• Clothes Whore 2013, 36" x 48" Oil on Canvas

    The latest development, here and I am loving it!  I cannot paint fast enough.  This is where I think I was trying to go all of this time, but it just didn't click in my brain, yet.  

    If you look closely at the more painterly, modern work I was developing with my mentor Aaron Smith, last year, you can see some triangles showing up.  Especially in the nostril area of my painting, "Stache." (see below).


    It seems so obvious to me now this is what I was after using color theory and approximating the image, but I was fighting in my mind any connections to my past working in animation and visual effects.  The triangulated representation is something I see working in computer generated imaging all the time. It flows with all of my color theory study and by painting with glazes these works actually glow in person.  Using an old method to create something new, but to steal from DFA - "Too old to be new and too new to be classic."  Perfect.

    Other points that stick with me is capturing the persona of a person, the aura or the feeling you get when they enter a room... you know? I get jazzed by the tricks our eyes play on us when two colors are side by side and how complimentary colors seem to vibrate!

    P.S. Titles came from the portrait sitter's email handles.

    The subjects are all friends and art comrades, mostly living at the Brewery Arts Complex where I live and work in downtown LA.

    Portraiture has been around since the beginning of time as testaments of power and status. This series pays tribute to a new way of viewing the portrait. Today anyone can have their portrait made.  My interpretation goes beyond capturing a likeness.  These paintings are modern abstractions representing our 8-bit, computer generated counter culture.  No more stuffy, expressionless faces of the Renaissance. This work rejects an academic approach to portraiture and embraces a modern take using nostalgia for old computer imaging and twisting the methods of the masters into something new.

    These will have their debut at the Beverly Hills artSHOW.  May 18th and 19th, Sat and Sunday! 

    My booth is #212 on Beverly Drive near Santa Monica, on the second block of the park.

    The spring show hours are 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.


    Don Don 2013, 36" x 48" Oil on Canvas


    Doom Sayer 2013, 36" x 48" Oil on Canvas


    Envize 2013, 36" x 48" Oil on Canvas


    Frida Study 2013, 20" x 24" Oil on Canvas


    Kupka Study 2013, 20" x 24" Oil on Canvas






  • The only collection of drawings Leonardo managed to publish in his lifetime were the illustrations for Luca Pacioli's book, De divina proportione (On divine proportions). Luca Pacioli was a Franciscan friar and Leonardo picked up a lot of mathematical knowledge from him in the period 1496-1501 when both of them worked for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo made for Pacioli's book, whose theme were proportions in geometry and architecture, about sixty illustrations that showed polyhedra. The illustrations were printed using the woodcut techique and that could be the reason that Leonardo in his Notebooks wrote down that all that should be published from his work should be made in the copperplate technique, and not woodcuts.















  • love it...








  • Head, 1962, oil on paperboard, 15.375" 11.25". Hirshhorn Museum

    Pretty much have fallen in love with Earl Kerkam.  
    Cannot believe I only just discovered him...


    American artist Earl Kerkam was "a painter of enormous poetic awareness, self-directed, almost totally without influence, he stands as an original American artist in the best sense"- Gerald Norland, 1966.

    Head, 1963, oil on board, 21.75" x 18.75". via

    Head, 1960, oil on canvas-board, 29.75" x 24.75". Smithsonian American Art Museum

    Head, c. 1960's, oil on board, 28" x 21.75". Stair Galleries, sold 2009


    Self Portrait, 1963, 14" x 11". via

    Earl Kerkam in his studio. Archives of American Art

    Kerkam shirtless in his studio, 1950's. via

    ~Via Mid Centuria
    General Information:
    Artist: Earl Cavis Kerkam
    Nationality: American
    Birth: Washington, D.C., October 7, 1891
    Death: New York City, January 12, 1965 (73 years old)
    Education: Studied at several schools including, Art Students League and Academie de la Grande Chaumiere.
    Style Influences: New York School, Abstract Expressionism, Figurative Expressionism

    Points of Interest:
    • In the 1920's he designed posters for Warner Brothers, earning a whopping $20K, equal to ≈ $250K today.
    • He was good friends with Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning.
    • After Kerkam was evicted from his NYC studio, Franz Kline offered him to share his studio.
    • Franz Kline once said when speaking of Kerkam, "Earl could paint in a telephone booth."
    • After his death a group of artists including, Hans Hoffman, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning drafted a letter to the Museum of Modern Art of New York requesting that they hold an Kerkam exhibition stating, "Kerkam in our eyes is one of the finest Painters to come out of America...and as working artists we could afford the stimulation such an exhibition would provide us."

    Kerkam Quotes:
    • "I can't speak French, but I can paint French."
    • "Painting a woman who won't take her clothes off is like interviewing a woman who won't tell the truth."
    • When a heiress knocked at his studio apartment door with a $1,000 in hand to have her portait painted, Kerkam looked her up and down through a crack in the door and said, "You're too pretty. Go away."
    • At his retrospective exhibit in 1963, when asked where all the people were? He replied, "They'll come when I die. I am not a fashionable man."

    Related Links:
    Go to- an article about Earl Kerkam, with a lot of great anecdotes about the artist.
    Go to- section in the book New Art City: Manhattan at Mid Century about Kerkam (see pp 171-177).
    Go to- Flickr set of Kerkam's work

  •  Andrea Büttner, All my favourite artists had problems with alcohol, 2005. Woodcut print. Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London

  • The decks are finally back from their US Tour 
    and I am ready to let them go for a steal! 
    $200 each plus shipping.  
    Go to my ETSY shop to pick one now for your wall!





    Vanitas III


    Vanitas IV




  • I really dig her work...  http://www.ryokotajirifineart.com/







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