New York series cont.

New York series

I started work on a new series based on my trip to New York this year. This is the first piece, with many more to come. This particular series will be on display at Bamboo Lounge in San Diego next month.

Empire State of Mind

So Jay-Z is calling himself the new Sinatra... should I just take his word for it? Guess so!



This is a preliminary drawing of sorts... I plan to translate it into a much more graphic style and add some background soon. It'll also be part of a new promo package I'm working on for this winter.

In other news, I've been invited to a group show for the month of December in San Diego at Bamboo Lounge. No decision yet on a date for the opening but I will be showing alongside Minerva Torres-Guzman and Elizabeth Lopez, both great artists who have earned their BFAs in Painting at Otis College of Art and Design here in L.A. Many thanks go out to Ramona Ramirez, the show's curator.

searchingforelliottsmith.com

I finally finished up the Searching For Elliott Smith website and launched it today. Such a fun project to work on— it's been a while since I created a website, but I think overall it turned out okay.

New York

I was in New York this past week for the CMJ premiere of Searching For Elliott Smith. Aside from the premiere, I wandered the city day and night in search of nothing in particular but beautiful things to shoot.

Charles Magicianpants

I believe that if Charles the parakeet were a magician, she'd be pulling ladybugs out of her tiny top hat!

Micheltorena Street

If you've read far back enough in this blog, you may know that I've always liked the juxtaposition of nature and urban areas (I explored it in some works that I created a few months ago). This is another piece that falls into that series, based on my own experience here in Los Angeles. I remember (on several occasions) leaving my friend's place on Micheltorena Street late at night and walking to my car while watching these coyotes run off across Sunset Blvd and back up the hills. I always thought it was so strange that something we associate with massive deserts and pure wildlife was right here, running across one of the most famous and busy streets in the world.

We Kill Everything We Love

Here's the final installment of pieces for the Obscured Eye exhibition next week in Calexico. These will hang next to two oversize printouts that each contain text from Kalle Lasn's Culture Jam, the book that was initially the inspiration for this series. I've included the printouts here for your enjoyment and/or enlightenment.

Searching For Elliott Smith

I have been very honored and privileged to work on a documentary for the past few years that is actually about one of my favorite musicians of all-time: Elliott Smith. During all of my three years at Art Center, I set aside extra time to (painstakingly) create hand drawn, frame-by-frame animation for several spots throughout the documentary. It took more than just a long time, but in the end I'd realized that the large amounts of caffeine and all-nighters were well worth the pain. I was given more than a ton of freedom from director/producer/editor Gil Reyes to create these spots, and now that the documentary has finally been completed, it awaits its moment in the spotlight. (It is set to have its world premiere at the CMJ Music Marathon & Film Festival this October in NYC.)

Now that the film is complete, it's time to focus on marketing... I've been given the opportunity to create a poster or two for the film, so I thought I would post the first drafts of them. We are considering a guerrilla marketing campaign in addition to the usual marketing ideas as well, though it will mostly likely be based in and around Los Angeles. A website is also definitely in order, and will be arriving soon. (Yet another project I'm looking forward to!)

I am very, very excited about this film– it has been nothing but a five year long extraordinarily intense labor of love, especially (and mostly) on Gil and Tony Ayala (cinematographer and editor)'s behalf. I am so unbelievably honored to be a part of something that I hold near and dear to my heart, and hope that the world re-discovers Elliott Smith's genius... or discovers it for the first time.


First poster: this is a revision of Gil's original idea.



Second poster: This was my initial idea for the poster... the absense of Elliott from a familiar place that his fans associate him with. (Solutions! memorial wall/"Figure 8" album cover, c. 2006) I did not want a beautiful shot of this wall in keeping with the sort of lo-fi spirit that comprises a lot of Elliott's earlier recordings. I was asked to keep the type the same, but was free to change the imagery.



Third poster: still keeping the type– a hybrid that plays off of both Gil's original idea as well as mine. The Polaroids contain some of the participants in the film. (Clockwise, L-R from top left: Steve Hanft, Ross Harris, Mary Lou Lord, Larry Crane, Jennifer Chiba, Sean Croghan, Tony Lash, David McConnell, Gus Van Sant.)



I'm hoping to create an illustrative version of the poster as well sometime in the very near future (along with a few more others), but in the meantime, here goes nothing!

Obscured Eye exhibition

This is the show which will display the latest series of work that I've been posting for the past month or so. If you are in Imperial Valley, please stop by and check it out... I've seen some previews of the other artists' work and it looks like it's shaping up to be a pretty great show! Otherwise, stay tuned for more new work within the next couple of weeks...