Illustration Friday: Africana in Sacred Texts

The African Masks I drew as part of my Sacred Texts series a few years back immediately came to mind with the theme for this week's Illustration Friday with "Disguise."  African culture is one rich with arts and crafts throughout its history.  Folks wear small masks in ceremony as well as very large headdresses to show their strength both physically and spiritually.  This particular mask is carved from wood and has a group of dogs carved into the top giving a crown effect I found fascinating in using it for one of my illustrations.  It was displayed at my Sacred Texts exhibit at The Tennessee Art League this past January-March.

Click HERE for my post about the SACRED TEXTS Exhibit at TAL in Nashville!

Click HERE for more on my Sacred Texts series and read about this body of work and why in the world I would draw over pages from The Holy Bible.

Click HERE for a stream of all of my Illustration Friday entries from this year.

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!]

Illustration Friday: Exclamation!

"Layer" is the theme for this week's Illustration Friday.  In all forms of art, it's all about the layers.  As artists, we start with blank canvass, panel, or paper and build our way up with our medium.  As you've seen in some of my process posts, a drawing can be more involved and have more layers than you ever expected.  Painting is no different, especially in when it comes to low brow, in which we often mix our mediums.  This painting, "Exclamation!" is from 2007.  For a few months, when I was staying with my buddy Nick after moving back to Clarksville, I had an assortment of scrap panels my friend Al was bequeathing  me from the shelving company he works for.  The panels needed some sort of priming so I went wild with spray paints and stencils before layering over it and touching things up with brushes.  Most of the art I created in this short time was very free and loose, being away from the tight confines of my usual illustration style.

Nowadays, with a busy illustration schedule, I rarely get to paint unless it's for a specific project.  What do you like better?  The low brow paintings or the tight confines of the illustrations?

(Click here to see all my Illustration Friday weekly entries)

Illustration Friday: Syndrome of a Down

Syndrome of a Down (acrylic on found wood / 2008)

This week's theme for Illustration Friday is "Dusty."  The first thing that popped into my head for this was my painting.  I don't paint that often any more other than for specific projects which call for the medium.  Several years ago, I loved to paint on found wood.  I had a couple of friends (one a house framer and one who worked for a company which built closet organizers) who would bring me scrap wood often covered in mud or sawdust.  I usually wouldn't clean the panels but rather take a Francis Bacon inspired approach of letting the grit and grime go into the paints to create one-of-a-kind textures.  Bacon is one of my favorite painters and he would often mix dust on the surface of his work with his fingers and paint on the raw side of the canvas where it hadn't been primed.  He was old school low brow!

(Click here to see all my Illustration Friday weekly entries) 

Illustration Friday: Bacon 'n' Eggs

Bacon 'n' Eggs (inks on found card / 2008)

This week's theme for Illustration Friday is "Chicken."  You can't have a chicken without the egg (or is it the other way around.)

My entry this week is from the same series I posted from last week (click here for last weeks where I explain the series.)  

Human beings absolutely love them some chicken.  You can't narrow it down to any racial stereotypes either, since worldwide, we slaughter 70 billion chickens annually, of which we consume their meat and eggs.  Only tens of millions of these are breeders and all male chicks are killed at hatching.  So we are sexually biased in our choice of the chicken we eat apparently but these baby chick corpses don't go to waste.  Alas, we turn them into fertilizer and pet food.  That's right- we even feed our animals and plants chicken as well!

It is estimated that the domestication of the chicken began about 10,000 years ago in Southeast Asia.  Today, there are more of them in the world than any other species of bird.  In the wild, a chicken has a pretty decent life expectancy of 5-10 years.  The marvels of modern meat processing have that down to just six weeks now.  Amazing what we can do with technology and world-wide demand for poultry... kinda scary though huh?    A chicken only lives .3%... that's three-TENTHS of a percent of it's expected lifespan.  To put it into perspective with that same figure and same scientific method, theoretically we could harvest fully-grown humans in just a few months, right?  Good thing we aren't cannibals.  

(Click here to see all my Illustration Friday weekly entries) 

Illustration Friday: Same Old 25th

This week's theme for Illustration Friday is "deja vu." The term is French in origin and translates to "already seen." Emile Boirac coined the phrase in his book The Future of Psychic Sciences around the turn of the 20th century. It is a reference to the compelling sense of familiarity which many people seem to experience occasionally throughout their lifetime. Deja vu is a very uncanny feeling when something about a situation triggers an ambiance in your mind that makes you believe you've dreamed about what is happening. Some say it's a simple glitch in the brain's wiring; some say it's a small glimpse into to the dormant portion of our mind which holds psychic abilities. Some people are more tapped into this than others . It's even believed by some that the feeling is us syncing into different alternate universes with different versions of our selves in the same exact situation. The only thing we know for certain is that it is a common unexplainable phenomenon which most of us experience several times throughout our lifetime.

"Same Old 25th" (inks on found card / 2008)

My entry for this week is from a series of illustrations I composed a few years back on index card dividers I found in my office. I've exhibited several of these in different shows themed around re-purposed materials and found object art. This work's character is in an exasperated state, probably after a uninhibited and uninspiring party and we get the feeling it's probably happened to him before.  The feeling of repeated disappointment led to the works's title listed below...

(Click here to see all my Illustration Friday weekly entries) 

SACRED TEXTS at The Tennessee Art League

My newest art exhibit, SACRED TEXTS opens January 8th at The Tennessee Art League's Premier Gallery in Downtown Nashville during the First Saturday Art Crawl. This show is nearly five years in the making, consisting of works created in 2006-2007.  I'm thrilled and excited to finally get this body of work into a public setting thanks to TAL curator Terri Jordan, who was very receptive to the concept of these pieces and was eager as myself to get them an audience.  

Gimme Shelter (and Keeping the Internet Free)

I was pleased to stumble across the website for the Gimme Shelter project tonight.  I participated in this art show back in 2006.  Five years later, they still have their site and all the tremendous art which was created in archival form for you to see at your convenience.  Artists from all over the world painted and drew on cardboard to raise money for homeless charities.  The work went on a touring exhibit across the U.S. and Europe, where the pieces were auctioned off.  The ones not sold at the shows were sold on Ebay.  This was an artistic prompt which I could not ignore...

One of my donated works from 2006... mixed media on cardboard

At least once a week I'm brought to a realization of the magnificent power of the internet.   Artistic projects can be documented though online galleries, time lapse videos, blogs, etc.  The internet not only gives us the power to share but to also archive our experiences for generations to come.

While we wield this power of global communication and sharing, it is in extreme danger today.  Net neutrality is being stripped from our basic rights as we speak.  We already know that the internet is severely censored in other countries such as China.  This is mainly due to their need to shelter the public from critical views of their government and social structure for fear of organization and rebellion against it.  The United Nations have placed freedom of speech and religion at the forefront of what is defined as basic human rights.  Our own country was founded on these ideals as well.

Wikileaks has brought the issue of net neutrality into debate world-wide now.  I urge you to look through the smoke and around the mirrors and focus on the important issue at hand while all this transpires.  We are the audience and will live with the outcome.  Our government as well as others in the world are pressuring companies to do everything in their power to shut down this single website.  The content of this site (however you may feel about it) aside, it is perfectly legal to provide a forum for this information to be shared.  This week, under urging from governments affected by this information, companies such as Amazon stopped providing hosting for this website without justification.  Mastercard, Visa and PayPal have cut off use of their services to make donations to Wikileaks, severing the site's financial influx which keeps it hosted and alive.  These are actions by companies which should be completely neutral in such affairs, but are making biased decisions and dissolving the concept of net neutrality as we know it. 

What happens next year when your website or social networking profile can be hijacked, investigated, and removed for speaking out against capitalism or American ideology?  What happens when you can be charged as a terrorist for donating money to a cause you believe in (but goes against what the government prefers?)  We have to voice our opinions while we have the freedom of speech and thought still in tact (in person and in digital form.)  No matter your political stance or opinion of Wikileaks, acknowledge today that governments and businesses have NO place in deciding the content you access on the internet, just as they cannot ban a book or stop you from speaking on the street, or stop you from organizing.  You don't need to be sheltered from the freedom to inform yourself and in-turn speak your mind.