My art gets a little “face time” in this video from Arlington TV (Arlington County Government’s cable channel. Airing locally on Comcast channel 25 and Verizon channel 40.)
Artomatic is back! After 3 years, the artists have taken over an entire vacated office building in Crystal City (over by the Pentagon and National Airport in Arlington, VA). Man what a dusty, stuffy old space. I got stuck with blue carpet but what the hey. I’m generally pleased with my show this time around. It’s another part of The Score is a Work of Art series but dedicated to bluegrass music. If you’re in the DC area, check out Artomatic. My space is on the 11th floor behind the service elevator. (Space#11-3-03-0262 – Floor 11, Section 3, Area 3, Space 0262).
In other news, we just bought a new house and are selling our old one. We move in late June. It’s a great diet! Try and put an art show together while simultaneously packing up your house so it looks like you don’t live there and also chasing a 13 month old around who has suddenly figured out walking. Yeesh. I’ll be happy to get to the beach in July.
Edit: Here are some photos of the bluegrass band. If I was cleverer, I would have named it and posted a set list on the wall.
Happy Holidays! As usual, I’m late for lofting this card to GCU in any decent amount of time this year but the link will be posted here as soon as it’s approved.
I had this idea last year as we were driving home from a weekend trip to NYC to see all the Christmas windows, the Rockettes, and, of course, some old friends. Bill and I were talking about the smell of the chestnut carts being one of the more defining elements of New York at Christmas. Unfortunately, it’s getting increasingly harder and harder to find chestnut vendors except in the tourist areas. And after doing a bit of research, we discovered that there was a pretty bad chestnut blight all across America in the early 20th century so now almost all of our chestnuts are imported.
For my holiday card this year, I wanted to create the iconic Sabrett vending cart. And for some reason, I wanted to do it in felt. I used to work with a lot of other media when I was younger and I was feeling nostalgic. I definitely wanted to get off the computer and get my hands dirty again. So I dug through all my art supplies and came up with all the ingredients for this piece. The only new thing I bought were the little Christmas lights which came from the sticker department at Michaels. I cut off the ones I wanted and used their own string to sew them on. I’m almost ashamed to say that some of the felt I used is almost 25 years old!
I scanned the piece directly and then messed with the colors, brightness and contrast in Photoshop. I admit I did a fairly quick job of it. Neither my laptop monitor nor my failing old tube monitor reflect print color accurately (I really need a new monitor), so I’m left guessing by number at the actual print color and saturation. Hmm, maybe I should ask Santa…
Back in the late 90’s to early aughts my brother, Harris, lived on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn across the street and a few blocks up from this wonderful juice shop where he took me for my first freshly juiced orange-carrot. I just couldn’t do the green stuff. We joked it was a lot like Annie Hall. Anyway, I made this illustration for him about 10 years ago or so. Custom giclee wasn’t that common and it was very expensive, so I printed the illustration myself onto four iron-on papers. I then painstakingly lined them up, ironed them onto a canvas, stretched the canvas, framed it in black electrical tape, and then presented it to Harris as a gift. Yup, classy. He loved it.
The juice shop and dress shop next door are no longer there. The street shot from Google shows that corner now to be so boring I won’t even bother posting a photo of what’s there. No flower stall, no vibrant yellow and blue walls. Oh well. Time passes, things change. Perhaps that is why art is (or should be) important.
Last spring, Cafepress offered a 16″ x 20″ canvas print including shipping on Groupon for $40 so I figured I’d try it out with this image. I pulled out the old image and discovered that not only could I not find a copy at a resolution higher than would print at 8 x 10, I HATED the techniques I used to digipaint it. This was back in my forced-patterns phase. That is to say, someone gave me a critique that I didn’t use enough pattern and texture in my work and I took them literally. Ouch. What they REALLY meant, I realized years later, was that my digital work was not friendly and organic-looking enough. Anyway, with the Groupon about to expire and REALLY limited time, I channeled my best Andy Worhol (that is to say my digital work will probably never be finished if I keep looking at it). I managed to locate the original drawing (inked as if it was meant for a comic book!), re-scanned it, blew up the low-res, aligned the paint layer as best as possible, used all the base colors, and repainted the image in roughly 5 hours.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s still not the greatest but it’s A LOT better than it was. I just uploaded it to Cafepress. Let’s see how it turns out.
