The Naked Silo

14" x 17", ink on Bristol board, 2004 My brief foray into erotica consists of one (somewhat mild) ink painting. This was based on a photo shoot I did earlier that year after I was approached by three young ladies who were eager to be in some of my paintings...and they wanted to pose nude for me. I was single at the time and I prefer taking my own reference photos, anyway (unlike the nudes in my Sunflowers series and elsewhere, which were from magazines), so how could I resist? I promised them the (quite tasteful) photos themselves would never be published as such, but I was (and still am) able to use them as reference for artwork, as that was the intent of the shoot. I never got around to doing more paintings from that session, but there is one other photo from it that I plan to use in an upcoming oil painting –but, alas, there's no nudity in that one, either...just whispering...

approx. 9' x 8', tempera paint on newsprint, 1989 (that's me on the chair) Somewhere in the winter of 1988/89, while I was beginning my first experiments with watercolour painting, a bunch of my high school cohorts formed a band called Lunatic Fish . Though not a musician myself, I was incredibly interested in music, so I attended a lot of their rehearsals, mostly to hang out, but also because I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes aspect of making music and I never really got bored of the necessarily repetitive nature of rehearsals. I guess it was inevitable that I would show my support more concretely by creating posters for their various shows. By the fall of 1989, they'd arranged a double concert in the auditorium, one for each lunch period, and we wanted to make sure the rest of the school knew about it, so we went BIG. Inspired by a very lovely piece by Dennis Mukai (below), lead singer Alex and I started assembling the newsprint papers necessary to make a hu...

various sizes, oil on canvas, 2008 Note: these paintings were not based on my own photo reference, but I did stylize the colours a bit.

 various sizes, oil on canvas, 2008, private collections Note: these paintings were not based on my own photo reference, but I did stylize the colours a bit.