new drawings (by: Teagan)

Filed under: art+photography, artsy., family, life, personal., pics, sketch

portfolio site

I am putting together an interim portfolio site for my own work, Karen’s work and our collaborative pieces.
Incidentally here is our latest collaboration : suspension of emotions
Any way, it is slowly getting filled out and you can check it out here if you like.

Filed under: art+photography, artsy., backstory, life, personal., pics, sketch

illustrating my daughter’s dreams

I have been a stay-at-home dad for just over a year now and both my daughter and I are loving it. It is by far the most rewarding and difficult thing I have ever done. I am not quite Mr. Mom, but I do do all of the cooking, cleaning, shopping in addition to being a doting father to Teagan. One of the newest additions to my list of things to do, is the creation of a daily ‘Princess Teagina’ story for my daughter, Teagan. Teagina (pronounced Tay-gee-nah) has fantastic and imaginary adventures that are loosely inspired by Teagan’s own daily events, dreams and fantasies. Creating these stories has been a real source of joy for me, watching her eyes light up at key moments in the story, or her continued questions and probing days after the story was told. It has been a way to teach lessons, and encourage her imagination. I’ve been creating these daily adventures for almost 6 weeks now and the other day she began asking what people or places in the story looked like, and asked if we could make her a book (I am also teaching her to read— which has turned out to be a great source of pride and fun for her. Weirdo. So anyway now I am making illustrations for some of the better stories.

for instance: Princess Teagina and her superhero sunday (left) and
Princess Teagina and the forest fairy spring festival (right)

 

Filed under: art+photography, artsy., backstory, family, life, personal., pics, sketch

studies for memory vessels

These images are some of the initial sketches for the memory vessels as well as some studies for other internal memory structures.

My newest body of work is all related to the concept of Intimate architecture+the space of memory. The vessels below represent the internal loci of memory or the site of storage. The shapes are boat-like vessels made of paper and book pages. Paper is not the best designed material for holding anything of substance beyond text and as such it is the perfect material to represent the fragility of memory and its potential to hold large ammounts of emotionally charged information. For me this new work is meant to be an exploration of the errosion and decay of (personal) memory over time; from the moments of perception all the way through long term storage and recall. I am intrigued by the affect of memory bias or atlered encoding of memories—the idea that we store our personal perceptions of events in our lives as memories and not the nuetral or actual events themselves.What impact does this have on the way we use these memories to construct our realities; first in the present and then in the future. I am also interested in paper as a repository for memory in the form of words. This concept of paper as the substrait for memory is slowly degrading infavor of new digital documentation of our lives, experiences, emotions and reactions, designed for consumption rather than preservation.

Filed under: art+photography, artsy., personal., pics, sketch

the first colaborative painting with my wife

This was the first painting that my wife and I colaborated on.
It was 1st featured in the Starbucks sponsered exhibition: Avant Grande— at the Chelsea museum in NYC in may of 2005. It was also featured in the View from inside exhibition at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery here in Portland.

Filed under: art+photography, artsy., backstory, pics, sketch