old time

1/2 hour documentary by John Nakashima for WV Pulblic Broadcasting. Appalachian Stringband Music Festival, or Clifftop, is a weeklong party I go to every year.
That's me and our band's awesome banjo picker, Chad, at 20:38. yay!

spring is here, cornchips and beer

Piping Hot

Chemistry is often called on to heal the rift between body and soul. The relief that people that people express when a doctor says their depression is "chemical" is predicated on a belief that there is an integral self that exists across time, and on a fictional divide between the fully occasioned sorrow and the utterly random one. The word chemical seems to assuage people of the feeling of responsibility for the stressed-out discontent of not liking their jobs, worrying about getting old, failing at love, hating their families. There is a pleasant freedom from guilt that has been attached to chemical. If your brain is predisposed to depression, you need not blame yourself for it. Well, blame yourself or evolution, but remember that blame itself can be understood as a chemical process, and that happiness too, is chemical. Chemistry and biology are not matters that impinge on the "real" self; depression cannot be separated from the person it affects. Treatment does not alleviate a disruption of identity, bring you back to some kind of normality; it readjusts a multifarious identity, changing in some small degree who you are.

--Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

bone & key

detail of vanitas...
it's stylistically different from the rest of the painting. it should be it's own little painting...yeah.

Capitol Meat Market

hehehe

i'm looking for a small stool upon which to sit during times of breakfast & calligraphy

Lots of calligraphy lately. I learned simple stuff from mama when I was a wee person, and now that I'm not all hung up on Real Fine Art For Art School, I want to learn more. I'm thinking of incorporating calligraphy/text drawings in India ink into the exaggerated still-lifes I've been doing (below.) Transferring all that sumptuous black ink onto soft paper fibers with a metal tip is oddly satisfying. I like journal writing in calligraphy because it forces me to pick and choose words carefully and edit my thoughts in real-time. Plus, I'm more reluctant to write something negative in beautiful script. Good stuff.


Taking a break from painting to do a digital vector drawing for East End Main Street. A large group of Charleston artists will create lamp post banners to be hung all over the East End. Neato! More details go public on the East End Mainstreet website & Facebook page this coming Monday.

It's been a while...

Between playing lots of music, working out a lot, and spending every other free second I have painting, there's no time to spend sitting around on the internet. It just doesn't seem that important sometimes, which is a good thing. But I do like to keeping a blog and sharing stuff with other people...
Here's my most recent painting, finished (maybe a little over-finished) last night. I'm stoked!


In a cruel twist of fate, I got either a stomach bug or food poisoning last Sunday, which caused me to vomit a big pile of shrimp I'd eaten a few hours before. I had to finish up that giant prawn with the seabug refuse still steamin' in the trash can.


eeewwwww