DESPITE Skrillex Spoiler

I've kept the full images of my work pretty well hidden away but I wanted to share one with you because the opening date for the DESPITE show is SO CLOSE! I'm freaking out because I have to finish everything and set up a hopefully awesome show. I hope you are freaking out because you're so excited to come out Saturday night! And since we're all freaking out, what better piece to show you than this one. This tribute to electronic dance musician Skrillex will be shown at the upcoming DESPITE gallery opening.

SHOWTIME!

The DESPITE gallery show opens in less than a week! Hope to see you all there!

Gallery Opening Dates

Hello again! Happy belated holidays from DESPITE, hope you all made a safe transition to the new year. This week has been eventful! It is warm enough outside to get rowdy with the spray paint again and I'm working on a new 4 foot by 4 foot beast of a painting that will surely turn some heads and stir up some political controversy. Doing my part to bring some change.

In other exciting news... the upcoming DESPITE gallery show has an official opening date and time! Check those out below and watch for posters if you are in the Walla Walla area. Hope to see you there!

The image below is the official 8.5x11 DESPITE poster. Feel free to right-click-save-as and do with it as you see fit, as long as that activity promotes the show and you don't stretch the image, resize responsibly! Also, I take no responsibility for your actions if you happen to do something illegal and get caught. You're on your own. Now go get 'em!

A Change of Seasons, Change of Pace, Change of Format

It wants to be winter here in the Northwest. I've been doing a lot of painting outside because the pieces are so big and I need a lot of ventilation when I use spray paint. Since Friday morning it has been to cold for painting outside to be a reasonable option. That puts me in a situation. I need to continue making pieces, but can't do much indoors... or so I thought. I visited a show of one of my art professors this weekend and was inspired by the smaller format pieces that mimicked the usual large work. I happen to have a stash of dense cardboard, the backing from pads of drawing paper, and today I saw a use for it. I primed to boards and brushed two base coats of solid yellow onto them. Then I used stencils and spray paint (ever so conservatively, we're inside remember). I am happy with the results, and the apartment doesn't smell to bad...

Getting Final

There comes a point when you can't put something off any longer. I've reached that point. My senior project presentation is next week, my gallery show has a ballpark date, and finals are rearing their ugly head. Its time to get things done! I spent this morning getting my presentation ready. Printing went well, surprisingly, and things are looking good. The gallery show is tentatively going to open in the middle of February and run until the middle of March. Leaves me plenty of time to get a few more pieces done. In the meantime, here is a sneak peak at one of my favorite pieces. The whole piece measures 4 feet by 6 feet and is pretty striking. It is also the source of the DESPITE eye logo. Enjoy!

DESPITE

Projecting and Collaging

Its cold outside! Pretty sure that there is a recommended lowest temperature for spray paint use, and we're below it. Unfortunately, I have to do most of my painting outside, fumes and all that... Anyway working on a really cool piece that you should see a detail of later this week. For now, here are some studio shots and a little more insight into my process... cheers!

After I digitally separate a photo into layers that will eventually become stencils, I print outlines of each layer onto transparency paper. This usually takes a bit of time, mostly because most printers are unreasonable beasts that tend to jam up, and they seem to have a thing against transparency paper, even when on the transparency settings.

Once my transparencies are printed, I hang the stencil paper on the wall and project the image onto it with this ancient piece of equipment. Using the projector and transparencies allows me to size the image more freely, and cuts way down on wasted paper and ink because I'm only printing outlines on a few sheets, rather than huge sheets with whole stencils.

I was ripping apart an Interior Design magazine the other day for a collage assignment, and found these pages with work by Shepard Fairey. His work has been a major inspiration for me so I was excited to find it in a random magazine. Definitely worthy of being saved on the studio wall. On the right is a stencil I made that shows up in my work sometimes.

Here is one of those times! I've been doing some mixed media work on canvases, collage, paint, stencils, marker, and some block prints. Its messy and confused, but I like it. This is a detail of one where the eye stencil really worked well.

Another detail of a mixed media collage. I really like how the loose marker outlines worked out in this particular piece. The photos are ones that I took in South America during the summer of 2010.

Details of Several Finished Pieces

Sickness, class projects, laundry, day-dreaming about the fast approaching winter, fiber-optic-cutting good-for-nothing construction workers... these are all things that get in the way of making art, and sharing pictures of that art with all of you out in the digital abyss. Some of the previously mentioned hang-ups are now under control, so here are some detail shots of some of the pieces that I've finished in the last couple of weeks.

Detail of  Grandpa G

Detail of Summit Ridge

Detail of the background printing on Understanding

Detail of Understanding (elaboration of the old Megan stencil)

Studio Randoms 2

The paint just piles up. No wonder the apartment smells like paint most of the time.

This stencil has been seeing some action lately. 

This is a detail of the black layer of a stencil set that I did of my late grandpa.

Got a pretty large piece of wood with a base coat of paint on it. Haven't decided yet what the image will be.  Notice in the background that the stencil from the previous image and some others are hanging on the wall. I tape them up there so that  they don't end up laying around on the floor getting stepped on. 

Spray Glue

As if the fumes from a heavy usage of spray paint weren't enough... I just discovered spray glue. Well that's not entirely true. I've known of spray glue for quite some time. My brother and I once threw empty cans of it into a bonfire. Sweet explosions but you didn't learn that from me. Then I used it to mount all sorts of printed material to sheets of foam-core at a graphic design job I once had. Fun times. Now I have re-discovered it as it pertains to art, and more specifically, to really clean beautiful stencil work. Sometimes my stencils get pretty complex and there are lots of tiny little areas that I'm trying to get to lay flat so the paint won't overspray underneath them. I've used pins to hold them down, but then you have holes. I've used little pieces of gravel, but then you have a bunch of painted rocks which is lame unless you're a little kid selling them to suckers at a profit. I've tried using sticks to hold the areas down as I'm spraying, but what happens when you have say two sticks in one hand, a spray can in the other, and three areas that you need to stay put? Bad news. Enter spray glue. Props to Shepard Fairey's "Obey: Supply and Demand" book and its short stencil tutorial for the idea. Mist the back of that stencil with some spray glue, stick it to your surface and suddenly life is so much more easy! Who knew. Now you do.