Dear Reader,

Greetings.

I'm an apprentice! More on that in a moment.

I was traveling for most of April. A busy and good month. So being home in May has been extra nice, and as I begin my 45th year of living (I just turned 44), I'm filled with optimism. At the same time, I'm trying to quash the urgent, constant, anxiously impatient feeling of having many things I want to do and not enough time to do them. My wife reminded me that I've always been this way, even when I wasn't trying to add a second artistic career, and even before we had responsibilities, haha. So one of my goals will be to embrace this season of transformation with more patience, and attempt to live in each moment.

Here is the final photo of the painting I showed you in the last newsletter. Perhaps this year I'll I strive to surrender to the beauty of living, like she appears to be doing:

Drifting

"Drifting"

9x12in oil on aluminum panel (Artefex), 2025

$4200

ON HOLD

SLC Workshop Recap

The workshop in Salt Lake City was great. Despite the dry air and some kind of crazy allergy with my eyes, lol. We had a hard-working and receptive group of artists in attendance, and the venue (Workshop SLC) was excellent. Shae the host was awesome.

Beautiful mountains from my Airbnb:

Demonstration painting #1. Light demo! When I have time to do multiple demo paintings, I like to do one that's dark and one that is light). Setup on top, finished demo below. (9x12in oil on artefex aluminum panel, SOLD):

Demo #2. Dark demo! Setup and finished painting. (9x12in oil on artefex aluminum panel, SOLD):

And of course we had to do some grape demos. Painting grapes is the absolute best. So fun. Can't stop, won't stop:

My next workshop is coming up SOON. In St. Louis! See details near the end of the newsletter. There are spots still open, I hope you can join us!

Tattoo Apprenticeship

I'm learning how to tattoo! I have officially begun a tattoo apprenticeship under my friend Colt Brown. Due to our distance (he lives in Wisconsin, while I live in Washington) this is a unique sort of apprenticeship... highly compressed and intermittent by necessity.

In lieu of re-finding the words to express myself, I'll share with you some thoughts I already shared via instagram. Here are pictures of my client:

Written April 21st:

"Work in progress-first tattoo ever made 100% by me. On my fourth official day of apprenticeship under @fineartfirst , I worked for 8 hours total on awesome client Aiden. This included designing by freehand drawing on skin. Aiden gave me complete free rein. I wanted to see how my still life stuff might translate to tattooing, and I wanted to try using color, so that’s what we did. I worked from imagination. I totally understand now how tattooers can have such long sessions. Those 8 hours just flew by so quickly. Everyday so far in the @timelesstattoos shop has been like that for me. Time seems to accelerate …hours just vanish at a surprising rate. Biggest things I learned from this session: SLOW DOWN. BE PATIENT. Make decisions carefully and deliberately. That clear direction from Colt took some time for me to comprehend. I also learned more about the variability of skin. How to be more flexible and adapt my process. In this case, sometimes I needed to wait a bit for the skin to calm down and the blood to recede before I could see the colors accurately. I’m looking forward to continuing on this tattoo when I come back to Wisconsin for a week in July. It will be interesting to see how this portion heals, and make adjustments accordingly. I can’t wait to fix the patchiness and refine my value transitions in the pear and orange. It’s going to be great to get the dark grapes in behind the light side of the pear, can’t wait to see that dramatic contrast. Felt good yesterday to gain a little bit more confidence with the machine, and feel more comfortable with switching between various sizes and tapers of curved mag and round shader. So much to learn. So thankful for this time to learn from Colt. Such ideal circumstances for an introduction to tattooing—I’m fully aware of my good fortune and unique opportunity here.

Tattooing is HARD. Tattooing is FUN. I’m totally hooked."

I assisted Colt on his clients:

Written April 24th:

"The beginning of my journey into tattooing has exceeded my expectations. I count myself absurdly lucky to be able to apprentice under @fineartfirst . Besides being a selfless and masterful teacher, Colt has a core artist value in common with me: the desire for unhindered freedom and experimentation throughout the creative process. Colt has developed an ingenious method of tattooing that facilitates this desire. His method is too complex for me to explain here, and too unique/personal to imitate, but the overarching philosophy of it has helped me realize that there’s probably a way that I can eventually make my style of art/painting function in this most difficult and high-stakes medium.

Pretty much every day here at @timelesstattoos @empireinks I’ve had the opportunity to assist Colt on his current ongoing projects: beautiful sleeves and a leg sleeve (and a tiny bit of a head tattoo!). Colt wastes no time and has been encouraging me to get in as much tattooing time as I’m comfortable with during this 8-day whirlwind. He’s also been impressively patient with me as I fumble almost everything at least once onto the floor, forget sanitary protocols, waste supplies, drip sweat out of my gloves, eat all the granola bars, and make his studio too cold. I also never imagined myself getting involved with something that necessitates shaving so many other humans.

Yesterday evening I was struck by the undeniable glory of seeing a little sharpie sketch on skin from imagination (small portion of a larger sleeve design) become a beautiful tattoo (by Colt’s skillful hand) in around an hour. I keep seeing this happen during my trip here but for some reason it really hit me yesterday. This is a lot of what I love about painting—the immediacy and creativity—but made so much more incredible by the fact that the canvas walks out the door and lives with it permanently. I don’t just make paintings for my own satisfaction, I also make them so that they will become a part of somebody’s home or experience. A tattoo by default becomes part of the person. How can art get more meaningful than that? What a crazy art form, I’m falling in love with it."

Beautiful Wisconsin sunset near Colt's place:

Colt is going to start a tattoo on me during my next trip to Wisconsin! I'm going back in July. He did some preliminary brainstorming by sketching on my skin with markers:

Colt is concerned with the "flow" of a tattoo. That is, how it fits the body. How it relates to the 3-dimensional forms of each person's specific anatomy. Here is is playing with a biomech style of design.

Colt evaluates the strength of a design from three distances. Up close, ~6ft away, and far away.

So curious to see where this takes us. I want him to do whatever he wants to do. I can't wait!

In July I'm also going to resume work on the fruit tattoo on Aiden, and begin work on another client! In the meantime, I'm practicing on fake skin and pig skin, researching tattoo technique and theory, gathering supplies and information. And painting of course.

In Progress

Here's a painting that's currently in progress. I'm really not sure what's going to happen next. We shall see...