Undercooked kale chips and sleeping cats

I'm back from LA and dealing once again with the cold of Chicago, haha.  I had a great time out west for the Gallery 1988 show with JC Richard.  If you're interested, the entire show has been posted online here.

I had some pretty incredible food while we were in LA ("we" meaning me and my excellent girlfriend, Ingrid).  Kevin Tong met us for dinner before the opening reception and showed us Cafe Gratitude, which more or less blew my mind.  Our hosts, Jimmy and Sean (Ingrid's uncle and his partner, respectively) showed us a great time, some lovely sights, and an interesting documentary about the 1980's underground drag scene.

Jensen, Kate, Amber, and rest of the crew at Gallery 1988 all did an awesome job hanging the show, and everything looked great.  I finally met JC Richard in person, and he was even nicer than he is in his emails.
It feels good to be back, even after such a short trip.  I've suddenly got a lot to finish before leaving for Austin to participate in Flatstock 38.  There's some pretty cool stuff coming up.  Real talk. 
 

I'm just trying to keep it together here.

 

So as I've been mentioning a lot here and on myspace facebook, I will be showing a bunch of new paintings and art prints alongside Mr. JC Richard at Gallery 1988 (Melrose).  Both Richard and I will be in attendance on the night of the opening reception (March 1st, 2013), and the show will be up through March 23rd.  I just took a whole mess of work over to my dear photographer friend Logan to be photographed.  I spent a good chunk of yesterday evening cropping and adjusting the photos, so those of you who don't live in the LA area will still be able to see the show on Gallery 1988's website when the show goes live (more info on that very soon hopefully).
Okay!  Time to start packing up prints and paintings to send to the gallery, and I've one more new art print to squeeze in for the show.  Stay tuned for a few previews.

Preview to the max

Here's a blurry phone photo of me laying down a hand painted layer on a few wood variants of a new art print.  I'm trying something new for the upcoming show at Gallery 1988.  There will be (very) limited runs of some of my prints on maple plywood.  This particular one has a hand painted color on each wood print.

The sound of a new world being born

Oh hi!  Here's a close up (poorly lit, not-sharply-focused) picture from a new art print I just finished.  The rest of this print, along with other new prints, along with several paintings, along with lots of new work from JC Richard will be unveiled at Gallery 1988 on March 1st.  Okay, back to work!

Rubbernecker

The other day, my friend Derek emailed me a picture he had seen of an empty warehouse on the southside of Chicago that had caught fire during a recent cold snap.  The water from the fire hoses froze rather quickly, completely coating the building and nearby lightpoles, power lines, vehicles, etc. in a thick coating of ice. 
My lovely girlfriend convinced me to take a day off this past Thursday, so we decided we would take a drive that afternoon and see this building for ourselves. The fire had apparently flared up again, so there were three fire hoses aimed at the building, some police tape and roadblocks on Ashland Street, as well as several members of the Chicago Fire Department on the scene.  Nevertheless, we were able to get pretty close to the action and take snapshots of this bizarre and accidentally beautiful spectacle.  It has not been reported that anyone was hurt or injured in this fire, as the warehouse was unoccupied (it didn't even have working gas or electricity), so we were able to satisfy our curiosity without feeling too much like morbid camera-phone vultures.
To see an old and nearly forgotten building caked in ice made me think about what our world might look like if a new ice age came to be.  I tried to imagine all of our magnificent structures, phenomenal feats of human engineering, transit systems, commercial airplanes, factories, roller coasters, water towers, missile silos--for better or worse--thickly entombed in frost for a future civilization to eventually discover.
I'd never seen anything like this before.  This has been a relatively hot topic here in Chicago, and between the scale of the fire (reportedly the largest in the city in seven years) and the remarkable appearance of a scorched and iced-covered warehouse; I think this will be a memorable little footnote in the city's history.  I know I'll always remember it, and I'm certain some kind of drawing and/or print will come of the many photos I took the other day.

Paint, pressing, pedaling, and punctuation!

Here's a little photo of our cat Kit having a supervised visit on the back porch.  The little guy loves going outside, but we have to keep an eye on him, as his adventures through the neighborhood would sometimes have him out for hours at a time.  He'd always make it back home, but his last big outing was a little too close for comfort.  So now we keep him on very controlled visits to the lot behind our apartment building (that, and catnip).  In this case he didn't venture past the steps, which were coated in a layer of very slick ice.
Quite a lot has been going on lately.  I have been putting in some pretty serious hours painting, as well as working on drawings for some brand new art prints, all of which will be in an upcoming two-man exhibition at Gallery 1988 with the excellent JC Richard.  I'm excited about these new pieces, and I'm looking forward to seeing what Mr. Richard makes for the show.  More on all of that very soon!
My band has been working on an album on and off for the past ten months.  All the tracking was finished a few months ago, and we all just approved the final mixes last week.  It's being mastered now.  We're all pretty stoked about it.  More on that soon, too.
It's a cold 17 degrees (Fahrenheit) here in Chicago today.  I'm contemplating layering up, breaking out the hat and gloves, and trying to skate a little bit today.  The streets are dry, after all.  This kind of thing would be best executed with a friend, though, so it's going to depend on other people's availability.

Les Rois Oranges!

I know my posts have been few and far between lately, but I've actually really missed doing posts about what I'm working on and about other miscellaneous adventures that don't necessarily involve my light table or getting ink on my jeans.
To the left is the last poster I printed in 2012.  It's a tour poster for The Devil Makes Three, and they will be available from the band on their upcoming tour.  I'll also have some copies for sale on my website in the not-too-distant future.
2012 has been an eventful year.  I printed a whole mess of art prints and rock posters, cramped my hand up doing some of my personal favorite drawings and paintings to date, went skateboarding a lot, joined a band, recorded an album, and tracked countless miles on my bike all over the city of Chicago.  Work took me to Spain, Germany, North Dakota, and Seattle.  I explored Istanbul on an overnight layover.  I skated a massive storm ditch in Albuquerque before a soundcheck while out on a brief tour with the band.  I feasted on vegan donuts a couple days later in Las Vegas.  My girlfriend and I drove our Fiat 500 rental car along I-5 in Washington with the sunroof open and bellies full of Mediterranean food.  I attended my first ever Hanukkah party, only to attend another the following night (Hanukkah parties are awesome, by the way).  I spent perhaps too many hours in a van, laughing with guys who are quickly becoming close friends of mine.  Besides posters, I had the exciting pleasure of being commissioned to do artwork for a beer label, a book cover, a print for a popular TV show, and a few albums.  I am still touched and flattered when people approach me with opportunities like these.  It's been a weird sort of journey to navigate and learn this trade publicly the way so many artists and designers tend to do.  But it's been rewarding.
It's an uncertain, bizarre, and sometimes incomprehensibly cruel world, but I'm immensely grateful for what I have.  Happy new year to anybody reading this.  Let's take care of each other out there.