Bombay Sapphire Competition

One of my coworkers has been named as a finalist in Bombay Sapphire's world famous martini glass competition. Check out all the concepts here and make sure to vote for Mike Roller's Vapour concept! Vote early and often! Drinks are on him if he wins ;)

NYC Show Dates

Well, the 2 New York shows are official, with opening dates and everything! The collage show at Grounded will run the month of June with the opening on Saturday, June 7th. The paintings show at GalleryFCB will run the month of July, with that opening Thursday July 3rd. Now we just have to get our work done!

See you there!

Newspaper Article

I have been really busy with work and painting this month and have been noticeably negligent in new blog posts. However, our office was just featured in the local paper and I thought this might be of interest to some of you.

Read the article here.

On another note, I will have a bunch of paintings up at Brutopia in Cincinnati starting Monday for the full month of April, so feel free to check it out and have a fantastic cappuccino. This is select work from '07 and older. I need to clear some room in my studio since I'm madly producing for the 2 NYC shows in June!

Swiss Idol

Some who know me well know that I have a not so secret love of American Idol. Now, I didn't like the show right away and in fact even ridiculed all the people I knew who were the early adopters during seasons 1 and 2. I'm not sure how I got turned onto to Idol during season 3, but I did and have been faithfully watching ever since.

Those who know me also know that I am ridiculously picky and tend to like things my way or only like certain things about certain things. Confusing, I know. So for example, most people like the first rounds of Idol with all the crappy singers. I dont. Most people hate Simon Cowell too. I dont. I think Simon is the one misunderstood soul (so is Ryan for that matter) who tells it like it is. When he says you are a crap singer, well, you probably are a crap singer.

One of the things in particular that I noticed when I first started watching Idol was Simon's watch. He wears a Chopard Mille Miglia 16/8407, which just happens to be the same watch I wear. I've always liked watches and figured when the time came to buy an expensive Swiss watch, I'd better be damned sure I'd be happy with it for a long time. I admire that about Simon too. His earnings during one season would probably eclipse what my net worth would be over a lifetime. But with that said, he still wears the same watch, episode after episode and season after season. Just one more example of his impeccable taste and discerning eye for quality.

What's the Deal With Parliament Cigarettes?

I started blogging about a year ago after getting turned onto it by my friend Matt (who is actually well on his way to making a name for himself in the blogosphere). As I've written before, blogging is kind of like Myspace for grown-ups. The longer I write, it seems more like Myspace for nerds, but I'm comfortable with that.

One thing that Matt got me turned onto was a little blog feature called sitemeter. Sitemeter tracks your daily blog visits and give the blogger a way of seeing how much traffic you get and essentially a numerical way of seeing that your time is well spent.

Ok, let me cut to the chase here. I check my sitemeter a few times a week to get a feel for who's looking me up, where from and what did they use to find my blog. Well, I've notice a trend that I dont get. Parliament cigarettes. Why you ask? Me too! I wrote a blog post about Parliament cigarettes back in October basically talking about how I hate smoking but I like the design of Parliament cigarette pakaging, and that seems to be getting me those hits. But the question remains, why are people searching the internet for Parliament cigarettes to begin with? None of the people ever leave comments, so apparently they're not as enamored with the graphic design as I am, but there must be something. Please educate me oh global Parliament searchers!

Collage

I've been focusing my artistic efforts lately towards 2 upcoming shows each with a different media, painting and collage. I just finished the second collage piece (of 10 that I need to do by June) and I thought I'd write about it.

The setting is the bank of the Seine on New Year's eve. The picture above sets the tone and provided some of the physical inspiration. My collage pices are always mixed media, so some sections are painted with justapozed or intgrated collage elements to help round out the story. This piece sums up the obvious, New Year's night, but what I was trying to capture more than anything was the underlying mood. As amazing as the Paris trip was by: a) just being in Paris and b) seeing our best friends, there was an undertone of tension. Both couples were having some serious issues and yet as close as we all are, we kept those to ourselves. That's the essence of what I tried to communicate and I am excited about showing it. It'll just have to wait until June. No sneak previews!

Inspiration

I talk about travel an awful lot. Whether for work or for pleasure, it still shapes and inspires me. Maybe it's because just weeks old I was road tripping from Florida to NY? Maybe it's because my first passport was issued when I was 11 months old. I have inherited my dad's wanderlust (and am eternally grateful for that), so in reality it's probably just genetics.

What I have continually marveled at over my years of flying all over the place is the amazing contrast of colors, textures, patterns and surfaces. Whether its dark, rainy runways with light getting refracted every which way, the blocks of color created by the water treatment facilities in San Francisco bay, or the way that in Arizona the mountains end and give way to these massive round fields (I still dont know what they are). I've got a mental diary of years worth of these images and I've been waiting for them to manifest themselves in my work. That's exactly what's happening now. I just wrapped up 1 more painting last night and am completing the first series of 3.