Alice in Wonderland

I've been invited to be in the Alice in Wonderland show coming up at the Hive gallery in LA. The show is sort of a celebration of the book and Tim Burton as it correlates to the movie coming out. I've been working feverishly to try to get my piece together. I have an idea to make it very cool, but the parts of the piece really need to come together in order for me to make it work.

For now though, here is the completed drawing at least, with some of the final paint on it. I really like it. I ended up looking through a bunch of images of Alice in Wonderland Walt Disney style and while drawing from some of the photos came up with this Alice. You will notice that my Alice doesn't really look like she would live in a Walt Disney world, and I'm completely fine with that. Still it is nice to have something in your head to think about while trying to put a character together.

I know there are all kinds of crazy characters that I could have worked on, but I really like the imagery at the beginning of Lewis Carrol's book. I think during our boredom a lot of us find ourselves falling down a hole with all of our memories and influences in it. Or wait, was that literal? I'm so confused. I guess it's good I'm not an English major.

well, I have to go to my day job, but on a good note, I start graduate school in four months, so the day job won't be a factor soon. Woot. Til then folks.

peace
-Mike

The Feed Your Soul Project

February has been quite the sparse month for blog posts. I apologize. My day job has been very busy and I have been taking some time for rest and relaxation after getting all of my paperwork for graduate school applications submitted.

It has been a busy year, but it has paid off. I have two exciting bits of news today. First off Indie Fixx has approached me to be involved with the Feed Your Soul project, and I have had a little time to put together a piece for them. As I understand it, you will be able to get a free print available only through the Indie Fixx website. I will be doing two or three different prints for the project. Here is the initial drawing for the first. I really like it.

The Feed Your Soul project is pretty self explanatory. What is it that feeds your soul? So I was looking through my bird books and found a book that compares the musical notes that birds make. This is a series of three different musical lines taken from Indigo Buntings over a three year period, indicating a change in song over generations of Buntings. The music is still very similar. I tried to show different generations through different hats. I think it works pretty well. Let me know what you think, and I'll let you know when the print is available.

The second bit of news is absolutely amazing to me. Anyone who has known me very long will tell you that I've wanted to get into graduate school for at least the past five years. Finally I can stop wondering, because I've been accepted to the Maine College of Art's MFA in painting with a focus on Independent Curating. I am thoroughly excited and look forward to what this will do for my work and my world scope.

Lastly, thank you to all of the new followers of the blog. It is lovely to see folks checking the blog out after all of this time. For those of you there from the beginning, can you believe that it's been a little over three years. Love it!

All of you have a good holiday! Go hug your Mom! She misses you.
until next time
-Mike

Smoke Continued & Wallets

It has been a fair amount of time since I've last posted. My apologies. It has been immensely busy on this end, both producing some artwork and also with that 9-5 job thing, and applying to the curating program at Bard College (cross your fingers by the way).

I have finally scanned in a little bit more work, though I am only blogging a couple things today. The smoke series is continuing, and I am happy to say is becoming a bit more amorphous. It was really good for me to be working loosely with the small drawings for the Concord Variety because it got me drawing quicker and thinking about the whole piece again. So where do we go from here?

Smoke in a scene with other people. This piece is also based a little on conversations I've had with friends about too much social media in public. So I'm going for a serene old man surrounded by a techie invasion in this piece. So far I'm feeling pretty good about it. I really want the paint to be sort of the ethereal nature of De Chirico. Surreal is good, but not all out surrealism.

This piece is by no means done, but it is a big step for me, because I am starting to think a little more about including elements from home, and having the smoke interact. It really has a little more depth in meaning, which is something that I've really been struggling with for some time. So I hope you enjoy some of these new pieces coming up.

Second and on a completely different note, I've started work on a wallet design for Tinymeat via my use of Twitter. So there you go all of you Twitter naysayer, it is most definitely good for something. Haha. Here is the front piece for that wallet.

I love the squirrel. So expect some more squirrels in the future. It is a bit of a shout out the The Bird Machine in Chicago. Jay Ryan's squirrels kick butt! So there you have a bit of what I've been working/thinking on. I hope that you like the direction things are taking and if not, there's some other stuff coming up soon, so hopefully everybody will have something they like.

until then.
peace
-Mike