Here’s House #6- maybe the last of the abandoned houses. We’ll see- they’re easy to do and they turn out really good.

Every once in a while I like to put on the site ideas I’ve half way thought through. We’re about a year an five months away from my gallery show at Unsmoke, and I’m trying to sift through what paintings I want to make.

Bear with me- feedback is appreciated.

Here’s what I’ve made so far:

• 6 abandoned houses
• (Almost) 3 portraits
• Knight/Astronaut/Angels trilogy (3 separate paintings)
• King Fear
• I also have the church cabinet, which I’ve never displayed.

So, the next steps I’m definitely going to do include:

• Make interior “Living Room” esque paintings of local businesses. I’m getting a haircut tomorrow and I’ve already taken some pictures
• Make more conceptual paintings (potentially)
• Make cityscape paintings of Braddock/N. Braddock (potentially)
• Make three more portraits (potentially)

That’s the blueprint I have in my head. I’ve been brainstorming while entering data at my job. I’ve made some preliminary sketches about something I think of as “rustbelt futurism”. Basically, it’s an imagined universe where the elements of my area just continue to exist all the way into the future. Here are some sketches:

I’m not 100% sold on this idea yet. It seems pretty low hanging fruit, in someway. It’s sort of a combination of stuff I’ve done (Starbucks Astronaut; Trains/Dragons)- but with a much stronger sci-fi element. One of the problems is that this project would be another enormous painting, and I’m not sure I want to make another enormous paintings. I might be able to dial it down a lot smaller, which could be compelling.

I also want to do a painting of the juxtaposition of the factory and the rollercoasters- I haven’t seen anyone do that well. Haven’t gotten the right picture yet.

There’s something there, though. An amusement park and this huge factory are on opposite sides of the same river- how wild is that? I need to get up early and go take a picture from the homestead grays bridge. I think it’d accentuate the roller coaster somehow- maybe use glass? I think having texture contrasts is a rich direction- some of the portraits (especially Portrait Train #1) have benefited from texture contrasts.

On a vaguer level, I was thinking about make a car/flower and also depicting our life in our house in a folkier, looser way.

Also, you can see in the upper right one I was thinking about chess- that was in August. Only took me six

I’ve also been thinking about trying to do clouds:

That’s a picture from out my work window one morning. It’s kind of wild how the clouds overpower the earth- their light and solidity contrasting with the murky unreality of the morning parking lots.

I’ve also wanted to do still lives for a long time:

Something like that. I’m not sure.

Anyway, I have a bunch of backlog of posts to do with all the work I’ve been doing. Let me know what direction you’d be interested in seeing me going- the hardest thing about these decisions is making them in a vacuum.