Subtractive Composites

40" x 30", oil on canvas, 2013, private collection

On this day five years ago, I posted my first blog entry here, not knowing if I would enjoy blogging, how long I would continue, or what I would get out of it, if anything. It turns out I kind of do sort of enjoy blogging (kind of) –mostly concentrating on my own artwork, but I also like writing the occasional post about Small Pond Arts (where I gladly invite you to meet me at the silo). Since I have no plans to stop painting, I may as well keep blogging about it.

And what have I gotten out of it? I like sharing my work, my process, my struggles (it might be insightful or educational to someone); I feel I've become better at discussing (though, not necessarily explaining) my work in person after five years and more than 400 posts of trying to be clear and coherent online; and while I don't prefer to dwell on/in the past, I do like to reflect on past work, to reassess and be critical of it so that I may learn and get better...and blogging helps, whether I'm looking back on my first watercolour or my most recent oil painting (this one). So here's to five years!

Carrying on with my Tournament of Shadows series, I've combined here my cleaver-wielding friend Sandra with a sword-wielding statue from the Pallas Athene Fountain in front of the Austrian Parliament Building in Vienna (which I photographed on a trip there with Krista in 2007). The lion tattoo is a larger version of the one Ashley has in The Lady and the Lions from earlier in this series (which also features a statue).

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Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing Beverly Hills Cop on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his Saturday Night Live days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining. Beverly Hi

City of Angels

17" x 11", watercolour and digital, 1999 Ah, City of Angels . I thought I was getting cool film noir but got a cheesy musical instead (Google it if you must). Still, it was fun to make the poster and associated images, mostly because the research consisted of watching real films noir and buying a great book on movie posters of the genre. I made tons of sketches and a few digital mock-ups. For the final poster above, I made three separate watercolour paintings (one of the couple and one each of the two black and white heads) and composited them in Photoshop, where I also added the text. In true movie poster fashion, I wanted the actors names to be the top two names, but I lost that battle and had to use the characters' names instead. It looks fine, but it implies that "Kingsley and Stone" are the lead actors in the show. Oh, well...it's only community theatre... By making the "angel" above half black and white and half colour, th

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co

The Naked Silo

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