Short video of me working on various projects

Day three- drawing on Space's wall, all done!

It looked a lot like this yesterday, but I did another layer all day today, ultimately using 11 markers. The size is 10 1/2 feet tall by 32 1/2 feet wide. This is a bartender's view of it.

The opening for Polyhedra is January 7th during the First Friday Art Walk, but stop by and see it in person starting this Wednesday, or for Icing, Space's New Year's Eve Bash.

Day two- drawing on Space's wall

I've never done anything this big before, but thankfully my current inclinations are infinitely scalable, I just have to change the size of my marking tool and I'm good to go.

If anyone wants a mural in their home like this, or in color (which would be different and fun) please let me know, I only charge a gazillion dollars per hour...

Day one- drawing on Space's wall

Things are moving along quicker than I expected on this wall drawing. I'm almost done with the first layer, if I work another 12 hours tomorrow I might be done.

Choosing to use markers instead of india ink and a brush was a good call, probably makes me twice as fast. I'm using Permapaque markers, which are water based double ended felt markers that work really well, the line width on the chisel end is about 6mm, and I'm using that exclusively. I've gone through 5 markers so far, I don't quite use them until they're dead, but they get "different" and I set them aside.
This drawing is part of a group exhibit entitled Polyhedra at Space Gallery, and will be open for viewing December 22, through January. Other artists participating in the show are Katrine Hildebrandt, Peter Jackson Huffey, Irina Skornyakova, Kyle Downs, and perhaps others, curated by Jenny McGee Dougherty.

sketch for a wall drawing at Space Gallery

Here is a 30" x 22" drawing made as another practice piece in preparation for a much larger wall drawing at Space Gallery. I will begin work on the mural tomorrow and have four days to fill about 300 square feet of wall space with dense line work like below. I have a more interesting composition in mind for the actual piece, I'm just experimenting with the markers, patterns and density in this sketch.

In the next few days, there will be more images of the actual wall drawing, so stay tuned!

like a self portrait from a desktop screen capture

new ink paintings

I just finished some india ink paintings I've been working on in preparation for Open Studios next week.

This is a detail of an ink painting on a 30" X 40" piece of paper:

This is ink dropped into wetted triangles on 22" x 30" paper:

This large painting is actually a practice piece done in preparation for a large (12 foot x 30 foot) wall painting I will be doing at Space Gallery in mid-December. I did this painting to test the brush size, gauge how much I could scale up the patterns I usually use, and estimate how much time something big will take to make. This probably took me 4 or 5 hours to make. I'll have 4 days to work on my wall painting, so I think I won't get overwhelmed, maybe just tired.

I'm in the picture for scale reference.

Upcoming Events

Please stop by for these upcoming events:

Conversations with gallery artists at Susan Maasch Fine Art, 567 Congress Street, Portland, Maine, Thursday December 2, 2010, 6:30-8:30PM

Participating Artists:

Anne Ireland, Tom Butler, Kate Russo, Jemma Gascoine, Elizabeth Jabar, Clint Fulkerson, and Jan Pieter Van Voorst Van Beest

Open Studios at The Artist Studio, 536 Congress Street, Portland, Maine, Friday December 3, 2010, 5-8PM

Participating Artists:

Greg Day, Kelly McConnell, John Knight, Lisa Pixley, Tina Purves, Sage Lewis, Joe Begnaud, Christopher Campbell, Lucinda Bliss, Stephen Benenson, Tim Clorius, Tim Keeshen, Roz Gross, Annie Larmon, Clint Fulkerson, Pickwick Independent Press, Cat Jensen, Jenny McGee Dougherty, Edwige Charlot, Kim Convery, Hilary Irons, Shoshannah White, Sean Newton, Kate Cleaves, Martha Miller, Carol Morrissette, Kevin Moquin, Elizabeth Chapman, Catherine Lo, Greta Bank, Jim Lynch, Kris Johnsen, Timothy Wilson, Joshua Loring, Edie Ware, Sean O'Brien, Devin Dobrowolski, Maria Wolf, Michelle Livingston

Two more drawings just finished

This is the fourth ink painting (or drawing) I've made by dropping pure ink into wetted triangles and having the overall form look like clustered cells. This time I made the ink droplets around the same size, to help make a gradual value change from a distance. I also used slightly gray water for the triangles to ensure that the overlapping edges would show up as light gray lines. You can see these in the second image:
For this second drawing, I made a preliminary layout to space the placement of my starting points or "seeds". The spacing is based on the porportions of the paper, and dividing areas in half.

I hardly ever make layout guides, but for this drawing I wanted things to start out regular and end up more irregular by way of compounding small scale inconsistencies. The drawing isn't quite done, but looks close enough to done for a blog post. The edges will get denser with a couple hours more work.

New ink painting

Here's a freshly dry ink painting on my drafting table. It's 22" x 30".