Done in the light of the television.

Embroidery for winding down and thinking. It really does feel like this process makes me more concientious in other aspects of my drawing. Probably because when you draw with thread you have to go so slow, and think of every stitch and how it will effect the overall impact of the object you're creating.

Side Doodle Central

thinkin' about girl talk at the beach

thinkin' about adventures and family

thinkin' about Bimbl and the believability of his design. Should cartoons focus on the mark making/ drawing or the creation of a completely believable world? What do the rest of his people look like, yada yada yada

Zinetopia

I devised a plan to make a zine so that I could explore this sketchy playful ink drawing thing I had gotten into. And so I showed my instructor all these half baked stream of conciousness drawings and was told that I was being lazy and that I shouldn't rely on my ability to make quaint charming imagery. Now, you can call me a lot of things, but lazy or un genuine is not one of them. Needless to say I'm now doing a linear comic/ story board  and all these drawings were kind of abandoned. 

Putting them together now, I can see that It was going somewhere really great.

Throughout the 4 years of attending art school, I'm repeatedly struck by the lack of patience teachers have or their flexibility when it comes to approaching their students different learning styles. There's no joy in the process and there's an overarching paranoia that makes some (I know, I know, NOT ALL) instructors jump in and try and save their students to just place them on a safe and recognizable path. I can see it in myself when I'm helping in the after school programs at SAGA, it's hard to see those put in your charge struggle. But dang, you just gotta grit your teeth sometimes and let them sweat and figure stuff out on their own. Especially in art where ones survival depends on finding a completely personalized visual language that bridges artist and viewer.

Yeah, So I like this.

I wanna see you big.

An Installation piece for the senior Interdisciplinary Visual Art's Honors/ Juried exhibition. I'm not particularly fond of the gallery experience so I threw a visual fit and made a very large awkward man for the show. He wants to be there and be imposing, but then on the other hand doesn't want to let you in. Also, I'd been playing with the idea of embroidery on a much larger and industrial scale so it acted as a small materials study for that. 

Since this piece attempted to be made for this event, photographing it wasn't of too much importance. Obviously now I'm kicking myself for not using a better camera though haha, especially to get the texture of the head covering. But alas, the idea that he would only exist for a couple of weeks, then disappear felt very important to me. The dismal quality of the photo's makes you wish you had seen it in person, huh?

Mark making.

Friends in Suits

I had the opportunity to work with Angela Jaquith, friend and classmate, on a stop motion collaboration. She does way more ambitious stuff than this, but I'm so glad that she approached me and was willing to scale back her creative potential to work with a numb-skull like me. She brought so much knowledge to the table, and floored me with her technical abilities as well as professional set up. Just the equipment and editing alone that goes into something like this was eye opening and I'm glad that my introduction to the world of film was so well chaperoned.

My contribution was just creation of the painting and harrassing a friend to come in for awhile and put up with us dressing him up and bossing him around. He by the way did an awsome job. Thanks Casey Hart!

Together Angela and I discussed and rationalized how to build out with each tiny movement, and it was fun to discover what strange things happen when you come together with someone else. On the one hand it doesn't fit exactly with what you would ever make, but then there's this kind of magic in knowing that whatever comes of the collaboration, you could never ever have concieved it by yourself. So in that sense,  building something that required a collision of practices makes it very precious.

Here are some detail shots to give a better idea of what was actually happening to the painting since in the final version some details were lost.

I didn't mean to, but the woman in the painting ended up looking like Angela!

Even though I think we were driven a lot more by the idea of our processes working together, there's a definite discussion of the cultural dilineation between fine art and craft, the male gaze and the gendering of materials.

MUTANT EYE BALLS. 

Blue Speak

  
A very short blog project. I wanted to make this ambiguous secret space on the internet but I didn't like where it was leading me so it was abandoned after a weekend. I really wouldn't mind returning to some imagery in the third piece though.