Great new article

Thanks to Katy at Creative Boom for the great piece!

Creative Boom

Kiddos

I finished my Unprecedented collection in November and have been a busy little bee working on my new series, Childhood. My vision is to explore growing up in various stages, even though the babies are my favorite. This one shows off my sweet and sassy little niece and her friend sunning themselves in South Carolina. So if we have a cyber attack and the power goes zap for the next 10 years, at least you’ll find solace knowing what noble project I’m laboring on in the glorious mango phosphorescence filtering in through my window!

The Franklin Factory

Just finished my illustration of the Factory (12" x 16") with a view of Franklin Juice. Thanks to Garrett Mills for photographing it! The original is sold but prints are available in 1/8" thick acrylics. My favorite part of this piece is the Energizer Bunny scooting along the gear. FB draws an older audience.. you all will no doubt remember that.... and 1990s Cindy Crawford also...Just finished my illustration of the Factory (12" x 16") with a view of Franklin Juice. Thanks to Garrett Mills for photographing it! The original is sold but prints are available in 1/8" thick acrylics. My favorite part of this piece is the Energizer Bunny scooting along the gear. FB draws an older audience.. you all will no doubt remember that.... and 1990s Cindy Crawford also...

Christmas Cards are here!

2020 Christmas cards are here! I began this tradition in 2018 with my Gnome and enjoy the challenge of imaging something new each fall.

This year I present to you A Girl & Her Llama. I realize llamas are so last year and sloths are trending... (you know you're a champ when you're trying to catch up to sloths)... nevertheless, I offer you llamas. This illustration was inspired by 2 ornaments from my mom and a friend. They are trotting off on an adventure somewhere in Lapland.

The cards are headed to the printers and I'm taking orders. Singles are $5 and sets of 8 are $20. Message me for orders.

Kirstenbosch Flowers

In addition to my new series on TN I'm starting a stash of small florals. Some of these will be available at the Thompson Hotel in Dallas... others will be free to purchase. Here's my first one. I still need to polish it but it's almost ready. It's from Kirstenbosch, the fantastic sprawling gardens famous in Cape Town. This piece is 6" x 8". This one's already spoken for but others are coming!

My Bright Idea

I had a bright idea recently (insert your joke).

For years I've been running across town to buy art supplies, hoping the day I dropped by to drop a $100 would happen to be a day of sales. Well, I was dropping off a friend at her house and who should I just happen to see lingering next door but Jerry. Jerry is my good friend Meg's step dad. Turns out he's been woodworking the last 2 years. Two months later he's making all my canvases and frames. Jerry does a great job and is a blast to work with. If anyone needs custom wood canvases or frames, or also tables and shelves and chairs, now you know who to call. Reach out to him at 615. 310. 3246!

Botanical Mix

Just returned from a fortuitous three day trip to the lone star state again. I sold 2 originals (including "A Day with Linda" to a lady named Linda, lol) and organized a 3 month show for my China collection at the talented Shane Friesenhahn's Botanical Mix (Dallas Market Center). Shane is also opening his own art and botanical shop in the Thompson Hotel in downtown Dallas, scheduled to open at the end of 2020. The shop will also carry some of my originals and notecards.

Stay tuned!

Why I Create Art (Part Two)

Creative work never bores me. It fatigues me and I take breaks, but it never really burns me out. It refreshes me. Each studio session becomes an improv exercise in going with the flow, especially if I don’t like the direction the work is taking.

For instance, today’s work might be shaping the leaves of a tree. The challenge becomes depicting both the patches of light coming through as well the movement from the leaves rustling in the wind. I’d begin searching magazines for shapes and colors true to the photograph but I’d also keep an eye out for oddities that introduce an element of surprise, anything from a soccer player to a movie poster. I also think as a designer, which means I eliminate clutter and make lots of adjustments to manipulate eye flow. But most importantly, I need to make people feel something, which is a quality you recognize but can’t describe. 

If I show the truth of what I felt, not just the literal event or place itself, then I’ve done something right. And sometimes all those things are accomplished by gluing a lunging soccer goalie next to Jackie Chan’s head next to palm tree leaves next to cursive text.

Sometimes uncanny things emerge. The symbols I stumble upon in art remind me of dreams. I recently dreamt that I got to spend a day visiting my dream company way up on the seventeenth floor of a skyscraper. That specific detail caught my attention, as well as the ladder of drawers, not rungs, I climbed down against the purple sky. It wouldn’t have made a lick of sense had I analyzed the dream with my rational, dualistic mind. Instead, I considered it paradoxically. Only then did the dream mean something: ambition is wonderful; it’s good to want to succeed and achieve, but the drawers symbolizing my innermost being were empty. Ambition alone creates emptiness within. I knew this because I risked my neck all the way down, my foot kicking out every fifth drawer to step down on. They had to be empty so that I could reach the ground safely. Further, seventeen symbolizes completion and perfection as well as approaching death. In other words, life is short and the way to life is the way of death in the world’s eyes. Now there’s no way I could have known that the roman numerals that form seventeen can also arrange into words that spell “I have lived.” The mystery of such a dream is like the mystery of the creative process- it unveils something I (not even my subconscious) could have known

But besides being good at it, and besides being an escape from a dualistic mind, I would add that it fuses things I love- fashion, photography, food, gardens, foreign lands, pop culture, and all the writers who write about these things- into a new medium. Paper painting is comprised of all kinds of things I find interesting.

Furthermore I love the intricacy of the work. I think back to my freshman year of high school, my favorite year because we studied Christendom. What jumps to my mind from that year was the romance I felt for the cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts we studied. We learned that cathedrals took generations, not decades, to build. We learned about the Book of Kells and the mad attention and exacting care the monks took crafting the Celtic knots, labyrinths and triskelions. Such works of art and devotion inspired me. At the end of that same year I realized I should pursue art as a career. I admire the absurdity of spending years, even generations, on a single project that may or may not last. But love is extravagant and wasteful.

A good portion of the world would consider this sort of love self-destructive and delusional. It’s no wonder artists with this mindset starve. Do they really think their vision and talent is so immense as to justify years of devotion knowing such magnus opums may be ignored or rejected? Anyone with common sense asks preliminary questions before diving into a three-year project- ie, is there anyone remotely interested in spending $30,000 on a street scene of kids in a poor district of Shanghai?

But then I think about Antoni Gaudi, an architect who slaved the last eleven years of his life devising a cathedral he’d never see completed. He lived to work and lived as a pauper. Though his designs revived much of Barcelona, he was left for dead for hours when a tram hit him. He was just a common beggar with shabby clothes and no identification. Or Julian of Norwich, a nun who frittered away twenty years in the prime of her life alone contemplating the meaning of a vision that occurred one May day. Or Marcel Proust, lavishing God only knows how many tens of thousands of hours writing impenetrable extracts on the beautiful desolation of the Parisian aristocracy.

Such heedless waste depresses most of us who find simple joy watching another good season of Billy Bob Thornton in Goliath. I am that person. But if everyone lived that way, my freshman year would have been another boring year studying wars, feudalism and plagues. I would never have seen the things that sparkle in the dark, places like the Chartres Cathedral or the Lindisfarne Gospels. I would probably have opted for more sensible college curriculum. I would have graduated and taken a job that wouldn’t have required any real devotion or work that demanded anything beyond my talent, time and focus.