Portland Preview

Here are a handful of the interior paintings that will be a part of my Portland show in May. If you are interested in this show, you may want to contact Lawrence Gallery Portland and let them know you want to be notified as the work arrives. I believe they will be doing pre-sales, and possibly a private viewing before the opening.

All Ten Plagues

Although this is mostly a blog of painting work, I also do illustration and design. I appreciate all three very much, and am continually inspired by artists in all these fields. In my work the three have remained very different and separate, and over the past few years I have tried to come up with ways to meld them all, but have kind of let them remain separated. I guess they all show up in one another in subtle ways. I was cleaning up some computer files and came across these illustrations. A year or two ago I had a job to illustrate the ten plagues of Egypt. At one point I had posted a few on here. Since then I have had a few people ask me to see them in their entirety, so here they are. As a whole I am pretty happy with them given the constraints of the project, one of which was a ridiculously short timeline. Coming up with fresh and individual ideas quickly for ten very dramatic scenes is tough, especially differentiating between flies, gnats, and locusts. I took a lot of shortcuts, and definitely like a few better than others. They were intended to be in a storybook style, almost children's book illustration, with a simplified "cutout" feel.

Leyendecker Book

I wish I had more money to spend on art books, there are a lot that I pass up that I wish I could buy. This is a Leyendecker book I bought a few weeks back, really nice, great prints, high quality, some of the best reproductions of his work I have seen. If you have an extra $40 it is worth the purchase.

Painting update: I have 13 of about 20 paintings done for my May show in Portland. I sent 2 paintings down to Wells Gallery in Charleston this week. Looks like I may be having another show at Wells Gallery with Evan Harrington in Charleston late this summer, which will be awesome. Our show together last year was a lot of fun, he is a really young guy, still finishing up school, doing amazing traditional work. Also, on another front, I am trying to figure out what to paint for an invitational in Tulsa this summer called "Masters of Influence" put on by the Lovetts Gallery. They pick a famous artist each year and ask artists to create a piece based on, or inspired by, the chosen artist. This year they chose Frank Lloyd Wright, which will be fun because he is an interesting character himself, I am a fan of his architectural work, his sketches are great...there are a lot of ideas to pull from!