Spirals In Love Show: Monster Art & Clothing

Starting this Saturday, I will be having a show at Monster Art & Clothing (http://www.monsterartandclothing.com/). The opening is during the Ballard Art Walk from 6-9 pm on Saturday, November 12. I'll have original paintings, prints, and assorted art trinkets available for looking and buying. Even if you hate my art (it's OK, I understand), you should still come to the store because it's AMAZING and they have lots of great monster-related items.

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Cupcakes Are So Passé

I've been pretty terrible about updating www.spiralsinlove.com or posting links to finished pieces on my art blog, but here are a few that I'm pretty sure I haven't posted yet. Prints can currently be ordered through these links (and any of the ones that are posted on imagekind or www.spiralsinlove.com), but I'm slowly working toward a process of fulfilling my own orders. This should be a minimal time commitment, since my 2011 online print order total is 0.

Sparklingly Christmas

I absolutely love Christmas. I am also pretty fond of monsters, so combining the two always sounds fun to me. This piece is essentially what I usually doodle in the margins of meeting minutes at work, but since I'm working on it in colored ink on colored paper I get to eventually hang it up and call it art.
This drawing has a rare quality in that my kids actually like it and it made them laugh when they saw it. Tonight I will be adding glowing colored lights which, as my daughter pointed out this morning, "will have spirals, OF COURSE."

I used a lot of adverbs in relatively few sentences here...

All Art Must Be Eaten

I finally got around to scanning and uploading, so there are a handful of new prints available directly from my store at http://spiralsinlove.imagekind.com/.

www.spiralsinlove.com will be updated with the new images soon.

Down To My Last

I lost my favorite brush! It's not a fancy or expensive brush, but I learned a long time ago that those things rarely matter with art supplies. I started making so much more art when I stopped going to the art supply store all the time and getting sucked into the trap of "if I only had THIS kind of brush and THESE new paints I would be doing something so much better" and then putting off actually ever making any art. But even after telling that little story I still don't have my favorite brush, so this painting was done with a new brush that will probably not be my new favorite because it holds so much water that I'll probably take it with me the next time I go camping instead of a canteen.


I'm not a very superstitious person so losing the brush is not like losing my lucky underwear (but if I had a pair I would draw monsters all over it to keep my privates safe), but it has thrown me off quite a bit. For the longest time I would just paint with whatever was at hand and let the randomly chosen brush dictate the feel of the painting. But lately I've grown so comfortable with this one brush that I'm having a hard time accepting the loss and moving on. I ended up making this painting as an attempt to jump to new gear, but I have to admit that my heart wasn't really in it with this one. It feels trite to me and the contrast between the red flower and black flowery collar on the monster didn't end up anything like I wanted it to.

The painting in this post is a submission for another Underneath The Juniper Tree contest (http://underneaththejunipertree.blogspot.com/2011/05/play-it-again-tex-music-challenge.html). The first issue of their digital magazine comes out tomorrow and as long as they're not openly mocking my art I will probably continue to submit things for them to review as I really like their mission of bringing creepy and interesting art to kids and adults.

Cold-Blooded Old Times

I'm probably getting the story wrong, but my mom recently showed my current art to someone I went to high school with (I don't talk to anyone I went to high school with so I guess she's my liaison) and they responded with surprise..."That's what he's doing now? He needs to go back to what he was doing in high school. THAT was what he was good at."

That story got me digging through my piles of art to look at what I was supposedly so good at when I was 15. I was lucky enough to have an art teacher who let me do what I wanted and gave me access to a full range of art supplies. I wasn't that angry, but all my friends were so I spent a lot of time trying to come up with something edgy or with a hint of violence, like the red smears on the otherwise pretty basic study above.


But when it came down to it, I wanted to have a certain amount of humor in what I did. Sometimes it was a dodge to distract from anything personal I might have put into my art, but usually it was just to make myself laugh. (A note on the painting above - I didn't actually finish it, my girlfriend at the time did. I learned that I don't have the attention span for oil painting.)

So I signed my name as an "A" for anarchy and made silkscreen vampires, but while my friends were carving ankhs into their skin I was making sure that the vampires were having the best time an undead parasite could.

Honestly, bright colors aside, I see vampires like the one above as much bleaker than any that I might have drawn in high school. I think the biggest thing for me right now is that I've been working in a consistent style for almost a year, which is by far the longest I've stuck with anything art-wise. Maybe I'll paint something violent soon, for old times sake.

The Haiku Is Free, But You Have To Pay For The Art

Wouldn’t it be nice

Your room could be much better

If you bought my art

A Really Good Poisonality

My son has been illustrating an activity book filled with terrible puns and fill-in-the-blank monsters. He asked me to paint some of them, and Gumble was my favorite so far.


Is Gumble drooling alone in the woods because he is poisonous? Or is he poison-free but just so spacey and disgusting that no one wants to be around him, even other monsters? The glazed but horrified expression could indicate that he has just found his spirit animal and is having his mind blown that his spirit animal is A GUMBLE.

No matter what the situation is that has stranded this nude and fingerless freak in the wilderness, I think we should be happy for Gumble. It's a beautiful day, and he's getting some fresh air. That's more than I can say for myself right now.

Cool For Cats And Kittens

I read in Harper's recently that original art is cool for both cats AND kittens. If you consider yourself to be either of these (you know you do), you owe it to yourself to get one heck of a great price on some original art. The piece of mine that's up today (BUYBUYBUY http://gotgotartart.com/?p=344 BUYBUYBUY) is actually one of my favorites that I've done because it captures the simple serenity I feel whenever I go in the water. Which, fun fact, even cats and kittens can appreciate.

http://gotgotartart.com/