I’m thinking of putting together a DVD of Goodbye Art… but I’m not much of a story teller. I can get a few minutes worth, but trying to span a whole year of ups and downs and many projects it a little overwhelming. If someone has a lot of experience in this field let me know. It would be nice to get some help.

I made fake teeth yesterday, I bought some of that FIMO clay and baked ‘em, then colored ‘em. Kinda gross cause they end up looking rather realistic. You’ll see the outcome of that in the next week or so. And….. yeah, hope ya’ll are well.

on with the blog!

This piece went through so many different designs before finally settling on this one. At one point the piece was going to be 150feet by 100feet (I’m glad I didn’t go that route!). When I finally set about designing this I knew I wanted to really utilize the grooves in the tricycle tires to add some texture to the piece but they couldn’t be too distracting. I picked the size based on that.

Putting the tricycle together was really time consuming because I had very little metal to attach my extension to. After getting the extension figured out I quickly attached the bucket, tubing, and wrapped it all with electrical tape. I ended up at the hardware store dozens of times on this piece and when I went to get paint I had my colors picked out that I wanted and got an inquisitive look from the guy, cause you gotta admit these would be unusual colors for a room.

The recording challenges were interesting as well. I rigged up a holder for one camera and screwed it to the ceiling…. didn’t work… I put a wide angle lens on it… didn’t work …. I put another wide angle lens on it utilizing a friend of mine, scotch tape. The camera looked rather silly with a dozen yards of scotch tape holding the lenses on but it did the job.

I was all ready to paint and was trying to figure out if the paint would actually go through the tubes. I ran a test tube (ha) and found I would have to water it down pretty well…. actually I figured this out after some trial and error. In the video you can see the blue paint going on pretty slowly so I had to keep watering it down. Even at a good mixture it took over an hour to apply some of the colors because I had to ride over every inch of the piece. I averaged about one color a day and ended up riding on my tricycle for over 6 hours. My butt hurt a bit, the seat is not made for an adult.

Some pictures and explanations

This is a great example of how the paint went onto the canvas. I cut stencils out of plastic and laid them on the canvas, rode around applying paint, then took off the plastic to show the paint applied exactly where I wanted it. This was how I achieved detail in such a small area. And here in the photo is the tricycle with the blue stencil.

Some paint on the plastic stencil

In progress. You can see a few spots where the paint got through the plastic into a place it shouldn’t be. Fixed with a light touch up later.

A close up so you can see the imprint made by the tires. I really liked this look.

I took some extra yellow and made covered this canvas. I will be cutting this piece up and giving it away with purchase of a poster on or before May 1st. Also all purchases made on or before May 1st will have a portion of their proceeds given to the Lance Armstrong Foundation. We’ll see what gets made with the little items they send out upon donation. woo!

Hope you liked the piece! It was a blast to put together.

phil

I’ve spent much of the weekend trying to put prints together.  I decided after talking with some people that I would make limited prints with the editions being below 50 prints.

I was trying to get outside today to put together another goodbye art piece, but it’s amazingly cold.  We had a high of 1 degree Fahrenheit today.  My outdoor clothes are good but I’m not sure they are that good, and my cameras won’t actually work in that temperature.  But I will get out there and create something tomorrow for sure regardless of the temperature.

hope all is well.

But I am very happy that I have been given a fairly green light to start up on my current large piece.  I hope to get moving on it again, although I will need to raise some funds to complete it.  I did some calculating and decided it would be in the range of three thousand USD to finish this piece.  I can get a bunch done now, but I may have to hold off to do the real technical stuff until I can afford the supplies.

That being said I am about to change around my print section and get rid of a bunch of pieces and make limited editions.  They will be below 50 prints each.

I need someones help.   If your interested in helping with this e-mail me.  I want to make a list of all the moments that appear in “a moment” if you have purchased the poster and are interested in writing them all down I would greatly appreciate it and maybe we can work something out.  again, e-mail me if you are interested, I would really appreciate it!

Goodbye Art is back in full swing. I’m excited about this. It was a really fun go for quite a while there and then became a bit of a burden. I have come back to it with a renewed vision and lots of ideas. Some projects will be playful and others serious.

high five for warranties! my laptop is crashing on me from time to time and I called HP and luckily they can fix it for me (I made it within two weeks of the warranty). But it will be gone for a week or so.

Alright I gotta run. I have some wine that is freezing out on the porch.

By the way:  If there is a subject you would like me to talk about here, email me.  I hopefully will discuss it.

It is rather obvious I work from photographs and technically I have to get permission to work from those photos if the end product can be connected to that picture.  …. eh, the short of it is, who knows if I can display or show some of my work because of this.  I’m really curious to see how it all turns out.

Art stuff:  I took on a more abstract idea this week.  I’m in southern California at the moment for vacation and spent yesterday in the mountains running around a burned hillside with a friend of mine that experienced the recent fires.  The picture that I came up with was a very fun and different piece.  It relies more on the viewer to interpret the work which as you know I don’t do a lot of.  But I am enjoying conveying ideas in a different way.  I will move this way from time to time and begin creating another body of work that is different than the large pieces I have done and the goodbye art.

DO YOU KNOW someone in New Orleans that lost their home to Katrina and the home has not yet been demolished?  If so please contact me because I am interested in talking with them.  And when I say home I mean a stand alone home that they still own and are waiting for demolition.   e-mail me iam@philinthecircle.com

So what’s been happening, uh lets see, well I haven’t touched the goodbye art idea and it barely ever crosses my mind.  I have been putting my time into my newest piece that unfortunately you can’t watch the progress on the ‘ol webcam because that thing sucks.  I fought it one week for two and a half days and then came to the conclusion that I was wasting my time and so I cut it out completely.  I also changed the entry photo to a piece of my art instead of those headless shots.   Anyway back to the new piece.  As willing as I was to let people watch the process I don’t really talk about it much except with some real vagueness.  I found that I don’t want to hear other peoples opinions of what I’m working on but opinions on the final product is of course cool.  I just don’t want to be impacted while I’m working on a piece.  That being said, the new piece involves lots of drawing and photography and the end product is playing on an idea we all know with a very technical twist to it, as well as it will change with time.

Hope everyone is well.

phil

But now I’m going to be side tracked a bit and go back to the fragmented style that I do so much of.  I’m definitely coming back to painting though.  It’s really quite fun.

One thing I mentioned before is I found a way to get my pictures digitally, and I did the final touches this morning and found that the final product is supremely top notch.  I scanned the gary ridgeway piece and the final picture is just impeccable.   I called around and have found a place that can do Giclée prints at 48 inches, so that print will be slightly larger than half size which is just wonderful.

If you saw the ‘ol webcam you will notice I moved stuff around. I will be doing a small piece tomorrow (today officially) that will be part of the goodbye art for this coming weekend.  I am a bit curious how that project will all filter out.  you’ll see come monday why I’m a little apprehensive.   oh and the piece that was in the webcam is going to be done an hour each day so I had to put it to the side for some time.  as it will take forever at this point.

When part time actually hits, in a couple weeks.  I think I will step out of my norm and do a series of just straight up paintings.  I had an idea today for a series and think that I should celebrate going part time and do something a little different.

g-night