A Smith-Corona typewriter. Recently completed and now comfortably inspiring a new collector in New Jersey.
Several years ago I started painting a series of typewriter vignettes. Recently looking for inspiration, I found that revisiting my own paintings as a place to learn and grow from.
You can check out all of my typewriter paintings to date on Flickr → click on this link.
This painting of an Oliver No.3 Typewriter from 1907 is my contribution to the Attention to Detail exhibition at the Robert Lange Studios in Charleston, South Carolina. The Exhibition runs through February 2017.
The exhibition features 30 realist painters from the USA, Canada, Spain and England. It is an honour to have been invited to show my work beside artists who share an affinity for this labour intensive approach to painting.
I found this magnificent typewriter at Everything Old – an antique shop near my home.
Many of these Penguin Classics are the books that you should have read when you were in your teens, but probably wouldn’t have understood fully until you were in your thirties. It is available through the Elliott Fouts Gallery.
Giving these books a try early on in life is good but I have personally found that revisiting them later makes them way more relevant. These books are written by people who had a full spectrum of experiences and knowledge and I am only now finding that I understand where they come from. Read more
I found this book, The Way To Win, and had to add it to my little late 19th Century library of books that reveal the way our people were thinking just over 100 years ago. The book is a very detailed, very long self-help style book from a John T. Dale.
After browsing through the chapters, I’m left to wonder if anyone who picked up the book in 1891 found success as they went chapter by chapter and tried to structure a meaningful, successful life.
The thing that I find interesting is how this book reads and seems so much like modern-day self help. It’s all here, published 125 years ago. You can find all of this being self-published on countless blogs or YouTube channels today. I wonder if John T. Dale would have found an audience if he was one of those numbers today?
I’ve done a few more studies, although one could be seen as more of a reach back to around a decade ago when pencils seemed to figure frequently in my paintings.
These paintings will be included in the small works December exhibition at the Elliott Fouts Gallery.
I found a bunch of Penguin Classics that I’ll be featuring in some upcoming paintings — this painting is the first study.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of my favourite books. Although it is fascinating, I actually don’t fear that the world depicted in it is the one we live in. It’s more like the one we are afraid we live in, and the truth is we actually live in a Brave New World which seems equally as terrifying.
My work has been, for several years, shifting toward a stark, near-white ground. These three paintings signal a shift to adding more immediate color to my paintings. I thought an obvious dose of primary colors would be a good place to start.
These are my prototypes that will eventually take me in a new direction. New ideas and experimenting happening in the studio – it’s exciting. Read more
A few more book paintings recently available through the Elliott Fouts Gallery in Sacramento, California.
Climbing Higher – 30 x 30, oil on canvas. New work featuring vintage primary readers. Available through the Elliott Fouts Gallery in Sacramento, California.
These two new paintings are at the Elliott Fouts Gallery in Sacramento, California.
The blades are like flower pedals, the body color is a crisp electric blue. This painting of a vintage Electrohome fan is one of a dozen new paintings showing at the George Billis Gallery LA from May 21 – July 2, 2016.