Sunday, February 3, 2008

-Blanket of Coins

I was hoping to have my newest work all photographed and planned to do sketch to finish breakdowns for a few. Since that hasn't happened yet, here is the best I can do with my point and shoot camera. This is a painting I did last summer. Starting off with a close up....


I've never been to Spain, but I named this painting after a river there.

"Guadiana" 30" x 30" oil on wood.
I was born in Altus, Oklahoma and moved to Arizona when I was 6 months old. There's that song "Never Been to Spain", a famous one that Elvis sang. Here's an excerpt:

Well I never been to Heaven
But I been to Oklahoma
Well they tell me I was born there
But I really don't remember
In Oklahoma, not Arizona
What does it matter
What does it matter

Thanks Patrick for pointing that out to me.


Detail sketch.

Detail of original sketch of girl.

________________________________

There's been a lot of talk about 'CHANGE' in the news...

A friend and I got to talking about how unfathomably massive a trillion is, so I decided to work it out and share.

Estimated U.S. $9 trillion(or British billion) deficit in currency coverage.

Summary of findings:
1) The US $9 trillion deficit broken down into quarters would blanket an area the size of New Jersey.
2) Broken down into pennies, it would blanket an area the size of Arizona, New Jersey, two Rhode Islands, and four Washington DC's combined and still have 14 square miles of pennies left over.
3) The deficit arranged into a solid-flat brick of stacked pennies would cover an area the size of Manhattan around 26 feet thick.
4) A tower of $9 trillion in pennies would make a stack all of the way to Saturn, or zig zag from the Sun and Earth almost 9 times.
5) Averaged out, America has added more than $106 million dollars each day to its deficit since 1776.
6) A calculation I found on the internet stated: A million dollars stack 500 feet (tall as the big pyramid in Egypt); a billion dollars stack 10 times higher than Mt. Everest; a 1 trillion dollars stack 1/4 of the way to the Moon 60,000 miles (97,200 Km)....
With that said, I guess 9 trillion, one dollar bills would stack (and no, not being placed end to end) would go up, arch around the moon and come back down to earth.

After doing all this math stuff, i came across a site called The MegaPenny Project, which is way more extensive and informative than my afternoon of time wasting. Cool images and other statistics to help visualize massive amounts of pennies.

Here's my math breakdown notes:
1 quarter = 1inch sq.(quarters seem to be 15/16th of an inch. whatev's.)
144 quarters = 1 ft sq.
if 43,560 ft sq = 1 acre.
then 43,560 x 144= 6,272,640 quarters per acre.
if 640 acres= 1 mile sq.
then 6,272,640 x 640 = 4,014,489,600 quarters per 1 mile sq.
if $9,000,000,000,000 x 4= 36,000,000,000,000 quarters
then 4,014,489,600 divided into 36 trillion= 8967 square miles of quarters butted next to each other.
New Jersey is 8,722 square miles.(according to what I found on the internet)

Using the same math in pennies.
1 penny= .75 inch sq.
256 pennies = 1 ft sq....
900 trillion pennies = 126,105 square miles.
Arizona = 114,006 square miles.
Rhode Island= 1545 square miles.
Washington D.C. = 68.25 square miles.
You could cover the area of Arizona in pennies, then cover all of New Jersey, then put a double stack covering RI, then a 4 stack on D.C. and still have 14 square miles of pennies left over.

17.5 pennies stacked = 1inch.
210 pennies =1ft.
126,105 divided by 22.96 ( square miles of Manhattan)= 5492.37 quarters per stack.
210 divided into 5492.37 = would cover the entire area of Manhattan with a brick of stacked pennies 26 feet thick.

5280 feet in a mile.
$11,088 of stacked pennies = 1 mile high.
divide 9 trillion by 11,088
$9 trillion = 811,688,311.68 miles of stacked pennies.
Though a planet's distance from each other vary, 800 million miles is about how far Saturn is from Earth, or the stack could go back and forth from the Sun to Earth, almost 9 times.

U.S. Declaration of Independence 1776.
1776 to 2007= 231 years.
365 days x 231 + 57 leap year days = 84372 days
$9 trillion divided by 84372 days = $106,670,459.39 per day of spending money we don't have since 1776.

Thursday, January 3, 2008

-2008


As you can see from the text above, I am in a two person exhibit over at the giant Jonathan Levine Gallery here in NYC with the wonderful Xiaoqing Ding.
Also Mr. Jonathan Weiner will be showing his solo show in the main room so it's really a three person show. I'm in very good company and am a true fan of both of their artwork. Lots of previously unseen eye candy.


Part II
Some discarded mock-ups of my new site had a prairie/Dust Bowl feel to them. To plug some friend's sites, a combination of inspiration led to the piece below. After seeing my site design from early 2007,(sorry I didn't archive it), my friend Tom Prior said I should really look at the movie 'Days in Heaven' by Terrence Malick which has an Andrew Wyeth feel to it. A few months ago cartoonist,Leah Hayes, and musician,Michael leviton, introduced me to Brooklyn singer/songwriter Sharon Van Etten her myspace music description says "sad prairie folk music." It was really nice to listen to while working on sketches.

After a bunch of unsatisfactory drawings I ended up drawing it in flash as my current menu since I was stuck on what to do for the new version.
I did this drawing based on my flash menu.(by the way I added a new roll over animation last week on her. Check it out.)

After transferring the drawing onto a piece of birch primed with a wash of brown, I blocked in the background and some of the water texture.

"Thought" 19"x 32" oil on wood.
I ended up leaving the cattails out of the picture cause I thought they might be too distracting and wanted to keep the image a bit more iconic. I'm still debating that since I do like them in the drawing.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

-Inspired Procrastination pt.1

I took on a freelance Flash job the past 2 weeks and with my show coming up I didn't get a chance to set up a post for last week. I did find some time to sit down and make this video.



A few months ago I saw this kid playing a version of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" and was in awe. I tracked down German based musician, David Qualey who wrote the arrangement and purchased the music from him.

I made the mask a few Halloween's ago, there's a string attached to the ears, then to a nail on the wall, then hooked back over the capo and wrapped around my hand to move the ears as my hand slides up the neck. I don't really play guitar, but after practicing everyday for a month straight its the best that I could do with a mask on.

Ok, back to work.

Monday, December 3, 2007

-Preview of Sorts

There's a show coming up for me at Jonathan Levine Gallery in NYC. Here's a piece from the show.

"Separate Lives" 24"32" oil on wood.

I painted this 7 months ago. Its been sitting in my studio collecting dust. After it was finished I took a cellphone picture of it and an acquaintance pointed out that there were two chimney's. He said it was like two people living separate lives in the same house.

Detail, there's a cat in one of the windows.

On Thanksgiving there was a wadded up napkin in my stairwell. I took a photo of it untouched. It was on the sill for ten days so I wonder if the super got spooked by it, because all the other trash had been regularly disposed. Looks to me like a fairy-sized mummy in a fetal position. Note the size from the match stick.

Sleep tight everybody.

Monday, November 26, 2007

-What's in a Name?

As of yesterday, this website can be reached at WWW. ESAO.COM! I've been waiting for 7 years to get that url and now I don't think it was really worth it.
Story at the bottom of this post....


Before "The Last Hour" had a name, the idea started as a doodle of a mother and mummified child portrait.


At the time I had been listening to the audio book of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and my sketch quickly became inspired by the atmosphere I imagined from this chilling father & son drama in the ash of post-apocalypse.

10"x14" pencil on rag paper.

No reference was needed to complete the painting. I like to leave it up to the viewer to interpret what they want from my images, but I guess I'll say for this one I imagined it's a sick girl being gently lead to the unknown(possibly death) in the comforting arms of her giant doll/reaper guardian. I decided to not have it carrying a sickle, but a bindle as if the girl's belongings may be in there for her journey.

"Last Hour" oil on wood 16"x24"


a bit closer.

In 2001 esao.com was taken so I ended up taking ".net" which was great. The Educational Safety Association of Ontario had owned it but never used it. It was April 2007 when they finally set it free, and the day it expired I went to purchase it.

The domain name went straight to an 'expired domain' auction site called Snapnames. I registered and waited for the three day auction to start later that week. No big deal. Minimum bid $60 so I bid $101 to see what would happen. There were dozens of bidders and I thought "Who are all of these people?" so I googled most of the screen names and found them to be domain reseller companies.

This is were legality becomes suspicious. Before the auction was over I started getting e-mails from domain resellers to buy the name from them(if they won it) for $2500. So my conspiracy theory is that Snapnames gives your e-mail to some domain resellers and if there's a particular interest in a domain name, then they can work together to bump up the bidding.

I won the auction with the oddly high amount of $925. Telegraphers from ages past would be rolling in their graves that a person would spend $132.14 per letter. Trying not to feel regretful that I could have bought a wii, or an xbox, or a life, I'd like to thank my new domain extension esao.com for keeping esao.net company.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

-Post Number 1

So I decided to redesign my site again with a weekly updated section that will include works in progress, news, upcoming shows, and other associated happenings.

Ok, first things first. I added a few new paintings and more coming shortly. The people at Equal Vision Records are letting me do a print run of these paintings I did for the band Circa Survive a while back. These prints can be purchased in my store section.



This painting has been lying around my house for months and since its going to be in the Aqua Art Fair with Roq la Rue for Art Basel Miami(along with a few other paintings) Dec. 4th, I thought I'd post it up.


Here is a thumbnail and sketch done on typing paper


A tighter drawing scanned into Photoshop with a photo of wood grain and one of a plate, mocked-up with gradients for reference.


Oil on wood 12"x18"


Happy Thanksgiving.