Canyons, deserts, and angels, oh my

Hi all,

Welcome back to the blog! Today, I’ve got updates on the angel painting, as well as recent shows.

As I mentioned in my last post, I got into the Wrightwood Wine and Arts Festival, which I showed at in May. I turned the show into a small road trip, and I got to see some really beautiful places along the way. I of course brought a sketch book with me to document them. Here’s a drawing from Moab, Utah:

and another from Snow Canyon (also in Utah):

Although that sketch was a fun one for the campsite I stayed in, it doesn’t really do the park justice, so here’s a quick video I took, too, just for good measure:

The festival in Wrightwood was a beautiful day — plenty of sun, art, and interesting people. I brought a few more pieces with me than I anticipated, too . . .

In addition to Wrightwood, I also recently showed at another Pancakes and Booze pop-up show here in Denver. I decided to change it up a little this time and bring some bigger pieces with me.

I also had a few more prints made for the show, so if you’re in the market for some giclée prints, stop by my Etsy account or shoot me an email!

Giclée prints — “Angel Torso,” 10’’ x 7.5’’ (left); “Shipwreck,” 9.5’’ x 8.25’’ (right)

Outside of the recent shows, I’ve been continuing to hack away at the cherub painting. When I last posted, I had finished all the studies and was starting on the underpainting. I’m very excited (relieved?) to share that I finally have finished the underpainting:

“Cherub — Ezekiel’s Vision” (WIP) - oil on canvas - 42’’ x 26’’

Freaky, right? If you’ve been keeping up with the project, you know that I’m using Ezekiel I (yes, that Ezekiel) for the textual reference. The Bible’s got some pretty bizarre imagery.

This painting has been a long haul . . . and I’m only halfway done. To give you a better idea of the scale, here’s me and the painting side-by-side:

I’m 5’11’’, and it comes up to my waist, so it’s not quite life-sized (whatever that means), but it’s definitely a biggun.

Because of its size, I think some aspects of the painting are better seen up close. Here’s a quick tour of the details:

I used such warm colors because Ezekiel describes the cherubim’s appearances as “like burning coals of fire or torches”. You can look forward to some color studies of burning coals (and maybe torches?) in my next post.

Aside from all the painting news, we also recently released a new issue (15.1) of Consequence. Stop by the website and pick up your copy up today!

The reading period for our next print issue is also open. If you’re a writer, be sure to send us your best work on the culture and human consequences of war and geopolitical violence before the reading period closes on October 15!

That’s it for now. Thanks for stopping by, and keep creating!

Faces, skulls, animals, and more

Hi all,

Welcome back to the blog! Today, I’ve got updates on the cherub painting and the self-portrait series, as well as some news on publications, shows, and festivals.

At the time of my last post, I had recently completed two self-portraits and was working on a third. The first two were a pen and ink and watercolor combo:

Self-portrait — watercolor and pen and ink on paper — 12’’ x 9’’

Self-portrait — watercolor and pen and ink on paper — 8.5’’ x 8’’

The third, which I’ve completed since, is mostly oil (with a bit of acrylic magenta) on canvas:

“Drift” (Self-portrait) - oil and acrylic on canvas - 12’’ x 12’’

As I said in my last post, I usually do self-portraits when I’ve gone through a major change or am at a transition in life. I spend so much time focused on writing — working on my own, editing others’, teaching it, reading it — that it’s a relief to be able to engage in self-reflection without the demands that writing imposes, especially when the dust hasn’t settled or I’m having trouble making sense of exactly where I’m at.

This piece, then, is appropriately titled “Drift.” I couldn’t tell you exactly what it means (if I could, that would sort of defeat the point), but I can tell you that there’s something about the play of super-saturated and muted colors, the screen-like effect of the brushwork and paint-handling, and the fluid-but-structured mark-making that captures the push and pull, the visibility and obscurity, the forming and dissolving that I feel in my self these days. Of what, exactly, I suppose time will tell.

In other painting news, I’m continuing to make progress on the cherub. When I last posted, I had finished the animal studies for the cherub’s heads. The cherub painting is based on the description of the cherubim (or what rabbinic scholars decided are cherubim) in Ezekiel I. Ezekiel describes the cherubim as having four faces: one, facing right, of a lion:

Lion head study - oil on canvas - 14’’ x 10’’

another, facing left, of an ox:

Ox head study - oil on canvas - 10’’ x 14’’

another of an eagle (direction unspecified):

Eagle head study - oil on canvas - 14’’ x 10’’

and, finally, the face of a human. At first, I didn’t think I would need to do a human head study (I’m a bit more familiar with the human head than I am with animal ones), but, after thinking about it a bit, I decided to do a few anyways.

I didn’t want to make a completely generic, mannequin-like face, so I began to wonder if anyone has any idea what ancient Israelites (Ezekiel’s kinsmen) might’ve looked like. It turns out, someone does. Or rather, some people do. A group of researchers, Kobylianski et al., published a study in which they reconstructed the face of two ancient Jews — one male, one female — based on the morphology of their skulls. I did charcoal studies of them both.

The male was from the Hellenistic period (third century BCE):

Head and skull studies, male - charcoal on paper - 9’’ x 12’’

and the female was from the Roman period (37 BCE-324 CE):

Head and skull studies, female - charcoal on paper - 9’’ x 12’’

With those, and a study of the full cherub complete:

Cherub, Ezekiel’s vision - charcoal and dry pastel on paper - 12’’ x 12’’

I finally felt ready to start the actual cherub painting. Ezekiel says the cherubim look “like burning coals of fire or like torches,” so I’m starting with an extremely warm underpainting:

Cherub, Ezekiel’s vision (WIP) - oil on canvas - 42’’ x 26’’

More updates on that to come. In other news, I’ve had/will have a few shows and publications. Last month, I showed at the Pancakes and Booze show here in Denver once again.

And, a few weeks ago, “Drift” was published in Artstonish magazine.

I was also accepted into the Wrightwood Arts and Wine Festival. I’ll be heading that way next month, so I should have more updates on that the next time I post. In the meantime, here’s a couple of 100% candid, organic photos I took for my application.

The artiste at work…

A preview of what my booth will look like

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading, and keep creating!

New year, new paintings

Hi all,

Welcome back to the blog! Today, I’ve got an updates for you on the cherub paintings and a self-portrait series, plus more work available on Saatchi.

First, let’s get the shameless self-promotion out of the way. I’ve added a whole bunch of work to Saatchi, including two hamsas, work from the Paradise Lost series, skull paintings, an abstract, and a very cute cat, so stop by and see if anything strikes your fancy! And as always, feel free to email me about purchasing a piece directly or to inquire about commissions.

The last time I posted an update on the cherub painting studies, I had finished the lion head study and was making my way through the eagle. For those who haven’t been following this (sub)project, I’ve been working on illustrating the cherubim from Ezekiel’s vision in Ezekiel I. In his vision, Ezekiel sees ‘visions of God’ that some rabbinic scholars believe include two classes of angels: cherubim and seraphim. If you’d like to see a quick study I did of the seraphim (truly bizarre), you can check out this post.

The cherubim are four-faced, four-sided creatures. One of the faces is human. The others are a lion, an ox, and an eagle. The cherubim also have four wings—two covering their body, the other two facing upward—with human hands beneath them. They also have straight legs leading to feet “like those of a calf” that gleam “like burnished bronze.” Here’s a preparatory charcoal study I did of the cherub as I geared up for the painting:

Cherub, rendered - charcoal and dry pastel on paper - 12’’x12’’

Since I’m not super familiar with lions, eagles, or oxen, I decided to do some head studies of each of these animals before diving into the full painting. I’m now done with all three (yay!), which you can see below:

Lion head study - oil on canvas - 14’’x10’’

Eagle head study - 14’’x10’’ - oil on canvas

Ox head study - oil on canvas - 10’’x14’’

The lion and the eagle I painted the way I spent most of my time at The Art Students League of New York learning to paint: alla prima, or direct painting. In alla prima, you start with opaque paint, mixing what you see and putting it directly on the canvas (thus the ‘direct’ name). For the ox, however, I decided to try glazing. When you glaze, you start with a monochrome underpainting called a grisaille, usually using a warm earth tone like burnt sienna. You then add the color in using thin, transparent layers.

This past fall, I started teaching a course called “Painting Through Time” where I guide families through the materials and methods of different painters over art history. The second painter I covered was Anthony Van Dyck, who, in my personal opinion, makes the OG list.

Van Dyck had a three part glazing process. First, he would do a grisaille in a warm brown. Then, he would add in the highlights using impasto, or thick, opaque paint without any kind of paint thinner added. Lastly, he would glaze and scumble the color in. Glazing uses wet, transparent paint to create thin layers; scumbling uses dry, thin paint.

I usually hate glazing, but I actually enjoyed trying out Van Dyck’s method while making a demo painting for class. In my demo, I did the grisaille using red ochre. After it dried, I taped off a third of the canvas and did the impasto highlights. Once that was dry, I taped off another third of the canvas and glazed/scumbled in (most) of the color. This allowed students to see all three layers on the same canvas. You can check out the end result below:

Van Dyck demo - acrylic on canvas - 10’’x8’’

Since I actually enjoyed this process, I decided to try it (albeit with a different palette) with the ox head study. Here’s the grisaille, which I did using burnt sienna:

And here’s the grisaille with the impasto highlights (and a touch of glazing on the snout):

I plan on starting the final painting of the cherub soon — but first, I decided to take a detour and work on some self-portraits. I look at self-portraits as a way of checking in with myself, using visual expression as a means to free myself from verbal or written articulation. I tend to do them at points of transition in my life or a short time after them, once things begin to feel a little more internally settled.

It’s been about a year and half since I moved to Denver from New York, and, especially with the new year starting, it felt like time to check in. I knocked out two quick ones using watercolor and ink. The first one I started with an ink line drawing, then added the watercolor:

Self-portrait - pen and ink on paper - 12’’ x 9’’

Self-portrait - watercolor and pen and ink on paper - 12’’ x 9’’

For the second, I reversed the process — watercolor, then pen and ink:

Self-portrait - watercolor on paper - 8.5’’ x 8’’

Self-portrait - watercolor and pen and ink on paper - 8.5’’ x 8’’

I’m also working on a new one using oil:

Self-portrait (WIP) - oil on canvas - 12’’ x 12’’

Funnily enough, this one is reminding me of another self-portrait I did in my senior year of college. I was taking a painting class at the time as an elective (I did my undergrad in Middle Eastern studies) and had no real training when I started it. The assignment was an ‘internal self-portrait,’ which is how I’ve more or less come to think of all self-portraits since. I had just come back from a rather tumultuous seven months in Jordan and Lebanon, and the piece definitely reflected that.

“On Anger” (internal self-portrait - 2015) - oil on canvas - 11’’ x 14’’

This one feels calmer so far, but I definitely still like green (and partially obscuring my face).

Aside from all the painting stuff, we also have a new reading period open at Consequence, the journal I help edit poetry for. We focus on writing and art on the culture and human consequences of war and geopolitical violence, so if you have any relevant work, send it our way! We publish poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, translations, and visual art. You can find the links to submit here.

That’s all for now, folks. Thanks for reading, and keep creating!

Hello again - updates, angels, animals

Hi y’all,

Welcome back to the blog! After a long . . . long hiatus. Things got a little crazy with a fuller teaching schedule, but I finally have some time to share a bit about the past months with you. Going forward, I’ll try to update the blog closer to once a month.

Most recently, I took part in the Pancakes and Booze show in Denver. I showed several pieces from my hamsa series, as well as one of my skull paintings and “The Dionysian.” Here’s them all together for the show:

From left to right, top to bottom: “Hamsa (Space),” “Hamsa (Blessing),” “The Dionysian,” “Skull #3”

As you might’ve guessed from the title (“Skull #3”), the skull painting is one of several. Here are the others for the curious:

“Skull #2” - 10’’ x 8’’ - oil and acrylic on canvas

“Skull #1” - 11’’ x 8’’ - oil on canvas

As you can see, I started with a lot more color, but to get the effect I was shooting for, I found it actually worked better to use a more limited palette. I’ve had this idea of trying to use color to do what William Blake did with line for some time now. In his drawings and prints, Blake overemphasized contour, making it hard to tell if lines were moving toward or away from you and if they were in the foreground or background, which in turn created some fascinating optical allusions. If you’d like to see some examples (and read more about how this worked), check out Stephen Leo Carr’s “Visionary Syntax: Nontyrannical Coherence in Blake’s Visual Art.”

I had experimented with this idea in abstract paintings before starting the skull series:

“Coherence” - 5’x3’ - mixed media on raw canvas

“Line, Color, Value” - 5’ x 3’ - Mixed media on canvas

but I hadn’t tried it with something representational. Once I did, I found that having a lot of saturated color made the whole thing feel a little like foreground, which was interesting, but not what I was shooting for. What I wanted was a foreground and a background that were constantly shifting, depending on what you look at and how long you look at it for.

What worked much better was to start with a very limited palette — the Zorn palette to be exact — using oil paints, then add a bit of acrylic magenta on top of the oils once they dried:

“Skull #3” - 12’’ x 9’’ - oil and acrylic on canvas

Because the limited palette created a clear background and foreground first, the saturated acrylic was able to move fluidly between them. The shift in texture from the smoother, earthier oils to the more irregular, plasticky acrylic also created a contrast I hadn’t expected. Happy accidents, right?

“Skull #3” has sold, but if you’re interested in the other two, they’re still available — feel free to shoot me a quick email to inquire about them.

The remaining painting, “The Dionysian,” has equally nerdy origins. I began reading Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy the first summer of the pandemic. Apparently, it was really important to Rothko, plus the title seemed apt for the time . . .

“The Dionysian” - 18’’ x 13’’ - oil and acrylic on canvas

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that there’s an underlying tension in ancient Greek art between what he calls the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The Dionysian, connected to the cult of, you guessed it, Dionysus, embraces the primordial chaos of the universe. Nietzsche identifies more fluid art forms with this impulse — music, lyric poetry, non-representational art. The Apollonian was named for, right again, the cult of Apollo. It tried to redeem the pain of primordial chaos by creating order and beauty — narrative writing and representational art are its chief . . . representatives. In this piece, I wanted the viewer to get mostly swept away into Dionysian chaos but to also have a little bit of Apollonian representation to hold onto.

In other news, I have a poem out in issue no. 6 of Pinky Thinker Press. The poem, “Court Poet for a Night,” came out of a year or so of experiments in which I was looking for ways to unite how I might perform a poem in a spoken word and/or musical context and the way the poem appears on the page. Well, that and being very broke during art school and finding some very strange ways to make money.

I also recently did an interview with Shoutout Colorado. We talked about my transition from casework to the arts, influences, favorite spots in Denver, and more!

I’ve also been continuing to hack away at the (new) angel project. I’ve taken a detour from the Paradise Lost project for a while, focusing instead on the angels as described in Ezekiel I. When I last updated the blog, I had just completed my cartoon of one of the cherubim from Ezekiel’s vision:

12’’ x 9’’ - pen and ink on paper

Since then, I’ve created a fully rendered version:

12.5’’ x 12’’ - charcoal on paper

As you can see, Ezekiel’s cherubim have several heads, only one of which is human. Since I’m not super familiar with lions, eagles, or oxen, I’ve decided to do several oil paint studies before moving onto a full cherub. So far, I’ve completed the lion head:

Oil on canvas - 14’’ x 10’’

and the eagle is under (somewhat painstaking) progress:

14’’ x 10’’ - oil on canvas

Welp, that’s all for now, folks. Thanks for tuning in, and, as always, keep creating!

Back to the angels, color chaos, and more!

Hi y’all,

Welcome back to the blog! A very belated happy new year to you all. It’s been a while since my last post—things got crazy with the holidays, new job/s, and my teaching schedule—but I’m back!

First, I’ve got two happy announcements to share. One is that I made my first sale on Saatchi since I started using it last spring. For those of you who don’t know, Saatchi is the world’s largest online gallery. Here’s the lucky winner:

“Guarded Sunset” - 12’’ x 12’’ - oil on canvas

It found a home with a collector in Boulder, about 30 minutes north of us in Denver. In case you, dear reader, are interested in a piece yourself, feel free to check out my Saatchi page, shoot me an email to inquire about a piece or a commission, or peruse the Shop & Learn tab for more goodies.

The second piece of good news is that I have an interview out with VoyageDenver, a magazine that tells the stories of local creatives and entrepreneurs. We talked craft, how I got into the arts, challenges I’ve faced, plans for the future, and more! You can check out the interview here.

Now for the good (read: nerdy) stuff. Since the weather has gotten cold and snowy, I’ve been back in the home studio. If I can work up the nerve/buy finger warmers, I might do a winter plein air piece or two, buuut for now I’m staying inside.

As a result, I’ve turned my attention back to the Paradise Lost illustration project. In case you don’t remember, I left off with a few studies of Satan from Book I, where he and the other rebellious angels have recently been cast into hell.

I started off with a conte and gouache drawing:

Study of Satan, Paradise Lost, Book I - 16’’ x 12’’ conte and gouache on paper

then did a study on Procreate, where I though through some of the color problems:

Color study of Satan, Paradise Lost, Book I - Procreate

and now, finally, I’ve finished the full oil painting:

Satan Stands to Address His Legions, Paradise Lost, Book I - 30’’ x 24’’ - oil on canvas

One of my main challenges in this painting was staying true to the textual references, which are… tricky. Milton describes hell as being a “dungeon horrible” surrounded by a great, fiery furnace with flames that cast “[n]o light, but rather darkness visible”. Satan also walks on “burning marl” (a kind of stone). So… how does one create flames that cast no light? And how do stones burn without casting light? And how exactly are we supposed to see Satan if there’s no light shining on him?

For those of you who aren’t big painting nerds, rendering an object (i.e., making it look three dimensional) with no light source is… basically impossible. It kind of defies the laws of physics. To get around that, I decided that, given his recent fall (and God’s omniscience in the epic), we could afford a little bit of light from heaven still shining down on him—a way for God to keep an eye on the tricky rebel and for me to solve my physics problem. Thus the light source at the top. This also allowed to me basically ignore whatever light the ‘burning marl’ might’ve cast.

As for the lightless flames, I started off the painting with a relatively dark background, which allowed me to make bits of pure, saturated color pop while keeping their value low (that is, make sure they stayed pretty dark too). I later toned down the background, but I’m pretty happy with the ‘lightless flames’ that poked through in the end. Here’s an early stage of the painting for comparison:

Early stage of the Satan painting

One of my other main challenges was showing Satan’s corruption through the chaos in the warms and cools. As I articulated in an earlier post, I’ve decided to show the level of an angel’s (or demon’s) corruption through the contradictions in their colors. From a distance, the Satan painting may look fairly unified, but when you get closer, you can see the warms and cools knocking against each other:

All this angel painting got me thinking… Milton says angels look this way, but what about the source material—that is, the Bible? Well, that and watching Midnight Mass on Netflix, which I totally recommend.

Turns out, it says some pretty weird stuff. After a little Googling, I found that one of the main sources of Biblical imagery comes from Ezekiel I. Ezekiel sees the heavens open up and has “visions of God”—and, rabbis and theologians have inferred, angels. But they’re not exactly the winged, Cupid-like version we’ve grown so accustomed to.

Instead, some are made of two intersecting wheels, “sparkling like topaz”, and covered in eyes. Yep, you read that right: shiny wheel eyes. That’s what angels look like. According to Maimonides, a prominent Medieval Jewish scholar and philosopher, this was actually the highest rank of angels. Here’s a quick study I worked up for them:

Study for Ezekiel’s vision - pen and ink on paper

And it only gets stranger from there. The other angels — believed to be cherubim — are a hodgepodge of humans and various animals. They have four wings, two of which cover their bodies; the other two face upwards above them. Under these wings, “on all four sides”, they have human hands. Their legs are straight and human, but their feet look “like those of a calf” and gleam “like burnished bronze.”

Perhaps the strangest part of the cherubim are their heads. Heads, plural—four, to be exact. One, facing left, is an ox head. Another, facing right, is a lion head. The other two heads are human and eagle. Ezekiel doesn’t specify where they sit in relation to each other.

This got me thinking, so I started on some studies of the animal heads and working through some of the perspective problems.

Perspective and animal studies for Ezekiel’s vision - pen and ink on paper

As you can see in my notes in the upper left, Ezekiel’s vague description of the eagle and human head create an interesting problem. If they have “four sides,” as Ezekiel mentions when describing the position of their hands and wings, and if we presume that each side gets one head and one head only, then how exactly is Ezekiel able to see all four heads at once? Shouldn’t one be facing away from him?

It’s almost as if Ezekiel is seeing multiple perspectives at once. You know, the core ingredient in Cubism? Maybe Picasso wasn’t such an innovative genius and more of a Biblical scholar. Or maybe there’s a translation issue, or the Bible just isn’t meant to be taken so literally . . .

At any rate, it’s been a fun issue to think through! To do so, I came up with a line drawing/cartoon:

Cherub from Ezekiel’s vision, study - pen and ink on paper

In conclusion, the Bible is the best source of surrealist and modernist imagery. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Alright, that’s it for this post! Thanks for reading, and keep creating!