Always Be An Emerging Artist: Howl! Festival 2012

At Howl! Keep in mind I'm 6'5"...

On June 2, I was part of an event at Tompkins Square Park in New York called Howl! Festival 2012. According to howlfestival.com...

The mission of HOWL! Festival is to honor, develop, create and produce. With an estimated 100,000 visitors last year, the many performances celebrate local cultural icons and lionize, preserve, and advance the art, history, culture, and counterculture unique to the East Village and Lower East Side

I participated in their "Art in the Park" event which is...

A live action weekend-long event involving 140 artists of all ages turns an 8 foot high, 900 foot long blank "canvas" encircling the exterior of Tompkins Square Park into an explosion of color and creativity.

This event was awesome because almost anyone that submitted an application to paint was accepted, there was no submission fee, the event was well organized, and all the artists were able to cut their slice of the canvas out and bring it home with them. Needless to say, the neighbor is a lot of fun and the people I met who lived there were friendly.

I drew on my vinyl "canvas" thing (the material was not cotton canvas but something able to withstand wind, rain, sleet, snow...) from 11:30 to 4pm. I brought nothing but a handfull of black oil bars with me and jumped right in without over thinking what I was going to draw. I always work from direct observation... so when I arrived at my section I looked around I started drawing the interesting shape of a light post. For there on out the drawing filled itself in... albeit slowly but surely. When I was finished someone offered to buy the piece from me and so I sold it. Not bad for a Saturday afternoon in The City!

Thats me sweating it out while working hard

Finished!

I thought I'd share with all of you a few recent oil paintings as well. All of the below work is created from outside of my Nyack apartment on South Broadway. I just sit outside, look around, and paint whatever it is that excites me that day. After seeing a Richard Serra drawing retrospective I can't help but to have thoughts of Minimalism running through my head while painting these days.