Who and What Inspires Me

I love art. More than the art itself, I love the story behind the person who makes the art. I think the most fascinating thing about art is that it's so much more personal and messy and involved than your typical job would allow you to be and show. What inspires me is, of course my background and culture and what I grew up with, but also it's the process and the artists I admire most. The most interesting and peculiar ones. Or the ones I can relate to the best. As of recently, I found some new artists to follow. I thought I would add some links for you to see. I hope you fall in love with their art as much as I have.

http://www.kurthalsey.com/work.html

http://www.camillerosegarcia.com/

http://www.hifructose.com/

Go, Fishies, Go

Self Portrait: Falling

At first, I didn't intend on doing an unconventional self portrait. Actually, I didn't intend on doing a self portrait at all. I just threw some colors on my palate, stared a the canvas for a while, and put paint on my canvas and went with it. Eventually, I went with the dripping paint and thought about titles and thought of "Falling" and then thought about my life as of late and I suppose life in general. Life definitely has its cycles and some repeating cycles as well and the characters to the right of the painting represent a cycle. It's a cycle I feel I go through time and time again. Feeling great and diving head in, second guessing my choice and trying to stay afloat, full fledged falling and attempting to crawl my way back on up, and then the final fall to the ground. I feel like it's a sort of universal metaphor for how all of us chase things we think we want and we sometimes end up realizing we've made the wrong choice in life and eventually it comes back to bite us and, unfortunately, when we realize this, it's a little too late. And there we are: lying on the ground, about to give up, bawling and messy with upset and somehow we make it back to making new choices that cause us to relive the cycle over and over again. I know this painting seems dark but really, it has a lot more to it than that. Take a good look. Things are almost never what they seem.

So I'm working on a painting for a couple. It's going to be this romantic piece and I'm working on sketches. What I'm thinking of doing is depicting interpretations of what love is, maybe incorporating text and classic pictures and some funky stuff like that.

My question for all of you who choose to read this (and answer) is: What is love and what does it look like? What does it mean and what kind of colors and emotions go along with it for YOU?

Don't you feel extra special, being a part of art?

Oh, and also if you feel like there's any aspect of "loooove" I missed and you want to add something, go ahead! Tell me cute stories about your love life. Tell me about some messy fights and heartbreak. It's all a part of the soup that is....well something witty about love and art combined gets inserted here.

Abstract: If Life Was a Comic Strip

This piece was incredibly fun to make. I was having, I guess you could say, a "trying" day and I needed something purely fun and self-criticism free. What I did here was dump a bunch of paint onto a canvas, let gravity make wonders, flip the canvas around a few times to change the path of the paint, and then take tiny brushes to pull out little monsters and images from the paint-blobs. The majority of the painting was made in one day and it took me a few more to figure out how to take the painting from scattered to visually appealing. I made a somewhat Japanese style background, or at least my interpretation of one, and stuck to your typical comic strip colors. I ended up interpreting the blobs of paint as a sort of fantastic interpretation of life while still being a little whimsical. Whimsical is always good.

Life always just seems to sneak up on you, explode, present itself as a mess, and then somehow turn into some sort of conclusion. You have little to do with what you're given but in the end, you shape what you get.

This time: I got dragons, spoons, and sunsets. I hope you like it.

Note: This copy is for sale so feel free to contact me if you're interested!