Animation test

I made this little animation for fun by drawing 4 frames on acetate and scanning them into Photoshop.

Filling Station

"Filling Station". oil on canvas. 6 x 4 feet.

Painting 200 final, we were asked to produce a horizontal composition with an environmental theme, I began thinking about bottled water, water ownership rights, etc. I imagined a scene built around something like a gas station where water is as equally commodified a resource. Progress shots below:

"McLuhan Invokes a Shamanic Analogue"

(This is a midterm essay I wrote for the class "Technology & Contemporary Art". We were required to discuss the writing of Marshall McLuhan in relation to several artists and their work. It's a few pages so I hid the rest under the jump break.)

McLuhan Invokes a Shamanic Analogue

Prevailing Western cultural myths surrounding technological advancement plot a trajectory of cumulative “innovations” that propel civilization – and by extension the individual – in a progressively more rational, mechanized, automated and abiological direction: away from the natural world and the animal body. It is generally accepted that technology represents a triumph over nature via a body of progressive improvements on tools and other media, and while that can be demonstrated to be categorically true, any analysis of the underlying side effects of individuals submerged in the techno-industrial milieu, especially negative observations, are met with skepticism, confusion or derision and occur late if at all. In the mid-20^th century, Marshall McLuhan presented an alternative interpretation that reversed the trajectory of the previous Weltanschauung; specialized, machine-like Cartesian man was a biproduct of print technology, print itself was a detour and the new electric technology promised to paradoxically deliver humanity back to an audile-tactile, whole field perception illuminated by the image of an instantaneously connected global tribe. It is the purpose of this paper to describe McLuhan's pioneering and prescient analyses that continue to run contrary to the generally accepted view of the techno-human condition (a mindset itself, according to McLuhan, that is a relic of long obviated print-oriented sense ratios[1]) in relation to individuals working in the arts and their role in the potential elucidation of the hidden yet profoundly transformative effects of the ubiquitous experience of media.

UFO Observing Mycoremediation

"The idea of a dimension-roving lens vehicle, once articulated, was never far away."
Inspired by Terence McKenna and Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984).
Watercolor and ink on watercolor paper, 6x4 inches.

Life Drawing with Ink & Brush

Another life drawing session.

Game of Drones

 
Normalization of violence through entertainment media comes as no surprise. Oil on canvas.

Ink Doodles

Unplanned drawing with ink and a large brush on 18x24 newsprint

Sketchbook cuts

Drawing Midterm

Third part of plant painting project, this one is very pale, hard to photograph.

Life Drawing in Ink

Last life drawing session I tried using ink with brushes on watercolor paper.

Finished this painting, I'd like to go back and rework the face and the red/orange in the lower right at some point.

This project entails painting a familiar subject then isolating and essentializing it by reducing color and form. I'll paint another one that's further abstracted during the next week.