Pub Painting

 

This is the actual Irish pub painting.  Notice it's triangular shape.  I was intending to do another triangular painting of an Irish landscape to go on top of this one, but alas....time got away.  It's painted in acrylic on birch plywood that was primed with gesso.  I like the warm cozy feel it has...just like sitting by a warm fire on a chilly Irish evening listening to great music.  Maybe someday I'll get around to actually hanging it somewhere.

 

 

 

 

 

Pub Sketch

I've travelled to Ireland twice in my life.  Once right after I graduated from college, and the second time was my honeymoon.  I love traditional Irish music--it's so lively and...well just full of life.  It's also best heard live.  There's just nothing like hearing an impromptu gathering of musicians in a little pub up on a side street in Dingle town--especially after a full day of hiking the Irish coast. 

This sketch was an attempt several years ago to capture something of that feeling--from memory.  It's the precursor to a painting that I did on wood and was supposed to be one part of a triangular diptych...but I never got around to the second part.

I'll show the painting later...

Tolkien Pictures: Part Three

This is actually the first image I came up with for The Hobbit, but it's my least favorite, so I threw it in last.  While I love the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, I am a little bit sad that when I now go to read the book, I have pictures of Elijah Wood and Sean Astin in my head. 

A real pity--and don't get me wrong, I love watching movies, but I actually enjoy reading much more.  Reading forces your mind to be active, and with beautifully descriptive books like The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, it's so much fun to imagine what Middle Earth and all of it's inhabitants look like.  To then have someone else's concept suddenly become visual canon can feel slightly barbaric.  Sigh...

By the way, for some reason, I've always loved the passages where Bilbo and company smoke their pipes.  Blowing smoke rings is truly an art form in itself.

Tolkien Pictures: Part Two

This was the illustration that I came up with for The Hobbit.  I liked the idea of a bunch of dwarves up in a tree.  This particular image was done in pen and ink with a watercolor wash.

 

I really had fun with all of that intricate bark texture...

Tolkien Pictures: Part One

Like a lot of folks I know, I'm completely enamored with J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.  I also really like The Hobbit, and as I read through it about seven years ago, I came up with a few illustrations.  This is the first and it depicts the scene when Thorin and company talk to the old raven.  It's pen and ink--one of my favorite mediums.

Here's a close-up of the scraggly old bird.

Why This New Blog?

The idea for this new blog has really been with me for a long time now, but I just never got around to creating it.  Most of my time is spent working at what I love most, which is building and performing puppets for Thistledown Puppets, but before I ever started Thistledown, I was always drawing, painting, or doodling...for years, actually.  And really, the cumulative hours of drawing, studying,...and seeing...has shaped both who I am and the work that I now do.

The bottom line is that I have lots of portfolios, sketchbooks, and nooks and crannies filled with images that nobody ever gets to see (which in some cases is probably for the best).  But I thought--hey, why not at least have a place where anyone who is even slightly interested can see some of that old work that I so lovingly labored upon?  And what's up with the name, you might ask?  Well one of my favorite dead guys, George MacDonald, once said that art should wake meaning in us, or at least wake interest.  My life has been devoted to having meaning awakened inside of me and in my work.

So here you go.  This is a place to show you some of my work and how I tend to see the world.  And it might get hijacked from time to time to share family photos and discuss my personal life a bit...but as Bobby Brown was fond of saying, "it's my prerogative".