sneak peek of tomorrow's MAKING BELIEVE art show

This evening I put up the two-man art show me and my nephew Christian will be exhibiting at GEEKS comics in Whittier.



When I proposed the show to my nephew he was extremely excited (which turned into nervousness once he realized the show was set in stone!). He's shown his work at student art shows in high school and has displayed, and sold, some pieces at his local art walk. But this is his first proper exhibit, and in conjunction with me, his good ol 'Uncle J'.

For the last several weeks we've both been working on our paintings. Some of mine were based on ideas I've has in my sketchbooks featuring the many characters that I come up with. Sometimes I think the ideas may work as a comic, maybe even a cartoon. But for now they'll have their debut in the form of paintings. Here's one (which regular readers of JAVZILLA will remember from this previous post):


The lurid colors for this piece came to me from discussing with some friends the funky color choices from old 1970s cartoons, in particular the wonderfully wild palette for the PLANET OF THE APES cartoon:



Okay, back to our regularly scheduled blog post!

Here's the piece, by Christian Silva, my nephew, that I think is the star attraction of the show (and the pic doesn't capture the detail and nuances of the piece)...



I really love this piece. It's packed with emotion, and I'm sure, insights that only the artist who created it has. Strong clash of color and a free-form style of expression that really inspires me. I was comparing his style from the way I usually paint. I often go for one bold image with a strong choice of bright colors, and some sort of symmetry in the design. Christian's approach is to layer a painting with several images at a time, often with an underdrawing showing through. He'll add text throughout the piece, and all the while using different mediums: acrylic, marker, even ballpoint pen. I started thinking that since I do comics, I use that medium to tell a story with pages and panels and word balloons. His pieces remind me of one-panel compilations: text and images are all overlapped together on the canvas, giving the viewer fragments of the whole story known only to the creator of the piece. I'll have to ask him on Saturday what he thinks of my 'theory'.

If you're in the Whittier area, please come visit us at GEEKS, Saturday night, May 23 from 7-10pm for our show!