My first video Sketch of the Day. I’m still working out the kinks with the camera and editing, but figured I’d share this one anyway. Hope you dig it.

Click on image above to enlarge

Music In The Video
Artist: An Horse
Song: Postcards
(Purchase on iTunes here)

More about An Horse can be found in the following places:
www.anhorse.com
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Above: The back cover is made up of newspaper clippings and a BART pass from a trip back to the States in July of 2009, a McDonald’s Cheeseburger wrapper in Spanish, tea bag wrappers from my good friend caffeine, and two numbered tickets from waiting in line at the Buenos Aires post office to ship Orange Gorilla Stickers around the world.

Above: The front cover is made up of pieces of newspapers from some of the cities I was in during a trip back to the States in July of 2009. The pink drips are leftover paint from my painting Bazooka Retrograde.

Pencil outline and first layers of paint.

Gessoed over the area to be painted.

New size = approximately 26″ x 31″ (66cm x 79)

When I started the background years ago I didn’t know what the composition of the self-portrait was going to be. I always try to keep in mind the words of one of my professors, “Try not to let the canvas size drive the composition of the painting.” In this case it meant cutting down the background to the size I needed.

For 4 years I’ve had this wood panel, made of 4 planks of wood, sitting inside my studio. Periodically while working on other paintings, I would apply the leftover paint from a session on the panel with a palette knife with the idea that it would one day serve as the background of a self-portrait.

Orange Crush Retrograde

Panel 1 of 3 | see all 3 here | each panel measures 23.75″ x 32″ (61cm x 81cm) | oil & acrylic on wood | 2010 | AVAILABLE

In late 2009 I started a group of multi-paneled paintings called the Retrograde Series. The paintings are an exploration of the memories, questions, sights, sounds, tastes of my youth, and their juxtaposition against each other, and the world around me decades later.

With Orange Crush Retrograde I dive down that rabbit hole once more. A memory of sitting on a bar stool next to my Grandfather, feet dangling high above the floor drinking an Orange Crush soda, blends with a memory of hearing Madonna tell Dick Clark that she wanted to “rule the world”. I wonder about the long and short term effects of war being a constant backdrop to the American paradigm, and that butts up against the fondness I had for my armies of little plastic men.

The composition is split into panels and cropped to exaggerate the idea that no one part of the composition is supposed to make a clear definitive conclusion about what the images mean as a whole. The hope is that something new exists for each viewer, and it is up to the individual to decide what answers exist within.

(See the first piece in the series, “Bazooka Retrograde”, here)

Based off of a photo taken in 1986 by Steve Caballero.