Just finished the second one.....

show this Thursday!

My friend Myah Bailey, who owns and operates an art gallery on Lovejoy St. named BENJAMIN BENJAMIN, is having a show in which 20 artists were coupled together and asked to paint each other's portraits. The concept is pretty fun, and the artists are even funner!....should be a good show. Here is the Facebook link.

Myah was kind enough to ask me to participate, so here is my portrait of longtime friend and confidant Kathleen Courian-Sanchez.

Come on out to the show if you are in the neighborhood this Thursday.....if you dont like art or artists, and still need a good reason to come out, then you should know Stone Brewing and the Canvas Art Bar will be on Hand for the show, serving world class wine and beer....

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.