Hi everybody. It’s been a little bit since I have put up a blog post mainly because I had one through GoDaddy and they discontinued that service so I had to find another blog posting website and connect it to my website.
Now that that is out of the way I am really trying to get back into my art in a full time manner, but of course I am working full time as a screen printer for an apparel company and it takes up a lot of time and it is weird hours too. Another issue that I am having is the place that I am living in now is not conducive to my life style. I have a separate garage area that I am trying to take advantage of, but there is no electricity that runs to it. So for the last couple of months I have been trying to essentially make my own power source in there. That has been a project on its own. I have basically made my own quite generator by using two twelve volt deep cycle batteries and a two thousand watt inverter. In the future I want to hook a fifteen watt solar panel with a solar regulator to the batteries to keep them charged all the time. As of now though I don’t understand why it doesn’t work and I am dropping that because it has taken too much time. For now I have just bought battery operated power tools and lights for when I have to cut wood in the garage. I am hoping to find and move into a better place with in the next six months.
Also with this whole living situation I am moving at the end of my lease to somewhere that is more suited for me both in the actually building, a house where I work and live by myself, to a more art driven community or at least the whole young professional thing is going on.
Now to the art, I am wanting to continue with the landscapes that I am working on as well as the paintings that are more mixed media and graffiti inspired. I have been working on an idea with the urban landscapes. One idea is that I will go to different sites and photograph and paint images of port-a-johns and dumpsters. I want to focus on these because I can bring more meaning to the viewer of those items through my paintings; also I am trying to relay them back historically to Monet’s Haystack paintings. Another thing that I am wanting to do with the landscapes is start to incorporate the surface of the painting into the painting itself. What I mean by this is start using material like plywood and leaving part of it untouched, so in the final painting the plywood surface is also part of the image. This may later turn into using material such as tyvek which I see a lot of when construction companies are wrapping buildings before they put siding on.
On the other side of my art is the mix media pieces in which I put things from my life on to the surface and work out imagery from there. My most prominent piece is the works where I channel imagery of my time in the Iraq war and how it affected my then and into the present. That was my thesis show that I did at CCAD. I have been following up with that process some, but lack of a good printer has halted that. I am currently in process of getting a good printer now.
Well, this is the first post of my newer ones to come.
CP
ChrisPackArt 