Beginnings of a t-shirt

This is a pic of the beginning of a t-shirt painting

I'm not dead yet!

Did I not give warning that I fall into a creative heap after I finish 13 Nights of Halloween?
It's like a go into a deep hole of incommunicado.
Yeah it can be a pretty dark scary place. But at least it's predictable.
I will be honest I have been painting but the challenge I set up for myself required a lot of time and effort.
I will be sharing it soon enough, sadly its not done yet.
I muddle around now and I make various paintings and paint studies.
Do people want to see this stuff?
Maybe.
But its unfinished. The internet just does not understand or forgive unfinished.
But maybe that's what this blog could be, a sketchbook to support the creative discussion.
I really don't have a place for that
Is there any interest for something like that?
I don't get much feedback so I may just go ahead and do it anyways

So what can we do with that?
I guess I should post something

Never got around to finishing this one.
I like it. It just seems to be missing the dynamic I was looking for that I saw in my head
I may come back to it
You can never tell what I will do when its late at night
But be assured there is more work coming
I am debating whether to do another 13 Nights of Halloween next year.
No worries its part of the process.
I will start to get excited and plan around June :)
Thanks for stopping by

What is inside?

I don't know what else to give you.
I go through this every year after 13 Nights of Halloween.
What next? I put it all out there. I fought my fight and went the distance.
Now it is the quiet after the storm.
The trick, I have found, is to quickly challenge myself again. To ask myself what is the next mountain I want to climb?
Do you take time to take a break and recharge? Am I even allowed that?
Did you like it? Do you love it?
Would you buy it?
Does it matter either way?
I will continue to make it regardless.
Someone on tv with no teeth is making moonshine and I rot here trying to make an honest living afraid of joining the dishonest world. Can you make a buck anymore with out stepping on someone else?
Would you buy the art if I was tan and in shape and you wanted to fuck me?
I put it all out there, I put my world and family at risk. If I was a prize fighter or a cage fighter would my worth be more?
I would make you get up and make you cheer when I won the fight. You would worship me and buy products with me plastered all over it.
I did not fight for your freedom I am a second class un-American who someone else put their life on the line for my freedom.
Is my support for the soldiers enough? Is my fight to feed my family not a war worth supporting?
Do you see me as lazy? Suck it up and get your ass in the corporate trenches with the rest of us?
Its not a perfect life but you will have enough money to buy things to numb that pain.

Am I broken? Am I the square peg in a world of round holes?
These fleeting thoughts fly through my head. They are a distraction. A conversation that throws up road blocks that get me to stop doing what I need to do.
I see the blank screen, the blank canvas
The monsters scream inside
I need to let them out

Rock and Roll All Night

I spent most of my life up until the end of high school wanting to be a rock star.
More specifically I wanted to be Bono from U2

Seriously that's what I looked like at age 19, or something close to that.
I have always been a fan of rock and roll and I spent a good deal of my life studying its history.
My biological father worked in radio during the 1960's and was working for Columbia Records when he passed way too early at the age of 30.
I am pretty sure that was a big influence on my infatuation with music.
Not to mention I grew up in a musical theater family. Lots of singing and dancing and performing growing up.
Okay so how does this all relate to my paintings?
I have spent a lot of time drawing analogies between my painting work and music and it's history.
I like to think of my work as one of my favorite genres of music, punk rock. But I have not always been that way.
I remember just recently I was showing some incredibly crazy awesome Universal Monsters artwork done by another artist to a friend of mine. I was really bummed. I thought the attention to detail and clean lines was so much better than what I do.
My friend was kind enough to point out, "Well yeah, but that's not what you do. I don't come to your work for that. Sure I like Led Zepplin, and Pink Floyd or Rush for there intricate detail. That is not you. You are my art equivalent of the Ramones, or The Misfits. I just want the raw energy, the cool subject matter and the over the top lighting and color."

I guess it should come as no surprise then that my only rock and roll painting is of Joey Ramone.
Punk just speaks to me.
Even this year with my 13 Nights of Halloween I make it through with rock and roll analogies.
I love every painting in my 13 Nights series. But lets face it, I also realize out of all 13 they are all not going to be monster hits with my audience. Just as its hard to make a rock album with every song being a huge monster hit. 13 Nights of Halloween is my rock album. The rest of the year is singles and B-sides.
Not all of my paintings are going to be "Blitzkrieg Bop" or "I want to be Sedated"
But it is a collective work that resonates with my thoughts and feelings at the time.
Much like many teenagers I never got to live out my dreams of being a rock star. Fear and resistance once again sidetrack my dream.
But I jam really hard when I paint and try to remember that not all bands or music styles are the same.
Like art you make music by listening to your soul.

Why do I do this?

Art is hard.
Art is unforgiving.
Art is risky.
Art is me at my most vulnerable state.

So why bother? I ask myself that all the time. Fact is I cannot NOT do it. I even tried.
I entered art school at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids Michigan right after High School. I barely managed to make it a year there. I am tremendously grateful for the experience because I received very strong foundation training there. It would serve me well later in life.
Due to financial issues and frustration I was able to allow the voice, the resistance in myself, to convince me to walk away. I gave almost all my art supplies to my brother and what ever was left I allowed my parents to sell off.
It took me almost 6 years to go back to school again. I was terrified. My foundation training that I received at Kendall allowed me to shoot to the top of my class. It allowed me to focus on a lot of my computer work since I was now studying to be an animator and digital artist.
Many people may not know this but I do 3D Sculpting as well.

I am looking to start messing with creating my own model reference for my paintings

I am sure many people are like, "What's so hard about your life you make art all day. Its not like you are scrubbing toilets!"

Whoever came up with the not scrubbing toilets line, I hope is burning in some circle of hell.

Yes I could also say ,"At least I am not being ass raped by inmates" if you want to paint a not so pretty picture. The reason is I worked very hard to make sure I did not go to prison. Just as I worked very hard to not have to scrub toilets. (Which for the record I did do at one point in time in my life as well as working on the slush floor of a slaughter house)

The fact is working at art is what I do to make a living because when I am doing anything else I want to make art.

I want to make art right now, but another difficult part of being an artist is, in order to live on it, you spend a great deal of time marketing yourself. I would say at this point a good 75% of my life is marketing.

What you hope will happen is you get noticed enough so you don't have to do that much non art things.

To be honest artists are weird individuals, most do not like to do self promotion. Society has trained us from a young age that it frowns upon us calling attention to ourselves. You are considered to have a bloated ego or a narcissist. I will be honest, I do suffer from a level of narcissism but I am trying to get better.

But really you have to sometimes except the fact that you may not see any success in your lifetime.

Vincent Van Gogh's work is some of the most prized and sought after work of the past century.

His paintings sell for small fortunes. But Van Gogh never got to reap the fortunes of his work. In fact he spent most of his life trying to paint through bouts of mental illness. (Diagnoses include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, syphilis, poisoning from swallowed paints, temporal lobe epilepsy and acute intermittent porphyria. Any of these could have been the culprit and been aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia and consumption of alcohol, especially absinthe.) 

That last bit was from Wikipedia. Fact of the matter was through all that adversity he just wanted to make art.

So why do I do it?

I feel I do it because the universe wants me to do it. I am a vessel of a muse.

Throughout mankind and its history it has always loved monsters. I feel my muse loves monsters.

I know this because the universe always responds positively when I make monsters.

I just need to remind myself that the muse does not always reciprocate with money.

But my Muse has always found a way to take care of me.

That said I could really use an agent or a promoter.

Because ART IS HARD!

13 Nights

I really don't know what I was thinking 7 years ago when I came up with the 13 Nights of Halloween idea.
I stole 13 Nights of Halloween from ABC Family. I never claimed it to be original and the number 13 just seemed perfect.
I had just started sharing work with the Deviant Art Community in June of 2006. I really did not have the volume of work that everyone else did. I wanted to have more in my own personal gallery to show off, not only what my skills were at the time, but to show people the subject matter I liked to paint.
Looking back now it was a patchwork of free thought. It was simply controlled chaos. The premise was simple, I paint a new painting ever night for 13 nights, I tried to keep my time restricted to an hour.
I would pull it off or it would blow up colossally in my face.
I think at the time I thought it was my best work, it looks so very clumsy and slapdash now.That said I think I had some great ideas in that series and I have already revisited a few of the images

It was over the following summer during an August vacation that my oldest daughter came up with doing a theme of Scooby Doo Villains. I had expressed interest in doing a central theme and she immediately said, "Do Scooby Doo monsters!" 

It worked out great. Themes have since become the foundation of every 13 Nights of Halloween since.

It was also a great litmus test for how much my work had developed from the previous year.

The 2012 series was a tough decision, the 1st thought that hit me for theme was Giant Monsters. 

The Godzilla movies from my childhood were such an influence on me and how I drew and how I played.

I had always wanted to do a series of paintings based on Giant Japanese monsters.

I was not confident at 1st if I could pull it off.

So I did a test. I picked a monster and I said to myself, "Let's see how much work is needed to pull this off.

Turns out I just could not do them justice with just a speed paint. That changed the idea of 13 nights dramatically. I have not held true to a one hour limit in quite some time. I had, in the past, allowed up to 4 -5 hours of painting for some 13 Nights paintings. But this was way more than that. I wanted to get an early start just in case I had freelance work I had to do to pay the bills. So I started back in September and went to work on it. I think it is some of my best work and I am really glad I took the gamble. 

But just like ever iteration of this series, it ups the ante for next year.

I think I will be up to the challenge. Thanks again for allowing me to share this artistic journey. I hope everyone enjoys the new series

Cheers 

Working and Reworking

It's time to come back down to Earth for awhile.
This past weekend at Rock and Shock was pretty amazing. As I mentioned in previous blog everything just went so well.
But now I sit in my office, in front of my computer and trying to decide, "What next?"
My emotions tend to spike and balance themselves in a weird Yin-Yang way.
So I am on guard because my emotions reached such a grand high this weekend that I may come down equally as hard. Sometimes you just got to keep moving forward. You reach down and find a way through. But there are sometimes where maybe you just have to accept that you just need a down day. The key is to just try and let the body rest and accept that you are human.
I try to take the good energy from the weekend and focus it on making better art or to take all the great feedback I received from all the people who stopped by my table and apply it to my work or my products for my store.
Its not as glamorous as painting, but it is necessary.
I am really lucky that Friday begins my latest 13 Nights of Halloween. This year is going to be absolutely epic. This year is the 1st year that all the paintings in the series are NOT speed paints.
This year is more than portraits, this is full on Giant Monster destruction!
My work has never been better for this years series and I cannot wait to share them with you.
It is always great to get the feedback, support, and sheer joy from everyone. It is an energy I feed off of.
I paced myself this year so I would not find myself exhausted and burned out.
I also had to make sure that I could do any freelance work without distraction during those 13 nights.
On top of doing the work for 13 Nights 2012, I am also finding myself going back to older pieces and reworking them.
I am not sure if this is against the rules of being an artist. But I find a lot of my early paintings just don't hold up well when printed.

The image on the left is the original speed paint from 2010 13 Nights. On the right is the more polished re-paint. It really shows up better in print. It is important to me that the prints I make are of a level of quality that I would be happy to purchase. Sometimes I cannot see that quality until I see it blown up in print form.

Its a long process of trial and error. But the good news is that I reap the benefits by going back and revisiting some old work and getting a chance to put some real polish on it.

I am very close to making my 1st skateboard print run. But that will have to wait for another blog

I just need to stay focus and keep moving forward and don't stop

See you Friday for the 1st night of 13 Nights of Halloween 2012.

I hope to share some memories of my 1st 13 Nights of Halloween

Cheers