Illustration Friday: Floundering

It's Illustration Friday again this week and we have the theme of "Soaked."  This stone age painting is from waaaaay back in 2005.  At the time, I was doing some very low brow painting aside from my illustration.  The panel was exhibited at The Alter Gallery here in Clarksville.  It was always fun painting on found wood, and just laying down some colors to see what happened.  The process took an entire 30 minutes I believe...  After making the first broad brown strokes on my white background, I decided I had an angel underwater.

"Floundering" acrylic and metallic marker on found wood panel

[Click here for a stream of ALL of this year's Illustration Friday entries!]

Trade and Barter

I'm an art lover- I have been since I was young, which is probably one of the oldest driving forces behind my creativity.  I own dozens of artworks from everywhere you can imagine.  Most of the artwork and prints I have come from trading my art for something I fall in love with.  Here's some of the great creative works which have found a home with me through trade...

Jeff Bertrand is a low brow artist out of Nashville who paints on all sorts of wild surfaces including guitars, found wood, light switch covers and flasks.  Recently, I lent my graphic design skills by designing his new business cards.  In return, I got a flask featuring one of my favorite authors, Charles Bukowski!

Here is a really sweet book from printmaker Jesse Shaw.  I traded some of my own art books with him for it.

Of course, his is much cooler because it's completely hand made.

Jesse cut out detailed portions of his prints and bound them with a patterned page in the back to provide a background as you lay it behind the pages of the book.  Each page is hand printed from wood blocks and lino blocks

Jesse explained that these were really repurposed works because it was scrap prints so to speak.  If a print had a bad spot, he hated to just throw it away so he cut out the good parts for these books.  Each book is unique with different pages.

This low brow painting was shipped to me by Unka Chuck of the Amazing Hancock Brothers.  After seeing their macabre style and mix of printmaking with low brow, I just had to have something.  These guys gut out old mattresses and print on the casings and do all sorts of wild work.

I emailed both brothers and Chuck hit me back, expressing his equal enthusiasm for a trade.  He even went as far as to let me know he'd have something in the mail for me to paint.  What arrived was a box similar to the one he painted and printed on for me.  I did a portrait of Chuck and his brother as one of my siamese faces which he had complimented in our digital conversations.

Here is what I turned out to ship back to Texas before getting "Strutter" in return...

The brothers are known to wear shriner hats at their shows and openings.  I put shriner hats on the little power animals on their shoulders as well.  On the other side, John's hand is holding a gun.

I'm a junkie for the creativity of others... I love to trade prints and even original work so if you are a creative spirit as well, hit me up at dregstudios@gmail.com and make me an offer I can't refuse.

Illustration Friday: Send in the Clowns

Inks on Bristol / 2008

"Swarm" is the theme the good art-prompting folks at Illustration Friday threw at us this morning.  My entry for this week is a Topsy-Turvy (Click Here for more on this series), entitled "Send in the Clowns."  The illustration was made for a three-man show I did with Jeff Bertrand and Charles Bennett for The Roxy Theater's production of a My Way: A Tribute to Frank Sinatra here in Clarksville.  This was one of the first times I had the pleasure of exhibiting at the Roxy and have worked with them once or twice a year since, making original artwork for their Peg Harvil Gallery to accompany productions such as Dracula and Julius Caesar.

[Click HERE for my post on Dracula: The Musical]

Some people are petrified of clowns.  When I was young, my mother had this clown painting in my room and I was terrified of it and often laid in bed just hiding from the gaze of this Norman Rockwell-looking hobo clown.  So now I draw creepy clowns which scare other people.  If you saw a "swam" of clowns coming, which way would you run?

[Click HERE for more posts on my Topsy-Turvy series!]