Sunday, December 14, 2008

Rock n' Roll Sketches

Music occupies much of my free time-both listening and playing- and it tends to find its way into a lot of my work. Record players and amps especially. I love how much power lies in such a deceptively simple shape. There is always a danger of making art that could belong in Hard Rock Cafe, however. It's definetly a subject rife with kitch. Oh well. Such is the challenge of any artist today, right?

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Bring the Noise






Here is a pair of posters I just finished today promoting my band, Single Lash.
They were created mostly with Corel Painter, with some help from Photoshop and Illustrator.
I think they capture the sound of the band fairly well.

Friday, December 5, 2008

Substance












I've been gripped for the past 8 months or so by the concept of "abstraction"- specifically the fact that all visual perception relies on the interaction of light on surfaces and the idea that all representaion is necessarily an abstraction. An artist cannot bring a tree into being on the canvas- merely make a series of marks which the viewer may (or may not) interpret as "tree." These ideas aren't new, of course, but becoming aware of the implications of them has been a radical epiphany for me, like a teenager suddenly realising that "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and "The Alphabet Song" are the same melody. This is why I have chosen seemingly "mundane" subject matter for these paintings- shadows, walls and floors and simple furniture. Within these simple subjects which in a literalist mindset we would identify with names like "chair" or "vinyl surface" is the abstractionist world of a lighted rhomboid surface or gradiated shadow triangle form further translated into the language of pallete knives and oil paints. These are baby steps and are likely to be interpreted as pretentious art-school wankery, but I know that they'll lead me somewhere really interesting.