What a pain in the can

Sardine Can Design for Trixie Little

Scanned Sketches, VectorWorks, Photoshop. 2006

I think the sketch is "Spankin' good!"

The Cleoesque spanking fish might be a bit too Disney, but you try making a fish sexy...

This week has been about doing it either well or often. I have done a number of revisions on this sardine can. Each version has made an improvement on the final design. It’s just a shame that we have to rush, with a one week from start to finish deadline.

Bills flats are out the door. In fact, the Chernobyl exhibit went up today. I hope it went well…

The highlight of the weekend was Vern’s party. His place is a great treat to be in. I really consider him one of the top collectors in the metro area. Sure the things that he collects are not priceless art. But the value is created by the whole collection.

My first Imagination Stage production meeting (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Fiddler on the Roof) was on Monday. I have high hopes that I will be able to make these “portfolio piece” productions, however, one director doesn’t seem to share my vision yet… I have been told that I should paint backdrops for these shows. So I might still be able to get some painting in.

The Versus project is going quite slowly, but I will make an effort to do some this coming week. Every day that I don’t do any of it is a day that makes the whole thing seem less like a good idea. I really need to be involved in the mechanics of painting in order to keep myself from analyzing myself out of it.

There is a call for submissions from Studioneight. It’s called “Reinterpreting the Masters”. I submitted the Rembrandt painting from the Dutch Masters cigar box as my “master painting” to draw from. I thought it was very droll…but it turns out that Larry Rivers did the same sort of thing (albeit sloppier) back in the day…I still think there’s time to work something up, since the show is in early June…

Many Irons in the fire this week...

Sardine Can Sketch for Trixie Little's act

The “performance art” that J exhibited last week was not what I expected. We basically watched him paint, while a punk band played. It was harmless enough, but it did give me an opportunity to talk to Scott. What makes talking to him enjoyable for me is the fact that so many things can be taken for “read” with him. I don’t have to explain, for example, about my self loathing for not getting work done when I have the opportunity. He’s been there, and has the integrity to back it up too…

Anyway, that night set me in a direction. I have a grand plan for some work during this next “semester”. I don’t want to jinx it by talking it up too much, so lets just say that it involves painting figuratively, realistically, while keeping a humorous/sci-fi feel, (perhaps in oil) on five large canvases….Of course, I am doing preparatory drawings and even a watercolor study of each before committing to shelling out $60 per canvas….more news as it develops…

The other development of the week was Lobsterboy. The T-shirts seem to be selling well, and they look great on colored t-shirts. The show wasn’t half bad either….

KT and Sara did yeoman’s work helping me build Bills photography flats…

The Helen Hayes Awards were okay, but I got into an argument with a friend of KT’s, which brought on lots of, er, drama…

Trixie dropped off the sardine can, and I am in a mad dash to design a label for it…

I’m off to see the dress rehearsal of fiddler on the roof, as research for my Monday meeting at Imagination stage…Gotta run!

Great Birthday weekend

Spear fisher

2006, Illustrator file

Graphic for Lobsterboy T-Shirts

Birthday weekend was a blur. KT and Sara pitched in to get Shaun into town for the festivities, which was perfect, because there is no one else that I would rather watch boxing with…amongst other things. Between taking over the basement of Temperance, Duckpin bowling, V for vendetta at the Uptown, Mayweather vs. Judah, or project runway at Sara’s…it was the perfect birthday weekend.

The fight was particularly good. A fight broke out during the fight. And the experience of E, Joel, Shaun, etc. watching it together was really great. I think I might want to start putting boxers into my work. I have been toying with the Astronaut idea, with the spacesuit as a stand in for masculinity and vulnerability….perhaps a boxer as a friend… I finally made a painting with an astronaut in it. He’s standing at a distance from a rocket, holding an umbrella in the rain. I really like the image of holding the umbrella (people will say it’s too Bacon or Magritte) while wearing a spacesuit…

The other thing I made this week is another Lobsterboy image. I decided that he needed to have a more cheesecake image, so I made a sexy spear fisher that has caught a lobster. KT says that the shells are going the wrong direction, but I think that makes it sillier…. It has that tattoo crossed with an old gas station logo look...

My schedule is ramping up, and soon it will be tough for me to keep up the pace and keep up with my “semester” schedule…

Happy Birthday to Me

Banner-Header design for www.artbyjared.com website

1000x130 pixels, .JPG

Its a bit Cheezeball, but I kinda like it...Hey, It's better than what I had up before...

This week has been punctuated by a bout of depression, which may or may not have anything to do with the fact that I turn 30 tomorrow. (Even though I am psyched for volleyball on Saturday...wheather permitting...) It’s a time for reflection, seeing as, if I live to be 90, I am a third of the way to the grave. Let’s not even contemplate the national average for men (which is 77.6 years) which puts me much closer to the halfway point than the “third” mark.

Anyway, it has led me to question whether I am effective at my chosen vocation, and what can be done to improve it. My problem is one of focus and time. I can’t seem to get things resolved (with a high degree of quality) fast enough to keep pace with things. I also can’t focus my energies if I know I won’t have a substantial amount of time to devote to it.

I have to sit down and really think through where I want my work to go. Much of the work I see on the internet is of really high quality. I feel that my work lacks this level of quality because I am not devoting enough time to it. Conversely, the rate of change and the level of visual sophistication in the general population has gone exponentially up in recent years. I can make things faster and better than ever before, but I still have an old fashioned way of thinking about the way my art fits into the world.

I also have a personal set of rules that may be outmoded. One of them is to not make works that are simplistic misinterpretations of surrealism. That is, take a subject, and then make it trippy or freaky. This is an artificial way of getting a result that looks cool, but contributes little to the debate (and does little to honor the true psychological roots of surrealism).

In the interests of getting better, I have developed a methodology for getting more out of my time over the next year. Since I seem to work well in a deadline situation, and also as a “burst” of energy, I developed a semester-like plan for myself in the coming year. I am committing myself to working on a set goal for quantity and quality of work on a semester basis. I have a midterm and a final planned for each three month period. These are just goalposts for me to chart my progress on, but they are also hard and fast deadlines that I can work towards. Let’s hope I can stick to it!