Friscolating Dusk Light

Dawn and Dusk 36x36

This is definitely a circle. I suppose you're inside of it and looking at it from the edge. But if it were rotated 90 degrees on the x axis it would look like a circle.

This is the first time I've ever used spray paint on one of these stripe paintings. It was nerve racking, let me tell you. But now I have twinkly stars in my night sky!

This painting was created as a wedding gift for my friends Christopher and Katie Aldridge.

BOB ROSS FORCED TO EAT OWN HEART OUT!

Our Secret Clouds (...and if you tell anyone those clouds are there...) 30x20

I really love this painting. It represents so much. I branched out in so many new ways with the techniques I was using. I really went wild with my restrictions, giving myself more and more allowances to be suggestive of the different details of the landscape. This painting is not a circle, unfortunately.

It also has some water damage at the top right. Not sure what that could be. It did rain a few times over Christmas, which marked the inception of this painting. The color palette of the ground reminds me of Central America.

The title is a little mysterious. It's a triple reference. This painting was not going so well in my eyes from the get go. But my friends, Devon and Nico, convinced me to keep working on it. I'm so glad I did.

One reference is to The Family Guy, for Devon. And from that starting point, it's a Bob Ross reference because I allowed myself to cheat my own method a little bit and use techniques, normally forbidden, to create a real 'landscape' look with mountains, and clouds, and the like.

But it's also a secret reference.

Checking The Boat Listings

Listing Boat 60x48

Of all the churning random hearts
Under the sun
Eventually fading into night,
These two are opening now
As we lie, I touch you
Under fuller light.

Girl, if you're a seascape
I'm a listing boat, for the thing carries every hope.
I invest in a single light.
The choice is yours to be loved
Come away from an emptier boat.

-The Shins

Don't mean to be trite by posting a bunch of shins lyrics, but I really did get the name from this song. I love the melody of the verse right at the moment that James Mercer sings the lyrics "I'm a listing boat." There was resonance in that combination for me. Hard to say why. But this painting looks like that lyric and melody sound together. Combined, there's a multidimensional sensory experience, I guess. Maybe hearing the sound of the melody with the meaning of the lyrics, whilst staring at my own painting is similar to what synaesthetics experience. WHO KNOWS? Tell me that. Who knows?

I'll tell you what, when my friend Brian Hudson and I rode our bikes to Portland, OR, we rode right by James Mercer's house, which used to belong to Elliott Smith...purportedly, anyway. Yes we sure did.

What luck?

Happy Accident (rain in the desert) 30x20

This painting is cyclic in may ways, like all of the striped paintings that I do. It is a dessert landscape at dusk, that is shortly about to receive some random rain. Like money from someone rich..."mmmm...money...mmm....double money." It screams, "there's always hope, even in the bleakest of circumstances," etc. But seriously, I endeavored to create the mood of serendipity.

I went over the tape a little on each layer of the sky in order to suggest rain beginning to fall from the clouds, delineated by the edge of the tape. The the 'ground' layers share alternating angled brush strokes to create a sense of slope for the dunes. I'm considering dropping the tape thing altogether, though. I'd like to just go free hand. But a part of me likes the restriction of tape, and the random fractal-esque patterns the water and paint create under it. I just don't know. Which means it's time to experiment.