trees + gears

I just like the lighting and atmosphere of this painting and I really should do more of them like this. And the distorting is fun to do too. Also, the blue in the sky is my ultimately favorite colour. Sometimes I feel my reality is exactly like this. No constant sense of time and space or anything really and a bit lost in a vast, empty land. I'm not crazy, no no of course not....

prints cont'd

This one is a mezzotint which nearly drove me crazy while prepping the copper plate and when printing. It's tricky to keep all the details but it generally turned out ok. I just love the intense blacks you can get with the mezzotint technique. Too bad it can give you carpal tunnel real fast!
I think I should develop this theme of technology and spirituality more in my work. I love the inside of churches, especially cathedrals. Hmmm...


It's unfortunately a bad photo but the only photo I have of this litho print with the imprints of actual watch parts that went through the press with ink on the side. It was a fun idea but made printing alot more labour-intensive. The image is supposed to be the exhaust from a space shuttle manned by someone who just lost their tophat.

prints I didn't mention yet

I'm unfortunately on a bit of a creative hiatus as I try to get my life a bit more together so I'm still looking back at the work I've done so far. At university I had so much fun with printmaking, especially lithography, but it also drove me nuts with the unpredictable yet labour-intensive processes. It's expensive to experiment and requires access to a properly-run artist printshop so I'm not sure when I'll be able to print again. My finished editions were really hit and miss but here's one of my favorites. I used diagrams from a physics book on the motion of the resulting quarks or whatever from smashing atoms together, an image of space and I used actual gears from watches and printed them with ink on an intaglio press for the sides of the other two images. On this one I scanned them and then digitally printed them on the side. I also had fun with a rainbow roll on a litho plate. It's part of a triptych on the theme of humanity's hope in technology; that it may save us from our mortality and imperfect nature.

Untitled from end of 2008

Here I wanted to show a galaxy sucking up this planet's atmosphere, though they normally suck up whole other galaxies or miscellaneous gases and dust which form stars. So it's dreamy and kinda apocalyptic at the same time. For the strange machinery I referenced some steampunk objects and made them more abstract.

summer of 2008

That summer was really good for my painting actually. I was able to hunker down and just bang them out. I hope such a time comes again soon and this present artistic drought ends!

This is the first one I did that summer and it's one of my favorites. The gears aren't as obvious, they're more integrated into the ground. My goal was simply to have a vast landscape with mixed industrial and natural elements in the light of a dying sun. The intense colours in the sky are supposed to be beautiful but at the same time indicating pollution in the air.

Here's another one done entirely from my imagination. It brings you inside a cave that's got possibly poisonous water/liquid and a single source of light in the distance.

This one has a Victorian lady lost in the woods, surrounded by mysterious darkness (or trees, or hooded figures) with no technology to help her. Just a source of light in the canopy above.

I just like my brushstrokes in this one and the sense it creates that you're zooming into this earth-like planet.

This is simply gears thrown out into space. The bit of galaxy behind them is based on a real picture of the Whirlpool Galaxy. The reddish bubbles of hot gas are where stars are born.

If you want to see the amazing beauty of outer space then you should take a look at Deep Space: The Universe from the Beginning by Stuart Clark. The whole thing is stunning, beautifully printed, oversized pictures with interesting info.

More gears!... from early 2008

This is a little painting with a bug-like rocket taking off for the great unknown. This is when I started taking more artistic liberties with the shape of gears. Perhaps they're getting mushy by the extreme heat of the take-off.



I have no explanation for this small painting. It was just for fun and to include the insides of a clock.



This is called the Orientalist. It's about the objectifying of Asia by white people in the Victorian Age which is why there are gears in her face. She also has the hair of a Japanese geisha, a Chinese top and a Korean sleeve in reference to the fact some ignorant people (even today) don't seem to realize we're not all from the same country (like China) and lump us all together.

Beginning of 2008

This is Planetary Attraction. I like the idea of worlds being dangerously close, illuminating each other's skies. It's about 3x4' and acrylic.


Steaming Forward: Weird train track/subway track traveling through land and space at the same time to who knows where.



Rolling Landscape. I didn't really have an idea for this one. Just that I like that kind of light that sometimes comes from sunsets and the sense of traveling.

End of 2007

I really like this acrylic painting and it is at Galerie Montage in Ste.Genevieve right now. I wanted a post-apocalyptic atmosphere with gears sort of left behind as garbage but also looking alive, like funny little bugs.

Tree Gears: trees with roots turning into gears. This was done in my intaglio class. Acid etch.

Victorian Landscape: This is the first time I tried mezzotint and boy was it hard. It was alot of long, physical labour getting layers of tiny holes into a plate of copper by hand. But I like how it turned out. I was able to get about 10 good prints.

Leaving for the future

Idealizing technology and the far future is such an integral part of human nature. Well, anyway you can really see it when you go back to the Victorian Age or even just the 50's. This is my first foray into such concepts.

Alien Moon

Here is when I started incorporating my love of science fiction into my artworks. And discovered it's fun to paint planets afterall!

Ascension

This is a photo lithograph print pieced together from other famous artworks and my own photos from Korea. Recognize Jackson Pollock textures? It was hard to keep all the nuanced shades from filling in while printing but a few of them turned out well.

Skies

Oops I forgot to post this one earlier. It's a collagraph which was my last print project at Dawson. It was really hard and complicated to print it so I only have one good print. I had something like 15 different plates I had to rub in the ink and then place them back together on the press like a puzzle. But creating all the different textures was alot of fun.

Mt.Rigaud

This is a family aquaintance running freely on top of Mt.Rigaud. He's a cute kid I just wanted to capture his exuberance. This painting is also at Galerie Montage right now

Transforming June

This is the awesome family friend I mentioned earlier. She smiles so much I was curious to see what she looks like when she's not. Turns out, pretty pensive especially with a background that makes me think of being lost in time...

Mt.Rigaud Forest

Wow it's really beautiful up there in the fall which is my favorite season! I took tons of pics. I'll show a couple here. Anyways, I wanted to capture the light over the path and through the trees. The way it hit the rocks and leaves made it simpler to use dabs of paint instead of longer strokes.

Crystal Gunk in the Sink

is the name of this one. It's my second colour litho print. I like how I integrated the colours and textures better than the first. The image came from this simple thought: What if we shed precious stones instead of dead skin cells? Wow, that's random. Maybe I'll do a painting of that too...

untitled print

This one's the first colour lithograph I did in 2006. I like the colours but not the image as much. Too much stuff going around...

The main face is a special family friend I wanted to flatter.

from grade school

For simplicity's sake I will post paintings and prints in chronological order of when I made them.

This one's from maybe Gr.7 or so. I just let my mind free and did whatever came to me and so I think it looks semi-abstract. I did this one in oil. When I was young(er) I was a total oil paint snob! I hated acrylic but now I like both.

TaDa!

It's a new webpage just for my artwork! It's still under construction but I will post the paintings and prints that I've already done and like. And I'll sometimes ramble about certain concepts or sources of inspiration. And I might also post a picture or two on stuff that I am working on currently.