Sorry for the lack of posts, I am in El Salvador eating mangoes and playing in waterfalls

Title pretty much says all. I brought some sketchbooks, but to be perfectly honest I haven{t really drawn a thing, I{ve been too busy sitting in hammocks and eating lots of avocados and jumping in various waterfalls, lakes and beaches. I{ll try to draw tropical things when I get back.

I'm featured on Illustrativo!

I submitted a piece a while back to my absolute-most-favorite-in-the-whole-wide-world illustration blog and this morning I was pleasantly surprised to sit down with my coffee and open my inbox to see my piece featured.

Thanks for coming out to the show

Hey everyone,
Thanks for coming out for the super fun show at Urban Light Studios, I had a great time and met a bunch of really awesome artists! Bherd Studios had a super fun group show up featuring John Osgood, PaperMarbles, and Jeremy Gregory (I really, really wanted to art barter with him, I love his stuff! He draws great whiskers.), and I got to have super nerdy conversations about tiny paintbrushes and paper weight.
The Phinneywood blog had a nice picture and a mention of the show, and Redefine Magazine also wrote a little bit about it.

Here are a few pictures of the opening:

Solo show tomorrow night!

Come on by! I just finished hanging everything and am super pleased with how it all came together. Tomorrow, Friday March 12th, Urban Light Studios @ 8537 Greenwood Ave North, 6-10ishpm, drinks and live music and giant taxidermed lion provided.

The Censored Garden

I came across this piece by Taravat Talepasand and haven't been able to get it out of my head.

A few new pieces

I'm only posting a few things because I want the pieces for this Friday's show to be a surprise, but here are few recently completely paintings.

Death Bear

I'm generally not a huge fan of a lot of performance art, but I really love this project. Maybe it's because I'm very interested in memory and the obsolescence of emotions, but it might also just be because I have a thing for people with animals (or boats!) on their heads.

Organization and collection a day

There is huge divide between how organized I would like to be and how organized I actually am. I'm actually very responsible and good with deadlines, and this sometimes leaves people with the mistaken impression that I have some sort of methodical, efficient system for how I work. Heh. Not true. I tend to make 3 times as much mess as a normal human being whenever I make anything. I clean up when I'm done, but the work in progress state is a little ridiculous. My drafting table is the size of a small country, and I manage to leave the whole thing looking like the victim of a very colorful apocalypse.
I'd like to be someone who keeps my brushes meticulously arranged according to size, and who keeps detailed notes of the ratios of paint I mix so that I can recreate specific colors. I would love to finish one thing before I start the next and neatly put things back where they belong. I am sure that organized artist exists somewhere deep down inside of me, but she seems to only appear in sporadic, slightly manic bursts of cleaning and rearranging that, for all their good intentions, invariably lapse quickly back into chaos.
In spite of my inability to maintain any lasting sense of organization, I often procrastinate by organizing things that don't really need to be organized. My favorite form of procrastination is arranging all my supplies according to color. I have a little shelf for all my paints, and when I'm not getting much done, I group them into color families to give myself a corporeal sense of accomplishment. There is nothing that I find more satisfying than getting a brand new set of paints or colored pencils where everything is shiny and clean and perfectly arranged in a color spectrum. I almost hesitate to use new supplies because I know they'll never be that pretty again! I stumbled across this blog and it really spoke to the organized, slightly OCD artist that lives somewhere deep, deep beneath my veneer of chaos. I love these little collections, they are like sushi for the eyes: each little piece is self contained, but the arrangement of the whole is so visually satisfying that these collections become so much more than the sum of their parts. I kind of want to wallpaper my studio in these!

Open studio coming up this Friday, solo show the following Friday

I'm currently sitting at my kitchen table surrounded by massive piles of mat board and picture frames. Go go gadget framing party! Gasworks Gallery is having its quarterly open studio party this Friday, March 5th from 8-10pm. I'll be opening up my cozy little workspace and letting everyone take a peek at what I've been making. Come check out the open studio, our gallery is home to 20+ artists working in a variety of mediums, and there should be a lot of neat work to peruse and interesting people to meet. Gasworks Gallery is located at 3815 4th Avenue NE, right across the street from Ivar's, and my studio is in the lower lever all the way at the end of the very, very long hallway.
More info: www.gasworksgallery.com

I also have a solo show coming up next Friday, March 12th, at Urban Light Studios in Greenwood. I'm very, very excited about this show for a few different reasons. First, I will be covering 56 feet of wall space! As most of you know, I tend to work pretty small (it might be more accurate to say almost masochistically small): at first I was a little daunted by the prospect of filling such a large space, but I work well with deadlines and have been an extremely industrious panda and will be showing 15 completely new works from the last 3 months!
Secondly, Urban Light Studios is an awesome venue. The gallery is part of the Greenwood Collective, and the space includes (but is not limited to):

-a giant taxidermed lion!
-a room carpeted in astro turf!
-a room made from the log cabin set of the TV show Northern Exposure!

I strongly suggest you come check it out, the Greenwood Collective is also home to Bherd Studios, and they'll be hosting an opening as well. More info:
www.urbanlightstudios.com
www.greenwoodcollective.com

This one is giant. Relatively speaking.

You know you've been working too small when something that's about 12"x16" seems enormous.