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I have been distracting myself off and on from the news by thinking about my old art. Wanna go on an ART-VENTURE with me?
Last night I asked myself a question that I couldn't think of the answer to. What were the first Dags I painted? I thought these were it for a sec:
Last night I asked myself a question that I couldn't think of the answer to. What were the first Dags I painted? I thought these were it for a sec:
Those ain't it though. Those are usually the first ones I show people because the environments draw people in. I think they were successful, and so I imagine them as first, but where did the dags come from, really?
When we first moved to Texas, I was enamored by the dramatic sunsets. We lived in a terrible Apt above a mall, but it had a clear, big sky view. I'd paint the clouds live in little bursts of at-home "plein-air" painting. Those dag paintings were after these studies. This is 2013
I started taking pics of every sunset to store inspiration for later. I was coping w/ not being surrounded by art 24/7 after getting out of school. Those were important paintings to me, You might feel hostility to normalcy in the dags, if haughty artist statements are your thing
I've been drawing gross, drippy things for a long ass time though. As a kid, I drew dragons endlessly. By the time I got to college, I had sorta stylized them to weird.. cartoon worm things. Here's 2 examples from *squints* 2008. I painted myself way more back then. Feeling old.
I obsessed over this symbolism for a bit: souls leaving bodies, magical essences, animals. I stopped painting self-portraits and made a hard, sorta inexplicable pivot to birds. These are 2010, the year I graduated. Something gryphon that starts to feel familiar, eh?
I painted this in 2012, as a companion piece to the three birds in the swirly composition believe it or not. A nice print of this hung in the deli I was working at in Baltimore for a while (and got smashed in a robbery! different story though), good times.
There are just shy of 200 people out there that have a Dag zine, which has those blue dogs on the cover, but I didn't conclude that they were Dags, I dont think, until Texas.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BBGDjfwj56d/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
https://www.instagram.com/p/BBGDjfwj56d/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
But lets record scratch back to 2010, cause I think this is our guy! The big paws, the neon blue. I dont think there's a better example of an early Dag than this:
I vaguely remember that this was the companion creature to the main character of what was probably a not very interesting story I was writing in my mind. But he comes with some rare artifacts! I went to school for animation, and this is.... not very good, hah
I'm an all over the place artist, and I wanted to share some of my journey here. Art development isn't as linear as improvement hashtags might have us believe. Social media asks us to be laser focused and marketable, but my personal development has wandered considerably
Anyway if you made it this far and you're an all over the place artist too, I hope this is encouraging! If you see artists posting about their improvement, remember its often not just a path from A to B. Even if all you see is two similar images, we're on a life long road!
