Frolic on Franklin

Frolic on Franklin is held every September to benefit the Roxy Regional Theatre here in Clarksville. Arts and craft vendors fill Franklin Street along with performances in front of the theater leading up to their annual gala fundraiser and art auction.

The guys from Clarksvillenow.com dropped by to talk about my work. Here are some pics from this year's event courtesy of their site...



The Tuckassee Woodworkers make some really neat stuff and demonstrate their craft for patrons of the festival...

A Portrait of the Artist- Judy Lewis

I first met Judy Lewis at Frolic on Franklin (an annual arts festival which serves as a fundraiser for The Roxy Regional Theatre) here in town a couple of years back. Judy is a very generous and talented artist and it was an honor for me to do a portrait for her! She wanted her dog Harley included and I know what a big Elton John fan she is. I posted the sketch on Facebook earlier this week so that she could get a sneak peak at the work in progress. She explained that she learned to draw by copying his album covers while she listened to the records back in the day.

Check out Judy's work at her Fan Page!

Merry Clayton (Music to My Ears)

I first read about Merry Clayton a few months back after hearing The Rolling Stone's Gimme Shelter for the 1,372nd time. I don't know what it was about this particular run-through but it hit me like a tidal wave of emotion. I'd always liked the song but man did it do a number on me that day. One of the things that got me was a background singer whose name I've mentioned. Waves of goosebumps overtook me starting behind my ears and traveling down my neck into my shoulders as her notes belted out against the apocalyptic forefront of the song...



Ooh, see the fire is sweepin'
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost its way

and Merry comes in...

War, children, it's just a shot away

The true beauty in the structure of this classic song is in the progression of the chorus. In the next portion of the song, it turns even more macabre with Merry taking over (before she's just backing up Jagger, now she's in control and sings...)

Rape, murder!

It's just a shot away

It's just a shot away

Three times she belts these lines out, and each time the emotion grows. On the third murder, her voice cracks and my body explodes with pins and needles. This might be the all-encompassing thunder of an entire generation in one note that can never be replicated. (I found later, that if you turn it up loud enough, you can hear Jagger in the background yell, "yeah!" when her voice cracks like that.

It turns out that you and I have heard this amazing voice many many times before and in places you'd never expect. Aside from The Stones, she sang for Lynyrd Skynyrd (Sweet Home Alabama), Neil Young, Carol King, Tom Jones, and Joe Cocker on one of my all-time favorite songs, Feelin' Alright! She also played The Acid Queen in The Who's Tommy. The most interesting song I found her on that I'd heard a million times is Tori Amos's Cornflake Girl...

And the man with the golden gun

Thinks he knows so much

Thinks he knows so much

Yeh, her again... and a new take on another song. (And a new portrait for your fresh eyes.)

Via Colori Street Painting Festival

Well, I turned the BIG Three-OH this past weekend with a full schedule. Aurora and I attended the artists' reception at RiverFest's Tour D'Art Friday before hitting the road for Elizabethtown, KY to take part in their annual street painting festival.




My portrait of Nikola Tesla: Architect of Light placed third in the Professional Drawing category. ($10 prints available through my website)

I was delighted to win a cash award finally with one of my works in our annual juried exhibit (I kept getting Honorable Mentions in past exhibits.) This was a nice birthday touch indeed and some fuel for thought before our festival in the morning as we left town Friday night for a rainy drive. This was a bad omen considering we had to be set up outside all weekend. We kept our fingers crossed and finished out my birthday with dinner and a small road trip.

Via Colori has been held in Elizabethtown for the past three years in their historic downtown. This annual street painting festival is a charity for the Advocacy & Support Center. Folks pull together to contribute in many ways through volunteering, making art, and getting businesses and residents to sponsor artists to raise funds. Upon checking in, I found that a local couple had been generous enough to have sponsored my square and made a donation.

One of my main motivations behind doing this festival was to try something new... which turned out to be the theme for the entire weekend. I've never really done any graffiti or street art or anything of that nature. I've done live paintings a handful of times which is pretty exciting to see the reactions from the viewers wherever you're at. I work pretty fast so I gathered a small crowd when they started to see my colors coming together!

My square was on Main St. Aurora manned our tent while I headed over a couple of blocks to get to work!







It was fun working with a new medium. We were each given a box of pastels and a couple of sets of baby socks to use to cover our fingers to blend the colors with. After laying down the colors, I did some blending to see where we were headed...




The streets were blocked off so folks were getting to see my work walking both down the sidewalk and up the middle of the street. I did a Topsy-Turvy with my square to maximize the head turning! I was bent over and deep into the process and kept hearing people say, "It looks like Picasso!" or just say "Dali." It was flattering to hear such masterful names be evoked by my progress. As I was finishing up, I began pointing out to people that you could see it differently from either side and how my Topsy-Turvy series worked. The children especially had fun running in circled and back and forth looking at my work.




One of the driving forces of creativity the instant gratification of it all. You put the colors down and you get results. There is instant stimulus to you and your eyes and your ears as people talk about what you've done. I got a lesson in this Saturday morning as I put my signature on my piece and the sky opened right up on us... I huddled under the awning of a local business drenched and watched my Topsy-Turvy streak down the street into oblivion. Some of the folks who'd been watching me work stuck around to have a laugh about it. Luckily for most of the other artists, they were still in the preliminary stages of their work while I'd furiously hammered mine out in 45 minutes. I couldn't have timed it more perfectly if I tried.


The art we create has a life and has a pulse just as we do. It has it's audience and it has it's time; whether it's 45 minutes of chalk, a few weeks before a piece of street art is covered, or time taking the life and matter of a piece of paper until it crumbles. Aren't you glad you are here to appreciate it?

DIORAMA-O-RAMA! (group art exhibit this weekend)

This Saturday night at 6PM, Billups Art in East Nashville will host The Diorama Show curated by Brooke E. The exhibit will consist of dioramas created by local artists here in the mid-south. Here is a sneak peek at the process I went through with my wife, Aurora and my good friend Alex creating a collaborative piece for this exhibit...

Aurora likes to make origami and we'd wanted to play around with her making some small animals and me drawing on them. The opportunity had not presented itself until Brooke announced this unique group exhibit! We knew right away what we wanted to do and I sketched out a game plan for the box as Aurora worked on the animals we'd be housing in our diorama...


I employed Alex to build our box. I traded Al some art for a very nice shelf that he build me a few years back... he's got mad skills with some molding and wood! A little blueprint and quick trip to the hardware store and we're in business...

I got to staining the box and accents and got everything put together and clear-coated...




...and then painted the inside to give us our background!


Aurora painted her little pets...


...while I got to work drawing out the other elements for the diorama as well as some small details to collage on the origami!



With the origami sprayed down with a sealant and the tree and foreground illustrations laminated and cut out, it's time to put the puzzle together and get the light in!



Be sure to stop by Billups Art in East Nashville this Saturday night between 6-9PM for the exhibit. There will be art from many of the best local artists there are. It's bound to be one interesting journey! $5 at the door gets you in, get's your whistle wet, gets you sixteen artists, and gets you Ronnie Lee Twist and the Future Cats! See you there to check out the Origami Forest in full swing and lit up!!

In Progress: New works for Bram Stoker's Dracula

This October, The Roxy Regional Theatre in Clarksville, TN will run their production of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Charles Bennett and I will have the pleasure of producing a body of artwork to accompany their play for this Halloween season!

Charles and I have had the honor of working with the Roxy in the past with both their Julius Caesar and Frank Sinatra productions which both bore some great work from us both. We'll be creating some collaborative works this time around as well!


Here are some sketches and line work from my works in progress for the exhibit...



Embodiments of vampires from film and Vlad the Impaler...


Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi...


Count Von Count...

Fright Night Film Fest

Well, I got Con #2 under my belt this past weekend in Louisville, KY at Fright Night Film Fest. I knew the weekend would be fun and I'd be turning my head frequently when I hopped out of the van to check in to the hotel- I took my first double-take at the slashed-throat corpse on the lobby bench (in reality a girl with her head down texting and in full zombie get-up- the head drooped down like that got me though!)

Two weeks ago, I was compelled to draw a portrait of the festival's guest of honor, early B-movie pioneer Roger Corman. Corman was off the beaten path in his time. He directed Jack Nicholson in his first movie, the original Little Shop of Horrors. Later, he went on to direct one of Nicholson's few scripts, The Trip (of which I'm more familiar than most of Corman's work -thanks Ryan!-).



In the movie, Peter Fonda's character takes his first dose of LSD as a self-journey and the basis of the entire movie (the acid is given to him by Bruce Dern via Dennis Hopper, who plays the drug dealer). The film is a very mature and realistic look at the drug experience itself. One of the main reasons for this is that Corman didn't want to make a movie about something he in fact hadn't experienced. So He, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper dropped some LSD in preparation for the project. The first thing you'll probably notice about my illustration (as many did over the weekend) is the famous plant. The part I like the most is the hit of blotter in the corner inspired by The Trip. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Corman in Louisville and talking about the movie early Friday before things kicked off. He seemed surprised when I brought it up, which led me to assume that it's not one many people ask about. I urge you to check out this true gem of rebel cinema. Roger had pleasant things to say about the print of this work which I gave him. I thought it would be neat to give him a souvenir since he's usually on the giving side signing autographs all weekend.


During set-up Friday afternoon, I was humbled with the compliments of a guy who stopped in his tracks when my work caught his eye. We spoke for a minute before I realized he was Jeff Gaither, an artist who's work I've admired for some time. Jeff is a self-taught artist (as am I) who has been making his sick art professionally for thirty years now. He has made album covers and art for hundreds of musicians including The Misfits, Guns 'n' Roses, and Stone Temple Pilots. I ended up trading him one of my new Third Eye books for a nice poster print.

Saturday night, we drove down to Shepherdsville to see my long-lost friend Stacey and his wife. Stacey had been harboring a few paintings I'd left behind when he and I lived in Nashville back in 2001. I think he was just happy to unload some junk! The visit brought the artistic experience full circle seeing work I'd done almost a decade ago.

Sunday, we took the down-time of a slow day to get around and meet some of the other incredible artists who were present. I lugged around one of my new print books (holding the nearly 70 prints I have stocked) and traded prints with some of the guest celebrities and filmmakers in attendance for autographed pics and DVDs also.

Aurora with Mike Christopher who played the Hare Krishna Zombie in the original Dawn of the Dead...



Rochelle Davis (Sarah from The Crow) was a really sweet gal and had some wonderful things to say about my art!



This guy ain't that scary for being the Predator!



If you think this is frightening, you should see her when she's mad. Aurora at the Shadowland booth...