When I was studying at Carnegie Mellon they had us choose one of three focus areas: PDP (Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking), SIS ( Sculpture, Installation and Site-work) and Digital (Video Work, Sound Art, Digital Art). Ironically enough, I chose Sculpture and SIS as my focus area. However, in the years since I’ve found that I use the other two discipline areas nearly as much as I do sculpture work. This is largely logistics though, it’s much harder to run a kiln in the area where I live and work than it is to set up a video studio, or a simple painting studio. So I’ve had plenty of practice in the ensuing years. Though there is a large chunk of work you won’t see on here, and those are the majority of the drawings from my classes at CMU.
Painting
Painting isn’t the technical avenue that I’d claim as my strong suit. The irony here is that I’ve done more painting in the last few years since art school than I ever did during it. Painting was a requirement, and I did enjoy learning the techniques, but I found it was much more enjoyable when I was free to explore on my own. And then one of my favorite projects in recent years was the birds, done for a friend’s wedding. That project involved a set of over 20 individual watercolor paintings.
Drawing
This is another area where I really started to explore after I finished school. For me, the first few years of undergrad were really skill building in this area, which I am very grateful for since that was what I needed at the time. But it’s difficult to explore techniques and build skills at the same time. I find I prefer clean linework in black and white and lean towards shading when I work in color. These are some of my favorite pieces and projects.