The Prodigal Son

It's been a while, hasn't it?

Here's the finished product of the Prodigal Son. Quite different from my original sorry excuse for an idea (see earlier post).



P.S. I grew up my entire life thinking that "prodigal" meant "really bad" or "really REALLY BAD" or something similar. I remember when I first realized that it meant "wasteful" it felt like an epiphany. Thinking about that even now, it really brings the parable close to home, because WASTEFUL is a way that's all-too easy to be in light of God's grace to us.

Veterans and Christmas lists

This is a monotype with colored pencil. Based on a guard at the National Gallery in D.C. He was great.




all right, I just got off the phone with my mom. She's hilariously wonderful. A while ago she emailed me about me and me wife visiting for Thanksgiving and Christmas. My mom's the kind of mom who, once autumn rolls around, is always asking what you want for Christmas, via phone, email, etc. Bugs you about it. Anyways, her email about visiting home sparked in me the desire to, finally, write out my Christmas list for her.

1. a sweet iPod
2. lots of money
3. lots of more money
4. D.M. Lloyd Jones' complete commentary on Romans (it's only about a million dollars)
5. gift cards for Half.com, Amazon.com, Buy.com, iTunes, Barnes and Noble, any art supply store,
6. anything that has to do with Sufjan Stevens, the greatest singer/songwriter ever to walk the earth (I already have most of his CD's).
7. a barrel of real live monkeys
8. sleep
9. slight comprehension of the vastness of the universe
10. ridiculous musical talent
11. lots of cool, random tiny objects
12. a really expensive etching press made by Takach
13. really good camping supplies
14. riddance of lower back pain
15. stuff
16. tight black leather pants
17. a black Harley-Davidson bike built by dad
18. a thousand-dollar scanner I can use at work
19. never-before-seen artistic ability and unstoppable motivation
20. FIVE GOLDEN RIIIIIIIIINGS
21.The complete set of Ren and Stimpy episodes on DVD
21. my own personal sushi chef
22. the entire city of Asheville, NC
23. the entire state of Oregon
24. a partridge in a pear tree

eine kleine painting (malen? ja, deutsch?)

This is a tiny little painting of the painting room. Mostly gouache, and watercolor.

i'm a poet and i didn't even no it

Here there be

four or three

imagee-

-sof art by me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

His first name's John
His second is Kerry
This drawing of him
Ended up looking scary



Cedar is big.
Cedar is tall.
If everyone knew him,
He'd be loved by all.



Angels bring messages,
That's what they do.
Since they're sent by the Father,
Their message is True.



This monkey's a Howler
and stuck behind bars.
Would you not howl too
if stuck behind bars?

1) duffel bag 2) bulldog 3) fear of nakedness

Today's lightning-fast story concept, thanks to Jamin's random-keyword-selecting skills...

Remember folks, these are mere stream-of-consciousness "word sketches." No proofreading, no revising, no prolonged thinking here. Nastyfast.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Spike?!?! WHERE ARE YOUR CLOTHES!!!?!????” Peter shrieked as he recoiled in terror, bracing himself on the doorframe before almost falling back out onto the front porch.
He had just walked in the door, only to see the forbidden white-grayish blur of his meaty bulldog’s body darting across the kitchen.
Peter couldn’t think. For a moment, he thought he was going to have a heart attack, his chest pounding and making his head feel like it was going to explode. The blurred image of his naked bulldog flashed across the screen of his memory until it reached the terrifying level of a Francis Bacon painting come to awful, nightmarish life. Trying his hardest to resist the horrifying image from clawing its way into his mind’s eye, Peter steadied himself and tried to replace the image with images of turtlenecks, tuxedos, and spacesuits—ANYTHING to crowd out the gut-wrenching recollection of his unclothed canine.
Yet, in all of this vicious, hellish mind-war, Peter knew he had to cover Spike somehow. He couldn’t get anyone else involved, he knew. He must somehow, someway GET SPIKE COVERED without looking at him. Trembling like a freezing Chihuahua, Peter managed to make his way toward the closet under the stairs and began tearing through it until he found, at last, his oversized adidas duffel bag. Ripping it out from underneath the pile of junk, he fell back against the wall with a house-rattling thud. He rummaged through the rest of the closet mess until he found, at last, his winter gloves—thick and puffy and Thinsulate. He frantically tried to cram his hands into each, trying to hold onto the duffel bag at the same time, until, exasperated, he remembered the Velcro straps, which he frantically ripped loose. Finally having smashed his trembling hands into the puffy gloves, Peter rounded the corner to the kitchen and listened long enough to hear the clicking of Spikes toenails against the linoleum in the kitchen. Summoning up every ounce of would-be courage he could, Peter turned and shouted into the front dining room, “Spike! Here boy!” and like a bolt of lightning turned back into the hallway and pressed his back up against the wall. The sound of Spike clickety-clacking across the kitchen floor became suddenly muffled by the carpet of the dining room: Peter’s dreadful cue to make a mad dash for the kitchen. Clambering through the hardwood floor of the hall like a drunken, enraged orangutan with FEAR written all over his pathetic face, Peter aimed straight for the Snoopy-shaped doggie treat jar, obliterating jars and pots and everything in his path. Shattering the heirloom Snoopy jar over the kitchen counter and spilling the treats all over the counter, Peter frantically clutched a handful of Snausages, threw them into the duffel bag, smashed his eyelids shut as painfully tight as possible, fell to his knees, and spread open the duffel bag.
And against all rational thought and with a voice quaking with terror Peter summoned the naked dog into the kitchen.
As the nightmarish sound of the clicking toenails and jingling collar grew louder, Peter cringed as he held the opened, Snausage-filled duffel bag as far away from himself as his stretching, trembling arms would allow.

some slightly less recent work

Here are a few pieces I did last year. They're all etchings.

Here's Gracen. She's a real person. And a real great person.


This piece carries ideas such as deliverance, salvation, rescue, transformation, and so on. In other words, "Everything's going to be okay."


This is actually the first/second of playing with this kind of imagery.


And I just really like this one.


Don't touch that dial. There's more to come.

Goil...

The other day I saw a painting of Toulouse Lautrec's (not the REAL THING, silly) that i simply had never seen before. I absolutely loved it. I would have to say it is very different than his famous paintings. ...anyways, I want to do a piece similar to it. I just did this quick sketch, vaguely based on his composition.

Story Time! (the first of many i think...)

I have been commanded by my superior to post a series of quick story-esque concepts that I and my fellow Portland Studios co-artists will be doing daily as a "creative excercise" of sorts. Every day, for a specific allotted amount of time, we will be given a specific set of criteria from which to put down a quick situation/story idea/concept as well as any sketches. It's kind of a foreign land to me, so bear with me. The whole point of the "experiment" is to see whether it helps our corporate creativenessishesqueness. er...

Here we go. The following is today's:

---------------

The red rubber kickball pinged off the face of the kid with the butt-cut and the oversized gym uniform, making his usually puffy, squinty eyes squint even tighter.

“Jeeeeeez,” he breathed out, cupping his face in his hands.
A group of boys erupted with tilting-back laughter.
“Oh, sorry Nedward, we didn’t see you there! You all right?” one of the shorter boys laughed out.
Edward half-turned away from the laughing mob, looking in his hands to find blood dripping from his nose.
“Jeez, Nedward, maybe you should work on the whole nose-picking thing—Looks like you made your nose start bleeding this time! You find a piece of gold?”
Again, the mob roared with laughter.
Edward hunched and walked, with longer-than-usual strides, toward the locker room, his smooth, bowl-shaped hair shaking and bouncing with each step. Through the echoing sneaker-squeaking and multi-colored archs of balls, he made his way to the big metal door of the locker room.
“Hey Nedward! Whereya thinkyer goin’!” Coach blurted out across the gym, his hands on his hips and his head tilted back.
What do YOU care? he thought as he heaved open the heavy grey door.
The door shut behind him, instantly muffling the yelling and screeching and ball-pounding. Edward walked past the rows of grey lockers and toward the back of the locker room by the sinks.
When he rounded the corner, he jerked himself to a stop. There was a boy standing by the row of sinks, his head tilted back, staring at the ceiling. He was huge, at least 6 feet tall. He turned his bent neck and looked down at Edward out of the corner of his eye. “You got a nose bleed too?” He said in a low, nasally voice.
Cupping his nose in his bloodied hands, Edward replied, “You have one?”
“What does it look like?” The big boy said in a annoyed, pathetic tone. He put a wad of toilet paper on his nose and looked up at the ceiling again. “That’s what I get for picking my freakin’ nose.”

Bad apple

Yeah, so today I open up my sack lunch and lo and behold, there's a demon-possessed apple in the bag. After the initial shock, I placed it on my desk, wondering what kind of diabolical thoughts it was having. Just for the record, I took a few pictures of it.





Officially weirded out, I stepped away from my desk for a few minutes to go look for some worms outside. Or something. When I returned...



Make of this what you will.