astronaut

This is my steampunk-inspired astronaut suit from a futuristic Victorian Age. An age of elegant space travel...

a sketch

This is just a random sketch painting I did in 4 hours. There's not that much to it but I love the lighting and the brushstrokes. I want to stay in that vein for new paintings to come.

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.