What follows is a collection of photos (with captions) that I took this Summer. Looking through my iPhoto Library I realized that I wasn't super proactive about documenting my life this Summer. Which is fine. Sometimes it's better just to do stuff than to worry about taking pictures of doing stuff. I still managed to take enough photos to put together this fecalface blog though. Because even though I try to act like I'm not concerned with self-promotion I'm actually totally aware of the importance of reminding people you're still around. Especially living way down here in Texas. We ain't got no Cobra Snakes down here y'all. (Is that reference still relevant?) Anyway, here's some photos of things that happened this Summer.

Jim Drain was in Austin this Summer doing a project at the Blanton Museum of Art Workspace. Part of his installation included a video that was filmed at Okay Mountain. Here's a review of the project if you'd like to learn more about it.

As soon as the pig masks showed up I knew things were going to get weird.

Things got weird.

The pinata store in front of Okay Mountain made this custom piñata for the video shoot. Those dudes are awesome.

The entire backyard of the gallery was filled with filing cabinets, mattresses, and fabric strung together. Participants in the video were asked to wear brightly colored outfits and were encouraged to wear face paint or beast masks and go crazy. I hid inside all night.

Tim Brown enjoying a moment of quiet after the madness.

I know Trippe is super into boats and the water and stuff like that so I thought I'd let him know I was on a boat this Summer.

Up in Canada, North of Toronto on Georgian Bay.

Not much to say about the place other than it's beautiful.

And inspiring.

And was way more enjoyable to look at than a computer monitor.

Okay, enough vacation photos. Back to the art.

My buddy Nathan Green and I worked on some collaborative paintings this Summer for a show in LA at Subliminal Projects.

Our aesthetics and studio practices are radically different and we thought it would be fun and challenging to try to make some successful compositions together. We started off with some sketches and rough ideas based on tarot cards, thrift store tapestries, and our sketchbooks.

I'm usually pretty cautious (timid) when I start a painting and it was fun to work with Nathan who just jumps in head first and starts throwing paint around.

We tried to mix our work in ways such as having me draw a character and have Nathan paint it and vice versa. We didn't want the end results to simply be each of us doing what we'd normally do on top of each other's stuff. We wanted the paintings to look cohesive enough so that a casual viewer could assume only one person had worked on them.

We decided to make six paintings and started working on all of them at the same time so we could jump back and forth and never hit a point where we were waiting on each other.

I really enjoyed trying to incorporate some of Nathan's studio practices into my own work while we were making these things. I never really do any type of collage or cut and paste stuff in my paintings. I might start though.

This is what Nathan's studio looked like on the last night of painting. We pretty much trashed the place in a week and a half. (That's how long we worked on the paintings.) Sorry for not coming back over to help clean up...

After we finished painting the pieces we framed all of them by hand, packed them up, and then spent all of the money we had in savings to pay for shipping to LA. Here's the gallery we shipped them to.

Here's Nathan in LA. He looks like this in Texas too. But I think in LA he looks a little more famous.

I didn't get very good installation shots of the work in the show. But if you hurry you can still check it out in person...

I also made some new sculptures this Summer.

The sculptures are titled: All Of The Boxes In My Garage I, II, and III. I made them out of all of the boxes in my garage. And some shoes and shirts from a thrift store.

The art show that these pieces were in was titled Weekend Pacifists and it was curated by Russ Pope. Here are a few of Russ' paintings.

Andy Jenkins was in the show too. This is one of his pieces. Andy was a huge influence on me as a young artist and it was really cool to be in a show with him. I don't take that stuff for granted.

Mike Myers participated in the show as well. (Not the Love Guru or the dude that tried to kill Jamie Lee Curtis in that one movie - a totally different dude.) This is one of Mike's pieces.

Chris Pastras was also in the show and as a result Jason Lee showed up to the opening. I'd like to say I wasn't impressed but I was actually really stoked. He was in Video Days for heaven's sake.

I can't forget to thank Roffry for letting us stay with him while we were in LA. Thanks dude. Tell Nern we said hi.

I finished up the Summer by jumping in a van with eight other dudes for a weeklong skating/camping trip to Colorado.

I lived in CO for a year and a half when I was in my early twenties and I have a real soft spot in my heart for the state. It's a beautiful place.

Shawn agrees. He made custom shoes for the trip he was so excited.

This is a towel.

The hills had eyes.

Make a joke about how good we are at cooking.

You get the idea. Camping with your friends is awesome.

Anyway... skating everyday for a week was super fun but I was ready for a break by the end of the trip.

So that's some of the stuff I did this Summer. Hopefully this blog gave you some temporary relief from the crushing terror of the impending Swine Flu epidemic. Are we really all gonna die? I hope not. I still have a lot laundry to do. {moscomment}