The 12 Caesars

When I see Roman Art I immediately think of fancy banquets and the excess in all forms.  America of course is viewed as the modern Rome. The American public including writers like Gore Vidal have been for the longest time talking about America’s link and similarities and growth toward the Roman Empire.  While Hollywood puts out a steady dose of sword and sandal epics for the viewing public to make the same association. In my work I feel I am showing this link in a new media.  By engaging the iconic image of the Caesar I feel I am showing the degradation, the excess that is America and Rome.

New cd cover for Returner! This bad boy is live size!

Yellow #2

I feel pressure when I go up to the Sketch Club. The people there, a few of them young, are very nice but they just draw the model, nothing more.  I use the model as a "spark of life- from life" to fight off my compulsive stylization. A few years back (out of frustration) the notion came that I should just purify myself of all the dogmas imposed by my teachers.  I took great pleasure in inverting every rule. Especially those rules given to me without explanation.  The biggest "joy-giver" was assuming my power over the model.  Showing the model in my own pure emotion towards him/her- hate, affection, etc.  I also became more obsessed with anatomy- doing my interpretation of it as I was learning it. When the models occasionally got to see a drawing of mine some seemed excited that I was doing something different. Others, I think, felt a certain sense of violation. I was not in some academic way trying to depict them, but drawing them as I personally perceived them.  I was drawing with such a heavy hand I may have wanted through brute strength to force out anything that I deemed a heresy.  Anything that could possibly hinder my complete isolation.
However that is what is so different in my current drawings.  I have been pushing the line back calming myself and I've picked yellow to depict that-it seems to me one of the lighter colors.  I want to let in the page.  Give different parts of the figure stronger representation or focus on them.   I have been all over the place with my ideas however I decided that the human figure is something I want to strictly focus on and make it my domain.
PS I haven't really been naming the pieces but I would like to call one of them "Concubine."

yellow drawings

Moby Dick

My friend Hillary is a big fan of the book "Moby Dick" So I made this for her.

The MILK drawings

Mesozoic 3