Redemption

In high school I applied for GSA (Governor's School for the Arts), which required me to create a portfolio of my work.  One of the portfolio requirements was a landscape from life.  Outside my backdoor most mornings, behind a cool tree, was an amazing sunrise, and I wanted to capture this moment.  

I rose at 5:00, gathered my paints, and headed for the great outdoors.  I was a little early so I retreated inside to grab some breakfast then it was back to work.  The sun delivered a beautiful site that morning and I jacked it all up.  My finished product looked like a mud puddle with a rainbow inside.  

The judges never said anything negative about my landscape, but obviously they had distaste for my work because I was not accepted.  No hard feelings, I know I did not deserve the scholarship.

    

Several years later I came home for the holidays to find this awful example of my work, framed and hanging in my parents' house.  My mom still uses this painting with her decor. 

Last year I created this drawing to redeem my futile attempt from the past.  This image is intended to be abstract; it represents a sunset instead of a sunrise and focuses more on the tree. The real tree looks nothing like this.  I "borrowed" this tree from an image I found in a Google image search.   

Ant Factory

After massive storms, when trees have been uprooted, one can see the infrastructure keeping those massive, natural-oxygen-tanks running.  Kids in large, urban spaces do not get to experience these wild acts of mother nature or the traditional tree house found in rural areas.  This is my interpretation of a an urban tree house with visible infrastructure. The more I look at this drawing the more I see an ant factory.  

Little Black Book

When I was a kid I watched Winnie the Pooh and imagined living inside a tree.  Once I hacked away at a tree trunk with a golf club to make way for a door.  As I grew older I realized that burrowing a hole into a tree to create a home will eventually kill the tree.    

My "Little Black Book" is not a list of phone numbers, but rather a collection of images.  I purchased this sketchbook with the intent of all my pictures being black and white: drawn using only a sharpie.  After a mishap with a generic Walmart version of a sharpie, color pencils graced the pages. 

The first picture I drew in my "Little Black Book" was this dying tree built out of skyscrapers stacked on top one another branching out in all directions.  The thick black lines represent electrical wires and plumbing snaking underneath keeping them all fully functional.  The Hundred Acre Wood made urban tree houses appear so cool.  Unfortunately, in the real world when we use trees as homes they die.