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).

Tha Format Episode 1

The final work.

Episode 1 of Tha Format

Here it is! The pilot episode of Tha Format, the Hiphop show for youth that I've been lucky enough to be a part of - I created the backdrop for the studio (pics above) that I posted shots of earlier, and also host a segment on graffiti (peep the end of part 3 for ya boy!) called Blackbook Sessions. The first instalment, which is shown here, was my concept, which was filmed, edited, and taken to the next level by Grant Smith. Shoutout to Taro, Erin, Angela, Conway, Musa, Daniel, and the rest of the squad too!

Be Relentless

Me and Tyler kickin' it.

Relentless (aerosol in collaboration with Tyler Huskins, 2012)

"Buffalo Marley"

Ayo! This is a piece I created in collaboration with a young cat, Tyler Huskins, in the Youcan office at Westmount Jr. High here in Edmonton. The fine people at Youcan got at me and asked to come in and show Tyler some things with spraypaint in a legal setting that he could potentially hope to earn money with eventually. The word 'Relentless' was chosen in reference to the office's style of youth work - they never give up on the youth. In that spirit, Tyler and I painted this piece in one 12 hour session. I'll be updating this post with better photos when I get a chance.

R.O.C. - The Documentary

R.O.C: The Documentary

Whattup! Long wait, but its finally here! The R.O.C. Documentary was created by David N.O. as a school project about an artist, myself, getting ready for their first gallery showings at the TU and Latitude 53 galleries in Edmonton. The subtitle of Dave's project 'From the Streets to the Gallery' is a reference to the changing venue of one artist's work - graffiti artists create public art in the streets, and this documentary shows work born of that world ending up in the art galleries of the same city that used to arrest for it. I had a lot on my plate while this was being shot, between going to school full time, working, getting ready for two important shows, and trying to work on the documentary, and I think I seem a bit distracted throughout as a result, but hopefully for the most part I got my point across, if not always as articulately as I'd like. David N.O. from Dojo studios did a tight job of putting everything together - this project was his baby and luckily for me he is a talented and passionate individual. Dave did everything in house, from the original concept of the documentary to the filming to all the editing in post - the man has a well rounded game and a ton of vision. Check out his youtube channel if you'd like to see more more of his work. Also, major shoutout to DJ AA, also of Dojo, for the all original homegrown hiphop soundtrack. His beats knock. Ok, enough of this, enjoy the show!

FPG 2

FPG2 (4x4 feet, aerosol & acrylic, 2011)

(Rough Original Sketch)

Ayo!! What's good?! Back again with another project that was helping keep me mega busy over the past few weeks - this is a painting that will be used as a mixtape cover for Edmonton rapper Doobyis. The concept we ended up deciding on was to have Doobyis' name and the name of the mixtape, Feelin' Pretty Good 2, at the epicentre of an explosion in the middle of the canvas, blasting classic golden era beats and stoned cold lyrics to your dome quick. In between the black rays of the explosion are illustrations of some of the things Doobyis raps about on the album - girls, drinkin', smokin', writing rhymes and spittin' em, reading comics, etc. I was on a fairly tight timeline with this piece as the mixtape was pretty much finished and waiting to drop when he approached me about doing the cover art, so I didn't get as much time to work out the background composition as I would have liked, but I'm happy with the results and am looking forward to workin' with my man Doobs in the future. Get free copies of the FPG series right here, and check for him on Facebook under Doobyis. Feelin' Pretty Good!

Raheem's Revenge (but wait...there's more!)

Raheem's Revenge (12x16inch, acrylic & aerosol, 2011)

Greetings! Life is good lately, I've been blessed with lots of fun work so far this summer, and I feel like every time I turn around a dope new project comes up or I find some new inspiration. Currently I'm prepping for a mural in an office, another one in a bar, and have a few more projects set up for August. The piece above, Raheem's Revenge, was a quick piece I created because after watching Do The Right Thing I kept wanting Radio Raheem to get some kind of revenge on the cops that killed him. If you've seen the movie, which is a Spike Lee classic, you'll remember Radio Raheem - he was the character that walked around playing Public Enemy on full blast from a mega boombox, dominating the soundscape wherever he went with hard Chuck D anthems. In the end (*spoiler*) he goes into the pizza joint as part of an impromptu protest and ends up getting his fly boombox smashed by Sal, the owner, for playing it too loud. He flips out and starts choking Sal out, which ends up in a brawl in the streets, promptly attended by the cops. It takes about four cops to pull Raheem off Sal, and they start choking him with a police baton. One particularly enthusiastic cop keeps choking him, lifting his feet off the ground, and when his dead body drops to the ground a little later, the cops freak out, drag his body into a cop car, and flee the scene. The situation rapidly escalates into a full scale riot, and Sal's pizza joint is burned beyond recognition. I figured that the best way for Raheem to get his revenge was to walk around the city, invincible, blasting his boombox and laughing at the cops as their batons bounced off of his iron armour.

Photo Credit: A.P. Louden

This was a quick piece I did on some found wood in my hometown of Calgary. I was chillin' with my brother, and my game must be slippin' because he took all these photos without me noticing a thing...Whattup Anton! We had a couple hours to kill, so we grabbed some cheap hardware store spraypaint and I dropped a lil freestyle piece.

Here's a quick shot of another piece I started on that day using some leftover dried up craft acrylics and some more found wood - I'll tell you more about it when it's finished! The title is Usher of Apocalypse. I used some automotive paint for the background which ended up staining the raw wood in a really interesting way...