Feelin' good!

I was able to relax a little bit tonight (almost all of my grading is complete) and do some artwork. I'm pleased about these pieces and I am PSYCHED to begin posting more again soon! It's was nice to have my brain back in art space for a while!

ideas for now

Here are some "sketches" I was working on the other night. SOON, I will be cranking up my artistic/creative efforts and will be posting more again. For now...

Tom Nettle artwork-in-progress

Here are a couple photos of a work-in-progress by my very good friend Tom Nettle out of Syracuse, NY. His oil painting are exquisite!

National Collage Society Annual Postcard Exhibit

Here is my entry for the NCS Postcard Show this year. All entries are required to be 4" x 6". This piece is entitled "Neptune Jelly".

Memory Project

Here's this year's piece for The Memory Project. The Art Club at Utica College sponsored this effort again this year. We get photographs of children in an orphanage (this time in Indonesia) and render the photographic portraits in a variety of art media. I am not so pleased with my end-product this year, but hope that the boy will appreciate it anyway.

"Muy Steza" (4.5" x 6.5")

Here's the final version tacked down and framed (although I might consider a black frame for this piece) along with a couple of pieces by John Stezaker. Again, although I had no conscious motivation to do a Stezaker-like piece, it seems pretty clear that looking at (and thinking about) his work lately influenced this piece of mine. Interesting, methinks.

Pareidolia and John Stezaker

Over the past month or so, I have been looking at the beautiful collage work of John Stezaker as I prepare a talk for this fall's joint meeting of Nomadikon (a group of scholars from Norway) and the Center for Seeing (SUNY, Albany). My talk will be about pareidolia, the phenomenon that occurs when individuals see faces in inanimate objects (like clouds and wood-grain). I am hoping to tie-in this phenomenon with a discussion of specialized cells in the brain and with the work of a select group of collage artists. I was in my studio on Sunday night and was mostly cleaning and organizing to prepare to get back to creating artwork! I only did a couple "sketches" which included this piece. I had no preconceived intention of making a piece like this, but afterward realized that my recent exposure to Stezaker's work (I've been reading a bunch of stuff about him too) seems to have clearly influenced my "vision" in this case. This image is not quite the finished piece (I'll probably get to that tonight). But I'm excited about it and couldn't wait to post.