Prospero

Recently I have begun to dig my way through the absurdly beautiful sculptures of Bernini. He sculpted figures on several fountains that I was completely mesmerized by while I was in Rome. I could do a thousand studies on the Fountain of the Four Rivers and still not exhaust its genius. The above piece is a study of Bernini's St. Longinus, one of the dozens of staggeringly gorgeous sculptures in St. Peters in Rome. Nothing I have ever seen is as impressive as the stunning collection contained in that cathedral. I look at the sculptures, with their power, their sense of lasting permanence and their approach to perfection and I realize that I have been fumbling around with sticks and mud all these years. In the light of these works, modern sculpture looks like forgettable parades of junk yard tin and bailing wire. A pile of failures stacked on a shanty of mediocre ideas.

The greatest art in the world lies in Rome.

Helen of Spartanburg Auto Diesel Repair

"The face that launched a thousand Chevys."

Cory and I were thinking it might be the best idea ever to do a modern retelling of the classic epic of the fall of Troy. Instead of legendary Greek and Trojan warriors and the Mediterranean Sea, we would set it between irate rednecks and leathery bikers, and in a junkyard in Berea.

We'll be taking casting calls starting next week, so get your votes in!

Helen of Spartanburg Roughs

TS&TS Final

The Swashbuckler & the Sea

Watercolor and pencil. 4 x 8 on 500 series Strathmore bristol, vellum.

The Ace of Spades

This is an entry I am doing for Zach Franzen's forthcoming post on the Portland Studios Blog. You should check it out. He got most of the staff at Portland to submit an illustration on the theme of cowboys, rendered on a 4x6 card. There are some real gems there.

I love doing these little things. I'd like to put together a full set of these gunslinger playing cards at some point...

Civilization

Recently, Zach Franzen, our once-peaceful Keeper of the Blog here at Portland Studios, in a moment supreme enlightenment, discovered that civilization, as a concept, is best described with the tea. (strange, I know, bear with me)
When he arrived at this illumination, he was immediately impelled on a terrible, terrible crusade. In a stupor, he went downstairs to the Dollar General and acquired ten thousand packets of the most inferior and evil looking tea I have ever seen. He threw all those packets (and a rock badger and a spare tire) into a huge vat and boiled them for 3 days and nights. When he was finished he brought in a super concentrated brew of semi-liquid death and held all of the artists here at gunpoint, forcing us to paint pictures of "civilization" with only this evil concoction of his. Waving an AK-47 in the air he cried repeatedly, "Either you paint with this bulwark of civilization, or I'll make you drink it! What's it gonna be people!?" He threw out all our computers, he burned our pencils and he flushed all the watercolors down the drain.
I hid under my desk while he cried, "In the new millennia, there will be, only TEA! No longer shall we wear the stains of our high fructose corn syrup! No longer the cold, synthetic hum of fluorescent lights! No longer shall we be shackled to the chains of these poisons and greasy black machines! NO! Society will be green! Civilization will be pure! No longer bereft of the blessed sap we, as a collective body, united in Tea, shall be transported to new heights! TEA! TEA! TEA!"
Fearing for my internal organs, I painted...



He has written his sinister manifesto on the Portland blog, for any who are discerning enough to see through his glittering generalities to the underlying poison written between those tea-stained lines.