Certain Doom

It's finally happening! In a little under a month Alan and I will have our show up.  I have a lot of new work I could show sneak peeks of but since I'm in a rush here's the flyer for now. Left image his, right image mine.  And there's a facebook event now! The show will be up for two months so if you can't make the reception or you don't live in Philly but might be passing through this summer you could still catch the show!

Stare Into These Eyes.. Discover Deep Within Them The Unspeakable Terrifying Secret

While I have tons of new work to post, I'm trying to hold off on posting full images of anything until after the show opens.  It's really hard for me to exhibit any kind of restraint like this, especially living in a period in time where you have so many platforms to brag on.  That gorgon painting was the biggest, most time consuming painting I've ever done, and it took a full month to finish (bearing in mind I also work at a job full time but still).  Not posting it in full and bragging like an idiot is sort of killing me, but here's a few cell phone pictures:

I'm probably not going to sell the original of this one at the show, because it was so huge and time consuming and would have to be pretty expensive, and that's just inappropriate for a coffee shop show.  But I AM going to have super nice high quality prints available of it, and I'm going to experiment with leafing the prints as well.  As usual, the best place to see images like this as I work on things is my instagram account, username everlastingfaint.  I have a lot to say regarding the meaning and personal relevance of the gorgon image (specifically in the case of this painting the gorgoneion) but that's going to have to wait until a later time, probably when I post the full image.

Something I CAN and should post in full is this flyer I finished in record time a few weeks ago:

This was just a little idea I had floating around in my head for the past couple months.  I originally wanted to design a skate deck with this image on it, and may still use it for that since it lends itself well to the shape.  It's just roughly based around all of those horror movies where the premise is that a witch or innocent woman accused of witchcraft was killed but then resurrected a hundred years later (usually in the 60's or 70's) ready for revenge.  I'm learning to plan paintings I can pull off in shorter amounts of time with a lot of solid black areas, which I actually think reads better for flyers anyway, and sort of sets off the more detailed stuff.  Anyway, this show will be fun, Golden Tea House is one of my favorite places to go to shows in this city and I'm looking forward to another summer of shows and riding bikes and swimming in lakes.

Aside from all this I'm about one night's work away from finishing what will be my 5th piece so far for the show.  Here's a little bit of it:

 

I have to say I'm really excited about this show.  It's been a while since I had a show, solo or two person and Alan is seriously an incredible artist I'm so happy to be planning stuff with.  Everything he's shown me that he's done so far as been amazing and we've spent a lot of time bouncing ideas off each other that we inevitably need to scale way back (left to our own devices with all the time in the world we would probably make hundreds of things in like 20 different mediums).  If you want to see what Alans working on you can follow him on instagram under the username "possumfingers" or look here if you don't have that kinda phone. 

Last little bit of whatever, I finally made a facebook page for my art. Over the years every so often someone will try to add my personal page on facebook and I feel bad ignoring those requests but if I can't identify the person as at least someone I've commented back and forth with or who has emailed me or something I usually wont add them back.  It's not that I'm crazy secretive, just that my  facebook page is full of stupid personal gibberish and pictures of me looking like a goof.  However, I did realize that the place where you could most easily view lots of my paintings in a nice easy to look at format was my facebook account.  So anyway, here's the art page, feel free to "like" or pass it along,  it's a great way to look at everything I've done in one place, and it'll probably be yet another way to see what I'm up to.  Important stuff like this:

Serpentine

There isn't much to report right now since I'm working as much as possible on that Medusa but I'm still probably just about a 6th of the way through it.  As I predicted I did end up redrawing her face:

I usually don't fidget with the drawing at the inked stage since it can get messy and I am basically a super impatient person  but I knew this would be the sort of thing where I would look at it when it was done and cringe because the face bothered me.  [edit: I realized reading this later that it's absurd to say I'm impatient and follow it by saying I'm going to spend a month painting like thousands of tiny scales so I should clarify that I'm really impatient when it comes to planning a piece.  I like to just get started. After that it's all blissful minutiae which I love.] Sometimes it pays to slow down and consider some reference, but going into it I was more excited about the snakes than her face.

And so far, a week into painting (evenings and weekends) I'm not even halfway up the snakes working from bottom to top.  My goal is to finish this by the end of the month but who knows if that's possible. Here's a crappy camera phone photo of a few snakes:

That's all for a bit, hopefully I'll have a better photo and some more progress soon.

Haunted By An En-ti-ty

So, as expected, last week I finished up that cassette cover in record speed, and I'm pretty happy with how it came out:

This is for Assembly at Dusk's demo which you can listen to here.  They were pretty easy going about the artwork and I mostly focused on making something that was simple that would be readable and have impact at such a small size.  The name "Assembly at Dusk" immediately makes me think of bats congregating and they had sent me some lyrics involving a specter so I went from there.  I'm especially happy with the sky.  It seems like I'll never tire of painting clouds.  I still have to design a logo for them and lay this out but that should be done soon enough.

I tried to jump right back into my personal work for the show but because what I'm working on now is so big, I don't have a lot to show for it.  I finally got this big medusa painting inked and to the painting stage but looking at it this morning I'm not happy with the static face and might need to spend another day fussing over it before I can start the endless task of painting scales:

On a side note, this weekend I found out about and began obsessing over Hexenkopf rock, a supposedly haunted hill in Easton PA with a ton of local legend associated with it.  The name translates to "Witch's  Head" and it is supposedly the sight of all kinds of ghostly apparitions, has links to Braucherei practice, a strange glowing quality at night, and is responsible for all kinds of suicides, house fires and strange events.  At any rate after I read about it I rounded up my friends to go there the next day.

 Like most of rural PA it's beautiful, and surrounded by old barns and PA dutch cemeteries which I did quite a bit of creeping in. 

When you're up on the rock itself the acoustics are really strange.  When I climbed up I suddenly heard clear as a bell hundreds of chirping frogs that I couldn't hear as I approached.  The area is really pretty and the rocks are covered in moss and lichen. I also found a headless squirrel hanging from a branch.  It was probably a hawk but it COULD have been a witch.  Pretty sure that's how these things get started. 

I was also delighted to see this protective Sator Square hex sign on the adjacent barn.

Anyway, this has sent me on a spree of book hunting and I think a theme for some new stuff (after this show) will be Pennsylvania magic and folklore.  Top of my list is this book, which possibly can only be bought (for a reasonable price) from the Sigal museum in Easton.  Sometimes I really love Pennsylvania.

I Have Always Been Here Before

Oh hello there! As is always the case recently it's been WAY too long, probably the longest break I've ever taken from this blog.  As always no longer having a job where I sit in front of the computer has made my online presence pretty shaky.  I've also always felt that reporting about what I'm making should never take time away from actually making things, and lately I've been really busy.  In addition to starting new paintings for my upcoming show, I started dabbling in wood carving in order to make some amulets both for the show and to eventually restock my etsy store.  Money from the store should hopefully filter back into my art to help finance getting limited print editions made to sell at the show. Here are some of the little amulets I've made so far.  Some are just sort of prototypes:

The theme of my half of the show (this is a two person show with one of my favorite people/artists Alan Medusawolf) is loosely the evil eye and protection so I've been doing lots of reading about both so you can expect one of my long rambling entries about that soon.  Both Alan and I will include carved and painted 3 dimensional pieces that tie into our 2D work as a somewhat unifying theme so some of these amulets will be in the show.  I'm also working on carving wooden silver leaf tipped weapons for the show. Here's the only finished one:

And here's an arrow head for a full arrow. It's not painted yet and I haven't carved the quill:

I'm also hoping to do a sword and an axe, but carving these things takes a ton of time so I don't know how feasible that is.  I also have a lot of trouble multitasking and I'm starting to worry these little experimental projects will distract from making actual paintings.  So far I've done two small pieces as a warm up:

and I've got another piece underway which will end up being the largest most elaborate painting I've ever done.  I'm slightly worried about what I've gotten myself into here but I think when it's finished it'll be really visually impressive:

It's about a foot and a half around.  I'm going to try to keep a lid on what I'm doing so that everything from the show isn't on the internet before the show opens but I have to admit, it'll be really hard with this one.  I have a lot of ideas I'm really excited about and I'd like to finish as many of these pieces as possible before the show in July which means waking up extra early to draw in the morning before work and coming right home and getting back to it. Woof.

I'm also taking a short break from personal work to do a pretty simple commission.  Here's the sketch, hopefully it'll be started and finished soon and I'll be able to share it:

I hate to say this since my intention is never to abandon the blog or stop talking about books and ideas I'm excited about but while I'm really busy I'll probably post the most work in progress and updates in my instagram account, feel free to follow me at everlastingfaint or to look at it online if you don't have a dumb phone.  It's a semi personal account meaning there are occasionally pictures of my cats (sorry, can't be helped) or weird junk in my house but never so personal that it's terribly revealing.

Back to work!