This might be the only true abstract I think I’ve ever done (having spent so much time focusing on realism and representation, abstract has always felt counterintuitive to me). More of a color study, really, I wanted to see if I could improvise my way through an image and have it look reasonably composed. I think I succeeded. I like the forms and color dynamics at any rate…
Based on the Thrawn character from Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novels, this was an artist insert, using my face and my art on the pedistals in the background.
This is the largest canvas I’ve painted so far, and while that in itself is not that impressive, being that I normally work small, it felt like quite an undertaking at the time. This became the centerpiece of my graduating exhibition, and the idea of a synthesis of mechanical and organic elements went on to inform a lot of my later work.
This one started life as two different pieces, done during my final semester when my exhibition had already opened and I was more or less marking time until graduation. They were painted separately, but when placed next to each other I found they had an interesting quasi-symmetry and liked the way they looked as one piece, so I attached the two canvases together.
This was a master study in my first semester painting class. The assignment was to select a work by a master artist and recreate it. At the time one of my favorite artists was M.C. Escher, and not just because he did the weird reality-bending pieces he became known for. For myself, his mastery at rendering reality was one of my bigger inspirations. His use of light and reflection to make a simple lithograph look like a black and white photo was one of the things that made me want to be a better artist. I painted it in black and white (and probably came off as a lazy bastard for this assignment) because this particular piece was a copy of a black and white lithograph, Still Life with Reflecting Sphere. Ironically, this was done before I really discovered lithography, but this piece (and others like it) would go on to be similar inspirations in those courses as well.
This was a commission for a friend, who’s a huge fan of Watchmen in general, and the character of Rorschach in particular. I’ve spent much of the last two years doing comic art, and haven’t spent any time painting, or really doing any kind of more traditional art. So it’s ironic then, that the first painting I’ve done in forever is a painting OF comic art.
Firmly entrenched in my Star Wars phase here, I was starting to experiment with the lithographic process, trying out colors and multiple passes. It came out kind of looking like a screen print…
Playing with fake watercolor in Photoshop