What Was Your First Clue

 

20×20 in. mixed media.
Lately I have been going thru some of my unfinished and forgotten projects from many a year ago. So for your viewing pleasure a piece that has taking me 40 years to complete. This piece was one started in college and was going to be a colorful sunset type thing, or maybe bright trees. At any rate I started seeing this endless range of clouds and vast depth in a strange landscape and kind of went with that. Seems so clear now not sure why I couldn’t have seen that back then. As for the title, being a Kansas boy I thought about a saying that is old hat…”We aren’t in Kansas anymore Toto!” I believe the picture speaks to that fairly well, don’t you?

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The Badlands

12×25 in. mixed media. In my younger days I tried my hand at commercial art working for the city of Topeka Parks and Recreation part-time, while working full-time at a Pet Food plant. The assignments were fun and I got a taste of working with a client and what they wanted and what you could deliver at minimum wages. The real nice thing was after doing this for about 2 years I realized if i was doing art like this for 40+ hours a week I would have gotten to a point of losing the zest of creativity. A great job and I met some very interesting people but my dream of being a commercial artist took a big hit plus I was good at making dog food 😉

At any rate this piece was an idea I had for a science fiction book cover long ago and finally did it recently. Markers, colored pencils, graphite lead, and acrylic created the effect…if you see a reflection in the picture I was too lazy to remove the piece from the frame before shooting, what else can I say.