OPENING NIGHT

Opening night for my solo show “Family, Friends, and Other Oddities” was really great. Here are photos of the show if you want to check it out.

Family, Friends, and Other Oddities

Opening Day

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls,

I present to you the greatest solo show in all the land and lucky for you it will be here in Miami. So come on by and crush a bit of wine.

Family, Friends, and other Oddities

Color as an emotion

For quite some time I was focused on the technical aspect in my work and especially in this series. Proportion, perspective, lighting, etc… Of course if there is anything that slipped in to each piece of the work it would be expressed in brushstroke and paint application. Which begs the question what would be the point of creating a number of painting purely based on family and friends if there is nothing more than technique? My answer came in the form that the truth comes out no matter how suppressed it is. And so I made a conscious effort to just observe and if something notable came out then I would catch it after the fact.

This painting of my niece is to me a reminder that color is one hell of a factor in emotion, along side paint application and proportion. It is a direction I will take in the next paintings to come. Color.

One of the greatest work of art from China

I read this story on The Guardian and thought it would be great to mention simply because of its irony. Here is an installation thought out by an artist, Ai Weiwei, and carried through by a good number of Chinese people. The artwork is uniquely Chinese due to its process which was by about 1,600 people in a small city of Jingdezhen where they were contracted to manufacture 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds. The intention was to fill a room 1/3 in size and the public was suppose to walk, run, and hold them in hand to as they run through fingers and toes. The problem is now they pose a health risk because the dust the porcelain produces is toxic to lungs.

The reason I site this particular work of art is because of its correlation to China today. I do not know whether it was the artist intention but it does speak to China being this manufacturing giant which has little thought to what repercussions such accomplishments have. I sight the toxic drywalls, food, and toys that have been revealed over the last couple of years not to mention all the pollution it produces, not that this country is clean of such pollution but I digress.

Now I do not know if it was the artist intention for this problem to occur with the work as it being its true concept. Of course, if it was he would not say such a thing in public due to that fact that the Chinese government would not like such an idea to be expressed. But despite that the work has not for fill its original intention I do like my own interpretation of this artwork, even more that the artist did not realize the repercussions to such an accomplishment. For me the work speaks more to the issues China is having today on the world’s stage due to its massive economic growth.

This is my stepfather.

This is my stepfather Juan. He is of Mexican decent but was born in the U.S. so it would be accurate to say he is chicano. I find him to be a great subject to paint and draw from because of the expressions he makes, if fact I may indulge in the future to do an extensive series of paintings and drawing just on him.

In my opinion he is a walking work of art.