i'm not quite sure why i love naval metaphors so much, i'm horribly afraid of water. and heights. bridges are my life's nemesis.

settle back, this is a lengthy one :)

anyway... there are times when you've embarked on a new voyage to somewhere you haven't been before, and you feel as if you're going in the right direction, but just a little bit off course. even just tiny degree off, and after a time you're lost in the middle of nowhere.

that's the feeling i had the middle of last week. this is a huge project, and a lot of work, and i need to know i'm on the right course. and i felt i wasn't, in terms of my workflow and process.

in order to get all these paintings done, i need to produce 5-10 of them a day. that's a lot. and i can't spend much time on time. and i was spending way too much time on them. as my girlfriend said to me, "you're being far too particular."

so, what to do? a slight change of course needed to be made. upon chance, while cleaning my studio, i rediscovered where this voyage began.

i found an old sketchbook and a set of old photos from art school, circa 1997 (yikes!). in the sketchbook, i found one of the very first sketches of lizardlad, the little guy that's in a lot of my paintings, originally intended for some animation i was working on. here he is:

you may recognize him from some later paintings, and my business card:

at the time, i was mainly doing large figurative paintings, nothing like the work i currently do. from that early sketch though, i did a small series of paintings, which i had forgotten about, but were part of my senior exhibition. i ran across a pic of these in an old pile of junk.

seeing these pics from 1997, i realized where this current project was coming from, and where it needed to go, artistically.

i needed to simplify, not just for the sake of getting things done, but also so the individual pieces would fit into the larger scheme of this exhibition, which will look a little bit like this:

with the way the paintings were going, the multitude of colors in them was going to destroy that grid. i needed to simplify, and go back to the more monochrome nature of my very first pieces in this style.

so, that brings us to today's update. several days were spent figuring out exactly how i was going to do this. hence the lack of updates last week, except for the fun little video. that was meant as a bit of a sneak peek :)

anyway... time for pictures! a few you've seen already, now in a slightly different form. and a few new goodies as well. colors aren't the best, coming from my phone and all...

enjoy. and once again a huge thank you to all of you who are helping to make this happen!

expect more new pics coming at a faster pace from now on :)