On January 1, 2017 I started drawing in a Moleskine Japanese accordion fold sketchbook with the intention of drawing in it every day for the entire year. When I filled one sketchbook I continued the drawing into the next one and so far I have one drawing that is over 600 inches long by 5.5 inches high. I managed to keep up the habit almost every single day of 2017. I missed a few, but made up for it with some crazy long days of drawing. In 2019 I entered the series of sketchbooks into the Yeiser Art Center Annual Members Exhibition and won Best of...
I was approached by the Katie Axt, Director of Main Street and Principal Planner for the City of Paducah, to design and license some of my flower and insect drawings to be used for her Broadway Mural Project. The concept was to fill vacant buildings on Broadway in downtown Paducah with pollinators to attract attention to buildings that are available for sale or lease, to beautify downtown Paducah, and to illustrate Main Street’s motto, “Local Grows Here.” The first step was mocking up what a few different vacant buildings would look like with the art in the windows. We decided on three to begin with and I provided mockups to get buy-in from the appropriate people. I remembered seeing some windows with photos in them in the Paducah Innovation Hub (another one of my website clients) and found out how they were done and who to contact. The perforated vinyl window film was printed and installed by Petter Supply Co. I contacted them and got them working on a quote and they came to an agreement with the Katie. The city decided to go with one building to begin with and worked with the owner of 315 Broadway to make it happen. Petter measured the windows and I did the production design to turn the chosen design into print-ready files scaled and cropped to fit the measurements. I also designed a “poster” area in the bottom right for some information about the project and about me and my work, with QR codes linking to the Paducah Main Street website and my own site. The feedback on the mural has...
illustrated portraits My fine art drawings generally have no faces (more about that here), but I actually enjoy drawing faces, too! Here are just a few recent examples. This illustration was done for a PopSugar article about a website/app called AllGo, which is described as “…a review site where fat people rate the comfort and accessibility of places so others can know what it’s like.” I was asked to illustrate some of the app’s high profile supporters. Interested in a custom portrait or avatar? get in...
REPEAT PATTERN DESIGN When I was in grad school at the Savannah College of Art & Design in the 1990s, I studied fiber arts and did quite a bit of surface design. Mostly block and screen printing, but I learned how to design repeat patterns – using drawings, photocopies, scissors and tape. I only did a couple, and although I worked for an apparel company after grad school, I never really did any more repeat patterns. In the late 90s I did a few very simple repeat patterns as backgrounds for web pages, when that was the hottest trend, but nothing very complex. In 2018, as part of the 100 Day Project, I decided to design a pattern a day. I took a few courses on Skillshare to learn the basics of how to create patterns in Illustrator. So starting in April of 2018, I made a pattern a day. Here is a selection of those patterns. Next up, working on creating...
This is my sketchbook from The Sketchbook Project. Thousands of sketchbooks are be exhibited at galleries and museums as they make their way on tour across the world before being entered into the permanent collection of The Brooklyn Art Library, where they are barcoded and available for the public to view. ...
This body of work continues my thinking about how the world sees people and how that differs from what the truth about a person really is. The layering of images on decorated backgrounds and pages of text talks about the things we do to hide our true selves from the world. It’s about how most people only see the outside – the surface decoration – and not the truths that lie behind the outer surface, inside the other person. Pretty, decorative, nice – but what does that have to do with what is inside? The unadorned, anonymous female figures that I draw say that what the world sees is just the packaging we were put in but did not choose for ourselves. But the outer physical shell is not the truth about a person any more than the personality that most of the world sees and thinks is the truth about us. The face and eyes are supposed to be the window that allows others to see inside, but that can be a lie. My figures have no window, because I don’t believe that it shows any more than what we want the world to see. You have to go beyond the surface, search through the layers, pick out the truth from all the surrounding surface decoration – the camouflage that hides the truth…the inside, from the world…from other people… from ourselves. There’s also a delusion here – that we can hide what’s inside. Sometimes people be see past the camouflage; see into you despite all attempts at hiding. Or maybe you can just enjoy what you see on...
As an artist working in the corporate world for a decade, I was stuck in cubicles and conference rooms when I’d have preferred to be in my studio painting. I’d been designing websites for other people rather than creating my own art. When I looked through the stacks and stacks of notes from unending project meetings and corporate training sessions, I realized that the conference room had become my studio. While designing large-scale internet applications for many different companies, I had also created small-scale works of art in the margins between my notes. These prints, from an exhibition entitledPaid Vacation: Drawings from Conference Rooms, are the result. The organic shapes, leaves, flowers, figures and animals illustrate my need to escape the hard cold geometrical world of computers and technology and cubicles. The flowing lines and shapes were an antidote to the rigidity of my “day job” full of pixels and lines of code and corporate red tape. Making these drawings saved my sanity! The titles were created using an online tool I found called a corporate bullshit generator. Another symbol of the duality of my corporate vs. artistic life! ...
