Hey muddy buddies! Been spending the week getting paintings prepared to ship off to Santa Monica for a 3 man show I’m taking part in at Copro gallery with my friends Carl Dobsky and Shawn Barber on March 5th. Starting to get kind of excited about it! It’s really the first time Being able to show a bunch of these nature paintings I’ve been doing since we moved out here years ago.

 

Never painted a tree before we came to Washington, but being out here and surrounded by them you can’t help but be amazed. They’ve probably taught me more about the mechanics of painting than anything else I’ve tackled, because there’s no real narrative, no actors, no distractions. Just edges, textures, and space. They are all pictures of things in our yard that I’m intimately familiar with. Having spent hours staring at them in real life, they inspired me enough to try to make paintings of them, so I want to do right by them. Having worked primarily in video games for the past 20 whatever years, where restraint and subtlety aren’t often called for, it’s been a learning process for me.

I hope people like the work.

some of the paintings that will be on display 

Should be fun to get down there and see people too. Haven’t really gone anywhere since the pandemic started. It appears like we’re heading toward the end of all this craziness, which I hope provides people the excuse to come out and see the show. If you’re in the area, please come check it out. Even if you think trees are boring, Shawn and Carl are both going to have some crazy pieces up.

This one won’t make it, but here’s a new little one I started last week.

There are areas that can get tedious, but this is one of my favorite stages of the painting where you get to get in there and be suggestive. Lots of scraping, scratching, blotting, and wiping. All while being extremely careful not to get paint anywhere I’m not supposed to. Fun times!

still a ways to go, but it’s getting there!