More ink . . .

A number of other ink drawings I did recently. There's more. Seriously, I did a lot of them.

drawings

New ink drawings done in the past few months.

Scrolls

Another two long drawings I did. Inspired by Japanese painting.

Catholic boys confess their sins.

These pieces started out as just an itch I couldn't get rid of unless I drew them. In a way I guess they're about my high school experience: an all-male environment; raw stoicism mixed with unchecked teenage angst; idealized perspectives of God and women. They are more symbolic than literal. The shirts, faces, hands, postures, and haloes are all imbued with their own meanings.

New work coming soon!

Sometime in the near future I'll be posting pictures of new art. Sorry for the big delay between posts. Been very busy trying to get a portfolio of a cohesive body of work together. Expect new ink drawings as well as some bizarre depictions of what it was like being a high school student in an all boys school. Also, wish me luck on submitting work to New American Paintings Southern Art issue.

new ink drawings

(Sorry about the picture quality.)

I've found that the harder I work on these the less interesting they are. It's about experiencing a moment, and then when the moment is over, all that's left is the marks made on the page. It might be a form of painting "masturbation", in that the real magic happens while the piece is being made- but the fact is that the viewer is invited to share in their own little moment. I like that.

story

I miss writing!

Still-Life

Cut-out construction paper shapes
triangles, crooked rectangles, chewed circles,
laid out on plastic placemats, the kind with dinosaurs and kitty cats.
If ever there was a still-life . . .
Sitting in his favorite branch of the fig tree, the boy wonders if there
might be something else he should be doing,
anything fig wood and vine could be giving him
but isn't. Velvet viscous green leaves shading his face
from sky so blue He wonders about blue. Wonders
why his brain sees blue, wonders about the prism in the atmosphere,
and wonders CAN I BE LIGHT? To be the answer to the riddle:
What can touch you, and yet never be held? The thought sticks,
sticks thought, sticking sticks. Touching gardens,
touching shingles, and in certain moments maybe the strap of a brassiere,
touching traffic, touching couples who are angry and couples who have children.
Beneath the shade of the fig tree, the boy wonders, cracked
light reaching into the tiny corners of his face. Then a warm wind drifts-
And the girl comes and sits in her father's empty study. She lays on the rug
underneath the window. Who knows what she's thinking-
she's chosen for the moment to be an action rather than a person. Sunlight pouring
in the window and onto her body, her moment, is all she is,
just a moment. Windows warming the cold house in the snow,
and if you were in the room with her you might not see her at all, if
only because of the light. Cracked wood winter shed
and a box of collected seashells leaning in the garage.
If ever there was a still life.

more sketches

The last two are cropped to show only half the image.

take a guess

so most of these were done over a year ago. they are incredibly relevant today, don't you think?

sketchbook

haven't posted in a while, sorry

just wrote this:


Left behind, I sit and dream
of days and weeks and months and years.
Caught between now and then,
I murmur in pandiculation:
"The most beautiful things I will ever see,
will they ever really happen to me?"
The moment replies:
"Goodbye."



CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZZZZZZ.

Butch Trivette

This fella lives across the street from me. Really nice guy.
(I didn't shoot this video, just so you know.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud-tpgfWiYY

(copy and paste)

new work in two posts, pt.1

these were more experiments in subtitles . . . which are not finished yet. Each painting is 4"x5". They're all relatively small, but I've been working on them in layers. There are probably at least 8 layers of oil paint on there, with gesso and ink that makes about 10, and then I'm probably going to varnish them later, so all in all they'll each be about 2 inches thick when I'm done.
ok, that's an exaggeration, but it's a good one.

new work in two posts, pt.2

male and female

two new large-scale drawings I did in my backyard. (Sorry but the shadows in the yard made for lousy pictures.) I was playing with a mixture of ground charcoal, ink and water. They came out pretty decent, but there's a part of me that's moved on to other ideas. I might just keep doing more of these, but already I have an idea of what direction I want to go in with some oil paintings. It's hard to remember just to have fun with it, when you're still trying to figure out what "it" is.

also: chalk. and a dinky self-portrait.

new link

Just wanted to inform you that I added the website of Frank Relle to my links. Frank is a very nice guy who takes pictures of New Orleans and other such places. In the future, when people want to see what America looked like when there were no reality stars around, they will look for his work and go "Oh, they actually weren't all the same, were they?"

text collage

made on an antique Underwood typewriter, using phrases from texts by Ezra Pound, George Orwell, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and an acquaintance of Lord Byron

new work

These are drawings I did when I still had a studio. The imagery is based on graffiti and tags found in and around New Orleans after Katrina. This is the first time I started making work inspired by Katrina, but it's not really work about tragedy or loss, although that is a big part of it.
I came to the realization that abstraction and representation are two sides of the same coin, and that there are systems of communication (language, constellations, numbers, braille, etc.) which abstract an idea but also represent it. I got really into cognitive theory and linguistics for a while.

As for the mirror: If I am not just myself, and 1 + 1 also equals 1, and I am the universe, as you are the universe, then the reflection, which is not the universe, rather a metaphoric absence of the universe, is the absence of me, and the absence of you.

more college stuff