At the Met

I spent my Thursday at the Metropolitan Museum. Everytime I go, I find something new that attracts me. This time it was the Egyptian art that was calling my name.

In Need of Inspiration

I'm off to the Met today, perfect day for it too - rainy and gray. I expect to return with lots of ideas to work out in tiny, automatic drawings.

This is a new drawing, I call it Innermost, after a Mission of Burma song that I was listening to.

Influences

Being such a visual person, just about every album that I have ever listened to is associated in my mind with a singular image. My earliest memories are based on the music that was playing in my house, and along with it, the album covers that I saw often. It has only become known to me recently how strong an impression some of the album covers made on me when I was very young.

These two are albums that I remember seeing a lot, and I can easily see how the shapes and patterns stuck so lastingly in my mind, and have surely impacted my work.

Touch 'Em All

My admiration and love for the game of baseball has been quite apparent in a few of my newest drawings. I'm usually unsure of how obvious the inspiration for my work is, but with these I think it's pretty clear. "Touch 'Em All" was drawn while watching the Mets play the Nationals.

My Fascination With Architecture

Everything I've been looking at and painting lately seems to have something to do with architecture. The idea that the structures we occupy have a great influence on us, on our personalities and actions, is very intriguing. The influence of our surroundings and the way in which our identities seem to shift along with a change in our location is easy to see. I imagine that every interior space has a holding of various memories that were formed there.

This is absolutely true for me, as all of my strongest recollections are intrinsically linked to a very specific location. With the paintings that I've done recently, I've created vague interiors, purposefully leaving some visual information out so as to encourage more work on the part of the viewer. The viewer is prompted to search their own memory database to fill in the holes in the piece, creating some sense of either nostalgia, longing, happiness, or sadness from this new composite recollection. It's fun to see what dormant memories are awakened from different paintings.