Walking Man with Cats - progress

Sitting Man with Cats - progress

Stove and Kettle progress

Man Sitting with Cats Progress

Man Sitting with Cats progress

These are the first two passes of the Sitting Man with Cats. See original drawings here and here. I'm approaching it as a diptych, both acrylic on canvas, 30 x 36 in. each. My goals with these are: to describe the figures more efficiently with fewer brush strokes, and to increase the range of what I can do with acrylics (i.e. thinner washes to thicker areas, use of different mediums, etc.).

Georgia & Luckies

Another update from the Japan series. I decided to remove the Japanese characters and zoom in on the can and cigarettes, cropping them in the process. This one is totally graphic. In fact, I'm painting this with the same insane precision used in Murakami's studio: flawless flat color built up with many layers of the same acrylic color, leaving no brush marks, no gradations, painting "within the lines" and exactly up to the line. It's as if the painting is an exact replica of the same done as vector art. The end result should appear as if it were produced by a machine.

Painting like this is kind of a break from the more painterly work I've got going, but I'm beginning to question if it's worth it. For one thing, I'm doing it on stretched canvas instead of canvas mounted on a rigid support, and the gesso ground is not as smooth as it should be to achieve true flatness. And I've cut corners in certain ways from the get-go, which all kind of negates the process itself. For another thing, this is Murakami's method, not mine, so it's not in my best interest to keep on with it unless I think of a way to improve on it or make it my own. Ultimately, these reasons make it hard to justify continuing with such an anal and time-consuming process of painting. I'll have to think of where I can go from here with this.

Stove Progress

Here is the start of the actual stove painting. By using a 31 x 41 inch canvas, I've cropped some of the left side of the original drawing. I'm kind of thinking that was a mistake, but we'll see how it turns out in the end. I started out with a more graphic approach trying to mimic the linear feel of the drawing, but am now loosely blocking in areas of color with a big brush and really thin, wet acrylic paint. I'm letting it drip the way it wants to a little too. Not abandoning a total graphic approach; more like a balance between loose and graphic.

Japan Things

In an earlier posting I mentioned that some work in this new series will incorporate Japanese subject matter. The man walking with cats below has some of that, but here is the start of a direction I'd like to try in which the subject matter is less surreal and more purely Japan, or at least a nod toward some everyday objects that informed my experience of Japan. I don't have original photos for reference, only these drawings from life I recorded in my journal at the time (ca. 2002-2003). I'm hoping the paintings that follow will in some way capture something that could be called "contemporary", though at this point I'm not sure what form that will take. At the moment my goal is to avoid painterly realism and push for more creative use of color and graphic approaches.



The free-standing kerosene stove/space heater makes winter in Japan bearable. With the exception of the northern parts of the country, most homes and schools in Japan are not centrally heated so people rely on these stoves to heat rooms. This one is not as new and fancy as the ones people keep in their homes, but it's what we had in the high school classrooms where I taught. This image is evidence of where I spent much of my time between classes. The heat and mesmerizing red glow were in effect like a campfire on a cold night. Oh, and it's pretty handy for keeping tea water hot too.



The characters at the top read "Asagohan", which means breakfast in Japanese. I used be a heavy smoker and coffee drinker. During much of my twenties, that would be my "breakfast". On one particular morning I was out of real coffee. The house I lived in was in a rural part of Osaka and the only "store" out my door that didn't constitute a trip to get to was a cold drink vending machine that stood guard at the foot of the drive that led to the house. This is where I got the Georgia can coffee, not quite a substitute for the real stuff but I developed a taste for it anyway. The text "How many more years?..." is me trying to come to terms with the knowledge of the risks that would worsen over time if I didn't get control over bad habits. The answer is that it took 3 more years. I quit both cigarettes and coffee in 2005.

Buster Bunny - More Sketches

More developed drawings of Buster.
As I mentioned in the previous posting, I wanted to substitute the balloons for something more material and representative of love and romance. After all, he's with his "girlfriend"; this ain't just cheap thrills. I started thinking of "I love you" balloons and chocolates, and developed the drawings here. They're the same drawing-- one was scanned and then I added the heart box of chocolates and scanned it again. I may nix the chocolates, but have not decided yet.

Buster Bunny

I haven't done many pet portraits, but when I do I try to depict something unique about the pet. Sundae Bunny was done for my younger cousin Hannah, whose pet bunny was actually named Sundae, as in ice cream.

Now along comes another pet commission, and if it isn't of another bunny! This is for a friend of mine and his wife as a memorial to their bunny Buster, who unfortunately passed away recently. My friend, Jeff, supplied the perfect photos and background story about Buster's "girlfriend", a stuffed animal that he gave the bunny lovin' to on a fairly constant basis. Buster and his girlfriend would even allegedly lie together post-coital for a while afterwards. The sketch here is my first response to the idea, but I was already thinking that the hearts should be replaced by something more material and representative of love.

More Preliminary Sketches - Cats

Here is another original sketch from an earlier journal (late '06 or early '07) of a man walking and being swarmed by cats. It is the first, in regard to the idea of a man with cats, and probably inspired the ones of the sitting man in the Aug 13 and 14 postings below.

Originally there were no cats. The drawing evolved from a very simple ink sketch based on my memory of wearing a suit in Japan in the Summertime. I was teaching English and it was mandatory to wear a business suit to orientations early in the contract, August and September, when it was still ungodly hot and humid. I was smoking then and have a vivid memory of myself trying to find my way to a meeting from the train station, getting lost, chain-smoking, and utterly baking along the way. The cats were added arbitrarily, although not that arbitrarily since cats pop up in my sketches here and there in my journals. There is one drawing I did of the same guy walking through a bunch of tulips. I thought cats would be funnier, as if they are the guy's fans, or entourage or something.



This is a much more recent sketch from last month. Now the cats are on their own; no man to harass. There is no concrete prior back-story driving this one. I started with abstract shapes as I often do in my journals and just let the imagery take shape freely with pencil and gouache. The totem cat on the left is an example of the kind of stylistic cat that pops up every once in a while in my books and the orange burst with the blue shapes exploding outward is simply form in search of meaning. The totem cat led to the addition of the cats on the right, and wanting to situate them in some kind of landscape I habitually chose a wide, desolate space with volcanoes in the background. This kind of landscape has worked its way into some of my more recent pictures, such as the two giraffes and the dive-bombing pigeon. Cats being the playful creatures they are, I thought the one should be batting around a fireball that erupted from the volcano.

Both of these sketches will be developed into more developed drawings like the other cat and sitting man drawings below.

Preliminary Sketches - Man with Cats

Just to back up a little bit, here is the original sketch in my journal for the sitting man with cats as it came to me on 7/7/07. I didn't know what to do with the idea then, but I'm hoping those lucky/holy numbers will turn out to be the harbinger of some good art. That remains to be seen, and I'm not any kind of numerologist or anything, but for what it's worth...

Another cat sketch

Next up in the man with cats series...
So far I've kept both sketches more linear than rendered in order to emphasize a more graphic quality in the eventual paintings. I've been playing around with the idea of veering from my usual painterly style into something more design-y with cleaner edges and flatter color. Likewise for the color, I'm hoping for a more vibrant palette than the warms and the earth-tones I have been using.

Start of a new series

This is one of several in a new series I'm trying out. I'll elaborate more on the series as I develop more ideas and post them here, but suffice it to say there will be cats. I also have plans to integrate Japanese subject matter, and sometimes there will be Japanese subject matter without cats, but that all too will become more apparent over time. This drawing is based on a quick sketch I'd done months ago of a melancholic man in a chair, being swarmed by cats. I have been this guy, but the deeper meaning of what's going on is still unknown even to me. My aim in this series is to develop a personal body of work in which the narrative will follow from the imagery, rather than the other way around. Hopefully I can elaborate more on that over time as well.

If you're following along, thanks. If too much time goes by between updates, email me to jog the blog machinery back into action. It'll keep me on task.

a bunch of bull

I just finished these two paintings as a commission for Sonoma Cattle Exchange, a beef wholesaler and retailer based in Petaluma, CA. The client wanted a large 4 x 6 ft. single Black Angus bull to hang in his conference room, and a smaller 30 x 40 in. farm scene featuring several Black Angus bulls to hang in the company's entrance way. He wanted both to reflect a classic, early American feel.

The large single bull was the first one I completed. It got many positive responses and "bull" jokes were abundant around the studio. I looked through many Black Angus photos to combine the right characteristics. This massive animal is after all the source of the beef industry, and I wanted to elevate it from being just a picture of a bull, to an icon full of strength, dignity, and stormy majesty.