Burroughs

This is another old piece from the spring of '09. It's an illustration assignment and a pretty straight-forward one: portrait of an author. I wanted to include this as a strong piece on it's own, and also because it got in to this last year's juried student art show.

I definitely had a lot of options, but I chose William S. Burroughs not just because I like the book Naked Lunch, but because he writes very vividly, and with a lot of imagery. It seemed like a good choice for a visual interpretation. I'm not going to go into every detail, but I will say that I'm using imagery from the book as well as Burrough's own life to show his mental state and suggest a degradation of the mind that creates as well as destroys.

Watercolor on cold press.

Christ on the Crossword

This piece is from the spring of '09. Our assignment was to do a collage, and I have a slight obsession with crossword puzzles, so I wanted to depict something with crossword. The idea to have it be Jesus was influenced by two things: first, I felt like I was keeping in the tradition of classic artists by doing something religious, and second, I thought a crossword of Jesus in a newspaper would reference how Jesus has a tendency to "appear" in everyday settings. This was actually very fun to make despite how time consuming it was. I wanted to keep all the little crossword numbers right-side-up, so I'd cut out as big of shapes of white squares as I could and then piece them together. It was kind of like paper Tetris. The black parts are the black squares in crosswords and any large patches of black I could find in newspapers. I painted a black border in acrylic to clean it up, but now I feel like the painted on border makes it feel kinda childish , so I'd probably lose it if I were to hang it.

Mixed Media

Dali

I'm adding some old art that I think is pretty good.

This piece was done in the spring of '09. It's my first woodcut and I'm pretty happy with it. The assignment was fairly open ended, we just had to have multiple layers on the foreground and the background (at least four layers total). I thought it was just four layers period, so I originally just had Dali's face broken down into four different layers. You might recognize that this was adapted from a famous photograph of him, only reversed. So, then I had to go back and add stuff to the background, which were just little images of common motifs in Dali's paintings. They're patterny, and the colors aren't quite right (the green should be much brighter and more visible). I honestly would prefer it cropped, but I might as well have it in it's entirety here.

Woodcut