Throwback Thursday #26 – Mankind’s Assimilation Of Technology

“Mankind’s Assimilation Of Technology”, ink and marker, 2011

In 2011 I was 32 and I was approached by a guy I had a class or two with in college. This guy was adding an art gallery to his tattoo shop and told me he would really like to see some of my art in his gallery. His name was Justin Nordine and the tattoo shop/art gallery was called The Raw Canvas. Justin has since gained nationwide attention on TV and in magazines for his unique watercolor-eque tattoo style. His art gallery was jury style and I was gracious to be chosen to show my art there.

When I started to gather my art for the first themed show, I started to realize a few things about my art. One is that I have always been been sort of all over the place as far as style, subject matter and medium. I had a few charcoal pieces, a number of water colors, one pastel piece, a guache piece, a handful of oils and so on. I also realized that I had nothing framed or really ready to sell. Compared to my peers showing at the Raw Gallery who had very definitive styles, framed pieces ready to hang and prints on hand ready to sell – I was a mess!  Without much money I scoured thrift stores for frames.

One of the early showings at The Raw Canvas

Looking back at it, my shows were so tacky. I put up way too much art and showed way too many different mediums and styles. In the picture above you can see oils, ink/maker, lithograph and spray paint (stencil).

Justin challenged us to always be putting new work into each opening show. After seeing the cohesiveness of my fellow artist’s showings, I tried some new things along the lines of keeping within a kind of series. One of these experiments was finding interesting old doodles from various sketchbooks, redrawing them larger and with ink on different kinds of paper and then coloring them with marker. I think I got more comments on this series (including Mankind’s Assimilation Of Technology) than most of my other work and I think it’s because people can better understand your style if its cohesive and looks like it belongs with your other pieces.

I continued showing at the Raw Canvas for a year and then, because I was a terrible salesman and made $0 on my artwork, couldn’t afford to rent my wallspace anmore. Maybe one day when I have more work of a particular style to show (and I have more money) I will return to showing art in a gallery.

Throwback Thursday #26 – Imagination’s Tangibility of Melody

“Imagination’s Tangibility of Melody”, Charcoal, 2010

Artwise, a big part of 2010 for me was preparing for a mission trip to Tokyo in which I planned to do [marker] graffiti in the street to help my team invite people to a young adult church in Machida. I spent a lot of that year teaching myself graffiti technique by reading a book and then practicing as much as possible. That story is pretty well covered here, so I will focus on the other art related things I did that year.

I was 31 and I wanted more than anything to meet “the one” and get on with starting a family. I think I was also realizing that I needed to quit putting my life on hold for those wishes -particularly my art life.

Because of my renewed focus on my art, I took to my charcoals to try some surrealistic or creative juxtapositions. In “Imagination’s Tangibility of Melody”, I wanted to draw a beautiful piece that shows what happens in my mind when I listen to my favorite music (usually electronic music). Of course this isn’t a self portrait because it’s a female. With this type of art I used to always like my subjects to be female because of how attractive the female form is to me. The shape emanating from her forehead is my feeble attempt to depict the nearly indescribable visions or impressions that music creates in my mind. Usually this happens more with the melody of instrumental music as vocals tend to uncover the mysteries and define the purpose of the music too much.

 

Throwback Thursday #25 – Exorcism

“Exorcism”, ink, 2009

In 2009 I was 30, I was busy with dating and going on a mission trip to Africa and so I produced very little art (beside doodles which are always flowing from my pen) I was still working full time at my church and finding my most fun projects to be the ones I did for Youth or Young Adult Ministries. Our young adult pastor was starting a series called Spiritual in which he would explore the spiritual gifts described in the Bible. His (and his team’s) idea for the series was something akin to comic book noir ala Frank Miller’s The Spirit. I drew this scene depicting a man casting out a demon as close to the Frank Miller style as I could at the time. This really was a challenge for me as my style has always been more in the “Funnies” comics, not the “Super hero” comics. And whenever I would draw anything more realistic it would be straight from a reference photo. With an imaginary image like this I needed reference photos of men in each of these positions (the pose for the man casting the demon I couldn’t find & so I had someone snap a picture of me in that stance). Then I had to use my imagination to make it into the exorcism scene and what was even harder is then to add all of the dramatic shading that wasn’t in the reference photos.

In the end, the team chose not to use my drawings and instead I used photos that I grey scaled and increased contrast on. This is how the series looked:

The intro created by Jon James:

 

Throwback Thursday #24 – Peace of Redemption

Peace of Redemption, 2008, 22×28, Acrylic

In 2008 I was 29 and working as a Graphic Designer at my church. Our Young Adult Pastor, Nate Ralston, was preaching a series on salvation and had this idea to represent his messages on Creation, Damnation, Justification and Sanctification. I can’t remember exactly how it all tied in, but he wanted me to paint this on stage while he preached about Creation. The planning team really had to twist my arm to get me to paint in front of an audience but I finally relented. I didn’t get much of the painting done live but finished it through the following week. Peace Lilies are usually white and so we put a coat of some wall texturing over the leaves so that the Creation piece would have pure white flowers.

This is how the painting looked to start.

The following week’s message was on Damnation and to illustrate what our sin did to God’s creation, Nate took more of the wall texturing and “messed up” the painting.  From the audience’s point of view, the painting looked to be ruined.

Damned creation. The “ruined” version.

The next two weeks were on Justification and then Sanctification. I can’t remembered exactly how he represented what, but he wiped the wall texturing off to show how Jesus’ blood cleanses us. His rag wiped off the “damned” mess but also the white over the flower petals revealing red petals underneath. This showed that not only does Christ cleanse us, but He makes us a new creation. I think the red leaves were to represent the covering of Jesus’ blood.

In the end this was a fun project and turned out better than I had expected.

Throwback Thursday #23 – Trip on My Life

“Trip on My Life”, ink, 2007

In 2007 I was 28, still living an adventurous singlehood which mostly put my art on the back burner. The style of this piece was inspired by some artwork that a customer had me make copies of when I worked at a copy shop. It represents that feeling you have when you can’t grasp all that is happening in your life. I tried to show some of the biggest things in my life at the time and how they all swirl in my head as I try to adequately appreciate everything while time is constantly eating away at it all. I don’t remember who all the eyes are here, just that my dad and mom are in there. The little girls are Rebecca Romelus (Haiti) and Chptoo Eweet (Kenya) that I sponsored from Compassion International and World Vision respectively. Other representations include a pencil for art, a guitar (at the time I was almost daily jamming out in the garage and wishing I was in a punk band). I wish I had written down all that is in the picture because now I’m sure there is a lot more hidden there that I don’t remember!