New Portrait

This is what i've been working on during vacation. I just started with the idea of using certain colors and went from there. I used myself as a model, but I didn't try to make it look perfectly like me. I wanted it to be more ambiguous. I haven't painted in acrylics for about a year so I wanted to use them again.

Decordova visit/ Chakaia Booker and sculptures from the park!

These tire sculptures are from Chakaia Booker's show IN AND OUT. Her pieces are all made out of tires. She shows the different facets of them and makes interesting shapes out of them. They can be rough looking and smooth looking. She made all these different textures from them. The one in red is dorothy shoes that is clever.

I like these sculpture figures by Ronald Gonzalez. They are made out of branches and pine cones. The proportions are very unusual.

This body part sculpture by Michael Rees made me laugh. Giant fingers in the air attached to feet and knees. It was made out of Luminore iron on fiberglass over styrofoam with steel tube armature.

Here is some of my Graphic Design work!

This first piece is a stamp of a world leader. I depicted Mother Theresa holding a baby. Its one of my favorite quotes of mother Theresa. "If you judge people, you have no time to love them."

I designed a poster for a jazz event at Bunker Hill, a tribute to Miles Davis. The idea is the you can see the where the head would be. The text sort of shapes the figure as well as the placement of the sunglasses and trumpet.

This final Poster is a design for a exhibit at Mass Art. The exhibit was about clothes so i made a hanger out of the text. I also dropped a teaser image from the exhibit in the corner.

I made the stamp and posters in Illustrator.

Here's some interesting posters!

This first poster is for the musician Mark Lanegan. I like how his name makes up his face and the descriptions and the glass is a nice touch. The use of complementary colors is nice.

This art piece is similar to the first words making up a portrait. The letters make up her skin.

This is a portrait of Biggie. Has a nice shift of letter sizes. The letters make up the lines on his face.

This Bob Dylan portrait is the same idea as the biggie. The words make up his hair and glasses.

This poster is for Conor Oberst. I like that the flying saucer is shooting out the name of the band. The giant person with a mask is a interesting in terms of scale.

Other Painting work!

This first thing is a painting I made for a book cover. The idea came from a description in the book. "It was shaped like a man but seemed to be only skin and bones, the face was round and the features did not have any major definition, its eyes were black and round and the mouth was pulled back and opened, she could see no visible teeth, just a back hole that seemed never ending. The darkness in its mouth felt as if it were drawing her in. There was no nose, just a hole where it should be. The thing was naked, if you could call it that, it wore no clothes and stood there, the white skin almost like powder and seemed translucent, from the top of its hairless head." (Evil Muse by Theresa England.)

This is another series that I am working on about contradictions. In short the contradiction in this piece is the idea that some republicans think its okay to own guns and kill animals, but abortion is unacceptable.

My Paintings

Over the last couple of years i've been working on different projects.

Last year I did this series on musicians that I follow. They are heartfelt moments that I wanted to capture in painting. I found clips from youtube and documentaries to get the shot I wanted. Then i painted them in Watercolor.

Here's a few...

The past year i've been working on this series of watercolors. They are done in a format like a comic book wood be done. I took fairytale stories and re did them to be modern. A lot of Fairytales and comics tend to be sexist so I tried to break some of that. I've gotten about 5 or 6 done but i'll show only two here.

Feng Zhengjie

Feng Zhengjie is an interesting painter.

He paints these woman who look generic. The color though is amazing. He paints in green's, blue's, and red's. His color's are bright like pop colors. Everything is smooth there is no texture. I just love his bold use of colors. The portraits are bizarre looking with the subjects eyes going to the side. Its like he is communicating that they are confused or even have no soul's. Eye's are one of the most important thing in a portrait because it expresses the soul of the person in the portrait. Maybe he is touching on a superficiality of society.

Cecily Brown

Cecily Brown is a Expressive Painter. Some of her paintings you can see images in them and some of them are extremely abstract. Her paintings are very fleshy and painterly. She uses a lot of color. I like how you can see things in her paintings yet they are one big mess.

Lisa Yuskavage

Lisa Yuskavage is a interesting painter. I like her work because the color and the lighting is amazing. She paints in a classical way. Her work is almost comical. Its all these sexually explicit woman and some of the distortions and scenarios make it comical. She is interested in young woman's sexuality.

Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton is a brilliant painter. She has this very immediate approach to her paintings. The paintings show the strokes. I like her washy painting style. Her paintings are also very contrasty and bold. Usually she paints stars from photographs that she is interested in. She also paints portraits of people she has relationships with.

Julie Heffernan

Julie Heffernan paints in a traditional style. The way she works is she uses images from her dreams. She uses her self as a model and finds other things to paint from life. Her work has these interesting narratives like the woman with fire hair. Woman with a chandelier coming out of her head and a fruit dress. Her paintings are painstakingly detailed. I love her use of color. She picks a spot as her focal point and brightens it up. I admire her attention to detail and use of lighting. Her narratives are very interesting as well.

Anne Harris

Anne Harris's work is really cool because its painted traditionally like old masters paintings, but its modern . She paints in many layers starting with veins and under flesh and paints lighter layers over that.

These paintings I choose are self portraits of the artist. They are distorted in the way that they don't look like the artist completely. The face looks different in each one. She shows all the details of the body like fat and cellulite. She wants to show what a real woman's body looks like. One of the paintings was when she was pregnant.

The portraits are very in your face. Her arms are always to the side so she can show all the details of the body. They are interesting cause they are modeled yet they blend into the background. The background is a flesh itself.

Dana Schutz

Drive

Boy

Dana Schutz is a contemporary artist.

She gained success at a young age. Most artists don't make money until they are around fifty and shes only in her thirties. She is a neo-expressionist painter.She uses bright colors and intense patterns. Her paintings are huge.Her work is more the idea of something or a feeling of something than a literal interpretation. Her work is very humorous as well.

Van Gogh

Van Gogh is an inspiration to me because of his beautiful use of color.

Some of his paintings make you feel ill and I like that intense feeling from the color.

This painting is a portrait of Van gogh and it expresses his troubled mind. The green color really drives home that intense feeling. The orange and yellow on his face contribute to that feeling. His eye expression is interesting because he is looking left and right. This overall effect is just brilliant.