Studio Time

When I originally got in to making artwork… Well, high school, anyway… I wanted to be an underground cartoonist like Robert Crumb or Vaughn Bodē. (I might have been inspired a bit by artists like Roger Dean, Frank Frazetta and Gage Taylor as well. 🙂 ) It was the early seventies… a reflection of the times. I still love those guys work though.

I did page after page of cartoons on typing paper and eventually had a fairly huge stack of them. College… introduced me to folk like Paul Wunderlich, Hans Bellmer, the Surrealists and so on. I lost much of my interest in cartooning in pursuit of other styles and forms. My stack of cartoons got lost or destroyed along the way but that influence still shows up in my artwork these days. This painting is a pretty good example.

This is oil on canvas that’s adhered to a hardboard panel. It’s generated with an automatic drawing that I’ve run a few straight lines through. Colors are typical for me… cadmiums, cobalts (gotta’ love poisonous stuff, no?), Naples yellow and so on.