Today, after 11 days non-stop drawing, I completed a large pen and ink drawing of Linda which sorta ‘marries’ my long interest in tiles and spirals with the squiggly cross-hatched drawings of recent years. I think it’s pretty successful and depicts my angelic wife (who doesn’t much mind my long hours in studio) with a […]
Crosby watercolor and ink 90 x 45 inches
When my “Sarah” drawing was first exhibited at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the founder’s wife appreciated it and invited me to create a similar life-size portrait of her husband, Crosby, a giant of a man and huge patron of the arts. They loved this portrait and it was later purchased by the museum […]
Self Portrait, painting in acrylic on linen, 60×40 inches
Today I completed something a little bit ‘different’… Looking back to the velvet paintings displayed at the 5 and dime when I was a kid — maybe they’re still up there today — hula girls, Elvis in all his glory, typical 60’s kitch in stiff opaque color practically glowing out of that black-black velvet… Well, […]
43 x 27 inch acrylic on BFK painting (self portrait improved)
This painting in acrylics on BFK paper went through several states and many weeks before arriving at an acceptable result. Here’s the final state of the painting: BFK is a very soft paper — because the tip of the flow-pen actually touches the surface, the paper becomes abraded (deeply abraded) as the tip repeatedly passes […]
54 x 29 inch gesture painting (self portrait)
Another ‘gesture’ painting — this one uses the same gesture character set as my earlier (and smaller) airbrushed “Jim”, but the gestures are slightly larger (1/4 inch squares) and are painted using the Paasche Flow Pencil, so the tip touches the paper. It’s painted on Rives BFK, so the paper surface has been abraded quite […]
Self Portrait
Another mostly failed attempt to realize a full-color woodcut. The source was a water-color self portrait I painted a few years ago. The reduction print was carved from three blocks in various reductions. A ‘yellow’ block was carved and printed three times, a ‘blue’ block was carved and printed four times, and a ‘red’ block […]
Do it your self portrait
Produced for a Hand Print Press print exchange (and summarily rejected SO unfairly by the short-lived curatorial committee) the text reads: Use a razor knife and straight edge to cut out the colored squares along the black lines. Paste 143 yellow squares over the 143 ‘M’s, 160 magenta squares over 160 ‘I’s, 186 red squares […]
64 embedded self-portraits
Here was an experiment to see if I could juggle the big image made of smaller images made of smaller images. The small self-portraits are made of 25 pieces, each of which can carry any of 5 values of lightness or darkness. This was the practice piece for the big self portrait you’re about to see…
6,401 self portraits
The image was lifted from a 1988 photo-ID. The title is derived from the number of self-portrait images used to make the image of me, plus 1 for the complete image itself. Since the image lives in a space 40 cells high by 40 cells wide, it’s 40 x 40 = 1600 cells in the image. Each of […]
1996 Embedded Self Portrait tiling
This self portrait was pretty much the end of the series. I produced an edition of 25 of these for the Hand Print Press, a print making cooperative which organized an annual exchange. Similar to 64, but much more ambitions, I was very happy (and very lucky) to keep the four color plates and one large etched […]