A little better.

Day 7


I keep flipping back and forth to this page to see what it would look like with fresh eyes, and it looks like crap.


I don’t know. I guess it’s almost finished, but it looks like a bunch of easter eggs. Excuse the dappled light.

Day 6


TED

06Jun07

Everyone must check out TED. Where we were…where we are…where we’re going.


It’s coming. Very frustrating that day. I felt like I was painting too much, overworking it. When that happens, for some reason, I keep painting when I should just quit for the day. After letting it sit for a day or two, I’m liking it more. I guess it’s a good lesson in being patient and sleeping on it before deconstructing and destroying it. I think part of the problem is that this is the only painting I’m working on. I used to always have about 5+ paintings going on at various stages. It really helped having a few pieces started, a few in flux, and a few nearly “finished”. Seeing the overall process of each can bring about solutions to certain problems. Every piece informs another.

Man, I miss this. I think I’m going to just start dedicating time to painting. It might be good to do a bunch on paper to get a bunch going quickly. Building/stretching canvases take a bit of time.

I guess the ultimate goal is to have one foot in design and one foot in painting/drawing.

Day 5


oh my goodness

28May07

i’m about to throw up. i just accidently deleted everything i’ve worked on for this entire quarter and emptied the trash. what next…


Here’s some progress over the last couple of sessions. Still needs a lot of work. This quarter I’ve been trying to relate Bodoni with music. Looking at the typeface reminds me of some of the sheet music from taking piano lessons as a kid and also from some of the choral groups I had been in high school and college. I imagine I’m going to be too frustrated with the color (as I most definitely am now) and will end up mostly being black and white with some of the color popping. We’ll see. The one thing I try to “meditate” on is something that my favorite painting professor/mentor D.P. Warner would say(imagine old hippy, Jack Nicholson/Nick Nolte lookalike in tight jeans with cowboy boots, Southwestern patterned button-up, big gut, balding on top/long in back, most amazing drummer). He would always tell me to…”arrive at it.” I love that concept of “arrival” in art and design. We want results right away and, at times, it needs time and mistakes and going back to the beginning. Things can’t be forced, but then I guess there are deadlines. As long as you can start with a complete open canvas and are willing to really throw it out there, all the elements will fuse together somehow.

day 4/flipped back

Day 4/flipped

day 4/flipped

Day 4

day 3

Day 3


Finished…right? ha. I hate having formulas with paintings, but I do like to always start with a ground color. It gets rid of the start white, loosens you up a bit, and is great to show through in areas, illuminating the entire process of the painting. That’s something I always try to do as well, show in some way, every stage of the painting in the final resolution. It’s great when you can retrace the steps an artist took with a particular piece. I think it helps allow the painting to “breathe” better, less likely to overwork it.

Day 2


For my Typography class, I was given the classic typeface Bodoni as a basis for designing a promotional brochure and poster. Additionally, we were given the freedom of choosing our third deliverable. I’m so stoked about this one because I am going to do a painting.

I’ve been drawing and painting all my life and went to school for it at Edinboro University (I guess I should be saying, “Go Scots!”). Now, with the amount of work to be done for school at PC, I just haven’t found, or rather made the time to paint. I’ve been jonzin’ hard.

Anyway, I plan on updating this blog with pictures of the progress, hopefully, at least every other day. We’ll see. It’s rather large…4′x4′. I should have taken pictures of building the beast. If I don’t have to, I try not to buy pre-built canvases. I like to build them myself. For me, there’s just something more meaningful when I paint on a canvas I actually build. At galleries and museums, I sometimes end up staring at the canvases from the side to try and see how they’re built.

So here we go…open, blank canvas.

Day 1

 back


I’ve been watching a few episodes on YouTube. I believe Michael J. Fox won an Emmy for this specific episode. If you have about 9 minutes to spare, watch it. A great mix of humorous/serious tones. I got to get the seasons on DVD.




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