Twiddlebug 30″x30″

Twiddlebug 30″x30′ on view at my show at he Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts

Pileup 48″x60″

I just recently sent this painting out to my gallery in San Francisco, it was big enough that it had to be crated and sent by freight which is somewhat terrifying. On big paintings like this I often will shoot several images and stitch them together in photoshop using photo  merge. The images here are all from a really large 180mb image so I can get super close and still retain a lot of detail. I have started a few more paintings along these lines and I am excited about how it is going.

 

my show at the DCCA

Panorama of my show at the DCCA. If you stop in during the month let me know and I will give you the tour.

In progress

Work in progress, I still have a few days to go. Any guesses on what the title of this one might be? Don’t post if I already told you about this one.

Common Era

Common Era, Oil on Linen, 60″x 48″. This post is a bit overdue, I have been working on large paintings recently and they just gobble up all of your time. I started painting Trompe L’oeil paintings of toys in their bags and it occurred to me that the inflatable toys I had been doing in their packages would make a great still life subject if they wereblown up. The toys seem to me a perfect metaphor for the type of painting I do in that they appear to be solid and have mass but are just an illusion.

I like that the painting suggests a narrative with characters but is also just a still life. 

This was a fun painting to do but a real test to my endurance, it took about two and a half months in the studio every day, all day, and a few nights scattered in for good measure.

 

 

Waffle Cones

This one has been done for a little while, I have been working on a huge project and I have just been too wrapped up to keep up with my blog. I made some changes to “Waffle Cones” and gave it a different background. I think I am done for now on this one. I learned some things that I have applied to the new big painting I am working on.

 

here is the old one it had a beachy feel-not any more

 

 

Produce… Re-Produced

I know, another corny title, but what am I supposed to do. In the back of my mind I make these posts with relative certainty that no one could possibly find them interesting but myself so I am jazzing things up a bit, woo hoo. Here is another painting in my ongoing series of revisiting recent works and changing them dramatically. Produce 20″x 22″ oil on panel. Gone is the minimalists background and in with the maximalist.

Here is the old version of produce with the simple background. In retrospect I think I was trying to bridge the gap conceptually between all of the work I was doing by keeping these paintings as strictly still lifes. Everything in the painting was in the still life set up in my studio so of course it was linked to the other still lifes I was doing. Now I sort of don’t care, I am going to follow my inspiration where it takes me.

Here is the still life in my studio to give an idea of how I was/am setting up paintings. Strangely, I now think the photos work really well and might someday be an avenue I explore. But for now this is where I am.

 

Rattler

Rattler, oil on panel 10″x 8″. I bought this many years ago at Wall Drugs in South Dakota, a store that specializes in just this sort of thing. If I remember correctly for a quarter you could play tic-tac-toe with a chicken in a big coin operated machine by the front door.

Visible Man

New painting “Visible Man”, oil on panel, 12″x10″ . This painting will be in my upcoming show at the DCCA. Come out if you can make it, the opening reception is on December 7th from 6-9.

 

Nocturne… re-done

Here is another painting that I have decided to go back into and change, hopefully for the better. This painting is “Nocturne” 38″x 40″ oil on panel. My experience with “Rocket Pops” convinced me that I needed to think about revisiting several paintings and I am really happy with the results.

This is the new version with the orange sky and lots of trees.

And this is the old version with a less detailed background.