Kenji Collaboration
I am sure that anyone reading this site will quickly realize that I like to play with text in my paintings. Fragments of stories or snippets of text litter my mind and always seem to find a way to fall onto my canvasses. So far I have always stuck with cutting stencils of a fairly run of the mill font (Garamond bold, for any design nerds following along), I tried to pick something that would not grab too much attention, an everyday typeface with just a little flair to keep it from falling to far into the background. The next painting will be different.
This time I am handing off the letter work to my friend (and Distillery neighbor) Kenji Nakayama. Kenji is a super talented stencil artist and, as luck would have it, he happens to have some serious skills when it comes to lettering and pinstriping. So, for this painting I started off by doing a fairly ghostly black and white underpainting, and then handed the panels off to Kenji. I have no idea what he will come up with but, I trust it will be great. Once he is done with it, he will hand it back to me and I will add the full color portrait right on top. Should turn out to be a pretty interesting painting.
Here is how the painting looks today, right before I dropped it off at Kenji’s studio (this is only one panel of the two, cropped to keep it rated G for facebook, click here to see the full painting).
It’s always scary to lose control of a painting in progress but, I am excited to see what comes back.