About me, and about my art

I have from very young had the desire to be able to draw and paint. One of my brothers could draw incredibly life-like images, and another brother’s oil paintings were amazing. When I was young, and tried to draw, it did not turn out well, I was 5 at the time, and had simply told myself I could not draw.

After firmly imprinting that in my young mind, I took drafting instead. I learned proportion, how to make images look 3 dimensional on paper, layout, shading etc. I was very good at drafting. Later in the digital era, I much enjoyed working with digital photo software and enjoyed retouching photos for my creative outlet. Don’t get me wrong, I still drew from time to time, but the images never came out the way I wished them to. But I still had the draw to visual art. I wanted to tell stories with words. So the digital era allowed me to take images and modify them to tell what I wanted them to say.

When unable to find images available, I purchased a digital camera to take my own photographs to manipulate. True to how I handle every other aspect of my life, I read every photography book the public library had to offer, and purchased some of my own. Then after putting around 10,000 photographs through my camera over several years, I felt confident in my ability and worked for myself doing freelance photography winning some awards for images and 10 of my still photos wound up on a tv news channel such as this sawmill fire.

Though most of my work involved

portrait photography and nature

scenes from the moab Utah area.

The transition to traditional art.

Drafting taught me quite a few things about drawing, Photography taught me quite many more about light, shadow, composition, form, structure, placement, depth, impact…the list goes on. Though many at the time were very vocally against DSLR camera’s. I am grateful for the digital age because if you have ever developed a roll of film, you either need a darkroom and chemicals, or quite a lot of money as it was rather expensive to have a roll of even 35mm film developed.

With a DSLR, not only was I able to put 10,000+ photos through my camera, but I had immediate results on how it actually looked. This far surpasses waiting 2 weeks to get the film back before you can decide if the f stop, shutter speed, film speed or color temperature corrected film or exposure was right.

What really fired the transition was when I posed for lifedrawing. Having been raised in the sterile environment that is Salt Lake City, UT, it was a bit uncomfortable at first to have a group of 11 strangers staring at my undraped body for 3 hours. But then it became a no-nevermind.

However; looking at the artwork generated I puzzled over some of the execution of the drawing. I had expected the group of 11 artists to be incredibly accurate, detailed, photography quality or some form of cognate. It wasn’t there was a variety, and the ones that were seeking true representation for practice, I squinted and thought….if I practiced a little, I could probably match that quality….then it occurred to me….”IF I PRACTICED”….now, every other aspect of my life I know very well, and is my personal philosophy to heavily research and read, but that is only 5% of the solution. The foundation as it were. The other 95% is doing, and experimenting. As I did with photography. 5% books 95% 10,000+ images.

So I checked out, over the next few years every book available in the library on art, and drew every picture in every book, whether it was an instruction book or not. I spent 15 min. to an hour drawing virtually every day for the next few years. Once my drawings were relatively photorealistic. I moved to charcoal. from charcoal to soft pastel. Then from soft pastel to acrylic.

I also dabble in ink, watercolor, oil pastel, and other media, I wish to do oil painting, but I don’t have a good space for oil painting indoors. Oil paints and the solvents are toxic and my primary line of work is health and physics related. DO NOT BEAT THE DEVIL OUT OF YOUR BRUSH, if you are an oil painter…RIP Bob Ross, I love you but that was bad advice to throw particulate turpentine all over your work area.

My goal of painting and drawing is to be photorealistic with the hidden image behind the image, what is the story of the person or creature, why are they there, what are they doing or thinking, what message are they representing, who are they on the inside. I paint the soul, whilst being more or less loose with representation. My favorite subject is placing life models and leaning on my scorpio moon and pisces cusp to glean the inner workings of the person and what makes them tick, sometimes asking obscure questions to glean from them, what sort of archtype from folklore and fiction drives them.

This is what I’m about.

I don’t do commissions, I like my art to be loved, and for this reason I generally only give away my original paintings should I feel like it will be loved. But I do like making the image available and to share what I love to do by offering it at low cost as prints, or in functional art.

Thank you for reading all of this and hope you have the most amazing day ever. Choose Joy, choose love, choose listening to each other.