Here you go! A timeline of my work throughout the years. The good and the bad. I made this primarily as a source for myself to see a timeline as to where I’ve come from, and where I’m going. Enjoy!
My father was/is a peace activist and my Mother a feminist who started her own non-profit to help abused women. So yeah, as you can imagine I was raised in a very open and progressive household. So, anyway, I was always interested in drawing. Some of my early memories about painting go back to my grandmother who was a painter. She had a large beautiful house which was absolutely packed full of her works (view her site at Frantiska.Com). I grew up in North Dakota so I would only be at the house a few weeks a summer which probably helped cement its mystical nature in my head. Her work ranged from guttural scenes of country life to large abstract earthy colored paintings exploring ideas about evolution.
Frantiska Palecek “Creation” Oil on Panel 1968 2.5 meters x 1 meters
Sculpture by Frantiska Palecek – Date unkown (estimated at mid 70s)
So I go through school being the kid who can kind of draw, though I was never the best in the class. I always struggled with it but kept it up throughout the years. Mainly drawing comic book characters and my own made up cartoons. I drew the standard doodles of cars and half naked girls until 1995. This is the year I believe I started making creative works that were supposed to be thoughtful and exploratory in some way.
1995 – I’m in high school in Bismarck, North Dakota. I get my first real girlfriend and am working as a ticket-tearer at a locally owned theater. I’m also smoking copious amounts of marijuana, most likely this caused me to start looking deeper into my drawings. I was also encouraged by my granola girlfriend who told me that I should continue painting/drawing (previously I wanted to go to a community college to study to become an electrician. This is was greatly due to the fact that I was obsessed with installing car stereos) I was interested in the artists you would expect a 16 year old pothead to like. Salvador Dali, MC Escher and Vincent Can Gogh. I was reading books by Carlos Casteneda and Ken Kesey. I was definitely a romantic in terms of art, believing in all the eccentricities and legends of the “great masters”
“I control the Pen” Ink on paper – 1995
“Head” Ink on Paper – 1995
My method was simple. Get stoned, listen to music on headphones. Draw. I also experimented with paint. As you can see by this first “painting” I really had no idea what I was supposed to do. my early oil abstracts were me really just trying to figure out how to get paint to stick ot the canvas.
My first painting. I believe I found the paints and canvas in the basement. Most likely a xmas present for my sister which had been laying around for a while.
Sun Explosion -Acrylic on Canvas – 1995 – I remember I was really excited about this painting, and would think about it while I was tearing tickets. You see that sky? That’s not a normal sky. I had to airbrush that yellow through paper doilies to get that effect!
After Graduating from high school I wanted to stick around because my girlfriend still had two more years of high school and I was also deathly afraid of leaving home. So, I attended the local community college called Bismarck State College. Here I studied with an old Vietnam Vet named Mr Sammons. He was very excited to have me as a student and I really buckled down to try and impress him with my drawing skills. During this period I made a lot of realistic pencil and charcoal drawings.
Gershwin – charcoal on newsprint – 1997 -
The goal of drawing was simple. Make it look as much as a black and white photo as possible.
In the summer I started private drawing lessons with Jon Twingley and he showed me a whole new world of art.I idolized his drawing style and although he was also from Bismarck he had been accepted to the Drawing Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. This is most likely what began to push the idea that I needed to move far away in order to really get in touch with the art world. Jon’s drawings were like nothing I had seen before and I began drawing every day. During this time my interest centered mainly around illustrators Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarf.
In 1998 I began painting. In a strange twist of fate I also started selling my works to a Ballet instructor who had begun teaching in Bismarck. He was a strange character and as a gay black man he stuck out like a sore thumb in Bismarck. He used to come over to my place and buy all of my paintings, and he paid good money for them as well. So, I had been painting for about a month before I started selling my large pieces. In an even stranger twist of fate, the ballet instructor was later arrested, and while he was in Jail someone broke into his house and burned it down. Needless to say the majority of my first paintings were lost in this fire.
Female Nude – Acrylic on Canvas – 1998 – Painting was burned up. Most likely heavily influenced by Willem De Kooning.
Allen Ginsburgh -Oil on Canvas- 8 Feet by 4 Feet – Most likely influenced by Rolling Stone illustrator Philip Burke. I remember I had to move this painting to the mall where the “Winter Art Show” was taking place. I strapped the middle bars to the rack, however it kept lifting and almost broke in two. Later, this painting served to disguise a wall where an unsucessful attempt was made at growing marijuana. Current whereabouts unknown.
Also it was in 1998 that my friends and I started the experimental music group “eat sinking teacups”. We played terrible experimental lo-fi music using instruments we found in thrift stores or borrowed from my friends dad who owned a pawn shop. The fact that my friend’s dad owned a pawn shop is important because while we lacked real musical talent we also had access to extremely large mixing boards and amps. In the video below you can see our large plush 1000 w amplifer which powered three fifteen inch speakers. We brought it to play in a coffee shop.
Not that you asked for it, but here’s a 57 minute Eat Sinking Teacups concert!! This was recorded at “The Screaming Bean” in Bismarck, North Dakota. Instruments used include an old record player, reel to reel tape recorders with real tape loops, casio keyboards, fruity loops, cool edit pro, an Akai sampler, mics, and effects pedals. Most all of which were aquired from my friend’d dad’s pawn shop. At one point I remember the entire audience left except for one man. He was that guy that every city has that comes to absolutely every single social event imaginable. aged mid 50s, supposed war vet, big grey beard. Anyway, he starts playing the keyboard during the last ten minutes.
I then moved to Old Lyme Connecticut
I drove my 1981 subaru wagon across the country with my brother. I then moved into an unfinished mansion in the woods. Needless to say the normal home sickness was compounded by the isolation of where I lived. This was the first drawing I made while living there. It is a self portrait and as you can see my stomach looks
all mucky and my tmj on my jaw is throbbing.
Self Portrait -Oil pastel on Paper – 1998 – After a few weeks of almost losing my mind I started class and finally made some friends. The school I attended is called the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts. It is a strange school that teaches only figurative realism. It was here that I got my foundation in how to make a painting. Basic things I should’ve been taught about color, composition, paint application, and history were all taught here. The teachers were very good and inspiring. And I worked my ass off. Sometimes painting and drawing for up to 14 hours a day.
ball and box – oil on canvas – 1998 – This was my first painting at the lyme academy. Damn it’s wonky
Interior of the school – 1998 – Oil on Canvas
Bathroom – 1998 – Oil on masonite . This is actually a painting of the bathroom at the house I grew up in. I did it during xmas break.
Summer of 1998 I continued making very classical looking paintings of Figures in Interiors and Landscapes. I was obsessed with Richard Diebenkorn at this time and carried his large retrospective book everywhere I went. I also loved the colors of Vuillard.
Woman in Interior – (The sitter is my ex girlfriend Andrea) Oil on Masonite – 1998
While I enjoyed the technical aspect of color theory and everything else I knew that the academy was very weak in terms of teaching conceptual works. I felt that if I stayed there I would most likely become a good painter with no content. So I transferred to one of the most liberal school in the US. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
When I started in Chicago I knew I was supposed to be doing something more creative, but I fell into my old traps and didn’t do much exploring. Looking back it is easy to see how scared I was to break away from the formal elements I had been drilling into my head over the last year.
new london – acrylic on canvas – 1999
During the xmas break I did these weird heads. They were painted on all these boards someone left at my sisters thrift store.
head – oil on board – 1999 – FAIL
I went back to school and finally started getting torn up by an instructor. It was the first time I was really challenged on a conceptual level and I loved it. Among some of the great traits of this instructor was that he used to line up all of the paintings people had brought in for critique and then start arranging them in chronological order according to when they should have been painted. He threw me out of his classroom on a couple occasions and told me to go to the library or to the museum. He was in fact a really great teacher, not an asshole and he forced me to start looking at more contemporary artists. I naturally gravitated to Luc Tuymans. My first attempts at interlacing concept were really clunky. Such as a series of boring looking business men done in acrylic.
Pat Buchanan -acrylic on canvas – 2000 . Inspired by “Soldier” by Luc Tuymans.
The year ended and I moved back to Bismarck into an old farmhouse in the middle of the country. I set up a painting studio, and upstairs in the attic I created a large recording studio for my first computer. The idea was to bring back “eat sinking teacups.” However it didn’t pan out and I primarily used the equipment. I recorded my first album “Marsh” here using bird songs from a neighboring slough. I also started painting from television during this summer. My first series was a investigation of the film Top Gun in paint.
Here is a track I made while living/working in the old farm house in McKenzie North Dakota. This was the first time that I had my own minidisc recorder as well as my own computer I could plug into. I started recording bird songs and singing along with them. I think there is something inherit about being in the middle of nowhere and beginning to make experimental music. They seem to go hand in hand.
I also tried to make songs with normal beats and stuff. This track “I’ve got a girlfriend, she works at Denny’s” (a title which had zero connection to reality) exhibits my early attempts at making something that resembles a normal song.
Download the entire album “MARSH” for Free by clicking here! .rar extension
I was supposed to go to study abroad at the Glasgow School of Art but I bummed around and ended up living in my sister’s basement. I continue to record songs almost daily and made more businessmen paintings. I made three separate albums. Marsh, Plastic Champion, and Grunewald.
Click here to Download “Plastic Champion” for free! .rar extension
Here’s an example of a track off of my album “plastic champion” about Elian Gonzalez which I made while living in my sister’s basement.
Download This Song. Free
businessman #something – oil, polyurethane on panel – 2000
I fly to Glasgow to study at The Glasgow School of Art. I didn’t really have any teachers who stuck out here. The best thing about the art school is that it is attached to a great club. I went out all the time, but didn’t drink much so I had a lot of energy to paint throughout the days. I don’t know what/who influenced me but I ended up doing this weird series of paintings of suburban america. Most likely being abroad helped me understand where I was from better.
Break Age – oil on masonite – Winter 2001 – Based from a picture of tiger woods and a random word which I pointed to in a newspaper. I stayed on for an extra semester in the New Media department however I found the department and the people in it to be really annoying.
2001 Summer- I fly back to the US, and then move down to Arizona. Here I lived in a small one bedroom apartment where i had an unbelievably small space to paint in. I started making little paintings and begin to paint almost only from films and television. I also began to explore the suburbs as a set for my paintings.
Step by Step – oil, polyurethane on Masonite – 2001 – I poured thick glazes of polyurethane on many paintings during this time which gave it a yellowish glaze.
Deck – Oil, Polyurethane, on Masonite – 2001
I have to fly back to finish up school in Chicago. I cruise through the winter session on an overloaded schedule and meet the requirements to graduate. I move back to Bismarck in early 2002 (probably for some girl, I’m not really sure why) and live in a basement of a destroyed house. The basement was supposedly used previously for satanic rituals and the words “hell” were written on the wall as you went down the stairs. I named the folder in which I stored all the paintings “Hell” and thus these have now become the Hell Paintings.
arm – enamel on masonite – 2002
bird – enamel on board – 2002 – These images were lifted from old encyclopedias from my sisters thrift store.
In the fall of 2002 I was planning on moving to Prague but a nerve in my face stopped working so I needed to stay in Bismarck as it got better. I moved into my parents basement and was bummed to not be in Prague. I made a few more paintings here based on television but also began to expand to doing paintings of video games, and satellite feeds as well.
Road Rash III – Acrylic on Masonite – Fall of 2002
2003 – I get better and move to Prague. In prague I become friends with Dennison Bertram who was also an avid counter strike player. We begin going to internet cafes daily to play in a room full of Russians. I begin to make paintings about the virtual world.
Dust 2 – Oil on Canvas – 2003
I also began performing as my alter ego King Vitaman during this time. Here’s an entire live concert for your listening pleasure.
Download the whole thing for free.
So that should bring you pretty much up to date. I started blogging in 2005 and you can go to the archives to see that progression. Cheers!
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