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The Art Milwaukee Awards closed up submissions on the 31st and after paging through my approximately 18,000 new pieces from this year, I picked two out that I thought were good examples of my work this past year as a whole...

This piece really kicked off my new direction. It was the first piece I did as a live painting for Art Milwaukee, starting a new way of creating work that may be the first step in accomplishing my goal of getting art into people's everyday lives, and really nailed down a process and approach that extended to most all of what I did the rest of the year. The layering, extensive mark-making, and wide range of color lent to the "disintegration" of the subject and really got me thinking about symbolism, spirituality and the human experience...

This piece notes the most recent and dramatic change in the work. While it still  employs many of the aesthetics, techniques, and ideas that came from the previous, it moves toward a bit of a new substructure, trying to evoke the scratching and mark-making of more primitive, natural and raw foundation, rather than the vibrant color saturated canvases that have been coming out before this piece. I still believe color is one of, if not the most important aspect to my work, but in this and some newer pieces, the subtleness of the color-wash is just as meaningful and powerful as the straight-from-the-tube blasts that usually dominate my work.