Kickstarter

Generally

I paint pictures of young people taking the world apart; taking the world apart where it is fraying a little at the seams.  I make drawings about things my kids and their friends do. I go out exploring and sketching in the sorts of places I would've wandered off to at fourteen and I mix these things and paint them.

Right Now

Right now I'm drawing and painting about places near the river; any river, though I mostly have access to the Willamette, the Columbia, the Colorado, the Roaring Fork, and Beaver Creek (the one north of Waldport). In July, I'll install a half dozen or more of these paintings at Portland's Froelick Gallery.  The show will be called, I Know Who's Drowned - It's Us!  The title is stolen from an event in Tom Sawyer.  None of my pictures will actually illustrate the event, but they all will attend to the potent attraction rivers and their tributaries hold for us when we need to go play somewhere less safe, more connected.

Material Support

I'd like to make sure I have the materials to execute and present the paintings at a proper scale, so I'm asking for $1800 through Kickstarter to keep things rolling.  This will cover the linen, oil, and supports needed, as well as framing wood, hardware, and the replacement of dying brushes (I don't want to do it all with my fingers) and gloves (see previous parenthetical statement). If we go over our goal, I'll discuss a catalog of the show with the gallery or at least another How To Draw zine (with gestures from the show), but for now my curiousity is driven by the paintings themselves. 

Gratitude

• I'll be printing a couple different relief images as rewards for supporting the project.  One will be a small scale notecard, on the higher side will be a 28" woodcut poster I've been carving and proofing for several days now. 

• In the middle range I will tuck in a small etching or a simple ink drawing like those in my notebooks.
  

• For those who really want to play patron, I'm happy to take you out on a wander along the river - whichever river we're closest to at the time.  We'll bring paint and notebooks and have an open-ended discussion about the paradoxical role of the river as both highway and frontier (some thoughts just won't hold still); or we can shut-up and paint. 

And for all of you who simply watched, read, and passed the video along: thank you.