A couple of really exciting pieces of news to share with you.

Vessel

Firstly, I'm thrilled to announce that I am now represented by Vessel Gallery, Oakland. Like everyone familiar with the East Bay art scene over the last decade, I've got to know and admire Vessel as one of the key galleries at the core of Oakland's art-led revival. The thoughtful curation, support for both emerging and established artists, and commitment to the larger community of owner-director Lonnie Lee have always impressed me. I was invited to take part in the well received group show Disruptus last summer, and now look forward to future projects together.

Crocker

In late August/early September I will be completing an installation piece for The Crocker Art Museum. The Crocker has an excellent and nationally recognized education program and last year commissioned four artists and artist-teams to design temporary art installations that could be accessed and interacted with by pre-school age children. My proposed piece has now evolved into a permanent sculpture/mural/installation environment that will completely remake the existing early years education space.

The starting point for my idea was a piece in the Crocker's collection, a spirit canoe from Papua, Indonesia. I will be making an actual life-size boat with human and animal figures, and building it into an environment that will make entering the room feel like entering one of my paintings. The aim is to invite children, and their adults too, into this scene and to immerse themselves in fantasy and role play.

It's going to be an interesting project the progress of which you'll be able to follow on Facebook or Instagram.

A couple of photos from the very well attended opening of this timely show in Carmel organized by Green Chalk Contemporary.

I'm looking forward to participating in this timely show organized by Green Chalk Contemporary.

AWAKENING
ARTISTS REACT TO A NEW ERA IN WASHINGTON
FEBRUARY 10- 26, 2017
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This exhibition of selected American artists explores diverse responses to a new era in Washington. Themes addressed by the artists include public and private reactions to the 2016 elections, the continuing effects of media saturation, the divisions of identity politics, the shifting status of gender, and the opportunities for positive change that may emerge during a time of transition.  The works include oils, mixed media, photography and sculpture; the variety of materials and techniques included in this exhibition illustrate how the interaction of the personal with the public can yield artistic expression. With Sharron Antholt, Kim Campbell, Kristin Casaletto, Peter Charles, Jamie Dagdigian, Susan Hyde Green, Peter Hiers , Anne Marchand, Logan Norton, Jane Olin, Robin V. Robinson, Temple Sisters, Robin Ward and Martin Webb

CARMEL PLAZA, 3rd FLOOR, CARMEL-BY-THE-SEA

My artist statement for the show:
I’m generally not a fan of Political Art. It can be preachy, and it usually preaches to the choir. However, If you make art about human concerns, your art is intrinsically political. The choice to actively value and pursue art making in preference to other life choices is also a political statement, whether you intend it or not. Therefore, in spite of my not making Political Art, I am a political artist, and I make art with a political dimension.
 
Last year I made a lot of paintings with boat images and thought of the boats as symbolizing travel, safety, adventure, and the very edge of our relationship to the natural world. There’s an appealing universality to them – every culture with water has boats and their symbolism is consistent. I, like everyone over the last year, have been seeing the reality of rising sea levels, increased flooding, and of course images of fragile refugee boats, all of which have added to the potency of the boat as a symbol.
 
My painting US Mary Celeste was made in the transition prior to the inauguration and reflects my feeling of the country being a drifting crewless ship at this time. The flock of paper planes is an image I’ve used before, and in this painting seems to represent a chaotic swirl of thoughts, wishes, ideas, or writings, and it remains unclear whether they are flying off the boat or are attacking it.
 
The sculpture Ark, a dark boat hull topped with a flimsy lookout tower and a lone tree, evokes notions of isolation, dislocation, and even paranoia. Maybe it also offers a glimpse of optimism too – perhaps an ark of hope seeking a new land.

Season's Greetings Friends!

I wish you the best end to this eventful year, a happy holiday season, and a peaceful, positive, and productive New Year.

The Last Year 

The first half of 2016 I spent mostly working on public art projects, and the second on studio work, making those incremental developments that painters make, and taking my constructed wood pieces to a larger scale.

As the year wraps up, the image of boats has emerged as a recurring motif. Partly because I've been revisiting and reworking some older Senegal inspired paintings that featured water and boats, and partly because of a new project where boats are central. Certainly some recent pieces contemplated rising sea levels and the fragility of coastal existence, so the boats naturally relate to that.

I also keep seeing boat related phrases as we navigate this new era of political uncertainty. "Up the creek without a paddle", "All at sea", "Battening down the hatches", "All in the same boat", etc, so maybe it's a timely image. Let's work on paddling together in a positive direction in the New Year.

The Next Year

I've just started working on a really exciting project with The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, and will be able to tell more about it as it takes shape in the New Year. Due to be installed and open in September 2017, it's a large installation piece with, of course, boats as a central feature.

I just spent a very enjoyable weekend with my former Oakland, now Asheville, based friend Scott David Smith at a mural event in the River Arts district of Asheville, NC. Around forty artists covered the building with fresh murals over three days. The artists making work ranged from graffiti writers to a medical illustrator. There was great camaraderie, much fun had,  and the results were super-eclectic. I collaborated with Scott and Ashley Weber to make the piece pictured here.

My work was recently featured in Art Reveal magazine along with a short interview. You can see the whole issue here, or read the feature below.

For the last couple of months I've been working on a 1200ft long mural in Hayward, CA. That's right, twelve hundred long!

The soundwall separates an area of housing from the very busy traffic of W Winton Avenue just west of the 880 freeway. The location is mostly seen by passing motorists and I expect that most will just catch glimpses of fragments of the mural as they pass by.  With this in mind, the piece is a playful series of images and scenes that don't have any set narrative, but invite the viewer to imagine their own - like a children's story book, but with the text missing! I started off by thinking about the gardens that are behind the wall and what might be happening in them and let my imagination run from there. The result is a parade of botanical images, fanciful geometric city-scapes, rivers, thoughtful or energetic figures, origami objects, abstract patterns, and giant dogs.

This was one of those public art projects where a huge part of the experience was the daily interaction with the community. Thousands of cars pass the mural every day, and many, many motorists shouted their positive reactions and encouragement as they saw the mural taking shape. Also local residents, especially around the Stonewall Ave corner stopped or came out to say how much they enjoyed and appreciated the work. The comments were truly appreciated and I loved the conversations - they're what doing these public projects are all about.  I was touched by, and am immensely grateful for my work being accepted and embraced by the community, and thank the staff at The City Of Hayward who made the project happen.

I don't yet have the definitive final set of photographs yet, but here are some shots of the piece taking shape.

BRIDGE Housing's new affordable housing building Mural had it's grand opening March 21st. The reclaimed wood mural I made for the lobby was the backdrop for the celebrations, and it was a pleasure to meet so many of the people who worked on the building, and some of the new residents. Big thanks to all at BRIDGE, Jeff Breidenbach at Argus, Lee Tollefsrud for installation help, and John Yoyogi Fortes (Digital Boondocks) for shooting this video.

A 20 x 20 ft mural using reclaimed wood for the lobby of a new housing building, also named Mural, at McArthur Station, Oakland. Some of the wood comes from Oakland homes, you can see street names in among the foliage etc.

From an interview on The Studio Work, "Robert Stevenson at Bridge Housing talked a lot about their mission being about rebuilding and “re-knitting” a neighborhood that had been fractured by catastrophic development decisions, and by successive waves of social change. Also Jeff gave me a lot of historical background regarding the origins of the area and the transitions it has gone through. I spent time walking around, exploring further for myself, and photographing sights that I felt indicative of all these thoughts. I latched onto the images of all the mature trees that line the residential streets around Mosswood Park, and thought about how they’d witnessed and endured all the changes we’d been talking about. I saw them as being emblematic of both resilience and new growth, and so trees and foliage became the main image of the piece. I like the idea of creating this wild forest-garden feel in among the clean architectural lines of the urban apartment building".  Read the full interview here.

More images here.