The Sacred and the Propane

40" x 30", oil on canvas, 2007, private collection

This is my dad barbecuing some kebapi. The cow in the background was always intended to be in the composition, but it wasn't until this painting sat around my studio for a few weeks, the cow halfway done with that ghostly aspect, that I realized that I had to leave it like that. The trees in the background are cypress trees which are very common in Macedonia, the birthplace of my parents.

This painting is an important one in my artistic development for more than the way I dealt with the cow and grass, texturally –it's also the first time I used the red underpainting as a design element, leaving a red outline around most of the subjects in the painting.

A couple of years later, this painting served as inspiration for a new series dealing with meat matters and our (mostly disconnected) relationship with the food we eat. Read about two other paintings from that series in my post about the Sommerfest show at Blizzmax Gallery.

Comments

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing Beverly Hills Cop on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his Saturday Night Live days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining. Beverly Hi...

Time Travel Helmet

The theme for this year's Firelight Lantern Festival is The Time Machine , and Krista and I were going to put together steampunk-inspired costumes for ourselves (which is why the helmet's painted in hammered bronze), but, after shooting the announcement video (second video at the bottom of this post) I decided I'd look better with a lab coat, bow tie, and goggles for a generic 20th Century scientist look. I'd previously built a jetpack as sci-fi costume accessory for stiltwalking purposes back in 2015, so if I were to combine this helmet, the jetpack, and my refurbished blaster and I'd have a pretty good, mostly homemade, sci-fi costume for...something...down the line... Creature! It sorta looks like a weird electronic sea cucumber or sea anemone from the top. More dieselpunk than steampunk; I like it. They were originally crystal clear plastic, but I sanded the insides and outsides to better disperse the light from the LEDs (which I bought, pre-wired...

YT-1300 Freighter w/Cargo Carriage (scale model), Part 1

For a couple of decades, now, I'd been curious about two things concerning the Millennium Falcon: what it looked like as a brand new, unmodified ship ...and how exactly did it work as a "freighter," anyway? That other build takes care of my curiosity about the ship, this one takes care of my curiosity about the freighter question... Hail, Bandai. Bandai Star Wars kits are amazing. Their larger models are super detailed, but even these tiny kits (the Falcon here is about 1/350 scale) are superior to many previous and current Star Wars kits by MPC, AMT, or Revell. Mini sprue tour. Interestingly, this version of the Falcon is the one from Star Wars , having only three landing gear boxes (two more were added to the front for Empire ), but the larger version I built as factory stock had five because it was the version from The Force Awakens . My only (very minor) complaint is that these smaller kits only have stickers instead of decals (the larger kits...

The Naked Silo

Search This Blog