I was delighted to have a piece in his collaborative show with Eric Minh Swenson, Nudes back a while. It was a great show and I was in the company of figurative rockstars from all over SoCal. 

​ksm

I am really enjoying the entire process of teaching and learning to teach. There is so much wonderful information to engage with and to share with the class. It's been great to work with the faculty at CSUF and see how they motivate, inform, demonstrate and inspire... each in their own way. 

I teach an advanced life drawing class this term. The students are great and the term has been going well. One of the components of an art class is doing demonstrations - demos - of techniques, processes and/or to illustrate new ways of seeing the figure, through form, gesture, anatomy or the play of light. I'm sure that everyone is different, but when the demos go well then I have more fun and the class seems to go better. Of course that may be in part that a bad demo has the effect of frustrating everyone, including me. 

I usually don't hold on to demo images. When they work I tend to give them to the student who asked the question as a visual for reference. But I'm told that they can be useful down the line so I've started taking pics with my phone or when I'm having work shot. Here is a little slideshow of some recent demo images. If you have  a question and I can demo a drawing or painting for it, I'll make that a future post. 

Most are 2 or 5 minute drawings, with a quick overlay to show how to block in the skeleton done in a few minutes over a very quick drawing. The media is mostly Cretacolor XL sticks on paper, with a little NuPastel on better stock from time to time. I'll add a few recent head studies when I get images. 

Through the end of May there are some great shows in the West and Duff galleries on the campus of Cal State University Fullerton. The calendar of shows and some information about the artists is listed at... 

Spring Into the Fire

There have been some amazing shows so far. Check out some of the press and blog pages on the SITF website. Barbara Milliron started the season off with Traces of Consciousness and her collaborative project, Life of an Artist. Jennifer Frias, artist, curator and collaborator followed with an evening of installations and performances in addition to a conceptual group project/installation. Tiffany Ma , Devora Orantes and Julianna Rico each installed strong shows in the West gallery.

Tiffany transformed the gallery into a miniature landscape which applied the metaphor of a dollhouse or dream home to describe the compartments into which memories, feelings, dreams and aspirations might be housed. After walking into a darkened gallery the viewer was invited to peer into windows, doors and small openings in a house which floated in the center of the space. Tiffany's sculptures, small scale installations and fantastical interior spaces were revealed as one circled the "home"... bending to look into low windows and standing on tiptoe to look into the upper levels of the dreamscape. 

Devora Orantes presented a series of strangely intense and unnerving drawings which invited contemplation while completely eluding understanding. Evoking landscape and figure traditions these large scale wall works employ a vigorously marked surface and complex layering to suggest states of mind, the fragility of memory and the fragmentation of experience. There is trauma and perhaps injury, isolation and longing in the fog of these subtle images. The title of her show, Tectonic, led me to feel that what was felt were not just personal, daily oversights and cloudy memories of unforgiven bruises, but cataclysmic, global collisions which lurk deep in the unconscious or hang perilously in the future.

Welcome to my blog. While I'm really interested in the future and a student of the past, one can only paint in the present. So I'll start right here. 

This month I have work up at MSJC. The curator Joe Posadas and Professor Eileen Doktorski have been great to work with and I've been out a few times to talk to classes about the work and what led up to it. Professor Josh Reed brought me to their attention and made the whole thing happen. It's a great space in a cool community college set in the farms and foothills near Mt San Jacinto. The landscape just knocks me out around there. 

The image here is of a young artist documenting my work for further study at a later time. Her name is Chloe and she has strong opinions about art. 

This show combines work from a few different bodies of thought and I'm surprised to see that they play together pretty well. The last few years have been a real awakening for me regarding the processes of drawing and painting. It has been so rewarding to re-examine my assumptions and take on my weaknesses in the community to other hard working artists. My faculty and friends have been so supportive and generous... I'm going to miss them. 

But watch this space as the countdown to my show in May continues. There will be a lot going on and I'll share previews of the other great artists showing this Spring, some of the work going on in my studio and the occasional look at best practices for the studio or art classroom. Please drop me a note or leave a comment/question.