Sneak Peek: New Paintings!

(detail)

(detail)

Yeah yeah yeah!! I'm back again with a sneak peek at the new work - I was trying to keep it under wraps until the upcoming solo show at Finesse, but I'm too stoked and have to give you all a lil look. I've been working nonstop on a new body of abstract work that has a much stronger focus on texture and patina than my previous work, and in short tries to visually elucidate the amorphous relationships between homo sapiens, technology, and the urban environment. This style is extremely time consuming and laborious, because it basically involves layering several paintings on top of each other and discarding the majority of each to make a single new painting. This stacking of layers as a process is evidenced partially as texture within the final painting, and perhaps makes a statement of its own regarding the structure of the aforementioned relationships. The photos you see here (more to come before the show!) are details of much larger works, and obviously aren't very efficient at capturing the texture or patina of the work, so you just gotta come to the show to really check it out!

RTR 1st Place

Yo! Here's a quick shot of my piece at the Rock The Rails competition in Leduc last night. It's an annual event that includes a skateboarding competition, a bmx competition, and a battle of the bands, and this year they introduced an art battle using spraypaint. I took home 1st place with the piece above - we had about 3.5 hours to put something together, but we only had cans of red, blue, grey, black and white to use. Unfortunately this is the only photo I have at the moment, and I promise the work looks better in real life (as is almost always the case with art) but there were several photographers at the event and I'm hoping to wrangle a better shot off of one of them when I get a chance...

Boom! Robots.

Whoa, watch out big guy! This robot is about to earn himself a Darwin award, smoking while holding that dangerous bomb. What is he doing up there, you say? Smashing the city of course... Pesky robots!!! Where'd they come from, you ask? Read on...

Yo! So a funny thing happened yesterday. I was chillin' at my homie Bmar's house in Sylvan Lake, and then 'BOOM!' all of a sudden (over the course of 13 hours) a gang of giant robots busted through the wall!! They were being real jackasses, savagely demolishing buildings and wreaking havoc on infrastructure with their lasers and bombs, but you know how robots are.

This guy kept rapping in weird robot voice the whole time, it was pretty good i guess.

But yeah, pretty much a battleground in there. And you know those damn robots aren't sticking around to help clean up.

This robot had a fancy hat. 

Finesse Home Living Mural

Greetings! What's percolatin'? Here are a couple quick shots of the mural I just finished at Finesse Home Living here in Edmonton (better photos soon!), where I'll likely also be showing my newest group of paintings (which have yet to hit the internet) over the next several months. They got in touch with me looking for something graffiti oriented to go along with the furniture in their new Environment brand showroom. Environment is an L.A. based furniture brand that designs consciously and is extremely aware of its own environmental footprint, going the length of making sure their business is carbon neutral every year through carbon credits, among other things. One of their furniture lines is built from reclaimed Peroba Rosa, an endangered Brazilian wood. They reclaim the wood from old Brazilian buildings and refinish it, satisfying the demand for furniture made from it without harvesting any living trees. I wanted to illustrate this and the rest of the brand's identity through the imagery and feel of the mural, as well as create something big and bright to scare people when they come around the corner!

How To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse

How To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse

(12x18in acrylic and aerosol on canvas, 2011)

(Photo credit: Diana Duzbayeva)

Up and at 'em, recruits! Zombie Apocalypse Training commences immediately! Just joking actually, no zombies around. Stay on your toes though. Here are some process photos of a piece I created to be the DVD cover for my homie Dave's new zombie movie. You may remember him from such films as the recent ROC documentary - he did ..umm... actually everything haha. He wanted something kind of inspired by the Resident Evil 1 cover, among other things - a dude surviving solo against evil. Some of my other inspirations were Bruce Campbell and the Evil Dead/Army of Darkness vibes - I chose to handpaint everything instead of insert the text digitally because I wanted to give it a touch of that cheap, crooked D.I.Y. aesthetic that is a big part of the history of zombie movies, but still update it and reference the impact of typography on recent zombie movies. Dave didn't want the look of cover tied to the rest of the look of the movie at all (which is kind of an old school B-movie trick) so it gave me a lot of creative freedom. Time was tight because Deadfest, the horror festival that Dave is dropping the premiere at, is opening right away. If you are a fan of zombies, movies, or any combination of the two, check out the temporary trailer for How To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse here (the first 35 seconds) on the youtube channel of my other friend and fly video effects wizard Arthur Mah, who is responsible for the visual effects and titling (as you'll find out if you keep watching his video, which you should). I'll definitely post a link when Dave has the full movie online - it's zombie-ish, violent, funny, and probably not for the squeamish. Ok, Until next time, remember: the only good zombie is a double-dead zombie! (no offence at all to any zombie readers).