The Naked Silo

26" x 20", watercolour on Yupo, 2012, private collection This was my only watercolour painting for 2012 and it was a bit of a challenge since the reference material was a black and white newspaper photo from when Tim Nikita (my brother-in-law), the foreground subject, was in high school. There was very little detail to work with and figuring out the colour scheme of the uniforms was difficult as the high school no longer has a baseball team and archival photos don't seem to exist online (I couldn't ask Tim because his fiancée, Meagan, commissioned this as a surprise Christmas gift). Meagan discreetly asked around and got me some colour notes for Tim's outfit, but I coloured the opponent to best contrast Tim while keeping somewhat in line with the photo ref. I couldn't really see the details in Tim's face so I made this about the action of him running to home base rather than it being a traditional portrait of him. Incidentally, I snuck Tim into

Flight 1 Flight 2 each: 14" x 18", oil on canvas, 2002, private collections Hands can be tricky. They're kind of hard to draw, and, since everybody knows what hands are supposed to look like (we see our own all the time!), it's easy to spot it when a drawing of a hand is off (this doesn't matter, though, if it's deliberately stylized to not be realistic). I like these two paintings of my cousin Amanda's hands for their looseness and liveliness. I did two more in this vein, but they're not as satisfying as these two.   Flight 3 14" x 18", oil on canvas, 2002 This one was done shortly after the first two, maybe only months later, but my tendency to "tighten up" came through. Still, there's some nice looseness, just not as nice as the first two paintings. Flight 4 14" x 18", oil on canvas, 2005, private collection I think this was done in 2005 (it might have been 2006) and I was using Krist

The Stack Earlier this month I undertook a big project to help 2012 go out with a bang. It was a test of endurance and a demonstration of my ink painting techniques and, although it was very difficult at times, it was very fun and ultimately very rewarding. I called this 100-hour painting marathon " Burning the Midnight Oil ," but a better title would have been "The Longest Day" since that's how my brain made sense of being awake continuously for over four days. Follow the link above to read my FAQ, then explore the rest of the  Burning100 blog to see all the portraits, view portions of the recorded live stream , and even read my log from 1989 when I first stayed awake for 100 hours. Enjoy!

Ink & Digital, 2004 This was the first Christmas card I illustrated because I wanted to send out something I made myself to friends and family. Being a Christmas card I figured it should feature the Big J (Baby J?), but I thought it would be more interesting to be a little circumspect, so I came up with the idea of having a woman (modelled by Krista, by the way) doing a needlepoint of the magic baby and his mom. The landscape in the background is a scene an Orthodox monastery in the lakeside city of Ohrid in Macedonia. The following year I made this other card  which focused even more on traditional Macedonian and winter imagery and less on the religious aspect (although it did still say "Merry Christmas" in Cyrillic).

above: private collection above: private collection above: private collection above: private collection above: private collection above: private collection each: 14" x 17", ink on paper, 2006 Check out the  first  and  last  paintings in this series for my thoughts on these lovely TTC gems.