asymmetric Rorschach test sketch

This is a sketch I did at work, figuring out a different way to systematically develop density starting with a geometric framework. I think it looks like a camel, a map of an island, and like a deformed roasted chicken.

six unique bodies from similar initial conditions

Window installation, First Friday, Pickwick Press

Here's me hanging my acrylic on polyester painting the other day. It looks kind of like a shower curtain but I still like it. The Opening for this exhibit at SMFA is 5-8pm during the First Friday Art Walk:

Also stop by Pickwick Independent Press at 526 Congress Street for our grand expansion celebration! I haven't been as active at the press as of late, but I am still a proud member and hope to see a lot of folks stop by!

New baby and art shows!!

Life is exciting after the birth of our baby girl Karina. She arrived six weeks early and after ten nights in the hospital we're home to begin our new family life together.

Now that we're home I've been finding minutes between our three hour feeding schedule to run up the hill to the studio to work on last minute art obligations, which are now finished. I made a large two layer acrylic painting on polyester film that is hanging in Susan Maasch Fine Art's window, to promote an April exhibit of my ink paintings and white pencil on black paper drawings.

Here it is hanging in my studio, it's 72" wide and 80" tall:

And here are some of the pieces as they are at SMFA:

Look for an image of one of my pieces in the 2011 Portland Museum of Art Biennial in the April Art issue of Maine Home And Design


Be sure to check out the shows at SMFA and the PMA if you're in town during April!

Ink Painting

Here's a detail of one just finished:
And below is a digitally recomposed version of the above image. It looks kind of like a brain. The actual piece is just a plain old oval.

New Nebula Drawings

These are drawn freehand, white pencil on black paper, 30" x 22". These will be exhibited in April at Susan Maasch Fine Art, along with about 10 other new pieces and a window installation, to coincide with the 2011 PMA Biennial. More stuff later when April is closer.

I'm disappointed to report that no one found my previous post by searching for "Justin Bieber's hair". Most of the traffic to this blog comes through my own website, facebook, and quite a bit from Nicholas Felton's Blog, Feltron- http://feltron.tumblr.com/

Justin Bieber's Hair is Worth Every Penny

How much would his first pube be worth?! OMG!!

Sorry about all that, I just thought I'd get more hits that way, but I'm sure it will increase my bounce rate ten thousand-fold. This is a kind of Google Analytics test in a way. But Google knows this and may thwart me . ,. , ,. , . , . ,

Who cares about art, and especially this art? Five people, me included.

These first two images show the progress I made in three hours. I really want to make animations of these ink paintings because I think a time-lapse video would be really interesting in conjunction with a static final product.

detail:

Another painting at or nearing completion:

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This is a decent article:

http://the99percent.com/articles/6994/Inside-The-Painters-Studio?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=ALL&utm_campaign=MIH+Mar+2+2011

Spiky Sea Cucumber and friend

These two paintings are a slight departure from the consistent blob clusters I've been making by dropping ink into wetted triangles. This time I'm dropping ink into the corners of the triangles, and the overall forms are left unconnected, precarious, and spiky. I imagine them as diagrams or patterns that could be cut out and assembled into bulbous forms, like they are flattened polygons of computer generated 3-d Models.

I've spent some time looking at patterns for making Paper Models of Polyhedra, and I guess I'm more interested in the look and layouts of the flat patterns themselves than the 3D forms.
I'm tempted to cut out this bottom painting and try to make a paper sculpture, but maybe I'll do it with a digital print in the future.

Progress on my geometric blobby ink paintings

This first one I've been working on for awhile. I'm painting areas of the paper the same light ink wash over and over to make darker lines as they overlap, but the whole thing is pretty much the same gray from a distance. It's not quite what I had in mind, but since the progress is slow, I'll have time to readjust my technique as new ideas arise.

This next painting is made by dropping ink into lines of water. It's not quite done, but close enough for a picture. This is a new approach to making blobs out of geometric shapes, which are formed by long thin blobs.

I really enjoy using wet media, I feel like I'm working with the fluid dynamics that govern action in much of the cellular world.

closeup:
Three blobs, just finished:
In this next one I'm leaving white spaces, then filling them in, fractal-like. The pattern is something like a Sierpinski Triangle (also gasket, or sieve).

Here the paintings are laid out tile-like, as I think about a display method for showing some of them at Susan Maasch Fine Art in April, concurrent with my Division Series on display in the 2011 Portland Museum of Art Biennial. This reminds me of Cassie Jones' display for the 2010 Center For Maine Contemporary Art Biennial. I want to make several more in this series in the next few weeks, so I can choose five to seven of them to show.

Snow Day= Studio Day

I didn't have to work in the optical lab today, so I had a chance to work in the studio and make two new graphite drawings. I actually like the narrow focus detail images more than the actual pieces. They give a sense of what I was seeing as I drew, my nose 3 inches from the paper. I like not being able to see the whole thing, up close they seem more immersive to me.

As I was drawing, I imagined that I was making maps for some imaginary landscape, and each line was a road or pathway connecting possible destinations. The changes in density could relate to population.

Here's the second one:


Anyway, I'm glad I have this blog so I can share things like this the same day they're made. In a week I might hate these and they may or may not ever be seen in public.