I wanted to be an artist since I was very little.  At first I wanted to draw comic books, and tried to create my own several times.  I don’t mean I went to a publisher, I mean I bought a sketchbook, created my own characters with a storyline and filled up the sketchbook like it was a comic book.  In high school I dropped the artist thing for the musician thing.  Of course, even though my mother prodded me to apply to Berklee my ego was too frail to imagine I’d ever be accepted.  When it became clear I had to go to college SOMEWHERE I decided to go to Ohio State.  At first I thought I discovered a passion for industrial design.  Being rejected by the ultra-exclusive program three times (mostly because I didn’t have an internship in design on my resume or an existing Bachelors in engineering) caused me to drop that dream too.  Time was running out to choose a major so I switched to Fine Art, which shared many of the same prerequisites as industrial design.  Since I’d been drawing probably before I could talk getting into the Fine Arts program was effortless.  I already had at least one professor on the review committee urging me to apply since my first drawing class.

Three years later I graduated With Honors, but with a BFA that I would find virtually useless outside of applying for a job as a fine arts graduate student.  The graphic design software that I’d been noodling around with in my spare time was what actually kept me employed and still does.  Painting instruction didn’t exist from a technical standpoint in my experience at OSU.  Painting classes consisted of abstract artists giving the class a theme and turning them loose.  There was little to no information on mixing, glazing, etc.  We had to learn how to make our own canvases in the wood shop though – they made sure we could do that.  Putting something intelligible on it when it was done was something else.  Anatomical study consisted of drawing naked people in drawing class and no more.  Who needs anatomy knowledge when you’re going to get an A+ for throwing balloons filled with paint at a canvas anyway.  I wasn’t alone in my disdain for the program, there were a few others (who I still speak with to this day) who were extremely frustrated with the focus of the faculty on encouraging us to become more like Jeff Koons than Alphonse Mucha.  It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that young Mucha’s went to art schools specializing in illustration – not state schools specializing in “free-form artistic freedom.”

(note: the one advantage of attending a state school was that I was able to take other classes and get minors in business and art history as well as a more liberal rounded education with classes in math, astronomy, biology, english, etc. that would not have been part of the curriculum at a “real” art school)

When I graduated and moved to California I was so fed up with my failure to paint that I didn’t bring any supplies with me.  While in California, working as a graphic designer by day,  I would try to start bands for a few years at night, eventually giving that up.  Every couple of years I would get excited, buy supplies and try to paint again -but with no idea what I was doing my attempts would end in dismal failure.

And then, in 2009 (five years since leaving Ohio State), something miraculous happened.  I started business school.  I have always been a master of time management and productivity.  Having to study again forced me to evaluate what I was doing with every minute of free time.  Also, a few months earlier a friend had clued me in to the downtown art walk, and I began following artists online.  In the past few years many artists have stated process blogs.  It is just like it sounds – they blog about the process of creating their work.  I learned more about how to actually paint in the next six months from studying these blog posts from artists like Eric Fortune, Julian Callos and JAW Cooper (just the tip of a massive iceberg) than I learned in five years of “art school.”  Of course, these artists went to “real” art schools like RISD, Pasadena Art Center, Art Academy and so on.  If I had it to do all over again I would skip OSU and head straight to Pasadena Art Center – but I can’t, so the best I can do is learn from these bloggers.

For an example of the progression of my work.  Below is one of my “best” paintings from college:

And here is the result of me tackling the same theme again in 2009:

Just look at that foot.  That foot looks better than anything I did in college right there…

So I started painting again, and now, knowing a little bit about how to do what I wanted to accomplish, my work was starting to look better.  As I often note on this blog I still struggle with backgrounds, unfamiliar textures, complicated lighting, etc.  What I run into frequently is that people who have no background in art assume that because I can paint a naked woman I can surely paint them a nice teddy bear or pineapple or bagel or car or whatever.  Not true.  That’s a little like asking Shaq to throw a curveball for your baseball team just because a baseball also happens to be round.  One of the most stressful assignments was when Sam asked me to paint her portrait.  Not only did I have to try to paint a person that looked real – but it had to look like her.   This was a fresh challenge and I blogged about it a little over a year ago here.  After the first, she requested another done on the same size canvas so she could hang them together.  I started in on the project with some crazy ideas.  I bought fabric to stencil in a background, started using metallic paint, etc.  But the end result was… less than satisfying.   I started with the face first, as nothing else would matter if I couldn’t get her face right.  I had to redo the face many many many many times to get it right.  Finally, when I felt I had gotten it right, I realized that the painting as a whole was doomed.  It just wasn’t going to work.

The image above was after doing work on the face and just starting to put in some hair.  I think perhaps the hair is where it all went wrong.  I had imagined a “glamour japan pop” kind of thing with hair flying around and little sparkly things and patterns in the back.  Like a still from a pop singer’s music video with CG stuff whizzing around.  But this is what happened:

No, there are no eyebrows.  Eyebrows always go on last.  It was right about this stage, seeing hair that was starting to look like the black symbiotic suit from SpiderMan 3, that I had to force myself to give up.  I’d been working on the piece off and on for months in between my regular Hive show pieces, so it was very disheartening to give up on 6 months of planning and grinding away.  It also meant I would never have the piece ready for Sam’s birthday, which was the intended due date.

So I decided to do something drastically simple, since complicating things had worked out so poorly.  I picked out a photo that Sam and I both liked of her from one of our trips to Point Dume.

This time the figure would be simple, the face wouldn’t even be visible and the background would be a blurry sea meeting the sky.

All three previous photos in this post were taken by cell-phone camera – not sure why I don’t have any real photos.

The eventual finished painting is not without its faults – but it came together much easier and faster than the previous effort and now hangs on the wall in Sam’s apartment.  This is the last work I did that was not for a show.  It may be the last work I’ll do for a while on canvas as I’m beginning a mural in a friend’s office building next week.  I’ve never done a mural before so that should be exciting and/or frustrating.