Studio Tour

It's hard to believe it's been a year since the last Visual Speedbump Oak Cliff Artist Studio Tour, but here we are. I've been crazy busy all week preparing for it, including making new "Rooster Bowls", a print series I'll talk more about in another post, and a painting for a show at one of the other stops. The show is titled "Bitchin' Chimera", made up of different artists' interpretation of the Chimera myth. Mine is "Texas Chimera", shown below. The tour is tomorrow, Saturday, and I'll post more pictures as things develop.

Winter Berries

"Winter Berries", 6 by 8 inches, acrylic on canvas.
This piece is my donation to the Dallas Challenge Auction Party, benefitting Dallas Challenge, a non-profit organization that has provided prevention, intervention, education and outpatient treatment services to over 147,000 kids in North Texas since 1984.
The auction is Thursday, December 1, 6:30 - 9:00 pm, at Norwood Flynn Gallery.

Holiday cards with this and other artists' images can be acquired, with proceeds benefitting the organization, from Dallas Challenge.

¡Lotería, Lotería! (Tres)

I was invited to contribute a piece to this show at the Bath House Cultural Center in Dallas. This is "El Pajaro", 20 by 16 inches, acrylic on canvas. The exhibit opens Saturday, April 30, 7 - 9 pm.

Here is the concept, from the Bath House web site:
This exhibition features 54 local artists who created artwork based on the pictures and symbols from La Loteria, a popular Mexican board game. Loteria resembles a form of bingo that uses pictures instead of numbers. In the game, each player is given a card with 16 squares with pictures and beans to mark the squares that have been called. The first person to get four pictures in a row, vertically, horizontally or diagonally, hollers out LOTERIA and wins the game.

La Lotería is produced by popular artists throughout Mexico. There are different versions of the game, all lovely variations of what remains, essentially, the same symbols. The images from the game depict common everyday objects, places and characters that are easily recognized and significant to the traditions and culture of Mexico.

Artists: Michelle Akers, Michael Benson, Rita Barnard, Kathy Boortz, Tomas Bustos, Gabrielle Castañeda Pruitt, J R Compton, Ray-Mel Cornelius, Misty Dean, Viola Delgado, Christa Diepenbrock, Carlos Donjuan, Emily Donjuan, Dan Dudley, Lori Dudley, Amalia Elmasri, Lilia Estrada, Jacque Forsher, Merry Fuhrer, Maria Teresa García Pedroche, Pastor García, Rebecca Guy, Genaro Hernández, Jacinta Hernández, Juan J. Hernández, Johanna Roffino-Hulsey, Alex Hulsey, Peta Jones, Jenny Keller, Darrell Madis, Freddie McCoo, Julia McLain, David Medina, Sandra A. Moreno, Roberto Munguia, Lupita Murillo-Tinnen, Mylan Nguyen, Andrew Ortiz, Anna Palmer, Cap Pannell, Chet Phillips, Brooke Opie Ragusa, Marty Ray, Richard Ray, Janet Reynolds, Linda Lucía Santana, Armando Sebastian, Linda D. Stokes, Jeanne Sturdevant, Chris Tinnen, Jose Vargas, Giovanni Valderas, Juan Valdez, Tom Walker, and Tim Wilson.

More on the original Lotería cards can be found at this link.

Thanks to Enrique Fernandez Cervantes for the invitation.

"Swarm"

Sometimes it's interesting to isolate a small part of a larger painting, and see if it makes something new. In this case, it's the lower right corner of "Outside".

Days of Dreaming

I have a show scheduled for the Fall season at Norwood Flynn Gallery here in Dallas. This piece is the direction this collection of work is going, so I'm looking forward to making more paintings like this one over the next few months. I'm posting it this New Years Eve because it also seems like a good representation of the concept of "New Years Resolutions", specifically to dream every day. I hope you have a safe transition into this new year and decade and your 2011 is a great year.

"Día de Los Muertos"

"The Florist", acrylic on canvas, 8 by 8 inches, will be included in the Bath House Cultural Center's "Día de Los Muertos" exhibition in Dallas, Texas. It opens Saturday, October 16, with a reception Sunday, October 17, 5 - 7 pm, and ends November 17. About sixty-five other artists are also participating. The exhibit was curated by Enrique Cervantes Hernandez.

Below is the official invitation, including the participating artists' names (click on the image for a larger version).

"Fictional"

"Moonfish", acrylic on canvas, 12 by 12 inches.

"Moonfish" is my contribution to an exhibit at the Bath House Cultural Center in Dallas, with an opening reception 7 - 9 pm July 10 and continuing through August 7. The show is titled "Fictional" and is in conjuction with the Festival of Independent Theatres.

According to the Bath House press release, the show was "conceived as a collaborative project between the Bath House gallery and the 12th Annual Festival of Independent Theatres. In the same spirit as FIT, which strives to celebrate the talent of local independent theatre companies, the exhibition also has as its main goal to provide a showcase for the innovative, transcendent and thriving art created by local and regional artists."

Based on elements of the plots of eight one-act plays presented as a part of this year's festival, invited artists chose from a list of single sentence "blurbs" to create images. Interestingly, knowing too much about the plays themselves was discouraged, as to avoid work that "merely illustrated the literary works" (hmmm...). The preferred approach was for "the artists to consider the short blurbs for their own inspiration merit in order to create personal, unique and independent interpretations of the phrases." *
Okay, works for me.

I chose "The Boy, the Girl and the Moonfish" from other possibilities including "Reconstructed Alice in Wonderland", "Bible Heroines", "Mystery Girl Scout", "Transforming Muses", "Snake Urban Legends", "A Day Spent in Purgatory", and "Pontiacs, Trains and Disneyland". I knew exactly what I wanted to do from the moment I read "The Boy, the Girl and the Moonfish", which doesn't happen that often.


* The best examples of illustration do just that, but that's a discussion for a different context.