Red Dots and Heart-Bending Art!

with Richard at his opening in The Downtown Artists' Co-Op

Tonight was the First Thursday Art Crawl here in town and I dipped down for the last hour or so tonight to see Richard's Hogan's "LOTS OF RED DOTS" and also check out the Roxy Regional Theatre's Valentine's Art Exhibit which I had a collaborative work with curator Miranda Herrick showing.

Richard has been a source of encouragement for me and other local low brow artists.  He has a taste for the imaginative and we've collected one another's work over the past several years.  He's even been nice enough to rope me into local events and warn everyone else about me and my art beforehand!

The paintings Richard exhibited tonight in LOTS OF RED DOTS took tradition from the china his mother painted with a technique where she used one small dot of red paint to draw the viewer in with the most active of all colors.  Richard used this technique over the years and you could walk through his installation and experience the ruddy magnetism of each to your eye.  At times they are subtle and in other paintings, they appeared more like a laser sight on a gun, for which I accused Richard of having a more macabre intention with the work!

Here are some great pictures my wife Aurora got this evening...
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Illustration Friday: Elephant Oil

"Elephant Oil" Acrylic and Spray Paint on Found Sign

"FUEL" is the theme for today at Illustration Friday.  I've got a brand new painting for you to preview as my entry this week.  "Elephant Oil" is a painting on a repurposed metal sign.  These pricing numbers for old gas stations were salvaged as scrap and I painted a slew of them with Charles Bennett for our show, BUY the NUMBERS which is currently on display at The DAC in Clarksville, TN through the end of next week.  Drop in and check them out live if you're in Clarksville!  The gallery is housing over 60 new works from the two of us!

Click HERE for The DAC's website and find them on Franklin Street to see the art in person!

Click HERE for pics from the installation of the BUY the NUMBERS show!

Click HERE for a stream of ALL of my Illustration Friday entries!

BUY the NUMBERS OPENING this Week!

Hey hipsters, if you're out and about this Thursday evening during Clarksville's Downtown Art Walk, you can check out my new series of recycled works with Charles Bennett.  It's a long story and history behind this exhibit coming to fruition from the materials used to the venue itself.  To make a long story short, our good friend Richard Hogan roped us in to do a last minute fill-in spot at The Downtown Artists' Co-Op in Clarksville this month.  For the most part, The DAC is a very high-brow establishment so we're gonna turn some heads at the opening Thursday!  Since we had about six weeks to get an exhibit together, we decided to up the ante with ourselves and make an almost entirely new body of work for the show involving repurposed materials with numbers on them.  I showed you several days ago a preview of some of the works we were doing at the time [Click HERE for the Preview!]  This blossomed into a collection of over 60 mixed media works to view at BUY the NUMBERS!

BUY the NUMBERS

New Paintings by Charles Bennett and Brandt Hardin

opens Thursday, October 6th, 2011 during Clarksville's Downtown Art Walk

The Downtown Artists' Co-op

96 Franklin Street / Clarksville, TN

Here's some pics from our installation of the exhibit last night!  Thanks to Richard & Mary Jo Hogan, Alexis from APSU interning at the Gallery, and Aimee Davidson for helping us get this thing up with absurd hilarity in record time!

We got a funny way of thanking Richard for getting us a gig at such a fancy venue!  He asked, "Are you guys EVER serious?" 

Richard with Alexis

Aimee and Charles hamming it up

Showtime!

Painting with The Wolfman

Today I hung out at Charlie's house where we're getting ready for a show that got thrown in our laps by The Downtown Artist's Co-Op.  We got one month to fill the DAC and are off to the races, opting to paint all new material because we looooooooooove to punish and push ourselves.  We're calling the upcoming exhibit The I Don't Know Show which will consist of all mixed media paintings, much of which will be on recycled materials.  The byline for the show is "Keeping it Clean in the Dirty South," since we have to watch our subject matter for the venue.  Personally, I think someone spiked the punch down there for us to get the show in the first place.

Let's take a look at what we cranked out today!  I'll get you started with my best effort to do a Fantastic 4 on the fly.  I picked the 4 out of the heap of numbers Charles found and that's where I got started.  We'll end up doing a couple dozen of these rusty metal number signs...

Acrylics on Found Metal / 2011

Click below for the rest of what we worked on this afternoon for the upcoming show!
 

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