Chronogram

Last week I did a piece for Chronogram Magazine. It was for a fictional story about a young woman who kills her fanatical mother in order to gain some stability and love in her life. The girl does the deed with a frying pan and buries her in the garden she shares with her new fiance. A crop of forget-me-nots grows where the body is buried and no one is ever the wiser. The editor wanted to stay away from alluding to the mother’s death; instead, he just wanted to use the most prominent symbolism, being the flowers and frying pan, in order to keep the piece simple and abstract.

Update: I was asked to do some handwritten text for the title of the story. I did a few different sets and I’m not sure which one they went with, but here is one of them with the illustration.

Sometimes

A new piece I did during yesterday’s amazing spring time weather.

Sandy Bebe

A new drawing for my series on camp. About 8 in x 15 in.

Experiments

Lately I have been trying to do more digital coloring with my scanned line drawings. I can get very frustrated by the computer but I think this piece I did yesterday turned out closer to what I have been trying to achieve. It’s still pretty basic but I think it’s a good start for more complex coloring techniques.

Summer is Coming

Summer is (hopefully) just around the corner. Time to go swimming!

Hat Head

I got the opportunity to paint another hat head for Barneys this week. I decided to give the Luke Wilson “Royal Tenenbaums” head a companion, so I painted Gwyneth Paltrow’s character from the movie.

Chipper

This is a piece for a benefit auction for a place in Connecticut that gives people with mental illness the opportunity to work, go to school and have somewhere to live. I was able to do anything I wanted, which sometimes can be more difficult than if there is a theme or guidelines. I decided to do a piece of my hedgehog Chipper and play around with mark making. The piece ended up being more decorative and “abstract” than what I am used to doing, but I think it will be good for the show since it’s not serious and more just something fun to look at.

Back to Basics

I have really had an urge lately to do a drawing with just pencil. No color, no brushed lines, just straight up pencil. There’s something really nice about being able to use such a simple tool and quite frankly, I can get lazy and not feel like cleaning brushes, putting paint out, making sure the cats don’t step in the paint, etc. So here is a drawing I did today, that goes with my series about camp. It’s about 13″x8″, on paper.

New Stuff

Here is a quick piece I did the other day. It was based on an Op-Ed article from the NY Times about how Obama is putting energy as one of the priorities of his agenda. The article dealt with the fact that he wants to do a lot of great stuff in terms of becoming more energy efficient and less oil dependent. Many presidents before Obama have said they wanted to stop relying on oil so much but in actuality, it is a very difficult thing to do and no president has really succeeded. The last sentence of the piece was something to the effect of “it’s going to be hard to change history”, which Obama will essentially have to do in order for his energy plans to come to fruition.