Current Work

This is a painting of my friend Nick Reid the day after a Ho-Down (hence the left over hay bale) at kingman. This is the first painting I did of one of my house mates on wood panel, which is what I've been doing ever since.


This is my friend David Klein right before leaving for a game of broom-ball.


This is a self portrait of me giving my friend Marjon a piggy back ride. She also has a stuffed piggy on her back. Elliot Block helped me take the photo for this.


This is Laura Beaton eating green tea flavored ice cream out of a pink ice cream cone. I didn't invent those colors, they are straight from the photo i took of her.


This is Dwight Crow stacking chairs before starting on his sweep and mop shift at kingman. He makes these chair pyramids almost every time he does his workshift.



These two photos are of what i'm currently working on. It's a painting of my friend Geoff Brookshire holding a creepy disembodied halloween hand in front of his face. Right around halloween people kept putting the hand in the dairy fridge so that it would fall out on you when you tried to get out some eggs or butter.

Hooray! This stuff is all my most current work! Yay current work! I'll post the painting of Geoff as soon as it's done.

Songs and Places

Spring of 2007 I took a class in the visual studies dept. of UC Berkeley called Songs and Places. It was sort of a history of American roots music combined with autobiographical elements by the professor, and the work we did for the class was interpreting what we learned visually. The class was taught by Tony Dubovsky, and it served to really help me get my confidence back after the painting class I took with Squeak Carnwath. We had to make a new piece based on whatever area of music we were studying each week, so they're all pretty small and not too detailed, which was really freeing for me. Here are some of he things I made.


This is based on the song "When I Lay My Burden Down," which has the line, "going home to live with Jesus, when I lay burden down." For some reason this made me think of sort of an odd couple scenario of a normal guy living with Jesus. I toned it down a bit and put it in the context of the spiritual it was for the painting. Oil on lose canvas.


This is based on the song "Banks of the Ohio," which is about a man drowning his sweetheart because she won't marry him. I was trying to play with materials here, so it's kind of hard to read. It's supposed to be a view up from under the water. It's acrylic with granular medium on cardboard.


This is a drawing of Leadbelly and John Lomax (sort of an imagined situation taken from a short film made about them. You can find the film on youtube - it's pretty silly). John Lomax was a musicologist who was the first to go around and record American Folk music. He was assisted by Huddie Ledbetter (aka Leadbelly), who was very adept at remembering folk songs he heard and wrote many great songs himself. If you don't know anything about leadbelly and John Lomax (and his son Alan Lomax), I reccomend looking them up. Materials are charcoal on watercolor paper.



These are a comic of a section of the song "Barbara Allen," which is one of the oldest remaining folk songs that made it over to America from the British Isles and was preserved by the people who lived secluded in the Appalacian Mountains. It's done in pen and ink.


This is based on the song "Careless Love." Though some versions of this song have been done that remove this theme, the one that I like the most deals with unwanted pregnancy. This piece is sort of about my anxiety over that topic. I didn't mean for it to matter that I modeled for myself in this piece, I just needed a model, but I suppose in the end all that stuff affects the meaning of the art you make whether you want it to or not. Materials are oil on canvas.


This piece is based on the line "If I get to heaven before you do, I'll cut a hole and pull you through," variants of which are used in a number of spirituals sung during the civil rights movement. It's colored pencil on vellum, with a brown paper towel glued behind it.


This is a painting of my cowboy boots. I did it in relation to the cowboy songs we learned about, which was fortunately right around the time I found these boots at the Ashby flea market with my mom. I used it later in a non-traditional self portrait show my friend Ivory King curated. Done in oil on lose canvas.


My friend Erin Morgan modeled for me for this, and I tried so hard to make it look like her, but I had a really difficult time with it. The photo it's based on was taken in Kingman's back yard. It was for one of the last weeks of class, which was themed loss, and had songs like "Red River Valley." I was really sad at the time that Erin was leaving for Argentina, and I love doing paintings of all the beautiful girls I know, so I asked her to pose for me. We've since sort of lost touch, which is sad - I'm lame and have too many people to keep track of ;___;. I hope she is doing well.

Old Paintings!

Since I haven't had a chance to photograph my new paintings yet, I thought I'd post a few older things. These are the highlights of the paintings I did from Jr. year of high school to Jr. year of college.

This is the first painting i did in high school that I really liked and was proud of. It's of Seth McClean. Yes, he actually was that skinny. Done in acrylic on canvas.


This is my first successful foray into oil painting, also from high school. It's of another crazy friend of mine named April Fredrickson. It's on a wooden cabinet door that was found in a stash of stuff in the wood shop at Sac High.


This is the beginning of my C-clamp phase. As well as finding those nifty cabinet door things in the wood shop at Sac High, I found this crazy huge C-clamp and decided to try posing with it. I started liking C-clamps because I liked all the old tools that belonged to my great great grandfather that lived (the tools, not the grandfather) in my basement in Sacramento, and also because of my mom really liking this Jim Dine painting of a heart with a C-clamp in the middle of it at the SF moma. She told me she liked it because it looked like the clamp was both clamping the heart shut and sort of a handle to open the heart. It made a big impression on me for whatever reason.


This is the first painting I did after my first year of college. I didn't take any painting classes freshman year, just a drawing class, art 8 and ceramics. This is the last painting I did before starting to use mediums other than terpenoid to paint with. It's a portrait of Jasper Leach.


This is one of the first assignments from my first painting class at Berkeley. The assignment was to do a "Home Depot Still Life," which suited me fine because I was able to use all the neat old tools from my basement. I think this also had an influence on my continuing to use C-clamps in my work.


This is a portrait of my friend Julia's former roommate Linda Berrera. She was a great model for both of us. The photo I worked from for this was taken in Cloyne's (my old co-op) back yard from a ladder that had been left up there for some reason. It was a really beautiful sunny day, and I also got some great photos of Julia, her then boyfriend Chris, and Linda all jumping in Cloyne's bounce house.


This is a portrait I did of myself dressed as a pin up girl, using the C-clamp theme again. I've always been fascinated with old pin up art, like Vargas and Gil Elvgren, and I thought that the hardness and mascunlinity of the huge C-clamp was a good contrast to that. I'm sort of vaguely trying to talk about gender and my self image here, I guess. Make of it what you will.


This painting is of my former employer's rich friend. I did it mostly to try and see if i could sell it to him. I didn't ever get a chance to, but I really like the way it turned out. It's the most lucian frued-ish thing I've painted.


This is a portrait of my friend Emily Brundige, whose blog I mentioned in my first post. I did it in Squeak Carnwath's class at Berkeley. I could never tell if she wanted me to have a style and subject matter already worked out or if she wanted me to experiment, but she certainly did a number on my confidence in my artwork. I decided that if she wanted a theme it would be my friends as pin up with oversized tools from my great great grandfather. People in the critique for this talked about how her arm looks like a penis. I don't see it.


This is a painting of Jasper from a photo I took on halloween. We had gotten in a fight over something stupid earlier that day, so he dressed as a southern belle to make it up to me. I was tring to experiment with painting technique mostly here. Everyone seems to really like the drips. I just thought it was funny that it was a man and no one knew. The dress he's wearing was my great grandmother's.


This is a painting of my friend Julia Wiener. I got the idea for it when we I went home with her over spring break to visit New York. Her hair was blowing like crazy on the Staten Island Ferry, and it was really beautiful. It was too dark to get any good photos that night (I tried), but I had her pose for me later and made this image. This was my first real experimentation with glazing, which is now the primary technique I use when oil painting. It was also done on canvas primed with rabbit skin glue (gross, I know), which turned me on to how much fun it is painting on an off-white surface. I mostly do oil painting on wood primed with clear acrylic medium these days, and I guess this is the beginning of that trend.


I had to churn out a bunch of paintings to fullfill the requirement for Squeak's class, and this is one of my filler paintings, but i do really like it. One of my last time painting my grandfather's tools. Also, red is my favorite color, and these tools were all red in real life. Hooray!

This blog is a place for me to post my artwork. I'm thinking maybe I'll be more productive if I have more people looking at my work. I was inspired by my friend Emily, whose blog is tomboycomics.blogspot.com. Hooray!

Recently, I've been working on a series of watercolors of people dressed up at comic books conventions. I haven't gotten too far yet. I've only done these three, plus a really terrible one of a girl dressed up as Sailor Moon. Mikie mentioned that if I made enough of these to fill a book, he could probably get them sold at Comic Relief.



Here is Wonder Woman eating french fries. Yes, that is a Hot Dog On a Stick soda cup.






These two are a set. The character here is Solid Snake from the video game Metal Gear. In the game he is a big buff burley guy, but he often hides under boxes to avoid being seen by his enemies. I asked this guy if he could fit under the box he was carrying, and of course, he could.


I should be taking pictures of my big oil paintings soon, and as soon as I do I will post them here.