Still Life with Three Bottles

Still Life with Three Bottles. Aaron's favorite game to play for awhile was "Guess the Bottle," where everyone who happened to be hanging out in my studio would take turns guessing which brand of beer or soda lay hidden behind the opaque layer of paint which coated it... I later painted over the background of this picture...

Hot Chocolate Espresso Steam Blocks the View of a Van Obscuring the Front End of a Compact Automobile

Hot Chocolate Espresso Steam Blocks the View of a Van Obscuring the Front End of a Compact Automobile. The last time I used a lined notebook, this drawing is an excellent example of when I used the geometric foundations of light and reality as objects in my compositions.

Close Up of a Painting Girl

Close Up of a Painting Girl. Honestly, I haven't painted another painting like this one. Which is nice... Very loose, a huge contrast to the style I would take up eight years later. This oil painting was painted in February of 1999, during my independent study in painting... I was taking an overload in credits to fit in the class during my last semester at school, on top of student teaching math... Again, "Close Up of a Girl" is weird because my topic of research was the grid...

The Silver Penguin

The Silver Penguin. A glistening chrome-finished steel statue, resting on top of a black box... I had spent all of the summer of 2006 drawing everything, everywhere, everyday. In the weeks before I moved to London, my drawing output increased even more. The implied geometrical forms help to define the overall shape of the drawing... Ever since then, something about the line has been so compelling.

Boy, Lost in Space

Boy Lost in Space. In the middle of my particle phase, I was having trouble articulating what I was seeing... It became difficult to justify the overt geometry of the particles of light that began to appear in my paintings and drawings... Everything had become too cerebral... The fabric of reality began to de-thread, revealing the nature of its' braid, and I had only began to internalize things...

A Naked Man's Feet

A Naked Man's Feet. Well. Short poses make it hard to draw an entire figure... It's 6:30am, Sunday morning. I've just come home from the Big Chill in King's Cross. It's been light for two hours already... Weird.

The Empty Chair

"The Empty Chair" is the drawing I was drawing as the photographer was setting up the lights on Thursday's meeting of the Life Drawing Society. It would be the chair filled by the model for the first half of the evening, after which he would move to a bright red couch with no cushions...

Male Head (Looking Up)

One of the drawings from last night. The model (a journalist) hadn't practiced holding long poses, so we had to alternate between four-minute and ten-minute positions. For some reason, it was hard to warm up... I blame it on all the flashes going off... The after-party was nice... I met loads of cool people, played the guitar for a bit, and missed my train home.

A Thinking Man

A Thinking Man. A nude male, perhaps my least favorite thing to draw... Tonight however, it's happening again. The London Life Drawing Society is letting a male writer from Maxim magazine pose so that he can write a story. I'm going, just in case they take pictures of the crowd... The price? I'll be forced to draw a naked man. Ugh. "The Thinking Man" came from sneaking into alumni sessions at VCU, sometime back in 2003. I used it as the template for a painting ("Four Men Facing Left"), which is why you can see bits of colored lines scattered somewhat randomly about the drawing...

Four Bottles and Some Particles

One of the first particle paintings, "Four Bottles and Some Particles" charts the path of light as it cascades in and around four bottles sitting on the ledge of my window. The whole "light as object" thing I'm still pretty proud of because it was an intuitive step beyond the two-dimensional and three-dimensional geometry that I had been working with (i.e. some physicists think that light is a manifestation of the fifth dimension)... Which came first, the science or the art? For me, it is the observation that comes first, the explanation second...

Black Lamp, Illumination (drawing)

This is the study drawing for my painting, "Black Lamp, Illumination," completed with a black ball-point pen. After the drawing, I painted the oil painting in the strict geometrical composition that I eventually called "synthetic pixelization"... Some time after painting the painting, I remember showing it to my mom, who said, "See? Now you've got something to show for how you've spent your time..." or something like that, but her point stuck with me...

A Plastic Watering Pot

An assignment in my first university art class, I was 18 years old and it was the beginning of my second semester (Spring 1996). "2-Dimensional Foundations" was the class, and at the time, I almost hated it for its' structure and rigor. Drawing from a still life set-up was the fundamental emphasis, but I didn't understand what Cezanne said ("Still life trains the eye") until much later... Looking back at this pencil drawing of a plastic watering pot, I see much beauty in its' simplicity and shape. Too bad I forgot to finish the hole at the top...

A Lighter

A red lighter, grid-based...

Resting Girl

After I had spent some years defining still life with shapes, my mind switched to using basic geometry as an essential alphabet for deciphering the human form. In late autumn of 2002, I began to have weekly drawing sessions with models (helpful friends, as I could barely afford my studio). My intent here was to use the implied indentations of invisible shapes to define Gwen's face... Later on, I would display most of these drawings and paintings at "Figurative Forms: Shaping the Lens", my second solo show.

Black Lamp, Illumination

One of my favorite paintings, painted in early January, 1998 while on winter break from William & Mary. A fine example of my synthetic pixelization series, the form of a black lamp is implied by simple geometric shapes. The main object sits in an arbitrarily imposed grid...

Dog

Literally, a dog named "Dog." It was winter break. I was home from university, chillin' at Mike's house. Interesting because it predates both my line and coloring series by a good seven years... I had forgotten all about it until I raided my stockpile of drawings to get ready for the first (and failed) incarnation of my last Richmond show: "Samurai Cat Caught in a Cross-Dimensional Vortex"

A Rooster

A rooster, from the summer of 2005.

Two Bottles, Particle View

Two bottles, so unassuming... light surrounding them... light revealing them.... light creating them... The depiction of light as an object was one of the major premises of my particle series. Here, light reveals it's duality by behaving as both particle and wave. The two empty bottles are chosen because they are indeed so nondescript...

A Pub Window in Winter

A Pub Window in Winter. February 2007, London winter is no place for a stranger... I took to drawing empty pub tables.

Still Life with Bottles and Grid

The painting that followed the drawing... The wooden grid structure is an allusion to the synthetic grid overlay that I was using a few years earlier.

Still Life with Bottles and Grid (drawing)

A preliminary sketch, this drawing includes a physical manifestation of the synthetic grid that I had been fascinated with for so long... The wooden net of squares and open cubes came to me through a chance encounter at a dusty thrift shop; I painted it black. In 2004, I was taking a break from over analyzing things and was enjoying painting straight forward still life set-ups with Gwen on a weekly basis. It was a very prolific time...

Onion with Silver Goblet

The colors find their own shapes, their own relationships... Light cascades around the objects. Shadows form, but the edges are always blurry. Sequential color fields broadcast interference upon one another... no beginning, no ending, only transition...

Ocean Waves II

Ocean Waves II. Just before the new year, a beach in Maryland in late 2005... I had just come back from Prague and was seeing things in a new way. Overlapping dimensions intersecting different planes of reality, particles of light and energy floating between them all, the waves in the Atlantic ocean were revealing a new insight. Crazy me, I didn't even realize that I was drawing in the same sketchbook as I had drawn in two years before. I found the first drawing ("Ocean Waves I") later on that night...

Ocean Waves I

Ocean Waves I. It was just before the new year, late 2003. I was in Nags Head, North Carolina and had just re-discovered colored pens. This drawing of the ocean waves crashing on the shore pre-dates my other pen and line drawings by a good two-and-a-half years... Something about the Outer Banks of North Carolina makes me relax as soon as I cross the bridge...

The Language of Love

Here, the dialogue is articulated as particles separating a man from his lust. He sees her with all of his eyes. Hard for him to speak, he manages to sing. This is a piece from a time where I was gluing things to other things, breaking barriers of object and space.

Sleeping Male, with Hat

In the summer of 1999, I first went to the Florida Keys. Mike and his family invited me along, and it was the first time in my life that I began to realize how dramatically colors can change from place to place. My visual palette had been expanded... This is a drawing of Mike, asleep on his bed after we had been out snorkeling all day.

Still Life Drawing with Boots

I was positioned to draw the model, but really liked the boots of the artist to my left...

Girl in a Chair

It was 3am, the Synergy Project in London, November 2006. My favorite part is the toes...

The View Off the Porch of an Apartment Complex

Looking off the balcony of an apartment in Richmond, there stood a communication tower transmitting energy in every direction. Penetrating and surrounding, the waves cascaded across the landscaped perimeter of the fenced-in complex to wash through me as they had everything else...

Big Noise is a Bug Who Wears Boom-Box Sunglasses

What can I say? It's a boom-box. It's a bug. It's a boom-box. It's a bug. It's bug named "Big Noise", and he's wearing boom-box sunglasses... One of the finer moments of my surreal series, I love this picture. If you look closely, you can see me poking out from behind the left-side of the radio.

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