River Styx magazine cover

This just came in the mail yesterday. It looks very nice.
River Styx is a non-profit literary magazine that comes out three times a year (for 35 years now). You can check out their website here: www.riverstyx.org

The cover is "Crescendo", the back cover "Under The St. John's Bridge"

A bit of process

I took a snapshot of the early sketch stage of "Performance". I'm not sure that it's worth much as an insight into my process. So I'll also offer this observation from my journal on finishing a painting:

"This is how I know a painting is finished: I realise that the last substantive brush stroke I made was about an hour ago and that all I've done since is nitpick at the details."

2 more paintings

These are also recent although they are not scheduled to be included in any shows so far unless they make it to my annual exhibition next April. I'm particularly happy with the piece "Performance" and may do some variations on this them at some point.

















"Performance" oil on canvas 2010






















"Under Water no.2"

two new train paintings

So I'm putting five paintings in a train themed show in Corvallis, Oregon (at the Corvallis Art Center).
three of them will be older paintings but I did two new pieces for the show. There will also be some photography and some kind of work using maps I think. I don't have the names of the other participating artists yet. The centerpiece of the show is going to be an elaborate model train set that they plan to suspend from the rafters. If you've never been to the Art Center it is an old church and I'm thinking it's going to look pretty damn cool.

The show runs from July 15th to August 14th with an opening reception on Thursday July 14 from 5:30 to 7pm. I'll defintely try to be there.

Here's the two new pieces:


















"Time Transfixed (after Magritte)" oil on canvas 2010













untitled so far

Horror movies and Van Gogh

I have little to no press concerning my work, so I put together a little press release (only my second ever) for my upcoming show and got this sweet little blurb in the online version of the Portland Mercury:

"New paintings from an artist who's been haunting the local scene for a decade. His paintings fall somewhere between a horror movie backdrop and Vincent Van Gogh, playing with light on starry, shadowy nights."

I like it.

Narrative Art

(I jotted this down a couple weeks ago on some scrap paper while painting):

"I am and always will be, unapologetically, a narrative artist. Life itself is an unfolding narrative event. Those who think story telling is beneath the dignity of visual art have lost touch with it’s original purpose."

Some art critics are dismissive of narrative art, presumably because they are intellectually stuck in the pretentious post-modern mid-twentieth century. Or they think that the effort to imply a story through art is some kind of a cop-out of artistic intention. I should think that at least one of the primary goals of any verbal story teller is to create images in the mind of the listener or reader. Just so, one of my goals as an image maker is to create stories in the mind of the viewer. Nothing is more vital than story-telling. Stories are how we derive meaning.

Bill Watterson Dinosaurs!

The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently published a short email interview with artist Bill Watterson. You know, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes! It got me thinking about what Mr. Watterson may or may not be doing with his artistic spare time these days. I assume (or at least fervently hope) that he continues to paint for himself. Since he no longer needs to earn a living he can enact the motto of recluse pianist Glenn Gould who said the best artist to audience ratio is 1 to 0.
I thought about his painting of dinosaurs that graced the back cover of his "Lazy Sunday Book" collection, but was unable to find an example posted on the internet. Shame on you Bill Watterson fans! So here it is.
(click on the image to view it larger)