Thanks to those of you who made it out to the 59th Annual State Bar Art Competition at the Long Beach Convention Center, where I won First Prize in painting :) Again, your support is most appreciated!
In other updates, the City of Santa Clarita has commissioned me to create a work of art dedicated to its Santa Clara River Rally, and the efforts of the community in cleaning it up. I will keep you posted on how the work develops!
I have also been commissioned to create the cover art for a new book coming out by author John Janda. John is an incredible writer, and I have worked with him in the past, in his novel American Spirit. Stay tuned for updates on this development :)
Currently, I continue to work on several other new pieces, and the above image shows my recent study in oil pastels, a medium mastered by the great Edgar Degas. It is further practice in color and layering. Although this piece is a "still life", it is not the subject matter that most concerns me - it is the process of viewing an object and translating that visual into an illusion of color on a flat plane composition. This process is the same whether the subject matter is a still life, landscape, portrait, abstract, etc.
What interests me is how the work is created, while the subject matter is secondary. This is, for example, why Degas is one of the greatest artists in art history - it is not his choice of subject matter of horses, dancers, or performers that gives his art a place in every art history book. And this is why a still-life, like those famously created by Paul Cezanne, can be just as interesting as an action painting or any other type of art.
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