Armando 2

            After creating the work featured in the previous post for my departed friend Mando, I reevaluated it and decided that while it was beneficial for me to create a piece that dealt with how I felt regarding his death. It wouldn't be fair for me not to create a piece that centered around him, and celebrated his life. The piece below was meant to show that it is possibly impermanence that breeds beauty.  Rest in peace Mando. 

Impermanence 

Dip pen and India Ink on bristol 19x24"

Armando

I have a massive back catalogue of dip pen drawings, so they will be coming through the works for a while.  This piece and the piece to come where made shortly after the death of a friend, Armando Montano. It was a shocking reawakening for me to see the first of my peers go, and for it to be such a shining and successful personality. He will be dearly missed. While making this piece I was dealing with harsh feelings of bitterness and iniquity. I felt that something had been taken, not from me but from the world. I wanted my say, my opportunity. I felt that after someone with a soul so beautiful had been stripped from the world, my only recourse was to deface something beautiful myself. If the world was going to be ugly, harsh, and vulgar so would I. I decided to purge these emotions in a drawing, I wanted to make a madonna but an unpleasant and uneasy one. The blood and thorned heart show the holy mother's suffering, her classic beauty has been hyper-sexualized, her face is worn and she caries the classic gothic catholic symbols that were meant to support her as a burden. Weather or not I was correct in what I did, it held value for me in the fact that it helped me to face a troublesome reality I saw within myself. 

"Mondano"

dip pen and india ink on bristol 19x24"

The Visit

I thought it was time to post some of my theater work, seeing as how it's all getting buried in Fine Art. This a is 1/2"-1' scale model of a set design that I made in class last semester. The Show was called The visit,  by Friedrich Durrenmatt. The show is about an impoverished town on the brink of starvation, that is visited by a former resident who has, since leaving, become a billionaire. She offers to give the town 1 billion dollars, provided they kill her ex-boyfriend. It is a very brechtian play with a sardonic tongue and cheek nature and many locations. I attempted to fit both the needs and the style of the play by creating a unit set that could function to adapt to the many locations and also add to the dry humor of the writing style.

the time travelers

This is a painting that I created while at RMCAD. It was a project intended to focus on time. While ruminating over what the piece should be I came across a story in the news that really took hold of me. It was the story of two young girls in China who had committed suicide. They had drowned themselves together in their parents pool; they believed that if they did so they would wake up in another dynasty. Time travel was a popular trend in the chinese culture and zeitgeist. There were many prime-time T.V. shows in which a woman would fall of of a horse, get struck by lightning, or be hit by a car and wake up in another era.

What struck me about the story was the incredible amount of belief that would have been required for these two girls to follow through with their plan. Drowning is one of the hardest forms of suicide, and they could have surfaced at any moment; but they loved each-other and they wanted to go together. To me as much as it is a tragic story, it is also a story about faith, love, and hope. There is nothing to say that these two girls did not succeed in their goal, and have been reunited in another time.

When I read the article the story was only a few hours old, and I started work on the piece immediately, making the piece also a record of my time and experience with the story. Here is a link to the original article if anyone is curious http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/teens-time-travel-attempt-fatal-deadly-die-suicide-china_n_1335487.html

"The Time Travelers"

Acrylic on canvas  5'x5'

Light years

This is a piece that I created while at Rocky Mountain College of art and design. When It was installed, I mounted it so that the painting hung 9 inches away from the wall. I installed Fluorescent tubes on the inside of the framing of the painting. I then painted the wall in a radius 12' from the painting's edges, so in total the piece was 26' wide.  After painting the wall i mounted hooks into the wall and installed 12000' of ribbons that tangled out from the painting and onto the wall. I wanted to encapsulate the viewer in the work, to have them bound in a nest or womb type of situation. The piece features an astronaut in the fetal position. The piece represents the infinite possibility of life.