deliberate obsticles and hurdles

Lately Ive been hitting a wall while painting. I feel as though Im just going through the motions and staying in the safe zone. Some hurdles and obstacles have been needed to help me stretch my creative legs, and I may have found them.

I stumbled upon a technique thats bringing more voice to what I want to do and creating an atmosphere Ive been looking for.

For a while Ive been thinking about painting over a screen (the type you'd use on a porch door or window) to see what kind of pixellated image it would leave on the canvas. Turns out the screen itself mixed with the canvas underneath creates a weird holographic effect, especially when held 1 to 2 inches away from the canvas.

These photos are taken from the first of which I hope to be a series of paintings using this technique. I created a shadowbox of sorts around the frame to suspend the screen about 2 inches from the canvas. The painting was inspired by some pictures I took of myself when I had the flu (swine perhaps?) this spring.

I might just call these SHADOWBOX PAINTINGS......


Oh yeah, and Ive begun to use spray paint, which makes me feel just a little bit closer to being a graffiti artist--which Ive always dreamed of being, but was too chicken s@%t to actually do because Im afraid of getting busted.

fresh paintings, pirated pictures.

So I've been shopping thrift stores lately looking for old mountainous landscape paintings with interesting frames. I bring them back to the studio and paint over them, sometimes letting the original print come through and sometimes completely covering it.

Pirating these old thrift store finds is therapeutic for me in a couple of ways;

1. Im really into the idea of building upon another man's work and wrestling out how to create something within the preexisting work yet maintaining a sense of synonymity. It feels communal and integrated into a larger story/rich in history.

2. The paintings are really just large and small scale drawings, most of which are done with vine charcoal. This has been an excellent way for me to refine, dust off, and strengthen my drawing abilities again--it seems that time has atrophied that part of my brain that understands perspective.

3. And lastly, they remind me of Montana and our experiences there these past 8 years (which I completely enjoyed).