I’ll be showing some of my art and have all my books available at two art walks in the next two weeks:

Saturday, September 27th, 2008, from about 10AM to 3PM
SE corner of Greenway & Tatum (in N. Phx / Scottsdale)
Sponsored by Angel’s Serenity & Intatto Coffee

Intatto Coffee will be closed -the owners have to leave town somewhat last-minute- but this is part of their semi-regular local Art Walk series. I also showed at their August Art Walk. It’s a very casual atmosphere, relatively little foot traffic compared to downtown (more on that in a moment), so it’s easier to take your time and really look at everything that’s being shown. I’ll be glad to talk with you about all my different books, and my art, and would even be glad to do readings if you like. I’m also told there will be live music by Amber Gaia, so it should be pleasant all around.

Friday, October 3rd, 2008, from about 6PM to 10PM
I’ll be in the “Roosevelt Row” street closure / booths area
(Either on Garfield between 4th & 6th, or on 5th S. of Garfield)

This is part of the Phoenix First Fridays Art Walk, and October is when “art season” really seems to start in Phoenix, so I expect a lot of foot traffic and big crowds, despite the downturning economy. I’ll still be glad to talk to you about any of my art, or my books, but I am definitely aware that a lot of people coming to the Art Walk downtown want to try to “see everything” and don’t want to stand still too long. It’s a lot of fun, especially if you like crowds and people-watching with your arts and crafts. I spoke to the Roosevelt Row organizers today and am told that there will be a stage set up at the end of 5th Street with live music.

I bought some interesting 4×4″ canvases today, and I’m going to try to have them ready for sale before the Art Walk on the 27th. I want to put as much effort into them as I would for any of my other pieces, but to have art that’s priced a little cheaper, probably $15 each. (Unless I do something weird/sculptural/with-lights to them…) I’ve tried to keep all my art at affordable prices, and while I’ve been creating larger and larger pieces (with larger and larger prices), I’d also like to do some smaller pieces with smaller prices, to suit a wide range of budgets. Come out and see what I come up with!

The local Art Walk at Intatto Coffee was yesterday.  Length-wise it was somewhere in between a weekend festival (two or three full days) and the First Fridays Art Walk (four hours), with setup starting at 9:30AM (7AM at home, for me) and breakdown around 6PM.  Daytime show in a shopping center meant plenty of casual walk-up traffic over the course of the day.  Nothing like the downtown art walk, which typically has tens of thousands of disinterested people walking by in a rush every hour, but since people weren’t trying to ’see everything’ and fight the crowds at the same time, it was easier to take a few minutes and talk to people about my books and my art.  Usually people at First Fridays want me to be able to explain 8 books and 10 years’ worth of art in 30 seconds, and -oh, yeah- they didn’t bring any cash with them.  This environment was somewhat more casual; people were willing to take more time and discuss the works.

Over the course of the day I sold (and signed) several books (good thing I brought them along, instead of just the art, eh?), and talked to a lot of people about the paintings I brought, and ran into a couple of old friends.  Then, when I thought for sure I’d make more money from books than art at an Art Walk (which is about the opposite of my typical average sales numbers), in the last hour of the day, I sold one of my latest paintings, ‘fibonacci series #1′.  Yay!

Between these actual sales and the fact that I didn’t have to pay for the privilege of setting up (well, aside from all the $$ we spent eating and drinking at Intatto over the course of the day…), it was infinitely better than First Fridays.  No, seriously, I’ve never sold more than a single paperback (and usually less) at the First Fridays Art Walk.  Maybe in the fall, but until and unless and in a few weeks I’ll be at Intatto again.  I’ll let you know when I know more.

Saturday, August 23rd during the day, Intatto Coffee (an independent, locally owned coffee shop which roasts their fair trade coffee daily - located at the Southeast corner of Tatum and Greenway in North Phoenix / Scottsdale) is having a small, local “Art Walk” showcasing local artists. I will be there with my art (and my portable wall, which I need to remember to repair before the 23rd. Hmm…) available for view and for sale in person.

I’m told the event officially starts at 11AM, and according to the sign on the door they close at 6PM, so I guess we’ll be done by then, right?

If you live in the area, or if you haven’t had a chance to come see my art in person at the Art Walks downtown this summer, or if you just want to come out and show your support for indie business and indie artists, you should come have a look and a cuppa.

Intatto Coffee Art Walk
August 23rd, 2008, from 11AM to 6PM
4847 E. Greenway Rd., Scottsdale, AZ
(Greenway & Tatum)

More of pictures showing, less of words describing:

After painting the black lines on ‘1, 2, 3, 4, ‘ I found that I had taken out about 99.99% more black paint out than I’d needed (above, left), so I tried to think of something to do with it.  I found that I also had a canvas in my room which I’d started another project on, years earlier, which had been halted with a canvas roughly 1/3 covered in black (above, right).

So I took a 1″ brush and painted on the black paint, covering the remainder of the canvas.  Since the black that had been on the canvas was in long, even, straight strokes, I tried to contrast, texturally, with short, curved, messy strokes - and to overlap the two somewhat.

The next step, days later, was  to draw on the partially obscured face with a black Sharpie.  The painting is black on black on black, so in normal room lighting it appears to be a blank, black canvas from many angles.  In bright lighting and from certain angles, the actual features are visible.  The image above has been adjusted in Photoshop to bring out the face and the textures and variations in the black.  The image below is a lot closer to the actual appearance of the piece, though angles and lighting make a big difference and if possible I recommend seeing it in person to really “see” it.

The finished painting, known as ’self portrait re: 2007′ is now available for purchase at wretchedcreature.com. Due to a close relationship between the two works, this painting comes with a copy of Worth 1k — Volume 2, the poetry journal I wrote in 2007.  (Please visit Modern Evil Press for details on the book, and to see a preview of it.)

First, I’m still trying to make a final decision on the title. Not, as I have struggled with for other paintings, because I have no idea what a good title would be. Instead, because there are so many possibly good titles for this piece.  So, because it made naming files easier, I’m referring to it as ‘U$‘ right now, but I’m considering a lot of fun things, such as ‘capital G‘, ‘one nation under…‘, ‘religious symbol‘, ‘idol worship‘, et cetera.  Feel free to chime in with suggestions.

So, here’s where this one came from.  After spending the morning writing this post and thinking about money for weeks and days and hours, it was time to try to sketch some ideas for a new painting.  What I ended up sketching was the dollar signs you see in the image on the left, below.  I’ve been taught, somewhere along the line, that the $ symbol had originally been based on an uppercase ‘U’ and an uppercase ‘S’ overlapping, and had relaxed over time to an S with two vertical lines through it and nowadays often only a single vertical line.  Since I often associate the idea of the “American Way” with no-holds-barred capitalism, corporatism, and since I personally consider money itself an evil I would prefer not to have to touch, you can see that between these thoughts it was less than half a page of sketches before I got to the symbol I ended up with, including the composition of the final work.

After sketching the concept with a pencil, it did not take long for me to decide that the background / foundation upon which this symbol belongs is the “grey area” that allows corporate f_cks to think it’s okay to ruin people’s lives and the world in the name of “market forces,” “profit,” et cetera.  I got out my black and my white and I made sure to emphasize the darkness of the grey, and to give the background a feeling of murkiness.  I don’t personally believe in “grey” in the way other people do - but putting it on a black background would have been both boring and extreme.  While the grey paint was drying, I got to work in Photoshop, creating a mock-up of the symbol.  This is a sort of continued sketch, for me.  I can play around with the details, refine the image, the colors, the composition.  The image you see below on the right, which I used to make stencils for creating the actual painting by hand, took me over four hours of computer work.

I then proceeded to work for two or three hours without remembering to take any photos of the intermediary steps.  No photos of the printouts of the outlines of the individual color areas, no photos of the canvas covered in tape, no photos of the printouts taped to the tape, no photos of the faint pencil line on the tape, no photos of the shape carefully cut out of the tape with the X-Acto knife (or the tiny place where my brand new, very sharp blade went through the whole thing instead of just the time), no photos of the green painted onto the tape, and no photos in the midst of peeling the tape off while the green paint was still wet.  The photo at right was taken in the first moment after the nearly eight hour haze of continuous work which enveloped my mind from starting the sketch to getting the “green S with feet” (as I was calling it) finished first evaporated.  Sorry I forgot to take more photos.

That took all night to dry.

The next afternoon I remembered to take more photos.  So first we have the canvas covered in blue tape, with the pencil lines quite evident, and then … well, I painted on the blue for the flag and the red for the flag and the horns and was getting carried away in a haze again and was already pulling up the tape from the midst of the wet paint before I remembered to take another shot.  The canvas is upside down, here, because I was peeling the tape away from the top half of the painting, and flipping the photo looked weird because of the angle.

And at right is what it looked like when I’d finished peeling the tape.  Looking good.  Dozens of paintings developing my stenciling technique over the last few years has made this whole process relatively easy for me.  I mean, I went to bed in terrible pain two nights in a row from the hard work of painting this piece, but -especially for the red, white, and blue- I had very crisp edges with very little leakage, vibrant colors with interesting variation & visual texture.  I found the result very satisfying.  There was not a perfect registration between one color’s edge and another, since the whole thing is done by hand, but that would all be covered over by the outlining I had planned for the piece.

I worked on another piece next, with the red and blue paint I had left over from this one, and after about seven hours’ drying, judged that the paint was dry enough to do the next bit.  You can see the next layer of tape (each pass in sequence covers less area, uses less tape, requires more time to draw and cut out more detail) applied, below, with the carefully hand-drawn stars and stripes traced on at left and ever-more-carefully cut out and peeled away at right.  I assure you, the whole thing was painstaking.

Finally, I painted on pure titanium white paint, careful with my brush strokes to try to keep from doing anything that would “leak” or otherwise cause problems.  Peeling off the tape at this step was the most difficult, because of all the tiny details of the stars.  About half an hour to lift a roughly eight-inch square of tape.  But it turned out quite well, I thought.  A few details that only a perfectionist such as myself could be disappointed by, which the camera doesn’t even pick up, but otherwise quite nice.  I let it dry overnight again.

The next day, after spending an hour and a half trying to find a silver DecoColor paint pen, I put the finishing touches on the piece, outlining the “green S with feet” in silver and tying the flag and horns together by outlining them both in the same black line.

So that’s the basics of making this painting; a lot of photos and not a lot of new process, since I was using a lot of old techniques to execute a fresh idea. The painting currently, perhaps temporarily, known as ‘U$’ is now available for purchase at wretchedcreature.com