Wednesday, December 22, 2010



Red Onions on YUPO paper. I should probably retake this picture in better light...

Friday, September 17, 2010

old drawings

I was just looking through some old life drawing exercises in my flickr account and decided to post some here. These are from 2005 - 2007, enjoy!






Wednesday, September 15, 2010




SOLD

9x15 Watercolor, swans on a cranberry bog, concept/composition credit Tara Sullivan

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

backyard



SOLD
18x24 watercolor painting of the mountains in Colorado, my friend Teresa's backyard. No wonder they say Colorado is the only state Californians happily move to!

Thursday, June 10, 2010

P1060884 P1060903

Two different models, one very traditional and one forces you to let go of your ideas of symbols and draw what's really there.



These are both in red and black contee crayon on 18"x24" bond paper

Monday, May 31, 2010

Seven Strokes

This was an assignment for a class I am wrapping up from the Spring 2010 semester at LAVC. The task was to create a painting in 7 strokes or less. Here's what I came up with:

Spring 2010 Watercolor

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Judith Linhares

Just wanted to give a shout out to one of my favorite female artists of our time. Judith Linhares had an exhibit at the museum at the University at Albany during the summer of 2007 while I was taking watercolor with Emily Rauch. Linhares' work seemed so effortless and simple that I decided it would be fun to try to copy one of them as an exercise in working with gouache. Famous last words! Her work is totally complex, I assume she learned "the rules" very well before breaking them, which she does beautifully.
Here is the piece I chose to work with:
Linhares
My copy needs a lot more work before I would ever show it. For now I have abandoned that project and am working on an appropriation of this painting.

How many times have you heard that one must really understand "the rules" of drawing before you can play with them, test them, and break them successfully in paintings? The closest thing in Linhares' earliest archives that even resembles any typical life drawing assignment are the two skeletons in the piece entitled Love Letters from San Jose, 1971.

I am imagining that somewhere there is a stack of classroom work with Linhares' signature in the bottom corner - surely no one can just become so talented without studying and working diligently... right? Her figures are layers of colors in geometric shapes, not apologizing for their basic forms because even though they look effortless they are well thought out and strategically placed to create these vivid dream like realities. None of the subjects are so outrageous that we can't connect with them and what they are, and at the same time they are something I've never really seen before. Cheers Judith, thanks for the inspiration!

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Watercolor on Newsprint

Sure, newsprint is probably the worst possible canvas for any kind of paint. It doesn't work well with watercolor and is known to deteriorate very quickly. So what?



After a quick warm up with my young friend, who does not care if we paint on canvas or newsprint, I did a quick sketch of the succulents in his backyard. It feels like handwriting to me, something that only I could have done.

Spring 2010 Watercolor

It could be ironed and then photographed in better light, but hey, it's only on newsprint anyways!

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Lemon




Eventually I'm going to have to cut that thing open and takes some pictures of what it looks like on the inside, but in the meantime, check out this working paper It Is Okay for Artists to Make Money…No, Really, It's Okay Robert D. Austin and Lee Devin at Harvard made some really good points, and I am especially interested in the idea of the three fallacies regarding art and business, and to find out that this is a universal "hot spot" among artists.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Commence!

My friend suggested that I join the artists in the Blogospehere and begin to document my creative work. Here's a self portrait from a while ago, to get started and for an introduction.



This is one watercolor I did a while ago while sitting on a bench in a mall. I always thought it would be fun to do the sketches on the packages for patterns, or something like that.

sans shadows...

I'm currently building a portfolio, so selecting work to share in the next few weeks should be very easy. Enjoy the show :D