3-d Sketching...

as an exercise in my metals class, we took common household materials and used them as a means to sketch out possible metal-made jewelry compositions. we had 20 or so minutes for each one, and we had to create a series. in 60 minutes i ended up with a 4 part series inspired by contrasting materials: organic and industrial, soft and sharp, etc. the series consists of a pair of earings, a braclet, and two broches. i'm interested to see how i can translate these to metal? we shall see.

Always on the ALERT

made this little sketch book with some columnar paper (on the interior) and! on the outside are some pages from the Aviation Engineer Force yearbook that maybe belonged to my great uncle? anyhow i use it for sketches and notes and life in casting.
*notice the diamond above the crouching aviation engineer*

doodles of the soul

about three months ago i embarked on what would be called 'my spiritual journey' (really i've been on this path my whole life and will be journeying well beyond my 6 month mark but this is sort of a personal survey, maybe even an inventory on my own steady process). in the beginning it had a very concrete set of terms and has since become more nebular. part of all this,though, has included these little mandalas. now, i don't know much about mandalas and i'd rather keep it that way until the 6 months are over. but at that point i will be looking back over the series, studying the way formal elements within the compositions have changed and how that may correspond to internal psyche related compositions according to the way Carl Jung analyzed mandalas. check it out, these are a few of my favorites, spanning the last several months.

You know those days where you spend 5 hours figuring it out?

this was one of those days. this is a cut paper collage technique used by Abigail Reynolds which i experimented with for a letter to a friend. I love her use of imagery and creative composition with such simple forms. check out her site! http://www.abigailreynolds.com/
i'm very interested in integrating collaging and the like into some future mixed media work, with heavy emphasis on painting... (rauschenberg come to mind much?)

final for painting 2

so this is the final i did for tim's class. it's not complete in this picture, but close. this piece was critiqued in two of my classes. what i drew from the crits was that i general paint on vertically oriented canvases which have strong horizontals throughout, like the rungs of a ladder. climbing up and yet still clarity is distant. anyhow, this painting was such a joy to do. imagine (!): thick oil paint, very particular visions of what the pallet should be, fast thoughtless painting.

Of Lily Lane...

These are a couple of my better in-class studies. the first i did as a collaboration with tim ford. he and i had two paintings going one class and would switch back and forth moving around the marks the other had made if neccessary. the second is a quick study which happened one fine day when i successfully turned off my brain and just played with paint.

What's more playful than frivilous nightmarish creatures?

i thought it would be fitting just before christmas to make a nativity.