There have been a few more pieces added to the portfolio. There are four paintings added to Painting 2003:

Three gallery shots from the show at the Dorsch Gallery last year:

And four new works added to Drawing 2004:

I remember one summer I spent on my parent’s back porch underneath the hummingbird feeder. I sat in the shade thumbing through my summer reading of Carry On Mr. Bowditch and Dove while hummingbirds buzzed nervously over my head. Over the course of a few months I became a regular fixture on the porch. The hummingbirds got so accustomed to my presence that I could hold my finger up to the feeder where they would light to get a drink. Their tiny, almost weightless, claws would wrap around my knuckle and their thread-like tongues would dart in and out of the nozzle.

I can’t recall another time since when I had so little responsibility and worry that I could just spend months lollygagging in the back yard befriending the local fauna. Vacations aren’t what they used to be.

Maria and I recently returned from a “vacation” to Utah for the holidays. There were short spans of time that weren’t planned and thus spent in front of the TV or inducing muscle fatigue playing the PlayStation’s Eye Toy (OK, that was just me with sore muscles the next day). The rest of the time was enjoyed with friends and family at get-togethers and Maria’s sister’s wedding. However, despite the two and a half weeks we had, we still did not get to see everyone we wanted, nor did we get to do everything we wanted. We left Utah wanting more.

It’s hard living away from family. It’s difficult to celebrate with them from a 1411.15 mile distance, and it’s impossible to be any support or help when times are tough. I almost feel selfish or reclusive living in Chicago, doing my own thing, while some of the best people I know live half-way across the United States. So, leaving kith and kin to fly back to a sub-zero climate and a chaotic exhibition installation waiting for me at my job was not an enticing prospect. At least Fran was waiting for us.

Some highlights of the Utah visit were:

• Having my wife cut my hair into a mini-mullet.
• Making some last-minute art at the No Hope Gallery in Provo.
• Maria’s sister’s wedding day
• Maria’s sister’s wedding being over
• Watching the Child Who Was a Keyhole raise their goblet of rock at a house concert.
• Spending two and a half weeks with my wife.

Just to let you know (both of you), the site now has all the features it was meant to have when I redesigned it last August. Here is just a little tour of the new junk:

• My portfolio - As I mentioned before, I have gone back and included many old paintings, installations, videos, and performances to the site which are now accessible from the menu at the left. And as of today, the portfolio also looks like the rest of the blog.
• Menus - Every section of the website now has a different menu, so now you don’t have to look at the recent comments on every page. As part of the new menus, I have included a “currently reading” and “currently listening to” section on the about page. So now you can see what I’m reading and what I’m listening to and say to yourself, “Boy, I thought I couldn’t have cared less, but as it turns out, I can!” I’ve included this stuff mainly to see if I could do it and to force myself to read more.
• RSS feed - Really, I had no clue what this was until about an hour ago. So for any of you who may have a news reader, here you go. You can keep track of every last entry I put on this site through the blog’s RSS syndication. I’ve also included RSS for the portfolio section so you can find out when I post a new art work. Once again, this is more for my benefit than yours.
• Perusing - On the main page you’ll notice a little section to the left called “perusing.” This is just a summary of some intersting sites and articles that I’ve come across on the web. Sometimes I don’t even agree with what is said, I just find the ideas interesting. These are just things I want to share.
• Categories - Each entry now has a category under which it is filed for easy reference. And if you are bored spitless with my ramblings on art, then you can just avoid that category all together.

After staying up until the wee hours of 11:30pm last night I now have my entire MFA thesis exhibition, Attract, Divert, online as well as the three videos that exhibited along with the paintings.

That pretty much catches me up on my portfolio highlights for that past two years. I still have to develop my film from the show I did at the Dorsch Gallery this summer. Once that’s done, I’ll try to get that up as well.

A little side note is that the Dorsch Gallery was mentioned in Art in America latest issue in their Focus on Miami section. Brook Dorsch is a really sweet guy and I’m really gald that he’s getting the kind of exposure he is.

In an effort to update my portfolio I have dug back to a couple of projects I was working on in 2001 and 2002. Originally they sprung from a need to do something “useful.” I was tired of sitting in my studio creating paintings that just referenced painting and pop culture without ever doing any perceivable good. I wanted to do something and not have it be about something, but rather just be something. So I set out to clean Columbus, OH. It was a daunting task for my little cleaning tote and I, but I did what I could. I scoured pay phones, sanitized playground equipment, wiped down bus stop benches, and cleansed fire hydrants. Eventually this lead to conduct a similar exercise at the Art Front Gallery in Provo, UT. I spackled the walls, re-painted, swept, mopped, disinfected, and set the gallery in order before printing the photos of the process and displaying them on the walls. These Cleaning Projects may be seen by selecting Cleaning 2001 or Cleaning 2002 from the main menu. Enjoy.

Rev up those modems and get ready to hog some bandwidth - some 2002 video projects will be coming soon!

It turns out that the show I was in at the Dorsch Gallery got a write up in the University of Miami Hurricane a few weeks ago. I think that having my work included in an obscure student publication would swell my ego if they had my painting right side up.

I have a tendency to tinker. If I can try new options and features in a painting, video, or website in a risk-free environment, try I will. That would explain why this website redesign has been five months in the making. Behind the scenes I have generated a dozen different layouts, an admirably vast graveyard of logos, and my site maps are legion.

I am not saying that I am 100% happy with the results that you are looking at (or 50% for that matter), but when I have a deadline I stop tinkering. I have an exhibit opening in Miami on September 6th at the Dorsch Gallery and my wife and I will be moving immediately after that. So I don’t really have the time to rework the logo or change the background color for the umpteenth time.

Dorsch Gallery Show Announcement 60K

A few things are missing:

• My portfolio - It can still be accessed at the old address (note: as of 11.30.03 my portfolio has moved to its new location and can be accessed through the main menu) but as I get a better hang of CSS and Movable Type the portfolio will show up on the site with a slew of new paintings, skteches, and videos.


• SUBRAB - The Utah Valley Music Archive has gone into retirement due to lack of disk space on the server. If you have any requests for music, just let me know and I’ll get around to sending you a CD…eventually…maybe.


• The Guest Star - This was a miserable failure. I got two responses from the plethora of emails I sent out to fellow artists to have a little niche on my website. So it had to be let go. Don’t worry, I gave it two weeks notice, a decent severance pay, and some letters of recommendation. It should probably find employment before I do.


• Musaque - With the demise of Radio Free Tiny Pineapple and SUBRAB there seemed little reason to keep it going.


• Splash Screen - Splash screens are sooooo 1999.

So thanks to the unfailing help and patience of my ingenious brother, “Grettir,” I have a new look to the site and a blog. Why do I have a blog? Who knows? They really shouldn’t put tools like this in the hands of the general public.

This project stemmed from a play between paint and print advertisements and it has grown to encompass collage and video. I began by using catalogs and magazines as my palettes while painting. Eventually I began to notice the interesting interactions and humorous dialogue between the scumbled paint blobs and the advertising imagery on the printed, paper palettes.

I now make a variety of marks on magazine pages, posters, window-sized advertisements, postcards, flyers, television commercials, and billboards. I create lexicons of abstract marks and shapes ñ dots, spots, blobs of varying size and shape, flatly hued planes, planes of mottled color, slashes, meandering lines, stenciled shapes, additive and subtractive marks. This play permeates my work.

The advertising images come first. Advertisements are designed to attract attention. Each effort I make is to subvert the advertising image while still leaving it with some power to garner attention. My marks edit some of the advertising information rendering it less recognizable and thus aligned closer to the abstract gestures of paint. Tilting the advertisement on its side also helps me to undermine the blatancy of the advertising image.

I react formally to the compositions and color schemes used in the representational imagery. These affect my choices of paint color, line, and shape. Sometimes the imagery interacts with the paint giving the impression that an olive green blob of paint is attacking a well-coiffed male mode. Or a yawning little girl sports a hat of bilious, red brush strokes. At other times the printed imagery and the paint seem ignorant of each other and resist a narrative bridge between the two media.

I try to strike what I see as a balance between the overbearing nature of advertising’s representational imagery and the nebulous understatement of abstract marks so that both representation and abstraction can be both forefront and periphery. Where representation and abstraction, foreground and background intersect and hinge themselves interests me.

view the paintings
view the video