Hey all,

I’m painting at Art Erotica tonight.  I painted there last year as well.  Here’s a video from last years event.  Evidently I’m not photogenic enough to actually appear in the video, but I swear I was there.

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 skipped the Faster than the Speed of Light fundraiser tonight because I got myself involved in a six hour portrait.  It’s been years since I spent this long on a painting, so I thought I’d see what happened.

I experimented a bit with the process.  I first did a tonal charcoal under-drawing, then painted over that with acrylic, then finished up with oil.  It’s a pretty good process, but I should have stopped after my initial glazing with the oil.  The features were much stronger in the acrylic under-painting.  Although you wouldn’t know it from my painting the model was actually very beautiful.

I also did a quick photoshoppery to it, to see if I could improve it.

I contributed a couple of paintings to a fundraiser for a local indepentant production of a science fiction rock opera called Faster than the Speed of Light.

It’s from 6-10 Sunday night, May 3rd, at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre.  The play looks pretty cool and the fundraiser event sounds like a lot of fun.  There’s gonna be bands and probably a lot of short haired girls wearing glasses.  Which is enough to get me to kick in a couple of paintings. More info here.

Here’s the paintings that I contributed:

So come on out and pay a lot of money for my paintings, or somebody else’s.  It advances the cause of short haired girls doing cool shit.

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: