Nylon Magazine - Pink

Nylon Magazine asked me to interpret the color, pink, for an article about this much beloved hue.


> graphite on bond. After a few thumbnails, a strange flutist appeared in the petals of a flower.


> blue pencil and white acrylic on Rives BFK, approx. 15 x 20" . While making this piece, I was thinking of Giuseppe Castiglione, a Italian missionary who lived in China and became famous for combining eastern and western pictorial convention and technique to great effect -- his work has the elegance and graceful composition of traditional chinese scroll painting, but also the chiascuro and foreshortening of the old masters.


> photoshop CS, 9 x 11" @ 500 dpi. And after some machinations on the computer and beyond, we have a sickly sweet confection, a polished, pink stone.

CALEXICO

Garden Ruin

Earlier this year, Joey Burns from Calexico contacted me about doing the album art for his next album. I was already familiar with their special sound, having heard them on KCRW, so I was very interested, especially after he mentioned that he liked my travel sketchbooks. Once in a while, a rare project comes along that promises to be fulfilling both intellectually and spiritually (usually, brute intellect trumps the soul, and photoshop scrubs it clean), so I was grateful for the chance to take on this project. He sent me all the music he was working on for Garden Ruin, and I drew inspiration from the lyrics.


> graphite on bond, scanned into photoshop, with type and rough digital color


> revised sketch after talking a bit more with Joey.


> acrylic on paper, 12 x 22"


> revised color in photoshop, along with some careful dodging and burning.


> type drawn with india ink



> interior art for the liner notes. Again, Joey gave me free reign with these drawings.


> Calexico's next album will be out soon, but I highly recommend all their work -- thoughtful, lyrical, eclectic, and lush.

Figure Drawing VI

>acrylic on bristol, 19 x 24", 5 minutes.


>acrylic on bristol, 19 x 24", 20 minutes.


>acrylic on bristol, 19 x 24", 20 minutes.

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Figure Studies
My color choices are more deliberate this time around, as I become more familiar with this way of working. Work/life has been very busy/stressful, so I'm glad I have a fews hours a week to escape, with no other task than to interpret what I see on paper. No phone calls, no emails, no revisions, no bills, no moral judgments, no existential crisis: "no-mind."