Presenting: Sweet Vice.

Now if anyone could show me how to do this in color...

Home. Some thoughts on technique.

I drew this in the summer, and it actually took two days. I must say I'm in love with gradual building of form with hard pencils. It lets you have a steady control of texture and to look very closely at your subject. And unlike working with a pen that quite quickly constricts your use of gesture, every time you step up to a softer/darker pencil you have another chance to work gesturally. It would seem two days on a small sketch like this would suck the life out of it, but to me this looks quite alive.

Maybe it's simply that I had such a soft spot for pen and line work all throughout college that I finally exhausted my use of it of course, but I think there really is something to line drawing process that is stifling. And it's the overbearing contour. No matter how much you try to build sculpturally, you get this containment effect. I still use contour of course. After all I think like a draftsman, not really as a painter: contour line is here to stay. But I am much more welcoming of it, when it's in 2H or 4H graphite. It lets the things you draw breathe.

Massage Therapy School Sketches

My Guitar

Dreams of Dying (Fixed Value Version)

"The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had..."

Daily Grind

It is, indeed, a pun on the coffee mug.

Why draw?

In my art and writing I seek to expose the aesthetics of thought, be it scientific, religious or commonplace observation of day to day life that is governed by the habit of swimming in whatever mixture of linguistics and culture that you happen to be immersed in. All habitual thought is blinding. Even eternal questioning that is my vice.

There is an escapist self-aggrandizing trend in the arts that takes reality, truth, expression as something not unlike dough to be shaped by the artist's hand, the artists and the marketer of selfish abandon being one. It is a less obvious trend than blunt political propaganda, more subtle and more hypnotizing. In my art, I seek to destroy this.

I am a student of massage therapy, as it is one of the few professions whose entire value system is based on the respect of anther person's past, present and future, their space, their reality, their pain and their healing. It's one of the very few occupations that teaches you to be within reality and face it with your whole being rather than run, fix, mold, change, fight, categorize or endlessly purchase. The world of art has a lot to learn from this delicate yet powerful directness that is akin to the most direct of arts - music.

Of course this brings up an excuse to obsess over the marriage of form and content, but, if there is one thing you want to know that matters - in art, in massage, in life - it is simply this: your INTENT.