Shepard Fairey, with a little help from Johan Bjurman

I've spent the last few weeks stalking this project going on downtown, and friend and mural painter extraordinaire Johan Bjurman, as he turns a mural concept by Shepard Fairey into reality on the side of the Pell-Chafee Performance Center.  I'll be writing a short piece about the process which I hope will be published in August. I'm also creating a video documenting how the heck you get a mural from a digital file to an eighty by forty foot wall. Links to come.

Now, to the studio to work on my Sand Dunes painting!

Oil painting

My kitten post didn't send my web stats through the roof like I thought (feared) it would. And here I thought everyone loved kittens! Maybe baby squirrels? No. . .  I'll have to think of another way to increase my stats, and go back to posting paintings.

The World Prodigy -  o/c

While we wait for the BP oil well to be finally plugged, I'll offer an older painting of The World Prodigy which ran aground in 1989, spilling hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into Narraganset Bay and polluting a stretch of the RI coast.  At the time I wasn't trying to make an environmental statement with the choice of subject, but in 1989 I was painting the working waterfront and the tankers and ships which unloaded at the Providence docks. I think I just wanted to capture the drama of the island of light and activity in the dark sea.

Luckily for R.I. the coastline has recovered. Not all victims of spills are as lucky. The impact of another spill which took place 20 years ago, the Exxon Valdez, is still felt and remembered by Alaskan artists.  I fear that will be the case for the people of the Gulf as well.

Kittens!

It's not that I don't have more substantive things to blog about, but no time to actually compose a rational blog entry. So when all else fails — kittens! (No, they're not mine, though I was tempted to kitten-nap them.)

I'm heading into a couple of week's vacation from the day-job though, so I hope to post news of some real progress in the studio, and I don't mean cleaning.

Getting there

I've spent about a week and a half making boxes for my paintings and stashing them away in the rack (at right). To box some of the paintings I had to buy some even bigger pieces of corrugated at RISD Metcalf store. At 7 bucks a sheet it was kind of pricey, but I was informed that they were The-Only-People-Who-Had-Them. I remember, though, buying large sheets years ago from a warehouse in Pawtucket for considerably less, but I couldn't remember exactly where, and had no time, so I hauled 7 sheets across North Main Street and barely fit them in back of my pickup. Thank goodness it wasn't a windy day.

So my studio is getting a little bit more organized, and I no longer have to maneuver a narrow path like some hoarder with 25 cats. Not that I'm not guilty of the "but I might need it someday" syndrome , but I only have one cat, so that disqualifies me.

I've also been working on my Great Sand Dunes painting, there on the easel. I changed the composition, which put me back a few weeks, but it's a better painting for it.

With all my cleaning and moving I've made the acquaintance of dozens of spiders, including one "dead" spider that I found crushed between sheets of cardboard. So as not to damage the limp little corpse, I picked him up with tweezers and added him to my dead bug collection (I am NOT a hoarder—I just might need dead bugs someday). An hour later I noticed he wasn't so flat. If I didn't know he was dead, I'd say he was standing on his feet. After another hour passed, he seemed to move slightly, then suddenly started making a mad dash around his container. I let him go, far from the studio, since he looked like he had potential to be a biter. Unlike this elegant long legged beauty I found in the garden this morning.

Overgrown Studio

Not sure I should post this pic, it's kind of embarrassing. But this was the state of my studio right now, BEFORE I retrieved over a dozen paintings from Roger Williams University on Tuesday.  Somehow my old studio in Warren, though tiny in comparison to my "two-car garage" space, seems spacious when compared to all this clutter. Things have reached a critical stage, and a major gutting and purging of the studio is necessary, so I'm looking forward to organizing this weekend, the first days I've been able to have any studio time in WEEKS.

The first thing I have to do is find a way of fitting 10 pounds of paintings into a 5 pound rack, so to speak. I have no room to build another rack, so I bit the bullet and bought 30 sheets of big corrugated cardboard to use to create custom boxes for my paintings, which should save some space. Right now they're lucky to get a poorly-fitting recycled box scavanged from the Utrecht dumpster, with the accumulation of half a dozen painting titles and yards of ragged tape.

I'm keeping a corner in painting mode though, to keep working on my Great Sand Dunes Painting which is getting perilously close to using up its year's deadline.  It will feel great to slap some paint on canvas for a change.

Torrential rain drumming on taut nylon is actually louder than thunder, in case you were wondering. I, on the other hand, was wondering if the tent was as waterproof as advertised. And if lightening were to hit a nearby tree, would it travel through the ground and if so, would an air mattress be any insulation. Also I was wondering if the storm would ever pass. After what seemed like two hours of wave after wave of downpour, it tapered off to an occasional splatter of drips when the wind jostled the tree above us.

Maybe now I could drift off....until, a half hour later (repeat the first paragraph).

After the second storm passed I spent about 15 minutes trying to convince myself that I didn't have to visit the outhouse, but bladders never listen. I slipped out of the tent and was surprised to find we were not underwater, just wet. On the trail to the outhouse I met a fellow bioblitzer who asked me cheerfully if I was coming to check for specimens on the the shore. It was pitch black. The hour was ungodly. That's when I knew I was surrounded by insane people. Of the best kind.

I was finally able to catch a few hours sleep before my ipod alarm went off at 6:30. The night before I had arranged to abandon the frog hunt and instead tag along on a small fishing boat to find bio-stuff off the shore to add to our species count. I volunteered to deliver the crew (Mary and Grace, left)
to Captain Feather's boat. I dressed as quietly as possible, trying to avoid stepping on the floor, which had turned into a rectangular water balloon (first lesson in tent camping, set up your tarp so the water stays on the earth side, not the tent side) and headed down the ClayheadTrail to my truck, then drove back to Science Central for coffee and excellent bagels before heading for New Harbor. There we met Christian and his 11 year old daughter Stephanie, and after another coffee run to make sure our crew was fully caffeinated, we boarded Captain Feather's boat.

That's not to imply that the rain had stopped, but it looked really pretty on the swells.


I spent the next few hours trying to stay out of the way of the crew, fishing rods, flying fish hooks, crabby pinchers, sharks (ok, a little dogfish) and ferocious saber toothed bluefish. I also tried some sketching, but you know what? It doesn't take long for a drawing pad to become fully saturated on a boat in the rain.


Everybody on the boat was excellent at catching stuff, except me, who just watched. Some of the catch would be taken back to the Blitz, some was set free, and some, I fear, was bound to end up on someone's dinner table.


After catching sea bass, dogfish, bluefish and a skate, Feather then took us on a roller coaster ride at 20-knots over the swells and back into New Harbor where they checked traps, chucking dozens of ugly spider crabs back into the ocean. The 2 lobsters were allowed to stay on board.


Back in the harbor we picked a few more passengers, because there was plenty of room for 2 little girls and me in the cab and four adults, a big dog and equipment in the back, for the trip over the bumpy dirt road back to the Blitz.

The 12 noon closing bell had already sounded, so it was time to pack up our wet tent and head into town to wait for the ferry. I'll leave reporting of the results of the 2010 Bioblitz to the scientists, but I had a great time. With all the rain and hunting for specimins, there wasn't much time to do any artwork, but something will probably develop back in the studio, when I catch up on sleep!