TIMBER!
Can't get enough of the woods art lately. Here is the beginnings of another piece for my upcoming show in June at Dream in Plastic. Can't wait to get painting these! It's kind of refreshing to work in a new style again. Also on the home decorating front... as you can see I added a new stump to the bedroom. I was walking home from the train a few weeks back and noticed there were a bunch of trees that were cut down/back along the highway. Found this beauty and hauled it all the way up to my place. For those of you that have walked to my place from the train, you know it can be quite a task. It's a super steep trek. Anyways I did a lot of work on it to get it to the state you see it now. I had to saw off a pretty good chunk that was cut unevenly when I found it. I cleaned up both ends an leveled it out. Then I needed to carve out a little sliver of rot that was starting to form. The stump needed to be dried out as well. I wanted to make sure there were no dormant little bugs hanging around too, so it was a long time before I actually felt comfortable bringing the tree in the room. Eventually I may decide to polyurethane the ends, but I just want to make sure it's fully dry 1st.

SKETCHBOT
So this is a little late, but I was part of a custom toy show this past Friday. The paltform was Steve Talkowski's Sketchbot figure. I have been itching to do a little sculpting for a while now, so I figured I'd give it a go and start with something simple. I have kind of been obsessed with this whole woods theme in my art plus I figured since its a robot everyone is going to be doing these really techy customs. So with that in mind I turned Sketchbot in to a tree, ha-ha. Actually I think it was my girlfriends idea originally. I also wanted to put something inside to make the custom more interesting. I picked up one of Nathan Jurevicius's Paleda Owl wind-up toys. It was a little too big to fit inside of Sketchbot, so I disassembled the wind-up mechanism and took a hacksaw to the bottom of the toy to shorten it a bit. Then I painted it and inserted the figure inside of my custom. Anyways here's the finished product, hope you guys like it. Show is up until April 23rd at...
My Plastic Heart
210 Forsyth St.
Lower East Side
New York
646.290.6866

VINYL ADDICTION!!!
Check out MYX tonight for a new episode of Vinyl Addiction! Jesse stopped by my old Brooklyn pad and we talked Carneys, painting, and animation. MYX can be seen on Comcast Channel 368 in the California Bay Area, Cox Ch. 479 (Orange County) and Cox Ch. 464 (Northern Virginia). It’s also on DirecTV – Channel 2067. Support my boy Jesse and his rad show!

VINYL ADDICTION

PAINTING THE TOWN!
Here's a few pix from the live painting session I did this past weekend With Dan Weise. The event is a monthly party called Next Step that is held at the Piggy Bank (448 Main St, Beacon New York) The party serves as a fundraiser to help support the Electric Windows art project in Beacon. At the end of the night the painting is auctioned off. It's a fun night of music, dancing, and live art. Here's a link to the Electric Windows site as well...

Electric Windows

From their Facebook page... "On July 31, 2010, twenty four street artists, from around the globe, will converge in Beacon, NY. During a three day period they will create live artwork and have it installed on the exterior of a 19th century factory building on Main Street."

NEXT STEP!
I'll be doing a live painting session w/ Daniel Weise at this weeks Next Step party to help raise funds for the Electric Windows project. Stop by the Piggy Bank (448 Main St. Beacon, NY) this Sat, party starts @ 10PM.

SUPER SHAPES!
So it's finally here! Team Umizoomi, the show I have been working on for more or less the past 2 years has finally aired. The show is a modge podge of 2d traditional animation, after effects, 3D animation, live action, photo collage, you name it, it's in there. I'm heading up the "drawn" department. There's only 4-5 of us actually doing 2d animation. It's a math based curriculum, teaching numbers, shapes, and patterns. The show follows Milli, Geo, and Bot who are tiny superheroes that help kids solve problems using math. It's a fun show, I know my neice and nephew love it! So check it out if you get a chance weekdays at 11:30 AM on Nickelodeon.

MOVIN' ON UP
So as I mentioned in the previous post, we recently moved. As much as I love the city I was really missing the little luxuries like privacy and space. I've been doing the apartment living thing for probably close to 15 yrs now and it just seemed like time for a change. After lots of research, Michelle came upon the town of Beacon, NY as a contender for the potential move. We visited a few times and absolutely fell in love with the town. Not only is it beautiful nestled between the river and the mountains, but Beacon has a great art scene as well. We're literally right down the street from the DIA!
Since the move, the house has become my new art project. So I figured I'd share a few pics of some of the things we've been doing, enjoy...
So we wanted to do a woods theme room for the master bedroom. The room actually overlooks the mountains, so we were inspired to bring a little of the outdoors, inside.
I ordered a few birch poles on line from this great company that sells birch poles and other lumber that was felled by mother nature. I thought it was kind of nice that they repurpose these fallen trees as opposed to chopping down perfectly healthy ones. Anyways I ordered 5 9' poles that I wanted to stand in the corner of the room to play off this great birch tree wallpaper Michelle found at Anthropologie.

The ceiling is aprox. 8'3", so I had to break out the hacksaw and trim off the excess.

I only wallpapered the one wall as an accent. Didn't want to go too crazy, plus the paper was super expensive, ha-ha.


Yes, I'm THAT anal. I can't stand when pictures are crooked. Also to the left is our oddly placed attic door which I kinda like cuz of its weird placement. I did a faux birch paint on it to tie it in to the rest of the room. Kind of neat cuz it's almost like a framed picture on the wall.

I'd like to sneak a few of these home improvement posts in here in between art posts as we continue to work on the house. I just think it's fun and it serves as a different outlet for my art.

BACK IN ACTION
Wow... It's been a while since I've posted here. Been busy with so many things both art and non-art related. But before I bore you with too many of the details, lets ease back into this blog thing with a quick art post. This June I will be having a solo art show at Dream In Plastic (a gallery/toy store here in Beacon... that's right, Beacon, not Brooklyn... I recently moved, but we'll get in to that in another post.) Anyways, I wanted to go in a new direction for this show, so I decided to venture away from my classic cartoony style and focus on more realistic subject matter. You know, new house, new lifestyle, going for that whole renewal thing, trying to start fresh. Above is my 1st painting/sketch for the show. Keep checking in as I will try to post more regularly and you can follow my process as I prepare for the upcoming show. There's a lot of other cool stuff I have to post here as well, I've been neglecting this blog for far too long.