So here's yet another self-portrait, I seem to be doing a lot of these this semester. This one was done shortly after the one with the really abstract backgrounf of the same size. I hope to eventually take one of my many self-portraits and produce a glass piece from it. Here's hoping.

In completely unrelated news I read an article today about a sculpture going on display in New York of Brittney Spears giving birth. The artist who made it is named Daniel Edwards, and while I wasn't able to find much background on him I did learn that he made a 'death mask' sculpture of the medically decapitated head of Ted Williams. Why was it medically decapitated? For cryogenic freezing, of course. I found the site for the company, a non-profit group called Alcor, and discovered that it is located in Arizona. My parents are going to Arizona in a couple of weeks and I'm trying to convince them to visit.
We'll see how that one plays out.
The World Snake 17" x 11" Oil Pastel (c) 2006

Type as Image is turning out to be one of my favorite classes. I'm fascinated by fonts, even though my brain says I shouldn't be. "They're just fonts, what the Hell?" Well I guess not, theres so much I never knew about the shapes we read. Anyway I'm throwing a link in there to keep things interesting. My latest glass piece is a window about Fionn MacCumhail, and Irish hero and sometimes regarded as the equivalent of King Arthur. He had prophetic wisdom that he accessed by chewing his thumb, which he burned while cooking the Salmon of Knowledge. The site linked is Godchecker and is a neat compilation of the pantheons of many different areas. The articles are usually fairly solid, however there's an attempt at humor which sometimes just confuses the facts and I wish they cited their sources better, but you can't have everything. Overall it's a useful site for mythological references.

I did this in my morning class today...er...yesterday. I can't think of what else to write. I like how the painting style came out. I took it back to my apartment to think over it and I had decided it needed color, brought it in to the morning class and- ta da- Barbara said we we're going to apoxy on pieces of antique glass to the back of it. I'm really pleased with the result and I suppose the only thing that would make it better is some sort of frame.

I did this piece as a homework assignment for my portrait class. Only three other kids did the homework so the teacher made all the kids draw from our portraits and we could pretty much do whatever. Why would you not do the homework? The feedback you get is so good.
In an unrelated tangent we had a speaker come to our Type as Image class to talk on Tuesday. His name was Ben Fry. The stuff he showed us was amazing, and while I was watching his presentation I realized I had seen his stuff before, a long time ago Kenny Osbourne had given me a link to his Zip Code Project. It's quite a fun little time waster.
His projects are amazing and intelligent, both artistic and fascinating. It was great to see someone who was an artist but also had an understanding of mathematics and science. To be honest, not a lot of my classmates are very bright, it's nice to know that this MIT graduate is out there as an advocate for intelligent, well-designed art.
The Window 24" x 18" mixed media (c) 2006

And here's another piece of metalwork! I finished this yesterday during my metal and enamel class. It's a beltbuckle made of copper, and it was damn hard. It took me a while to get the soldering right, as the image and background are two soldered pieces of copper, and the enameling did a number on the solder! But finally, here it is. I am very pleased with it. A piece that looked like it was doomed to begin with (even the enamel was going weird) and now it's done and set to be put in the metalworks shows. I'm slightly concerned about where the show will be, the students are a bit notorious for nabbing each others work...
Belt Buckle Enamel, Copper (c) 2006

So here's finally an example of my work in other areas. This was done last semester in my Gravity Pour Casting class. The piece is cast in bronze and wrapped with bronze wire and the back is copper wire with another piece of cast bronze for the clasp.

Park Street is a crazy T-Stop here in Boston, it must be one of the oldest with the way it's designed. Which isn't very well. There's lots of traveling up and down stairs and darting across tracks to get where you want, and then there's the long tunnel trek to the orange line. Good times to be had, in general. So here's the red line, below, Park Street.
Park Street Collage (c) 2006

This was an in-class project for Drawing Explorations where we had to create a piece using the same 'style' as an artist that we covered in a slide lecture, I chose the artist Takashi Murakami, a Japanese artist who embraces the colorful and cartoonlike pop-culture of Japan. He is best known for his Louis Vuitton monogram design. I chose him because his style was so indulgent and playful and I couldn't resist to make a piece so whimsical and bright.
Bird 14" x 11" India Ink, Prismacolor Markers (c) 2006

I'm a fan of this piece, it came out nice. The character is one I've had for a while, he's from the same train of though as Perry and Frankie. I want to make this in to a bigger piece, too, maybe in a wood from with some enamel pieces. We'll see.
Transitional Period 14"x 11" Watercolor, Gouche (c) 2006

The piece above is another assignment from my Drawing Explorations class, I forget the specific requirements but I know that this piece features the view from one of my windows here in my apartmen overlayed with the veiw from home. It's about the transition I was making, and continue to make, from living in the country to living in the city.
Transition Collage (c) 2006