After a winter of studio-hibernation, Spring brings the artist back out into the world with a frenzy of activity ... (relatively speaking).

Opening March 16th at The Compound Gallery, Oakland, the show Outside the Box II is a group show of work by artists who contribute to the Art in a Box art subscription project. The artists will be showing their "full-size" work including some 3D pieces of mine. Details about the show here.

As a sideline to that show, Compound is launching a special edition of hand-glazed plates available to Art in a Box subscribers. My contributions are pictured here >>> and more information can be found here.

Still at The Compound, I'm continuing to make work for my solo show coming up in June, opening reception Sat June 15th. I'm excited to be planning a show in such a great space and the new pieces intend to make good use of it. There should be a few surprises ....!

Meanwhile, I'm a finalist on a couple of public art commissions and am really enjoying the process of developing concepts and visuals for those designs. The public art process can be quite a process, but it makes a great contrast to working in the studio and at this point the two things are feeding each other nicely with ideas and images.

Finally, I've been installing some commissioned art into paving at Coddingtown in Santa Rosa in various phases since 2008, and we're currently planning the final piece of that work to be done sometime this summer.

I've had a studio at The Compound in Oakland for the last few months whilst I worked on the mural project. They have some great old letterpress printing presses there so I took advantage of the opportunity and made some prints. I can't remember the last time I made any kind of prints and had forgotten how interesting it can be. The image is from the painting Five O'Clock in the Morning, and I used a mix of collograph and linocut.

I've got to do more of this stuff ....

Sometimes random projects outside of my own art present themselves.
Here's an interesting one. I was asked to make a 16 x 9ft WPA style mural for a new restaurant. They gave me some original digital artwork by Mark Mcintosh used in their other restaurants to use as the basis for the design. Farmworkers harvesting corn and a triumphant brewer turning it into beer. Being a fan both of the WPA era style, and of working large, I took it on. It's been a fun challenge to work in a more representational style for the first time in a long time.

Now it's complete and installed at BJ's Restaurant in Santa Rosa CA. It looked huge in the studio but much smaller on the massive new wall - a very satisfying project though.