New work Hawaii #1 "Between Interruptions"

I have been living in Maui Hawaii for 5 years now.  The majority of my time has been spent tattooing, spearfishing, surfing, and enjoying my life with Athena. and our dogs. 

This winter I started a new oil paining.  Nothing too serious, I simply had an idea to work out.  I worked on the painting when I was not tattooing; which is mostly never being that I have been almost booked solid for a few years now.

My life here on Maui is so very different then what it was in Minneapolis.  I have found that the ocean is everything to me.  All I want to do is play in it as often as I can.  With this new painting I decided not put too much academic thought into painting it, and simply paint. I work on it as I have time and at my leasure.  Everything is improvisational as I am only reacting to the work as I do it.

"Between interruptions" 2017

More to come as I finish them. 

Aloha...

Artwork of the month: The Death of Germanicus.

There are parts of human history that I obsess one simply because they reveal a portion of truth about the nature of mankind, as to what we are capable of.  I like to paint these important events in history, repurpose them and link them compositionally to a historical work of art about the same event.  Nicolas poussin did the same thing here.  

Poussin took the history of Germanicus's murder and used as a compositional model a sarcophagus from Rome.  Brilliant conceptual, compositional oil painting; Albeit there are so few that can and will connect the dots to read this painting as it was intended to be read by Poussin.  

This oil painting is a Masterwork example of compositional oil painting.  Go spend some time reading its imagery at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Nicolas Poussin

French, 1594-1655

"The death of Germanicus"

1627, oil on canvas

Germanicus was murdered out of envy and fear...

...fear always has and always will destroy mankind's future.