs Shirt. doG _ ribbions

being an artist

so then we work and work and work,
and for me i paint_ i paint_ i paint,
and more recently I have had a couple of shows,
therefore, I have been working extra mad.
so then
what?
comes from this.
you see now i am just in the wondering about it all phases.
i wonder about your experience after shows,
i think i might just lock myself in the closet for three years.
to me i think the best part of any show ___ is making the show,
then
after the show you have to just do nothing.
and now when i see the work i think it might be better of floating down the nearest river.
i am wondering to you.
and to all of you_
what are the up's and down of your work?
do you always love your work?
when are you most close to your work?
how does it feel when you stand in a room full of people looking at your work?
what does it mean if you sell your work?
what does it mean if you do not sell your work?
it order for me to ask these questions , i feel I should give you a little insight to the answers i have come upon.
first of all.
I hate showing my work, and when I am showing it, it is when i hate the work the most.
I love the work the most when it is in my studio.
just me and the work. then when it leaves, I feel I no longer have any connection with it.
sometimes people will say..
"i love your paintings"
and I am like ___ "paintings what paintings?"
as in I almost forget that they are mine hanging upon the walls.
.
anyway ___ is it work?
and why work?
you see too I have been thinking in the last months.
...
about the whole artist thing at all.
i suppose for about 7 years i was so driven by it.....
to make it
to show it
to sell it
and now i am just thinking ,
what the F *#K.
>
artist.
ugh.
could this just be the come down after a show.
I was told last week by some one I really trust,
that one could not be faking "being a painter"
if one loved it so much and lost track of time while doing it.
you see,
i work say 60 hours per week in my studio,
and i must say it might border on an obsession.
then
you
take
your
labor
of
loves
and put them into a public space and then you are left with nothing to work on.
it is like a big wave of water drying up mid-stream.
....
maybe it is like any other job...
and
then
you
nearly
collapse
after
months
and months
of work.
well the last thing i would like to say.
___the last thing I would like to wonder...
is this
do you feel that you have already moved past your "newest" work when it it finished.
in that_
you feel that you will make better and different works__whist you have the newest and freshest works right in front of you?

Just Curious KEllie

New Painting

tim lane



The Attacking Third of the Field, 2009
acrylic, oil paintstick, crayon, cloth, bubble wrap, painters tape, dryer lint on paper
19.5"x22.5"

Monte Do Gozo Mall

Monte De Gozo Mall
4'x4' feet Acrylic, Oil, Tape and QR Codes on canvas stretched over panel.
the landscape in the back is from Monte do Gozo in Spain. It's Galician for like...pleasure mount. it's the last city on the camino before Santiago and back in the day you used to be able to see Santiago from the top of the mountain where there's a little statue you can barely see in the picture. it's kinda center to the right. there is no mall that i know of in monte do gozo...until now.

b

champagne with yax kuk mo

i made this while waiting for paint to dry on a bigger 4'x4' piece. this is 24"x19", acrylic, tape and oil glazes. the pink, text like thing over the forest is tape. the statue is of yax kuk mo who was a mayan king of aztec decent and those rings around his eye are symbols of the storm god. but no storm is coming and everyone is chilling the f out sipping on cristale.
travis and molly good luck with the wedding stuff in michigan!!!
bradneRR

Temporarily

Here's a new 2' square painting, "Temporarily." This was originally going to have a lot more elements -- a couple ghostly icebergs painted floating in the "water" and on the horizon; also a sunken city that I spent quite a bit of time drawing pillars and urns and broken pediments for. Then I attempted to transfer the drawing of the ruins using a piece of paper bag and an oil stick -- total disaster. So I quickly wiped it all off. After a lot of consideration (and some urging from Randi to leave it simple), I decided to stay with this composition. I was trying to juxtapose something like a beautiful sunrise with a gathering storm -- or a tropical sky with arctic waters. The idea that a beautiful sky above reveals nothing about what is sunken and hidden, at least.

white background birds

here are chirp 16 top
and chirp 17 bottom
i keep exporing these birds
so with these two
i was watching dave chappelle...
maybe more importantly i been watching my process
these in particular i decided they were done before i put the big wash of color in the background
what do you think of them in comparison with the previous colored background birds?
the "public" reaction seems to be more in favor of the "finished" look of the others.
im glad i did these

Ian Swanson

There is a Detroit area painter whose work has really been catching my eye lately, Ian Swanson.

www.iancswanson.com

I thought you might enjoy checking his work out -- it's a mix of really highly finished stuff and rougher, almost haphazard elements. I can see a little Chris Martin (the painter, not the guy from Coldplay), a little Aaron Curtner, a little of each of us too, in his work. I thought Tim, especially, might consider him for future SCENE Metrospace stuff.

I'm going to try to make one of his openings, he seems to be pretty active and productive right now, and I totally dig the compositions he comes up with.

some shitty little paintings

i wasn't gonna post these but since there's been no post for awhile...

the top one was a recommendation from my friend dan. i'm sure you guys know how people are constantly telling you "you should paint X" (X usually being the suggester doing something absurd) and you almost always ignore it and think "do you pay any attention to what i actually paint? how would this fit that at all?" but this time around i thought....you know what? even though this idea isn't very close to anything i've been painting lately, i'm going to take up the challenge and paint two monkies sparring on capybara steeds and i'm going to try to fit it into my current "artistic vision" it turned out okay, i think, and it was fun painting the animals.

the shirt one is a funny story that i can't type online but ask me about it sometime. it's called "a few things that happened in my shirt." i don't like this painting but i like the idea of having a bunch of stuff happening in a shirt...in a weird way i think it's similar to stuff travis does when he has a lot of abstraction going on inside a bird or a babe...just here it's repersentational stuff going on. i will hopefully explore this idea more later and hopefully it'll be successful.

these are both 19x24" acrlyic on paper...the capybara one has a QR code in it and the shirt has some aluminum on top.

New small works

I've been moving into a new house this past month and have only stolen a few moments to paint. Here are some pieces I've recently finished.

The top one, "Carthage," was begun a long time ago when I was painting with coffee. I was never that satisfied with it, so I set it aside and recently added the white areas and the small red square. It's framed with leftover strips of black cherry, something I plan to do with a lot of the small pieces.

The second one down is "Reflecting Pool." This one has been through many stages, but finally I'm pretty happy with it. It is a little more vibrant than the colors here suggest.

Finally, "Ascend" is another piece that was begun a long time ago and sort of stagnated as a fairly boring composition until I added the connecting arc and it all kind of activated. The first and last pieces were completed for exhibit in Tim's "Little Big Show" along with 3 others. "Reflecting Pool" is a stand-alone, a color and layering experiment for some of the larger pieces I'm working on.

taking advice and other stuff

with these 19x24 paper pieces i was following some advice from lightgeist. first, kellie's advice from way back when to try doing stuff with no source material and travis' advice when he talked about making paintings that were an identifiable color. here i have green red and purple. next i might do a suggestion of molly's to do a tree house...which i was thinking about back in the day but couldn't make it work. also i was doing new stuff here...using aluminum foil and QR codes. in each QR code there is a few sentences of description of other rooms. so these are about spaces in spaces inside spaces etc. if you have a smart phone you can interact with the paintings, scanning the qr code to get the descriptions. i know these paintings basically suck but i was trying a bunch of new stuff. they really are just studies for later, bigger things. so any feedback is much appreciatd so i can improve the new stuff...especially anything about color...i really wanna get better with the color. also...are the QR codes dumb? thanks!


green room: acrylic, oil, aluminum foil, ink jet print outs

red room: acrylic, aluminum foil, vinyl, tape, ink jet print outs
purple room: acrylic, oil, ink jet print outs


##some of the QR codes say things like:
"I had never seen that door before. How had I missed it? I grew up in that house."

"Deep in the forest there was a florescent pink wall and a purple couch along side it. We sat down and had a drink. "

"We carried the couch into the cave and set the television up. It was damp and dark but we were ok. "

new figures

these are two new watercolors ,
i put birds in their shirts
im now full speed ahead on the book im doing with that writer
after these and getting the first check i can devote more time to it
not feeling like im losing money if im not painting for the gallery
which is something i battle with considering
experimental or outside projects
wierd
these photos are not the best, alot of subtlety is lost
i like these backgrounds. im considering some other forms of abstraction into these large passages
lovin it

oil portrait

Here's the finished piece. I took this crappy first photo in class with my iPhone, so I'll take a better shot and replace it. I'm happy with it overall, but there are a couple of drawing issues that bother me and other minor things I'd like to fix up. I'd be worried to do anything else without reference, though, so it'll probably stay just like this. I learned a lot with this piece, so I'm looking forward to doing another. I've never painted something so small and complex as this face, but there's something fun about painting tiny details.

pro artist hrs

Found this blog entry and thought i'd share it. A professional artist says she spends as much
time in the studio as she did when she was working a 9-5 job. Pretty interesting:

http://joannemattera.blogspot.com/2009/04/marketing-mondays-how-is-your-pie.html

the winding stair

don't think it's done quite yet. that pink has changed a bunch of different colors.
2'x4' acrylic, oil, ink, tape and sequins on canvas over panel.

also here is a link to a better picture of the fountain post below. i think i'm not
gonna add the trees because i like having part of it open. i dunno...

here are some lips

from my recent little paintings