Opening this Saturday at Monster, delicious dumplings, a mural

Getting anything productive done during the Thanksgiving-New Year holiday corridor is more or less impossible. It's like six weeks are just lost to the Bermuda Triangle. Somehow, in spite of feeling like time has been slipping away, I have managed to make all sorts of new paintings during the last few months, and I'm going to show them all to you this Saturday! I'll be showing my new works at Monster Art and Clothing as part of the Ballard art walk, and there will be catered snacks, a guest aerialist, and general shennanigans all around.

I'm also currently showing with Justin Kane Elder at newly opened restaurant Revel/Quoin in Fremont. Here are a few reasons to go check it out:
1. The bar makes an amazing Manhattan
2. The architecture is beautiful
3. Justin's work is incredible and you will be totally in awe of the fact that it is all spraypaint
4. DUMPLINGS! RIDICULOUSLY DELICIOUS DUMPLINGS! Granted I am biased because dumplings are pretty much a religious experience in my book, but seriously go eat them.

In other art updates, I'm hopefully going down to Portland next week to paint a mural. It's been a looooonnnngggg time since I last worked on a mural, and I'm super excited at the prospect of working on a large scale again! There's something extremely satisfying about painting directly on a wall and creating something that interacts so directly with viewers.

Woo hoo painkiller stupor!

I sprained my ankle at my open studio last week-- surprisingly it did not happen during the dance party or pullup contest, but rather while I was walking down my hallway. My pride was hurt just as much as my ankle, and I have been sprawled on my couch working my way through my friend's leftover vicodan stash (thanks Rebeccar! You're the best!) while absent mindedly sketching out some new pieces.

I have some pieces opening at Urban Light Studio's 2nd Anniversary group show tomorrow night, looks like it's going to be a solid lineup and a lot of fun!

In other news, I recently interviewed Stacey Rozich (one of my absolute favorite Seattle artists!) for Redefine Magazine. We were both really happy with how the interview came out, it turns out we have boatloads of common interests and motivations, including a deep and abiding love of detailed Eastern European folk garb. Check out the interview here!

It seems like my work has been going in a bit of a new direction of late, and I'm excited to see where the series I'm currently working is going to end up. To give you an idea of this aesthetic shift, here's a work in a progress peek of the giant painting I've been working on for... er... a really long time now:

Interview on Proxart Blog

I recently chatted with the folks over at Proxart magazine about my work, you can read the interview here.

I've got a bunch of things lined up in the next couple months and have been locked in my studio a lot of late. Here's a sneak peek, I've been using lots of triangles of.

A more designy project

I've been working on a rather disparate assortment of projects of late and have been doing some more design-based work than usual. Here's a peek at a poster design I just finished for 826 Seattle.I had a lot of fun working in an intentionally childish style. My color palette a few years leaned heavily towards bright blues and oranges, and I made myself intentionally move towards more muted tones because I wasn't happy with the way my color choices made everything I made seem cartoonish. That said, I'm still extremely drawn to crazy bright colors (one of my studio walls is painted a lovely color named Tequila Sunrise), so it was nice to have a project where wince-worthy hues were totally in keeping with the style I was going for.

Right now I'm also working on a somewhat secretive project. I've always wanted to delve more into comics and graphic novels, and I'm making a comic book for my friend's really awesome project that you should submit to. I'm a little worried I'm not going to finish in time because I have a lot on my plate at the moment, but all I did manage to use this project to justify buying myself the complete Calvin and Hobbes boxed set as "reference material." Turns out that was an extremely unproductive idea because now I'm re-reading the entirety of Calvin and Hobbes to procrastinate on all my painting deadlines.

Running with this Russian fairytale theme

I just finished this piece a few days ago, not quite sure what's going on in it, but it seems like even more of a straight illustration than most of my stuff. I think I'm writing a story but have yet to figure out what the plot is.

A sadly destroyed fishie

Things have been a little nuts on this end of late-- a whole crew of us went to Burning Man this year and our projects took on a life of their own, so I was more or less out of commission on painting for all of August. I spent probably 40 hours making a 7 foot long angler fish suit, and was really, really pleased with how it turned out. But then on the drive down to the burn it rained for 12 hours straight, and no amount of tarps proved to be enough to protect my fishie. It was sadly destroyed by the time we got there. Its tattered remnants are in my basement, and I'm hoping to fix it back up for Halloween, but I'm still a little too sad about the state it is currently in. Here's how I made it and what it looked like before its untimely demise:

Phase 1: I took an old external frame boyscout backpack that I'd found in a free pile and stitched little pockets to insert PVC into. I used bailing wire to create a rough frame for my body, then used wood glue and parchment vellum to start making my skin.


Phase two: The skin was pretty much on, I built up more layers of wood glue and paper and eventually switched to elmers glue (I went through almost 3/4 of a gallon on this project....) because I needed it in bulk. I added a rough coat of tissue paper to start creating the colors I wanted.


Phase three: The skin was on, I'd attached a tail, and started being more attentive to detail in the patterns of my scales. Here I am taking it for a test stroll on our street, you can see the fangs of Bill's amazing pterodactyl bike (I'll post pictures of that later) on the right.

Phase four: I cut out each scale and individually applied it. This might sound like a masochistic amount of work, and you would be right to think that, but the ultimate effect when the fish was lit (did I mention that the whole fish is a lantern? Like I said, I got a little carried away) was totally worth it.

Phase five: Late stage test run. Fins and flippers are on, wiffle ball eyes are applied.

Phase 6: Testing my fangs! Bill and Andy and I all hand soldered all the LEDs for our costumes. Later we discovered that there are basically LED christmas tree lights that one can buy that would have made out lives about a million times easier, but we became pretty damn adept with our soldering by the end of it, so I'm actually fairly happy we went the labor intensive route.

And this, my friends, is the final product with little dangly front light and all. To tell you the truth looking at this picture makes me a little sad. Sigh. Oh well! I will fix it for Halloween and it will have its moment to shine (quite literally).

I have a few other random things I've been working on of late. I was going to post them now but all this talk of my fish has left me wanting/needing a beer.