Journal Cover

The cover of a journal where I worked out some childhood issues through art. Freud would be tickled pink.

Childhood Journal

I haven't journaled in quite a while due to a serious lack of time to devote to the fun and the frivolous, but I did finish one a few months back that was initially going to be all about my childhood. It wasn't long in the process of creating the book that it inevitably turned into a deeply psychological manifesto on my father's death. This is one of the pages from it.

Small Portrait of Bram Ebenezer

After a long hiatus, I'm back to drawing again (albeit sporadically) in the late evenings. Finishing this felt wonderful and has made me realize just how much I missed it. I really need to make sure I make time to draw every day, even when I'm consumed with other artistic endeavors that have sucked all the energy from me by day's end. It's important, not only to keep my skills honed, but to feed my soul as well.

Small Portrait of Bram Ebenezer, graphite on paper, 2009

Mixed Media Hen Collage

This is another found piece from my foray into hand tinting photos. The hen is Trixie Bee, who poses surprisingly well for a chicken. I was sort of all over the place with this one: spray paint, bleach, the hand-tinted photos. If I remember correctly, I was feeling rather giddy at that time and it's reflected in the uber-bright colors and ten thousand layers of various media used on this work. It's quite a thick piece, depth-wise.

What Do You Make Of This Life?, mixed media on paper, 2007, from the series Things With Wings

A Found Collage

As much as it's a pain in the ass to be forced to work in a corner of the kitchen, constantly needing to root around in boxes for various paper, canvas, brushes or "that thing I really need right now (insert name of badly needed yet totally elusive item here)," storing my things in our damp cellar, and tearing my hair out daily with the chaos of dealing with no studio while my new one is being built, it does have its advantages.

Having to poke around in all of those cartons, portfolios and crates over and over and over again has unearthed some artwork I haven't thought of in months or in some cases, years. Every last piece is totally insignificant (trust me on this), but each represents my experiments with new techniques (for me at any rate) at the time they were created.

This collage was one of the first large-scale pieces in which I used the technique of hand-tinting photographs with oil paint, an extremely time consuming process that lost its thrill for me super quickly. Those in the photo industry back in the early 20th century must have rejoiced with the development of color film because having to hand create color tinted photos sucks. It really does. That said, I used it on a few mixed media and photo collages before I grew immensely tired of it all and moved on. This was one of them.

Metamorphosis, mixed media on board, 2008

Encaustics VI