1998: Evil Friends
Too busy to write the intros I wanted to, I’m going to be posting a lot of paintings the next few days, leading up to Halloween. Here’s the new painting:
The old paintings:
1998 Evil Friends
The intro:
In 1998, I had finally decided to do paintings every year. To combine the fun of having a party with all our friends and the fun of making Halloween paintings, I decided to put my friends in the paintings. This has become a tradition now, but it was at that time just a theme for the year.
’98 was really tough to put together for paintings and party, but I’m really proud of us. I had gotten my appendix out a couple weeks earlier and couldn’t move that much. Luckily I had finished most of the paintings by then. I had a week off and made a movie of all the best horror scenes in film (as of ’98) I still play it at the party. I should get around to updating it, missing from it now are the Ring, 28 Days later, Dawn of the Dead, House of 1000 corpses, all sorts of good stuff.
For the original paintings, I wanted to make things spooky without being too overt. I was thinking 30s horror films where more was left to the imagination. So I just called people up, brought them to the apartment, and staged them in creepy poses using dramatic lighting. It was one of the most fun series of shoots I’ve done. Trish helped with the pose suggestions and the lighting. I used an actual film camera. Which is weird to think about.
For this year, I was going to redo a painting of a couple of friends from that year, but it turned out they wouldn’t be able to make the party and I like to have people in the paintings at the party and vice versa. So I e-mailed a couple of friends who are a lot of fun, and great at posing and are coming to the party and Trish and I went into town, got dinner, walked to a creepy alley on 2nd and … Locust, maybe? and shot the pic. Everything good in this picture is the enthusiasm and acting of Marques and Karen.
For the style yet again I tried to get into the neighborhood of Bill Sienkiewicz, greatest living artist. I didn’t work out. I put in too many colors and it things got watered down and boring I actually was going to give up on this painting after the first pass of colors, but then figured I’d mess around since there was no pressure. And at that point, I had plenty of time to play with. This was around Sept 15th or so. After the first underpainting, I painted red midtones. Things got much better. Then the darks and a painting was forming. Finally I added a fourth layer of darker midtones and just “painting” loosley. And here we go. I like it very much. Guess I got the intro in anyway.
Hope you like it. Next: Evil Masters
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