Dedicated to my brothers and sisters under the cloud...

For the past couple months I've been doing a lot of work involving depression with Chlorine Nights (which should be printed soon) and a couple other pieces including The Black Dog. It's something myself, as well as most of my family, have struggled with throughout our lives. So it seems only natural that I would eventually confront depression in my art. It's also something that I feel most everybody can identify with. Whether or not you have been diagnosed, or you feel sad, or you don't feel any sign of it at all...everyone recognizes that familiar feeling. The cloud of hopelessness, loneliness, or ambiguity has touched everyone's shoulder at least once in life. Whether a loved one died or your heart was broken...the feeling of depression is something we can all relate to. With these new works I want to aesthetically reproduce exactly what depression feels like to me, in simple terms. I want the pieces to be noisy and uncared for. I want to feel rather uncomfortable when painting them. The paint is applied in thick coats while aerosol runs over top. I feel the essence of the dark paint and the thick, muddy aerosol illustrate at least one corner of depression. I don't hope you understand the disease by looking at these pieces, I hope that you can get closure. I hope that you can get a hint of what I feel all the time. And I hope that these works show you that there are people out there that understand. You are not alone.


The first attempt. And yes they are self-portraits




I used a lot of umbers with the acrylic, never any pure black.




The paper I used was a 300lb. Arches paper. Extremely heavy and durable to a ton of saturation.
I then attached it to panel later on.

SOCA Halloween Bash Flyer

Here is the flyer I made for the University of Saint Francis' Annual Halloween Cookout.
I had a lot of fun drawing up this zombie dude and adding the color digitally. The entire concept of the poster is humorous and pretty awesome.
Little zombie fast food boy!

New Things...

I've recently got my hands on a couple new things so im going to post them here.

If you haven't checked out Black Magic, White Noise...please do so now.
It features a ton of amazing illustrators, photographers, digital artists, sculptors, etc.



Secondly, if you haven't gotten your hands on any of the Sistine Press releases then your a fucking goon.
GET THEM

www.sistinepress.bigcartel.com
www.sistinepress.wordpress.com



Thirdly, im basically finished experimenting around with this recent piece and im submitting it to the Renaissance in Roanoke Festival on October 9th. Definitely excited.

Sam Weber

A friend of mine, Katie Moore, showed me this painter a couple weeks ago and I've been obsessed with his stuff since then...Especially his experiments. Go check out Sam Weber and get some of his prints!

www.sampaints.com

Here's some of the work he did for a Lord of the Flies publication:

New piece started

Tonight I started a new painting/illustration involving marker/paint/and aerosol on panel.
The piece is sacrilegious and violent.






much more to go!
Will post finished product soon.

GOOD NEWS!!

I just sent in the finished artwork and layout for the new Close Only Counts release, Your Not Gonna Like What I Have to Say. Im super fuckin pumped on this release cause so many people have put sooo much time into it and it definitely shows. It's a giant collaboration involving all of my best friends and thats the best way to describe it. Keep your eyes peeled for a release date and the release show in order to get your hands on one of these. My good friends at Midwestern Decline are putting out the release so go check them out too:





I cant show the whole layout on here but I willshow the individual mugshots that I drew up for the band. You can fid them inside the cd. But this is the overall style I went with:











BUY THIS CD!!!!!

CHLORINE NIGHTS

I started this new book project a couple nights ago and so far im realllllll pumped.
The book is a somber collection of illustrative, photographic, literary, and digital work done by myself. The book is hopefully going to be a hardback with at least 25 pages of material. Its one of the first times i've real tried successfully compiling illustrative, photographic, digital, and writing into one. I also tried to stick with a much more simple design theory and not litter the page with an excess of detail and brushes and chaos. Essentially, Chlorine Nights is a visual interpretation of depression....as simple as I can put it. All pieces were drawn, photographed, written, and compiled by me.
Here's a couple peeks: