The past few weeks have been a crazy mix of tremendous work at the gallery, including the start of The Small Ad Shop, (a boutique advertising firm that will operate alongside saltfineart) AND an overwhelming desire to throw myself into new creative projects at home. 
Lately, I’ve been exploring my background in illustration and design, finding myself less inclined towards defining myself as a fine artist with HUGE panels. I am working small again. Above is the finished illustration for Joy Shannon’s latest album tentatively entitled “Out of My Dreams.” This piece was completed in about two days after spending weeks trying to wrap my head around an earlier design on a much bigger panel. I realized, in part through this project, that I tend to chase ideals that I do not bother to fully categorize or even plan towards. I just run, run as fast as I can towards what I want without any real thought as to WHAT and WHY and HOW.
How that translates into my art as a whole is unfortunately a lot of wasted panels with half-expressed ideas. I get bored and move on or get intimidated and flee or just get distracted by another idea/goal. At any rate it’s a very inefficient way of going about things and I’ve decided to make a concerted effort towards finishing anything I find worthwhile in starting. 
a.k.a Don’t Panic
General Officer, 10 x 8 inches, pyrography, graphite, acrylic and colored pencil on board
I am posting original work from my recent exhibition in Long Beach plus a few new pieces on my etsy page. I am the most excited about my recently completed Telepathy diptych. It took me the better part of the last two weeks to complete (all that herringbone fabric rendered for hours and hours…crazy). They are being sold as individual panels on purpose because I like the idea that even though they were created to be together there is a chance they could be separated.
Melodramatic much?

It’s hard not to be in awe of all our collective human experiences. I pour through countless antique photographs, at flea markets and online looking into the faces of individuals to find the few that I feel compelled to recreate. I always wonder who they were, if they had a happy life filled with love and excitement, or a tragic one. The faces always become manipulated by my feelings as I create the work and I believe that how I imagine their lives to have been comes through.

Officer’s Wife, 10 x 8 inches, pyrography, graphite, acrylic and colored pencil on board

Cecilia Paredes is renown for her performance, photography, sculpture and installation. Using her body as canvas, she paints herself into backgrounds of damask and chintz, forests and deserts. But she never completely blends —-never becomes mere decoration. Paredes is a part of the permanent collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Panama Modern Museum, Museo del Barrio New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Costa Rica among many other institutions. In 2010 she will have a a solo show at the Moscow Modern Museum of Art and a Fulbright sponsored show at the Cultural Institute in Lima.
For more information call 949.715.5554 or visit saltfineart.com

i adore this guy for all time as it is and then i check up on his website and find that he has graciously covered the Doctor Who theme song. be still my heart… check it out HERE

and just because…

Getting back into writing, rewriting/editing older (rejected) work but more importantly getting around to new stuff. Here is a little paragraph I worked on last night.
…But she said something pertaining to the end of the earth that resonated with me. “Everyone experiences their own apocalypse. There is no human race after you die.” Being catastrophically afraid of death and the concept of nothing happening in the hereafter beyond enriching the soil around you, I thought about that for a surprising length of time. Minutes, as I seemingly stared into the abyss: my left foot. The mud from our afternoon hike was drying and at the point of flaking off. The only thing I could come up with was this: Life is random and mind-blowingly breathtaking as a result. We laugh and it becomes absurd, we cry and it becomes tragically absurd but nothing patterns out in a way that we can anticipate. For any control freak worth their salt, death becomes the thing you want to focus on either from a point of fear or a point of fascination. A bit of dried mud fell and I felt a wave of despair and annoyance rise up from the center of my chest. 
God damn it, I just swept.
It is the thing that will happen no matter what.

 
My dear friend Charlotte Perez turned 31 last night and we threw a little surprise party for her.  She is a squirrel (not actually) and so it made sense to play off of that for the theme. I put this flyer together with the initial plan of plastering it in a three block radius around her house, but I ran out of time. So it just made it’s way to her front door and all over the backyard. It was priceless to see her walk into the party clutching this with a very startled look on her face. Oh yeah…we’re on to you Cha. It was only a matter of time before you were taken down.

Later we went to The Swinging Door in downtown Tustin which, if you haven’t been, is one of the best bars in Southern California. But don’t tell anyone.

Cha and Will being Squirrels together
Cha with her new tattoo sleeve at The Swinging Door
CASTOR AND POLLUX          colored pencils on paper            55 x 45 cm, 2011

PROTECT ME   colored pencils on paper     30 x 40 cm, 2011


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