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June 25, 2006

Piercing Gaze / Art Highlights

I had a nice art-filled weekend, despite the torrential rains. I logged some serious time welded to my drafting table just playing around with some different materials that I don't often work with in my normal course of business. Really felt a nice loose freedom with a super-fat graphite pencil on vellum, which produced the above image, among many, many others...

Also, I saw some amazing art...

Lee Mullican
Magic Night, 1966

My wife Julie introduced me to the work of one of her idols, Lee Mullican (at NYU's Grey Art Gallery). He had served as a Topologist in the Army, and aerial photography greatly inspired his amazing mystical paintings. See this show! There is so much of his work, and make sure you follow the exhibit downstairs, which has the above painting which will melt your rods and cones in short order.

Tom Burckhardt
FULL STOP, 2004-2005

We also visited the impressive Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, CT for the first time. Tom Burckhardt's "FULL STOP" is a fictional artist's studio lovingly recreated object-by-object in cardboard and india ink. It's a startling moment stepping into this space, and you feel a bit like you stepped into a cartoon.

Posted by keegan at 11:57 PM

June 12, 2006

Full Moon on Dean Street

Amazing full moon tonight...While out walking the dog very late, I was inspired to record a rough little nocturnal cityscape...this is (very) loosely based on my view looking out over Dean Street onto Bergen. I have been wanting to do some paintings of the city at night...this has whet my appetite.

Posted by keegan at 03:13 AM

June 07, 2006

Illo for The New York Times

(Click above to see the full image)

Just finished this drawing for The New York Times' Thursday Styles Section (June 8, 2006). The story was about how younger workers in their 20's and 30's are often passing on the standard two week vacations, in favor of longer vacations, in-between their frequent job-hopping.

Read on to see my sketch and my reference photo.

You can see I had to make some serious modifications to my photo...They specifically asked for him to be 'cooler' than the frumpy guy in my sketch...so I had to do some Johnny Drama-style calf implants and restore my youthful thick hair.

Below is my original sketch. All-in-all a really fun job to work on, right up my alley. I had tons of great reference to use for the Thailand-through-the-portal part...I really enjoyed spending time in the scene...I think that is a crucial...you need to love the place you are going to be spending so many hours in...

Posted by keegan at 09:27 PM