I did a few paintings this Christmas as presents.  I did one for each of my roommates, and one for my parents.  I naturally waited until the week before leaving for my trip back to Indiana before starting these paintings.  I did three paintings in three days the week before Christmas.  The one for my parents was done on a 16×24 hardboard.  I stole a few idea from looking around the East Side Studio Tour and the 12×12 Box Art Show and started masking a border around my paintings.  It makes them look a lot more complete without a frame.

The paintings that I did for the roommates were both 24×24 with a 4 inch border done on 3/4 inch plywood.  I lifted that directly from something I saw on the studio tour.

I also participated in the Austin Figurative Gallery Winter Opening Show.  I have several paintings hanging up at the USAA.  During the show we did a live painting demo.  It’s always fun to paint in front of a crowd.  Usually it’s done alone.  We did four fifteen minute poses of models in costumes.  We got my favorite models, Drea and Waverly for the special event.  I asked them for space outfits, and they delivered with some great outfits.

It seemed to go well.  Spiderhouse opened the bar in the USAA so we had drinks available.  The music was excellent and we had a good amount of art up in the place, including some incredible photographs by a guy named George.  Unfortunately hte rest of his name eludes me.

I just finished a painting of a street scene of Austin.  This is East 6th Street, somewhere around Rio Rita.

I set myself up with a painting desk at home a couple of weekends ago.  Up until now I’ve been doing all my paintings on the go.  The main places I would do the paintings were the AFG, AVAA, various hobo camps, and The Varga’s House.  So I’m going to be branching out in subject matter now that I have a desk where I can set things down, like reference photos and paint brushes.  I should have done it months ago.

So what I have here is a painting from a photo I took in Montreal.  I was there in 2006 I believe for a conceptart.org workshop.  I was woefully unprepared as all I had to show off was an embarrassing assemblage of stuff on a dvd from a semester in animation school.  I had a sketchbook that was full of awful crap and showing that stuff to pros was fairly humiliating.

This was an attempt to get used to painting architectural stuff.  I’ve found the sharpie underdrawing technique works well for this sort of stuff as well as the figure paintings.  What I do is make a drawing on the board and thinly paint some general colors over the top.  The drawing still shows through so I still have the a guide for the rest of the painting.  I then paint more opaquely and cover the drawing.  I’m not too concerned with covering the drawing entirely.  If you look, you can see it showing through in places.  I’ve got to start experimenting with oil again and see if I can get this working.  I figure if I paint the first layer thinned with mineral spirits, I can do the same sort of thing.  Acrylic is just currently much easier to handle.  Once it dries, you can just paint over the top.

Here’s my entry to the 12 x 12 art box show that opens on the 5th.  It’s acrylic and oil.  I used acrylic modeling paste to make the texture that’s on the surface.  It was my hope that it would look like really painterly impastoed brushstrokes.  Instead it looks like ceiling plaster in a Quality Inn.  But, it’s covered in galkyd and shiny.  People like shiny.

It could be yours for just $100.  A little bit of Tom Britton to hang on your wall.  It’s preferable to a little bit of Tom Britton that won’t come out of your upholstery.

Somebody once told me that Marvin Gaye named an album the same as the title of this post, after a divorce.  The story I was told was that he recorded it so that he could pay alimony, thus the title “Here, My Dear”.  If it’s true, I think that’s pretty awesome.  I’m not going to do a search to try to verify the story.  Some things are better if left in the realm of myth.

So, this social life thing has been a bitch for my keeping up with updating.  No aplogies from me though.  It’s important to occasionally talk to women; not just paint them naked.  Both are pleasurable activities, sure.  Each have their own set of frustrations and pitfalls, but it is important to maintain balance.

I’ve been floating around the idea that in order to attract more visitors to my site, I may need to write about something other than myself.  This site sometimes get 5k spiders a day, so it’s being well indexed.  I think anyway.  So I need to type about more things of general interest to art folk.  Maybe the world at large.  Perhaps if I subtly work in keyword like “Michael Jackson autopsy results” or “Megan Fox nude” I’ll get a lot more traffic.  I’m not sure exactly why that’s a desirable thing, but it seems to be the thing to do if you have a website.

After a couple of weeks of doing shitty paintings, one finally came out decent.  There isn’t much resemblance between the model and the painting.  The model was actually really attractive and the painting is kinda puggish, but I think it has a mood.

I did a couple of drawings of my roommate’s dog.  I’m putting these up to prove to my friend Tiffanny that I do have a soul and can draw nice things.  Not everything I draw is demonically dark or has the foul stench of hetero-male sexual frustration.  Just everything but these two drawings of a dog.

So, I’m just gonna lay the rest of the stuff out here.  I’ve been doing some sci-fi sketches for a short comic book story I’m contemplating.  I also have a demonically dark photoshop painting to share.  So here it all is:

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted.  In between my last post and now I’ve taken a trip home and changed residences.  I’ve been busy and couldn’t find my camera for a while.  So I have a fair amount of stuff built up to post.  I’ve continued the acrylic paintings and drawing sessions.

So here it all is.  I’m just gonna lay it out here.

OK. Here’s my drawings and paintings from the last week. This is a fair amount of shit. Despite the gothy look of my latest painting, I swear that I don’t think that I’m a vampire, wear eyeliner, or carry around a vial of blood from my one true love.

I was pretty productive today.  It was one of the first Saturdays in a while that I’ve woken up without a hangover.  I went painting at the Austin Figurative Gallery from 1-4 today.  Then I went for a run.  Then I did web stuff at Café Medici.  They have a superior latté.

I may be harming the drunken artist image I’m trying to cultivate online with all this talk of running and lattés.  I’m going to have to stop before I reveal myself as the yuppie douchebag that I’ve become.  I need a 40.

So I started a new series of paintings.  They are called “Grocery Bag Paintings”.  They are called this because they are done on grocery bags.  They are very similar to the “12 Pack Paintings.”  The only difference is that the paintings are done on a grocery bag instead of cardboard from a 12 pack.  This has some advantages.  That the paintings are bigger is an advantage.  It’s a more comfortable size to work, and after I throw them into a frame, obscuring the fact that it’s a painting on a grocery bag, the bigger size affords a higher price.  That is, if I ever try to sell anything.

Another advantage is that if I go into a painting session with a bunch of grocery bags, as opposed to 12 packs, nobody feels the need to have an intervention.  Now, if anybody is considering an intervention, the answer is no, I don’t need one.  Because only losers quit.

Sunday there were one hour poses at the AVAA.  I took the acrylics and one of the paintings turned out really nice.  I think it’s the most successful painted portrait I’ve done so far.  I think the key was a fairly detailed under-drawing.  That’s something that 15 minute paintings don’t afford me.  Time for drawing.  Here’s the painting big, because I like it.

The rest are from tonight at the AFG, except one that was done the same day as the portrait.  I don’t like it as much so it goes on the slush pile with the rest of them.

This website is starting to look repetitive.  I think I need to spend some more time on something to make sure I haven’t forgotten how to draw.

Sunday after the Art Erotica I was back at the AVAA for the figure drawing.  This is where I learned some consider referring to an AIDS charity benefit as a “sausage fest” to be bad manners.  I still think it’s funny.  I’ve also made a few tweaks to this website.  I installed the All In One SEO Pack plugin to optimize it for search engines as well as Statpress Reloaded to track my visitor statistics.  I check it far too many times a day.  I get all excited when I see a hit on my site from a Google Image search for “drippy paintings.”  I also put up an icon for the RSS feed.  Because, evidently, people use them.

Monday I painted at the Austin Figurative Gallery.  Every third Monday we’ve started to do 2 hour poses instead of a bunch of 15 minute ones.  It’s nice to have the extra time.  Here’s the result.  It’s an acrylic painting on a gessoed piece of plywood.

Next on the list for site tweaks, I need to figure out a way to encourage more comments and redo the galleries.

I was invited through the AFG to do live painting Saturday night on stage at the Art Erotica 2009.  I accepted.  I’d never painted in front of a crowd before.  But I was prepared.  I had made business cards so that I could participate in the most douchebag of activities: networking.

I knew that the paintings that I did would end up being auctioned.  The Art Erotica benefits AIDS Services of Austin’s Paul Kirby Fund and all proceeds from the sale of the paintings go to the charity.  Despite the philanthropic nature of the event, I participated.

The scene was pretty much what I expected; men dressed like Rob Halford, women dressed like Rob Halford, and giant penis statues.  The walls of the place were lined with erotic art that was being sold through silent auction.  The highest bids were being placed on a print of a painting by Jacques Louis David.  My guess is that due to the high quality of the print, people didn’t realize they were not bidding on an actual painting.  Either that, or they liked it and I’m a condescending asshole.

We set up on the stage, ringed around a black chair.  There were about 10 artists, some drawing in charcoal and some painting.  Because I was one of the last to arrive I set up front and center where my paintings would be the most visible to the audience.  We were doing four 15 minute poses.  This is a rather quick pace to produce a painting, especially in front of a crowd of a few hundred people, many of whom undoubtably had art hanging on the walls.  It’s easy to impress hippies, but other artists…

The first pose was the female.  I found my hands shaking while I was painting.  I didn’t realize that I was nervous until I couldn’t hold my brush steady.  Fortunately I was doing the drippy acrylic style  I’ve been doing for the last few weeks at the AFG.  It doesn’t exactly require the precise hands of a surgeon.  But it does require steady bowels. I was able to pull through and the painting turned out ok.  This gave me a boost of confidence, and my hands didn’t shake for the rest of the paintings.

The other three went well also.  I don’t think that I blew any of them.  They all sold in the auction afterward and in a clever display of douchebaggery I slipped a business card into the back of each painting.  People seemed to like the paintings.  Despite my general unapproachability I received several compliments.  The organizer of the event looked at my paintings, said they were beautiful, thanked me for participating and gave me a hug.  I could occasionally hear comments from the crowd such as, “Damn, he’s quick.”

I took a picture of the crowd from the stage, so people wouldn’t think I was lying when I said I was painting in front of a crowd of hundreds.

I didn’t take a lot of pictures of the costumes in the crowd, but here’s a couple of shots that I like.

Here are the paintings that I did on stage.  They were taken in a very adverse lighting condition, so the colors are all wonky, but these give a general idea.

Here are all the photos I took that night in a set on flickr.  In all, I consider the night a success.  I had a great time, people liked my art and I saw some of the finest penis sculptures south of the Mason-Dixon.

Submitted for your approval, the last of the 12 pack paintings.  These may not be the last, but I haven’t been buying beer since Thanksgiving.  Only because of the calories.  Nothing to do with the stigma of drinking alone in my apartment.  If I was a thin guy I’d have no problem with drinking alone.  It’s just the extra 700 or so calories a day catches up with me.  So, until I go on another drinking bender these are the last of the 12 pack paintings.

Not to worry though, I’m not going to start using real materials or anything.  I found that a gessoed plywood board makes a nice surface for painting.  Since I don’t mind some texture in my paintings, it’s perfectly good for cheap.  A nice big pricy canvas is for old lady hobbyists who make a painting every three months.  Not somebody who does six paintings every Monday night.

In other news, I’m painting Saturday night at the Art Erotica.  Should be interesting, I’m not sure what the setup is going to be.  I don’t know if it’s going to be one long pose or a bunch of short ones.  A long one would nice, since it’s in front of a crowd it would be nice to be pull off something decent.

Here’s the video from last year’s event:

Here’s Monday’s paintings: