Core Speech: Shoosty Gallery Opening at The Deerfield Historical Society

So, the trick to these paintings is on the wall right there, and what it shows you is a travel van and an e-bike, and then a watercolor painting. And what I've been doing is I've been traveling around and using these special watercolor pencils, they're called Durwent Inkintense meaning highly saturated watercolor pencils.

And they make, they trick you because they're soft when you put 'em down. But if you touch 'em to water, they're really bright and and so anyhow, it turns into a watercolor and I'm not happy with it. It's good, but it's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for something iconic. And so I covered it with gauche.

And gauche means it's a opaque flat paint. And the trick is that it eliminates things and helps you to. The underlying shapes, and I was looking for the shapes. I was looking for the shapes of vistas. Everything's gotta be really big vistas, but a vista of the ocean is pretty flat. It doesn't really do it unless you're in one of those dangerous, perfect sea kind of things, which haven't got to yet.

Anyhow, once I had the shapes and I liked them, I threw it into the iPad. And then the magic occurs, and so using something called vector art or vector painting, I can vectorize all the shapes very quickly and then give them gradients that are exquisite and turn up the saturation full on a hundred percent.

So like one of my tricks when I go out to look at landscape is I'll take a photo and I'll turn the saturation all the way up and I'll duplicate the photo and turn it up again and duplicate the photo until you don't recognize that picture anymore. It is so oversaturated. Looks like the Beatles album.

And that is the look I'm looking for because that high pitch, that high saturation is. and it allows you to have freedom of thinking about things in a way that you wouldn't think about them normally. And so that, that led to the the vector painting led to the final concept, which is the paintings you're seeing on the wall.

Every one of these started that way. They're all done by I think backwards. You don't go to the painting first. You go to the drawing and through all these steps in order to get to this level. I have Does that take, this one was started on Friday and finished on Tuesday. Oh, wow. Once I had the concept that goes fast, include the initial shots that you take up, the initial stuff.

Hours and days in a life, that's where all that stuff is always happening. And by being an artist and doing art, it gives you the ability if you can't stop thinking to to put it someplace to you. And it really helps to calm me down because I think a lot. And so I like to paint because it's a slow.

Nice. And it's almost like a meditation. Yeah. So when you're actually painting, that is really like a meditation. I don't know if that answers the question or not, but it's super fun too. Yeah. This piece here, this piece was created back in high school. The actual piece that, that's not here, it just was done in high school, but it was awful because you can't make a straight.

You can't make a straight line and you try your best and then you say, oh, it's not straight. It's eh, it is what it is. But today we have these tools, these vector tools, that allow me to have perfection, like O C D, perfectionist, like I'm so happy now, right? And so I can make a piece like this and then print it out, and the lines are perfect, and I'm just super happy with that. So that's an overview of the main show here. All of them because their vector are highly scalable. They can be any size. As you can see, there is a piece right behind Dave, right there. So that's on fabric, right? And all of these pieces can be applied to fabric. Diane's wearing one of my scarves, right?

And Gabriela back there, I don't know if she can hear. Is wearing a piece design based on this this Hillsborough inland so this is the Hillsboro Drawbridge. Come on in and model it. Come on in. Where she,

Hey, are you hear me? Yeah. They want her to model. Yeah. We need Gabriela. Here. I'm so sorry. Here she's right. So all of this can be applied to almost anything. And so Gabriela's wearing the latest

I It's falling nicely. Yeah. Should I actually, so it's it looks fine. Just so you know, it's longer than it actually is, and that can be in like so many, there's 20 different styles that can come into, so the piece I wanted to, because I knew I was doing a show here, I wanted to do something that related to Hillsborough, and so I took my bike and drove around and stumbled on the drawbridge, which I really.

And I took some photos and took it home, and then turned it into what's called a moola design. Mola means like a Guatemalan pattern, and it's one of the things I do. I study art all day, every day, and I wanna learn the styles of every different location. So the Mola piece, Is something I've always liked.

And if you go in the other room, there's a painting of L aal, the volcano from Costa Rica. Done in the same kind of style, that kind of Mola style. Is it funny,

the way he said it, MI, that's his new name. Yeah. Yeah. I went to I, I invented the characters that you see on the drawbridge and had a lot of fun, like placing them there. And I want to pitch to the city to change the wall. Make them paint that. Yes. And then I came up with the Manatee as a character, thinking about this place, thinking about what could represent this place that.

That was just playful and happy all the time and made the floating manatee. The piece is being auctioned off a hundred percent donated to the historical society. And my framer, who's this incredible second or third generation framer that has paintings in all over the museum frames all over all the museums, happens to be here.

We have 'em here in South Florida. Donated a 24 Kara Gold frame to that paint. Wow. Wow. Yeah. So that's like a $900 frame and right now at $400. Yeah. Anyhow behind you over there is a really fun piece. I don't know of anybody here knows the artist, Henri Russo, Henri Russo he was during the impressionist period.

And he did a painting called, The Sleeping Gypsy. And I know that I'm talking quickly and maybe I'm not reaching you on the level that you need to understand this thing. So on that page that's on the wall, there's a QR code to reach me and you'll find QR codes all over this building to reach me and I'll explain it better,

But the story goes that on the drive that we took with the van, I was looking for, I don't know, something about the American Indians that would resonate. And I stumbled on a library, an American Indian library, and they taught me about the white buffalo. And the white buffalo is, the creation story is related to the creation story of the American Indian.

And okay, now I have a quest. Gotta find the white buffalo. And so we went all over looking for the white buffalo, and I ended up at North Dakota at the. And the badlands are also called The Painted Rocks. And so when you look at those bad lands, the radiated, horizontal stratified rocks, they turn colors in the, depending on the time of day, they're very subtle.

But I was looking for a real high saturation. So I went there and did a drawing, and then I went to the museum's nearby and got the clothing. And did drawings of the clothing and kind of like a paper doll. I took the clothing and attached it to the model and added the white buffalo because because of the creation story and in the process found another Indian sculpture and the big horn sheep and have him drumming the big horn sheep into the moon.

So it's a real playful piece, and that's gonna be my next large painting when I. Get back to my empty house. Cause all the paintings are here.

The funniest thing is that as we drove and ended up at Niagara Falls, I started doing the drawings of Niagara Falls from the bottom. And when you look at Niagara Falls, it's gigantic and the water's amazing and there's like mist.

So, I started drawing the. Because I'm thinking Japanese art and the mist would be really interesting as I did the mist and then I went down below like 18 floors down, doing it again, and there's the mist started drawing again, and those shapes turned into the white buffalo. And I think that the Niagara falls and the white buffalo, that's the same thing.

It's water! That's the creation story for America and where a better place than those Falls. So, anyhow, that's the story of that poster over there. I'm proud to share it with you. There's lots of paintings around here. There's a progression of where it all went from. I'd love to tell you in more detail, but I think it, it's more personal.

Maybe I can grab one and show it.