Once I started holding a pencil as a child and drawing with it, like most children, except I never stopped. Talent in any form is a cursed gift. Cursed Gift??!! What the hell is that???? It's a gift that starts out being a curse. The artist, weather it's painting, writing or even performance has to create. An obsession that over rides everything If and only if the artist can survive and endure the Curse part, eventually it becomes a gift and can be enjoyed and not drive oneself to the edge.
My foundation is cartooning....Cartoonist have to create more than copy so they become very creative designers and illustrators. When I am told that someone has a relative that can look at something and draw it. It makes me think, we got cameras and copy machines now. Back in the day of the Sears Catalog, they needed artist that could copy.
Portraits can be one of the hardest pieces of art to create. You got bone, muscle, skin tone and even facial depth,plus the soul of the person that has to come through to give it life. A wrong shadow here or a misplaced highlight can make the portrait totally off. People are not icons like movie stars that can be done using what they are known for, such as things they wear or hair style.
I started doing portraits when I started doing caricatures using pictures of the person for reference. I would try too get as close as I could get , to the face ,then put a funny body under it. It's suppose to be a cartoon so even if I did a so-so job on the portrait, it came out great as a cartoon caricature. Then one day after many, many years and hundreds of impressions; I had just completed the head and face of a caricature I was doing and had not yet added the funny body, when a lady came up to me and asked, after looking at the reference picture I was using and said, "What do you charge for your portrait work??" From that point on I was an artist that could do portraits.
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Signs
The sign work below was done on primed wood using, "ONE SHOT Enamel Sign Paint" for the artwork and lettering. I'm showing these not for the art itself but more for the endurance the paint can take. These signs are located in Northern California.They have been outside for just about 15 years. One Shot is also the same paint used for pin striping and graphics.
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Two babies.....One is Laughing and playing with it's feet the other is crying and crying and crying and crying. The difference. The crying baby is worried about the future that it can not see except through its own fear. The Laughing Baby playing with its feet is retarded...we should all run in fear and be scared every moment of our lives...wait....ooops...wrong ending....the laughing baby is living in the moment and not concern with the uncontrollable.
