This series of works is an exercise in creating color schemes---four identical paintings, each with a different scheme: chromatic grays (top left), muted (top right), prismatic (bottom left), and a combination of the three. Along with those constraints, each was also made to convey a distinct mood. Because I chose for my "self-portrait" to be of my hands in a knife chopping formation, I based the moods off of mind-states and emotions I commonly feel in the kitchen.

Chromatic Grays - Careful

I chose to combine violet and yellow for this painting's chromatic gray, as the muted-to-gray purple hue gives a very peaceful, tranquil tone. Oftentimes, kitchen prepwork requires a careful focus, and I felt that this choice of color reflected the calm disposition that that requires.

Muted - Coalescence

The two muted colors, burnt sienna w/ blue and red w/ green, alternate on each hand as the value goes from dark to light. Each hand begins at a different color for the darkest value, making it so that the way the colors are arranged are mirrored. To me, this reflects a synchronicity between the hands---together, they complete a value scale of dark to light for the two respective colors, reminiscent of the idea that hands rely on each other to perform a singular task.

Prismatic - Zealous

The colors are arranged here such that their natural value reflects closely to the actual values in the subject, allowing for the inherent qualities of the colors to be the only factor in demonstrating the lighting of the hands. The dark, cool colors of the surroundings contrast the warm, zappy colors of the lightest parts of the hands in order to demonstrate their vigor. It's meant to be reflective of how even if the rest of the kitchen is slow, I might be chomping at the bit to get moving.

Mixed Schemes - Whole

The colors in this painting are made to reflect a warm fondness, a feeling of “being in my right place.” The bright blues contrast with the warm burnt siennas so as not to create a mood of sleepiness, and together they're a grasp at a mood I feel on the right days in the kitchen---that there’s nowhere else I’d rather be and nothing I’d rather be doing.

Digital/Personality

There is also a fifth painting, created by drawing digitally over the lighting & contour lines, with a focus instead on personality. I was tasked with selecting a color that I felt described me and explaining why, to ask someone who knows me well to do the same, and to then create a color scheme based on those two colors.

For my chosen color, I selected a dark, slightly muted red, because I thought myself subtle, reserved, and thoughtful. I then asked my mother to select for me, and she gave a bright & bold orange, citing that I am "bold, energetic, friendly, and warm." I filled in the gaps of those two assessments with colors that create a strong contrast with them, as I felt that while the colors were somewhat similar, their assessments were quite different.

This absurdity, built to portray the proper non-dominant hand formation for chopping an onion, stands at 3' x 3' x 1'8" (5.5x the size of my own hand). Instead of traditionally surfacing the armature, the reed was "surfaced" inside & out with acrylic paint, and set against the semi-realistic image of an onion on a surfacing of watercolor paper. 

The original title for this piece was "Perfect Form," and "Perfect" possessing quotations for the final title is in reference to a quirk in how the final piece differs from its idea: along the armature's construction, the fingers appear to have graaadually angled backwards from their intended orientation, resulting in the third knuckle not being in its proper position for the technique. While it would likely fool most people, a certain demographic of the workforce might notice the mistake! By what was a bit of an unintended consequence, the piece appeals precisely to its intended audience by having an issue only they are likely to see---I think they call that a happy accident.

See this page for information on this piece.

The objective of this project was to create a set of twelve completely identical wooden block modules that interact with each other as toys, tiles, and bricks. In the carousel above, images for each of those interactions are arranged in that order. Pieces were cut all from the same  8' x 3.5” x .75” pine wood board, refined, and intensely sanded to ensure snug fits and soft surfaces.

The title for the set, Izabellas, comes from the inspiration for their shape: the song Izabella by Jimi Hendrix. The song’s bass part does a laid-back and steady tremolo rhythm (picking back & forth between two notes at an even pace), which is the feature I remember the song most by. The three ascending “legs” of the module are drawn from the rise in notes before each tremolo bit, and because of their equal distance apart with different positions, they also represent the notes of the tremolo.

The pluralized title refers to each module being a singular Izabella.

You either know these forms as a consumer, or as a service-worker. In the restaurant industry, they're prolific. They come in three sizes---quart, pint, & cup---and we use them for everything. Perfect for when you freeze a big batch of something and only need a couple of pints pulled out at a time; perfect as a reliable measurement device; perfect for taking catering leftovers home in, leading to an accumulation of an unknown number of containers that you only realize has grown so large when you start to run low at work. I know someone who uses them at home as drinking glasses. Many consumers take their deli soups home in these and throw them out afterward, not realizing that they're endlessly reusable (we only get rid of them when they break!). 

When I was tasked with creating sculpture from a found "waste" plastic, these omnipresent forms were the first thing that came to my mind. For those who work with them every day, the sensory experience is imprinted in their brains---what they feel like, how flexible they are, the sound they make when dropped, that time they cut their finger when taking the lid off of one because the rim was chipped, or that time ham glaze dripped all over the walk-in because the container they put it in had a barely visible crack. If you work with these, you will immediately recognize them in this sculpture, which maybe isn't the point of the sculpture, but it's all I could think about while making it.

Each of the forms in the nine combined compositions of this piece are made with type: the font Bodoni 72, in bold. It's clearer in some compositions over others, but the second two photos in the carousel above---the in progress photos---might shed some light on how each was composed. It was done in steps---compositions with one letterform, those same compositions with one or two more letterforms added, and then those same compositions modified to create negative space where the forms intersect, with the introduction of a grey value to some parts of those forms. Each of those three stages was done such that the compositions stood on their own, as well as a part of the group.

My favorite compositions of the nine are the top-middle and middle-right!

This piece is considered soft sculpture---in this case, made from fabric. I was tasked with completely deconstructing an existing stuffed toy down to each single plane of fabric, then using those materials to construct a new form. I had done reflective writings for the project both before and after the deconstruction/reconstruction, which sum up what there is to say about the piece:

Before

The toy I chose is unusual. It looks homemade, and since nothing turns up with a reverse image search, it’s not unlikely that it is. If not properly “homemade,” it at least feels one of a kind, made by hand locally wherever it was sold---whoever made it, they appear to have signed it (in cursive), so it’s at the very least not something that was mass-produced. Its fabric is shiny like nylon, and stitched to have a rough surface. Its stuffing is stiff and heavy, and it seems to have dilapidated over the years to where its joints can no longer support it, causing it to slump under its own weight when sat upright. It’s clear by its webbed feet that it's meant to represent an amphibian, though its color and humanoid features make it an unrealistic representation, and muddy whether it's meant to be a frog or a toad. 

It's wearing a bowtie and holding a white flower, so it may have been made to commemorate an occasion—a wedding, a birthday, or, perhaps morbidly, a funeral. It also looks and feels very old, not only because of its physical qualities, but also because of what I assume to be its context---I don’t think that hand-crafting a stuffed toy as a gift or to commemorate an occasion has been a common practice over the last twenty years or so, so this toy feels like it must have come from at least as long ago as the 90s, but possibly as long ago as the 70s. It has a somber aura to it---it looks dead by the way it’s slumped over, and the fact that it was donated away presumably by the family who received it (or perhaps in the disbursement of a passed family member’s belongings) gives a feeling of abandonment, of the tossing away of something crafted with love and care.

After

My concept for this piece came from a desire to preserve parts of the “frog” subject of the original toy, while altering it in such a way that drastically changes its context---a viewer might be able to guess from its recognizable features (shape of a frog leg, webbed feet) that the piece is a transformation of a frog, but instead of considering what it used to look like, they might consider why or how the frog as taken this form. The process began as a practice of seeing how I could manipulate the stuffed toy to satisfy design tastes of my own---such as with skewed lines, revolution around a point, and asymmetry---but I was eventually taken by imagining the final composition as a spacey, uncanny transformation of a frog. What cosmic spaghettification happened to this frog to make it look like this? Is this what a frog would look like in the 4th dimension? Is this the universe’s perfect form of a frog?

A major focus of my analysis of the original toy was its somber implications---I couldn’t separate from the idea that the toy was made with love, and then was lost or cast away. I considered how it might have been special both to the person who made it and the person who received it, and felt a weight around the fact that with all of its unknown history, its path took it to end up as a project material in my hands. While its new form is perhaps leagues away from the cheery representation that it once was, it’s been revitalized to once again be relevant to a person, now inhabiting a context much different from the bottom of the storage bin that it likely came from.

My iteration of a classic 2D design assignment---a self-portrait that's been divided into 1x1 inch squares, each square limiting the drawing to a mark-making system of one of seven 'found' textures. The textures I chose to use are all derived from food: the cross section of a red onion, a pint of tomatoes (or perhaps couscous as the mark-making gets smaller), grains of rice, the roots of garlic, curly kale, and the veiny striations of a leek. Each depiction of texture isn't so much a representation of the actual food item, but instead the visual/tactile sensation one might experience when looking at or touching it---for clarity, they were parsed down to the barebones elements required to convey that sensation. 

With that concept in my head, I thought it only right that the portrait I work from be of me doing something food related!

This is the final chalkboard piece that I created during my full-time employment at Sugar2Salt. It's far from a goodbye, but still represents a farewell, a thank you, and an expression of love and appreciation for the time that I've spent there. The simple message of "We love you" is my way of saying "I love you" to the restaurant and its patrons, and serves to communicate also what I know to be true about the restaurant and its ownership: that they love and appreciate their patrons dearly. To those unfamiliar with S2S, the gentlemen pointing at you is none other than Chef Jonathan Dayton!

A sculpture of four bristol board planes constructed by slotting and piercing the separate planes together---an academic work for a foundational 3D studio class. The hatch-cuts aim to give the sculpture interesting interactions with surrounding light, and to demonstrate movement as the space between the lines of multiple planes (seeing through multiple planes to the background) changes as you move around its different viewing angles.

I received Anthony Bourdain's classic Kitchen Confidential as a Christmas gift and absolutely flew through it, enamored with Bourdain's wit, humility, and love for the restaurant cook. In his follow-up book, Medium Raw, this was one of my favorite quotes. It's a perfect distillation of his attitudes about cooking. The hands were drawn from a photo in Jacques Pépin's classic culinary technique book, La Technique, where he demonstrates how to properly peel and mince garlic. I had picked up La Technique by Bourdain's endorsement!

This piece depicts a gentle wavy water surface, with the swells of waves that catch light as a bright and colorful mishmash, and the dark shadows completely void of light. The large contrast between the two don't necessarily follow with a complicated water surface, but I feel that such a stark contrast is complementary to the look & aesthetics that come with using chalk.

The original conception for this piece was to make a sculpture of a wasp at such an unrealistic scale that it inspired the “heebie-jeebies.” A wasp, foreboding enough on its own, would certainly reach another level of horror when scaled to the size of a housecat. But before it even touched the kiln, I had the idea to instead apply a more otherworldly color scheme, with a psychedelic vibrancy that inspired more a feeling of wonder than of fear (though some still found the form foreboding). The “candy” part came from the observation that combined with the bright colors, the sheen of the glaze-finish was reminiscent of hard candy.

Made out of love for my favorite Hendrix album, Rainbow Bridge. "Pali Gap" is the title of an incredible instrumental track on the record---a contender for my favorite Hendrix song. The swirly design emanating from the needle of the turntable represents the music, with the colors mirroring those of the album's sleeve. Both the location of the needle on the record, and the rotation of the center label, correspond to the exact location and rotation where Pali Gap begins playing on the vinyl.

During the glazing process for this set, I brushed wax directly onto my hands and applied them to the pieces before dipping. A simple process for a simple effect, but they feel special to me for their personality---after all, they're my hands!

A set of four basic mini-pots with companion saucers. They're each no more than three inches in diameter---just the right size for cute succulent plants. The hatched lines were created by cutting masking tape into thin strips to apply before dipping.

The form of this pot is based on a common ancient Greek vase called an aryballos. Aryballos were made to store perfumes and oils for daily use, and were often tied to the belt of the user via a small loop or handle at the top (this piece is much, much larger than the average aryballos of ancient Greece, and has more in common with their vessels used to store wine, olive oil, or water). Hand-built entirely with coils---except for the disc-top, which was cut from a slab. The surface design is generic, meant to capture the spirit and color of the Proto-Corinthian era (c. 775 - c. 600 bce) of ancient Greek pottery---though the juxtaposition of a snake eating the tail of another is a subtle foray into the visual storytelling that can be found on much of their ancient stoneware.

A manifestation of my love for bumpy-scaly reptiles and amphibians. Especially toads like this one---when captured with flash photography, their blank stares and chubby features are on full and glorious display, and I think they are absolutely hilarious. For his warts, I applied small pellets of watercolor ground to the paper before painting so there were literal bumps raised above the surface of the paper.

A portrait collage in homage to Cam Grants of the H3 Podcast. If you know, you know---and if you don't, there is a 99% chance you never will.

This piece began as just an exercise in depicting hands. I took the approach of drawing each and every of the distinct planes that I could observe on each hand, as opposed to attempting their organic shape from the get-go. I intended from the beginning to involve a bright and vibrant color scheme, but it wasn’t until the drawing was complete that I knew how I would do it. I kept visible the sharp, angular planes of the hands, then painted the planes in an array of solid colors, adjusting their value from plane to plane to depict light and shadow. This ended up being much more interesting to me than just using the cues of the planes to depict the natural contours of the hands.

A scene from a golden early morning in the Elk Valley of Rosebud, SD. Rosebud is a Native-American reservation to which I've been numerous times. The landscape in Rosebud is gorgeous, with lots of variation in terrain and geography. High elevations, incredibly deep valleys and gorges, rollings hills, badlands, and thick forest---with lots of little scenic gems to be found in and around each. It is a special place.

Another of the manifestations of my adoration for the gone-too-soon, one-of-a-kind, greatest-of-all-time Jimi Hendrix. An academic study, it was done in monochrome to simplify the task of portraiture.

This was the first academic watercolor painting I made, done in monochrome so that we could focus on getting values right before confounding the task with color. It's from a breakfast spin on beef pot roast served at S2S---it's been a while since it's been on the menu, and I cannot wait for its return.

Made for a friend of mine, who asked for a painting of a particular pasta dish which he made regularly for his girlfriend. The piece was a gift for her upon her arrival in the United States.

This client was going to paint over their chalkboard wall because, with their kids moved out, it no longer served its purpose to keep track of chores. But, they saw a chalkboard piece that I did for S2S, and was inspired to reach out to me to see if I could breathe new life into their wall. I was given near-free artistic liberty, and it's one of my favorite chalkboard pieces I've done.

A valentines-inspired chalkboard for S2S put up for the month of February. The font for "all you need is" is the same font used in The Beatles's 1968 film, Yellow Submarine.

I adore Lobel's classic Frog and Toad books. I grew up reading them. This page became relevant in pop-culture in recent years, where I saw it again and had the idea to put it up at S2S. Because of people's shared loved for Frog and Toad and the relevance to S2S's pastries, it was a much-liked addition to the space. The Christmas-ification of the piece was a fun compromise to keep it around longer---it was up for five months!

A chalkboard in celebration of the arrival of spring. The phrase is a modification of the final stanzas of Mary Oliver's poem, When I Am Among the Trees: 

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

The quote was introduced to me by my wonderful environmental science teacher as an idea for the spring chalkboard at S2S. Thank you Mrs. B!

A valentines chalkboard for S2S, inspired by one of my absolute favorite Black Keys lyrics. The lyric comes from the song "Everlasting Light" off of 2010's Brothers. The line is preceded by "A train going away from pain."

These are selections from drawings done in my second semester in a life drawing class. To me, life drawing has become an unlikely love. It's the proverbial stereotype for a college art class ("do you paint naked people??"), but holds oodles more depth than most would think. The portrayal of complex emotion, conflict and irony, vulnerability and strength, multi-faceted possibilities for storytelling---these are all things that are natural to life drawing. There isn't a more human medium of expression.

These are all studies---attempts at grasping a particular technique or medium. Most are done with less than an hour drawing time, some with as little as fifteen minutes.

Selections from my first semester in a life drawing class. See the above item for an account of my experience with the medium.

For this piece, a contour drawing of the still-life scene was made, and then a graphite ground was introduced onto the paper by rubbing a stick of graphite deeply over the entire piece. A subtractive technique (erasing) was then used for highlights and surfaces brighter than the graphite ground, and an additive technique (introducing more graphite) for surfaces that were darker. A subtractive technique is uniquely conducive to depicting reflective objects, which was the major focus of the exercise.

This piece was first drawn in graphite with distinctions of light and dark mapped out with dashed line. An ink pen was then used for light and shadow effects. It wasn't intentional in the setup of the still-life, but I loved the implication that the model hand was dialing the phone, and that the skull was making the call.