Day of Giving

For Christmas this year, I gave family and guests portraits in oil. I started this project about four months ago and finished just before Thanksgiving. These are those gifts. All paintings are 5" x 7", except the last one. Not pictured is my Uncle Henry's portrait (although he is pictured) because I forgot to photograph it when I was wrapping presents this morning. Darn, I liked that painting too. Anyways...

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!

Good night, all. Enjoy the company of your loved ones.

Andrew Jackson & Polk

Andrew Jackson & Polk, Oil on Canvas Board (20" x 16")

Andrew "Hitler of the Cherokee" Jackson is commonly regarded as one America's best presidents. Old Hickory had a quintessentially American "my way or the highway" attitude I rather admire. Andrew Jackson kicked the Spaniards out of Florida under no authority but his own; he gave us the DNC's Jackass, back when that was something to be proud of, and he would strike down with great vengeance and furious anger anyone who brought offense to his accidentally polygamous wife, Rachel. I think he is my favorite president.

"King Mob" Jackson knew how to party too. At his inauguration, the rabble stormed the White House, broke the plates and got steaming drunk all over the lawn. Those were the good old days of representative democracy. As President he (briefly) paid off the national debt, gave all his buddies jobs and fought a ceaseless war against the banks. We could use some more of that these days. For his work we've named countless parks, counties and even cities after him. We even put him on our money, ironically. And like any President worth his salt, he survived an assassination attempt.

By contrast, James Knox Polk often languishes in history. Polk's was a protege of Jackson, and his political star rose in proportion to Jackson's success. "Young Hickory" is remembered mainly for being America's first 'dark horse' candidate, and for "Polk's War of Aggression." However, the Presidency of James K. Polk was remarkably successful. Polk accomplished all of his campaign promises in his first term, and being satisfied with the results, declined to run for a second term. Polk, the youngest Prez until JFK, reduced tariffs, expanded America's borders, and continued Jackson's prosecution of the banks via the independent treasury. Then he quit, enjoyed retirement for about 100 days, and croaked. Lucky son-of-a-gun never had to live through the Civil War. Polk's most lasting legacy is his invention of the mullet.

Both of these men dearly loved their wives, but neither had legitimate children. An old story relates that Andrew Jackson encouraged the romance between Polk and his wife, Sarah. (Possibly to cover their own illicit Presidential love, according to some malcontents). However, Polk was rendered sterile at a young age by a surgery to remove urinary stones. He never raised any children. Andrew Jackson, on the other hand, had a large cadre of adopted step-children and Indian war babies. He must have taken that white man's burden stuff pretty seriously. Any descendent of these men would be some sort of bastard of history. But hey, leaders are made, not born or bred.

I would like to dedicate this painting to my friend, Andrew Polk, who has been interning in the beltway for the last few months, learning the swampy arts of his forefathers.

The Tree Fort

Past Blasters: Volume Two, Issue One

As promised, Domestic Terrorism.

The Tree Fort

Go Towel Off, Kid.

I have a hypothesis.

My hypothesis is that something typically mundane and uninteresting can be made interesting though many iterations.

To test this hypothesis, I have been saving the paper towels I wipe my brushes and knives with for the last 3 or 4 paintings I've done. This is the result.

I think it worked. It would be interesting to see what something like this looks like for a range of different artists. Maybe it would say something about their technique? Or say something about their style.

This has also really highlighted how much paper I'm wasting, so from now on I'm going to use rags. (Raegs.)

For my next trick: HAIR.

Dr. Laser's Revenge, The Final Chapter

Past Blasters: Volume One, Issue Three

This is the final installment of volume one of pastblasters, wherein I entertain myself by recounting to myself all of the awesome things I have done. Currently I have been discussing the creation of a wall mural entitled

Dr. Laser's Revenge

!!!!

Catch up with issues one and two. 

Now, I'll admit it. In this series so far, I've been a real pic-tease. So this post is going to be heavy on pictures of the completed work.

That sexy dude on the right is the Artist, preening before his work.

A couple of technical notes:

• The 'space' color is Disney brand Galaxy Black, and it is the richest color black I've ever experienced. Gotta love those animator colors.
• Every star/galaxy/globular cluster is either red- or blue-shifted. Just like it would be if you looked out your spaceship and saw this in real life.
• Acrylic paint is very cheap at Wal-Mart. That said, I doubt the ability of this mural to age evenly. Or to age well at all, considering it's in a frathouse, and a good chunk of the wall has no insulation behind it.
• The coral reefs were my favorite part to paint. The ecosystem of the planoctopod is best viewed from ~2 feet away.
• During the day, sunlight will shine through the holes mentioned in the previous post, forming the brightest constellation in the sky. Sometimes art happens by accident.

Within These Walls.

Uh way to focus Joe.

A couple of thematic details. The characters in this painting have a story, or mythology. I've been thinking about it for over a year now, but I'm not ready to tell it because I'm not done gestating. Here is what I can say at this point:

• When I painted this I assumed the robots and planoctopod were in conflict. I later realized they were dancing. If you had 8 arms, you would want to dance with more than one partner at once too.
• The gold 'occult' robot is male. The silver robot is a female. CONFIRMED.
• The viral looking ship in the middle of the painting is a T4-stellarophage. It infects stars and uses their energy to create replicas of itself which explode out of the chromosphere, leaving a lifeless brown dwarf in their wake.
• The planocotopod has a gold sucker filling. It's ballin'.
• How did that whale get there?! What a crazy place for a whale! He sure looks surprised! CONFIRMED.
• These robots were build by other robots. However, they do not have smaller robots inside them, like many other robot-built robots. They are just automatons, not autoautomatons.

Beverly!

Dr. Lasers Revenge. Acrylic on plaster. Appx. 11 x 8 ft. 2009.

Questions still unanswered (Please discuss in groups of three to five, and be prepared to present your answers to the class):

• Where did the robot constructors come from? Are they planet (planoctopod) bound?
• How do planoctopods reproduce? Can gaseous members reproduce with terrestrial breeds, or have they speciated?
• Do interstellar octopi have any natural predators? Do they do they have an energy source other than stars? Perhaps they are cannabalistic, like some aqueous squid. 
• Is the sun also a octopodian creature? What about the ringed moon? If the sun is octopodian, how does it sustain itself?
• What's all that binary say?
• What does the occultbot do, besides having some outlets, a soundboard, usb plugs and a dot matrix printer?
• Seriously, what is that whale doing there?! What a crazy guy!
• Where is Dr. Laser and how does this constitute his revenge?

Next time on Past Blasters, a heartbreaking tale of hope, loss, domestic terrorists and the fire department.

One Way Ticket To Brown Town

Welcome to Brown Town

This is the first in a series of color wheels.
Why brown? Because brown, moreso than any color paint I own besides black, eats other colors. You can throw gobs of paint into brown and it will stay, mostly, brown. This is an exploration of that... brownness. Brownieness. Browntownliness.

I realize this color wheel does not represent actually color relations, from section to section. I was working with the paints I owned and fitting them into the dodecagonal shape, a shape I feel particularly drawn to. I wanted to get in all of the pigments I owned. Except black, because that's just ridiculous.

It was only toward the end of this painting that it began to remind me of this (SFW, at least currently). The other color wheels will not be so, um, evocative. I hope.

This painting generated a lot of gobs of excess paint. I hate wasting paint, because I am cheap, so I've begun to scheme a way to do "run-off" paintings with the left-over paint. These would be casual works; more exercises than anything else, simply to practice form and technique. To do that, I need a lot of cheap canvases. Hmmm, I think I know just where to get them.

My work is still in a didactic phase. I'm close to graduating from 'hobbyist' to 'enthusiast,' but not at the point where I'm willing to call myself "a painter." The work continues...

Andrew Jackson & Polk is looking pretty good, though.

Work in Progress #greem2a

These greems are not the only greems that be.

There is an infiltrator amongst these greems. Not every greem is what it appears to be; the greems suspect a conspiracy.

Dr. Laser's Revenge (2)

Past Blasters: Volume One, Issue Two.

Previously on Past Blasters I covered the sketches I made in anticipation of painting a mural in the summer of 2009. A mural that would come to be known as...

Dr. Laser's Revenge

!!!!

In the second week of August I took a trip to my frathouse, kicked out the guy living in my dorm, (he had an apartment), and dragged everything out of the room. It looked like this:

An empty room.

A messy hallway.

The room without anything in it was a narsty place. One of the walls was covered in accumulated drunk scribblings spilling off the door and mostly in smeared crayon. The previous year I had experimented in gluing CDs to the ceilings, but the ceilings in the house had a popcorn treatment, which made gluing tedious and tenuous. Since I had more CDs and further ideas, the popcorn posed a problem. The crayons, the ceiling and the total lack of color all had to go.

"Miniona <3" I wish I had kept.

I Eat Asbestos.

I made decent progress the first few days. I scraped the popcorn ceiling, which is pretty easy with a spray bottle and a paint scraper. I painted the ceiling, primed and painting the walls, and glued up the CDs. I also attempted to "prep" my canvas. The wall I was working with had an orange peel finish, which, given the detail of my drawings, was not ideal. I had anticipated this, but did not have a clear idea of how to surmount the problem. I could have re-plastered the wall but c'mon- I not some sort of professional craftsman, nor am I made of money. So I took my family's rotary sander with me, and applied it to the wall.

The wall, it turned out, was already bowing in and cracked. This is due to a fact I discovered when I took down a dartboard that had been nailed to the wall. The wall, my canvas, was put up over a window. The window is visible from outside of the house. The gap has not been insulated in any way; light comes in through the nail holes. You can peep through them.

Sanding was not effective. I wore down all of the grit wheels at my disposal and did not make any part of the wall appreciably smoother. I did kick up a lot of dust, however. After sanding set off the smoke alarm in my room, I put a shower-cap over the detector. Further sanding set off the smoke alarm in another room.

that's not me

that's a rat on the loose

I then turned my attention to the door. The door to the room had two pre-existing elements I wanted to keep. It named the room, "Dr. Laser's Office" (Dr. Laser is a a demo bar). The bottom half of the door said "HELP" in flames. Otherwise the door was covered in forgettable things. In order to keep the elements I wanted, I repainted them in black. Then I painted the whole door in red.  The sections in black showed through. After a second coat of red, I repainted the black outlines, thus preserving the elements I wanted and covering extraneous details.

that's not me

that's not hell, it's help.

During this whole time I was also working on an even more elaborate project, renovating a room in the basement. My attentions were thus divided, and I began to slow down. The story of that renovation has been recounted elsewhere, but I think I can sum it up with two pictures:

this actually is hell.

this is a purington paver

Regardless, after a significant fit of labor, I was good to resume full time work on the mural.

Last time, I mentioned that my approach suffered from not being well thought out. In the first place, I distrusted my measurements. They were made, alone, while the room was still full of somebody else and their stuff. I wasn't sure exactly the size of the wall I was working with, and wanted to be able to adapt to that.

Moreover, I overlooked practical measures that would have saved me time in favor of technological gizmos promised to make work easier. An overhead projector, I am still convinced, would have worked (better). I would have had to print out everything on transparencies, and possibly print the sketches on several sheets, but it was something I was prepared for. An overhead projector was not forthcoming, I could not find one to borrow and they are actually very expensive.

At this point, I should have realized the easy way to do this required photoshop (which I had been working with), no projector, and a smidge more confidence behind a brush than I had at that point.

Instead I started looking at the commercial grade projectors in the art store, and because I was on a budget, bought the cheapest one. The Tracer Jr. The Tracer Jr. is something best used to entertain a child wanting to draw a large version of a sticker. It should never be used for a mural. The projection window is 3 square inches. There is no way to raise or lower the projection except for the elevation of what it's sitting on. The Tracer Jr. is very wobbly. Perhaps  the Tracer Sr. has sturdier legs.

After a few days of stacking up boxes and arranging lofted beds and trying to block all the light out of the room and sweating I managed to draw a rough outline of my pictures, projected on the wall.

It looks easy enough.

But using it feels like this.

So how could this agony have been avoided? Simple, draw a 1 foot grid on the wall, create a gird over the mural picture in photoshop and re-draw (or paint directly) on to the wall. At the time, I did not consider this option. I probably would have been suspect of it in any case. Until the point when I was standing at the wall with the Tracer Jr. in use, I thought I would be reproduce all the details in the paper copy directly on the wall. I thought painting would be akin to coloring-in what was already there. I really imagined it would be like a coloring book writ large. In fact, until rather late in the game I planned to outline everything with cartoony black lines at the end. Most of these preconceptions were shattered.

At the end of my visit, I was far from done. I had a some of the characters in the mural painted, but no background and no details. I had to leave with much of it undone, and I had to come back to school early and work like a marathon runner to finish it.

This is how things looked at the end of my mid-summer trip:

I also built this couch

And sawed the top off that bunk bed

The Beksinski is by my roommate.

It's a lonely planet with no arms.

Next time I'll cover how I worked myself to the bone to finish this thing before I crash landed into my senior year. I'll talk about how I discovered how to paint, and what techniques I stumbled across. I might even discuss what I think the work could mean. Or not. Mostly I'm going to talk about Galaxy Black.

Also there will be pictures, lot of pictures. /wg/ quality pictures.