This little water color is of a flower that grew from a bush on the side of my house. This is an enormous bush that has some really sweet flowers and attracts humming birds. There is so much breath-taking nature around us up here in Santa Barbara that I haven't really been very compelled to paint. Why bother? But it was nice to get out the colors and do a little painting this afternoon.
This is a commissioned portrait. What a treat to be able to paint the best masseuse in San Diego! This was my first treatment of the subject, utilizing a variety of water media and acrylic glazes. However, I may develop other works based on the studies that I completed while still living in San Diego.
This is the second of two large paintings (40" x 50") that I completed for the lobby of Flood. The colors are earthy greens with streams of a rich and vibrant red. I was asked to use a high gloss technique that I had been spotted in my earlier works. Such a reflective shine makes for a really attractive painting that is difficult to photograph. That is why it is shown from the side.
This painting is from a very strategic modeling session. My wife and I planned out each pose based on our favorite figurative paintings throughout art history. This pose was taken from The Toilet of Venus ( aka 'The Rokeby Venus') by Diego Velasquez (1599 - 1660), 337 years before I painted this!
This painting marked an important event in my progress as an artist. It was during the initial stages of this painting that I bumped the coffee table, knocking a large brush loaded with red oil paint onto our cream colored rug. At that moment I realized this would be the last oil (large) painting that I could do while we live in this little apartment. But it looks great hanging on the wall above our dinner table.
I have been a passionate Jazz aficionado since I was about 15 years old. This was one of my very first oil paintings (when I only had four tubes of paint and one brush). I chose to paint a candid portrait of young Charlie "Yardbird" Parker. The portrait seemed to convey an eager expectation of things to come: of greatness just waiting to be unleashed onto an unsuspecting world. His expression captures how I felt about painting at the time, the skin folded over his mouth came from just experimenting with the smoothness of oil paint, but it is also symbolic of frustrated (inhibited) communication: a theme in the art of most teens.
Outdoor painting is a longstanding tradition that many painters have excelled in. This was a painting that I did outside of the studio that I lived in for a short period (after college). It was a completely natural surrounding and I was able to make many observations of the rose bush that grew on the wall outside my front door. This painting is my most successful (and only surviving) record of those (flowers and vegetation) observations. The number 624 represented a date that was significant to me at the time, and I thought that it produced a very trendy look. This painting hung in 'Fuel for Your World' for several years. It is now held in a private collection.
This painting has an interesting story. I do not remember how the painting was started, or what I had originally painted on this canvas. However, at one point I had painted a portrait of a Canadian missionary whom i had met in Guadalajara. I was never happy with this portrait and i tried several methods to fix it. One method was to paint red curtains at her sides. That did not work. So i painted a large version of an image that I had drawn of Al Green (seen on the left of the canvas). It was an improvement, but still not satisfied, so i stored it for later revision. When Adam Klekowski asked me to donate paintings for a benefit show, i decided to completely re-paint this canvas with something from my past, but I could not allow myself to paint over Al Green! This skateboarder image was painted exclusively for the aforementioned benefit auction (Ignite) to raise funds for the African Bible College.
This was a mural project that I worked on while I was in college. It was going to be an enormous diptych consisting of two walls at either end of the art department office. I used to work on it between 1 and 3 am (because I didn't want to be seen). With such a small window of time to work, this painting was not progressing as quickly as I would have liked. So i abandoned it and painted a conceptual piece instead: a diptych that stated "impatience creates impotent art". It was not really understood, but nonetheless well received.
A study after one of my favorite Diego Velasquez paintings. I painted this at my home studio after my first semester away at college. Yet, this was painted before I took any University painting classes and well before I had any formal instruction on figure drawing.
Revisiting the compositional idea from a previous series with great success. This is a very large painting that is now in the home of a private collector.
A study after one of Diego Velasquez's studies for his painting that is sometimes referred to as 'Three Men at a Table'. I found this study of particular interest because it contained a woman in the middle seat, yet many of his biographers have claimed that the final painting is an allegory of Velasquez's life. Where he, as the painter would be seated at as the fourth person at the table and each of the people seated at the table represent him at a stage of his life.
Having a much tighter composition, many people like this study better than the final painting. I used to find and make use of items that other students had discarded. This sketch was painted on a panel that i found next to a trash can. The pink grid was already there, the figures and architecture are all products of my imagination.
Inspired by painting of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and (of course) the young Salvador Dali. This was painted over an Obey poster, given to me by Shepard Fairey. I can remember painting it in my dorm room, I didn't have space or an easel, so i just propped it up on top of my drawers.
One of my all time favorite Bible stories is that of Samson, a man who had chosen by God to be judge over the Israelites despite his obvious flaws. He was an extremely passionate man who lived a dualistic life. This painting was an attempt to convey and summarize his life and sorrows.
Inspired by both Francis Bacon and Diego Velasquez, this is my own take on the subject of money and the church...
This is one of my all time favorites, it has a long story about the process by which it was created. The head of the Art Department at my school said that he liked it very much because it was sac-religious: comparing the Mother of Christ to a Donut. A pastry. A sweet and tasty treat which was nothing more than a sugar coated hole. I think that this guy might have been more than a little deranged. I chose the subject matter from the page of a Catholic calender in my grandmother's kitchen. The donuts came in when I needed a background and that was the snack that I was currently eating. Nothing more.
Portrait in my college painting studio. This is a very simple portrait with lots of little details that I find significant. The shadow across the wall connects the simple composition started by the vertical hanging surfboard pointing at the girl who is lying horizontally on the couch. The visual path usually ends at the mirror on the wall that reflects me painting her (after Valasquez's 'Les Meninias'). The most unusual part of this modeling session was that she insisted on watching me (with one eye) with the same intesity as i was observing her. This event was likely to have sparked my interest in the subject of 'object-oriented' figure painting (as a harmful pattern that I had noticed developing).
Portrait in my studio. This is my good friend Jonathan, we wanted to paint a goofy portrait ( I had some very silly props in my studio, including an Evil Knievel motorcycle helmet like the one worn in 'Easy Rider'). But it was too goofy, and I couldn't stop laughing. So I had to ask him to remove it, and as you can see, it turned out to be a pretty normal looking portrait.
This was an exercise in creative disobedience. I was 19 years old and in my first college painting class. The assignment was abstract expressionism with generous applications of paint. I did not have much money at the time and I knew very well that paint is expensive, so I threw some spray paint in the background (cause I used to have tons of spray paint). Then I thinned down the oil paint as much as I possibly could (making a little paint go a long way). This canvas is about four feet tall, and it really grabs your attention when you walk into the room. People often mistake the subject of this painting for Dizzy Gillespie or some other famous jazz trumpet player, but it is Sidney Bechet, virtuoso of the soprano saxophone.
Sometimes the produce of the earth looks so good that I just have to paint it! I can't remember what show I painted this for, but I do know that it sold right away.
This was an Experiment in Mixed Media, I created it shortly after moving to Los Angeles. That place is so saturated with media it can be quite oppressive.
Cafe Rejection is a study of architecture and body language. There was a lot of study that went into this painting and it was all from a scenario that I invented while day dreaming in class. I acquired several of the elements from the artists that i admire. Notably Edward Hopper's pallet and lighting, the tense and mysterious scenarios of Rene Magritte and the empty dreaminess of Giorgio de Chirico (or any of the early surrealist paintings).
This is a self portrait from my college days. This pose for this painting was taken from a photo that I snapped on February 26th of the previous year. That date commemorated the 10 year anniversary of the day that I had been hit by a car and instantly rendered comatose. God miraculously saved me from death that day. I took the photo with that 'death escape' in mind. The execution of the painting was done so quickly and with such exactness, that I greatly admired it with. I could not help but draw a parallel from my prideful vanity to 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde.
Michael and Amy Caldwell (owners of Yoga One). I approached them with the idea of this portrait, which i painted days before Amy gave birth to their daughter. The style and pallet that I used here is the one that i later used to paint 624 with great success.
This painting is an idea sketch done in tempera. The social scenes that Degas painted have been a large inspiration to me. This painting combines his well known painting "The Absinthe Drinkers" with a lesser known portrait (the man seated at the table in the bottom of the painting). I do not arrogantly assume that I have anything to offer the works of master craftsmen like Degas, but it is fun to toy with the idea.
This is the third painting of a triptych. I tried to remove the particular identities of the individuals in this painting to move the focus towards the situation rather than who the figures are.
This is one of the series of three paintings that investigated the idea of unspoken communication. I modeled for the male role and I actually had rather long hair that was braided into corn-rows when I modeled for this. I thought it best to leave that detail out of the painting.
This was a logo that I designed for EZ Pay...
