Metropolis Rising

• Size: 14″ x 14″ x 1.5″
• Substrate: Canvas
• Medium: Oil pen on Acrylic

There is this two second intimidation to a blank piece of canvas when there is no plan. My right hand circles over the canvas without touching it, and my head is in this state of confusion and trepidation, and what seems like 20 minutes, is literally only a blip of a second before my hand decides what to do. This is all new to me, since before there were hours of planning before doing an execution. Its like a battle strategy, divide by the ruler, and conquer by the brush, and when all is said and done, there is no white space left to fight over.

I’m sitting in a chair in a massive group of people listening to them speak off of Melrose and Fairfax in West Hollywood. It’s 11:30am, I’ve had this canvas since 8:00am and I haven’t figured out what I’m going to make. Lately I’ve been focused on the shape of a cumulus nimbus cloud, which technically is a vertical cloud made up of atmospheric instability. Its flat at the base, with a massive bouffant of swirling electricity and humidity at the top. This kind of represents the build up of static imagination in my head… and how lately it has come together. Its never in this free form existing flow that pours like coffee in a 24/7 diner. Its sporadic and temperamental, and once the threshold is broken, its like an exploding dam.. never ending, and often spilling over the edges and into the ravines of the sides of canvas.

The 2nd form that I keep on drawing is cityscapes.

My head is like this city at times, and all my thoughts are compartmentalized into these spaces. The shops are desires, the apartments are basic thoughts, the museums are dreams, and the broken down sectors are my fears and insecurities. The city keeps growing, buildings building on other buildings, and the thoughts get demolished and rebuilt along the way. But I see them, as these twisting forms, consistently expanding in structure and distance as I get older. When I was a boy, I was a town, and now as a man, I am a city.

That day, in West Hollywood, in that metal uncomfortable chair, I drew a cumulus nimbus, and what erupted were more clouds in contrast to the city. This piece is about our ideas built on the foundation of our time here. Our hopes, desires, fears, and loves, built like a city around sporadically growing clouds of imaginative summer thunderheads. These are ideas inside the icon that guide us around the circumference of our dreams and possibilities and wonders inside our head.