The original ICON4 sketchbook entry.
I offer this for your consideration. A bunch of years ago, my closet friend and colleague artist/illustrator David "Pinting" Pohl urged me to market my sketches "as is" like a style. David has an impeccable eye, but for years I neglected his suggestion out of fear, misgivings and all sorts of other lame reasons. Over time though, as I gradually [I mean GRADUALLY] became more proficient in Photoshop [I'm FAR from it] I could see his point more and more clearly. Declining fees and digitally jagged deadlines put a lot of pressure on me, especially with my chosen medium [oil based Alkyd]. Making a painting for me can be a slow process [if not for the drying time alone] and trying to fit really tight deadlines became an increasingly stress generating problem and I have enough of those. So I thought "WTF?" and decided to give it a shot after the ICON 4 conference held in San Francisco [my first trip out here] sponsored a digitally produced sketchbook featuring work from all of the particpants in 2005. Now I have a
huge portfolio of sketches and "sketch style" jobs along with "educational" process sketches. I still feel a little schizy about it but it's begining to seem more natural to me now.
Anyway, here's a recent piece for
California Magazine, AD Michiko Toki. CA is the UC Berkeley magazine and this was for their "naked" issue. It's a feature called
Out of Eden about a guy called "the naked guy" who attended class naked and caused all kinds of ruckus and legally challenged the system's regulations on dress, notions of purpose and identity. He ended up a jail suicide lending a sad ending. Besides the Photoshop sketches I have also been keeping Moleskine books of actual analog "brick and mortar" drawings and paintings which can be seen under the Galleries heading on the right. Sometimes, I'll snatch an idea from the Moleskine and re-configure it on a much larger sheet of paper so the sketches feed the paintings as it were.
