Orange and Blue Portrait Painting, Windsor McCay, and Jascha Hoffman

"Orange and Blue Portrait"

18"x24" Oil on Canvas

2011

I couldn’t really think of anything to write about this painting.  I’m pretty happy with how it turned out though.  As I’ve said before my paintings are often influenced by early animation.  Yesterday I came across this musician called Jascha Hoffman and his video for a song called “Some Hungry Guy”.  The video was pretty interesting to me from the get go.  So I went to his website and read that it was inspired by the work of one of the pioneers of animation, Windsor McCay.  Director Benjamin Ahr used the old panels from one of McCay’s comic strips called “Little Nemo in Slumberland”.  Little Nemo debuted way back in the day…1911 to be exact.  McCay hand-colored four thousand 35mm frames to make Little Nemo.  It took him four years to complete.  That is pretty mind boggling!

So here is Jascha Hoffman’s website and video for “Some Hungry Guy”.  It’s a little creepy, fascinating, sad, and mesmerizing to watch.  I like the song too.  It will be stuck in your head if you listen to it a couple times. 

Old School Hair Drying Chair Painting

"Hair Drying Chair"

18"x22" Spray Paint on Salvaged Wood

2011

This painting reminds me a lot of my grandmother.  When I was a child she would take me with her as she got her hair done.  She would always sit in a hair drying chair and talk with her friends or read a magazine while she waited.  As a kid this contraption was really confusing to me.  Taking into account that I was only like 4 years old, I couldn’t figure out what that round thing that came down over the top of my grandmothers head was doing.  It was just a strange looking chair to me. 

As I drove home the other day I was sitting at a red light.  I looked over into the window of a salon and saw one of those old school hair drying chairs.  I was immediately taken back to the hair salon with my grandmother.  I know it may seem like a random object to make a painting of.  I often try to add something that appears a bit random into my paintings. 

Salvaged Wood Painting

"Untitled"

14"x18" Oil on Salvaged Wood

2011

As I’ve said before, I love to use salvaged wood as a surface.  For this painting I used pieces from a wooden pallet attached to a wooden frame.  I like the way pallet wood is usually really beaten up.  It just looks like it has been through a lot in its lifetime.  Being dragged around on some dirty factory floor or gouged by a forklift.  It seems to give the wood some character.

Pink Portrait Painting

"Pink Portrait"

18"x24" Oil on Repurposed Wood

2011

"Pink Portrait” is painted on what I usually call repurposed, recovered, or better yet salvaged wood.  I found it in the trash is basically what that means.  I like to keep my eyes open for junk people throw away when I’m walking or driving down alleys.  I look for anything that could possibly be painted on.  If I see something that looks decent, I drag it home and start painting.  I especially like pieces of wood that are old and weathered.  I just like the way they look.  To me, they hardly even need paint, they are already interesting enough as they are.  One artist that I really like called Word to Mother often does this as well, and comes up with some really great paintings.  You can see some of his work at StolenSpace Gallery in London.    

Blue Bird Painting

"Blue Bird"

24"x48" Oil on Canvas

2011

Well “Blue Bird” (I know I’m pretty awesome at naming stuff) is a painting I made to go along with the “Red Bird” painting.  It wasn’t my intention at the beginning, but when the blue painting was hung next to the red one, the pair of birds seemed like a couple.  The blue painting being the male and the red one being the female. 

Red Bird Painting

"Red Bird"

24"x48" Oil on Canvas

2011

Often when I am trying to come up with an idea for a painting or if I’m just plain bored, I will draw some random lines on a piece of paper then try to see an object in the lines I draw.  I guess it could be compared to finding pictures in the clouds.  This painting started off with a line that looked similar to a question mark without the dot at the bottom (?).  It reminded me of the neck of one of those huge birds that hang around the water.  A heron or a flamingo or something like that.  So I decided to make it into a painting.  I didn’t look at any pictures of birds when I painted this, I just painted it as I thought it should look.  So I guess I’ve got some kind of imaginary bird here.

 

I’ve always been interested in ancient forms of text from cultures like the Sumerians and the Egyptians.  I had also become a fan of Jose Parla and Renta’s work for a while and I really enjoy how they incorporate types of writing and text in their pieces.  So I decided to try to come up with some kind of written text of my own.  I suppose you could call it a “font” if you’d like, since each symbol represents a letter in the English alphabet.   You can see what I came up with on the right side of the painting.  This was my first use of this text in my paintings and I have since used it many more times. 

Portrait Paintings Inspired by Animation from the 40's and 50's

"Tom #1"

6.5x8.5 Oil on Canvas

2011

The more I look at these portrait paintings I’m reminded of the cartoons I used to watch as a little kid.  From the classics like Bugs Bunny to the Transformers cartoons from the mid 80’s.  Even more so, I thought of the old UPA (United Productions of America) cartoons from the late 40’s and early 50’s.  The animation in them was very simplified, a break from the style that Disney had become well known for at the time.  Many of the animators at UPA actually worked at Disney.  The style of UPA cartoons seemed much more stylistically graphic. 

As I sat back and tried to think of a few cartoons that reminded me of my portraits I kept coming back to the classic “Gerald McBoing Boing”.  The characters as well as their surroundings are very simplified.  We are shown just enough to know whether or we are on the playground, in the bathroom, or walking up the stairs.  Nearly everything is boldly outlined in black.           

I have always loved cartoons like these, and I’ll admit it, I still watch them today.  I went back a looked at a few of my paintings and I realized that my work was extremely influenced by the animation of the 40’s and 50’s.  Sometimes when I paint I don’t even realize where I’m getting my inspiration from until the painting is finished.  It is some kind of subconscious thing where the visual cues around me make their way into the artwork.

Learning more about my paintings is one of the main reasons I started this blog.  I wanted to write more about my artwork.  I’ve only been doing this for a week (and I still really don’t know what I’m doing) but I’ve already started to learn more than I expected.     

Simple Portrait Paintings Are Less Stressful

"Nick #1"

6.5"x8.5" Oil on Canvas

2011



I had been painting a few portraits and I found myself wanting to shove thumbtacks in my eyes because I wanted the paintings to be perfect.  I decided to take a break and make a few paintings with a more stripped down and simplified technique.

I broke things down to their most simple forms.  I chose not to shade anything and just put some paint on the canvas.  I threw in some simple outlines of the facial features and came up with a few paintings that I was pretty happy with. 

These came with a lot less stress as well.  I’ll still keep trying to paint some lifelike portraits, but now I know when I feel the frustration set in, I can always simplify a few things and paint a few pieces that get me back in the right state of mind. 

New Oil Painting with Old Roots

"Make Your Old Shoes New"

36"x60" Oil, Acrylic, Spray Paint, Enamel, Ink on Canvas

2010

I was at my uncle’s house for a family get together.  Which one it was slips my mind. It was probably Thanksgiving or Christmas.  I was looking through a few books sitting on a shelf and an old picture of my distant relatives fell out of the pages.  The photo must have been from the early 1900’s.  That was where this painting started. 

I had become interested in some street artists like Jose Parla, Banksy, and Herakut to name just a few.  After checking out some work from these folks I decided to make a stencil of each of my relatives from the photo and bust out some spray paint.  The figures at the bottom left of the painting are what emerged. 

From those five figures I continued to add to the painting.  I saw an old commercial from who knows when…maybe the 50’s.  It was for a shoe repair shop so it must have been pretty old.  The slogan for the shoe shop was “Make Your Old Shoes New”.  This made me think of the relatives of mine in the painting.  If you think of it, we all sort of walk in our ancestors shoes, but we make it new.  We tread our own path, but it is often rooted in the paths of our ancestors.  I decided to add this element to my painting in the text below the black figures.

The rising sun shining on the red winged blackbird perched on the branch came from my memories of the seasonal change from winter to spring.  Spring being a season of new growth and rebirth.  I have no idea if it is true or not, but I remember hearing that if you start seeing red winged blackbirds flying around that spring isn’t too far away.

The woman figure to the right of the painting holds up her hand to gain the attention of the blackbird and remind it to usher in the spring.