from washington dc to miami, fl to cancun, mexico to washington dc!

I just returned from a trip to Mexico and am finishing up some journal artwork from that trip. It was a lot of fun to take the journal international; I've also found that one of my favorite places to draw at is airports due to the vast diversity in people, clothes, objects, etc. Luckily, I had the opportunity to experiment with a slightly new medium and I'm very excited to see how it will fit in with my journal work.

I'll post the finished pieces within the next couple of weeks!

my new focus and a new transition!

After a lot of reflection on what I wanted to accomplish with my body of artwork, I realized that I had solid work across a variety of media but all of the categories and individual pieces seemed disjointed; I felt as if my work didn't have enough conceptual substance or utility and function. It was at that point that all of my experience, education, and exposure to the fine arts and graphic design came together to create a single epiphany...I wanted to document life through art using a journal approach, along with artwork using individual media.

Over the years, I've become increasingly interested in sketchbooks and journals as well as documentaries that focused on nature. From travel logs and handwritten notes in sketchbooks to the Planet Earth dvd series, I found the documentary aspects, and how they integrated with art and creativity, to be fascinating. I wanted something more for myself than creating a piece of artwork for a wall or website; the idea that my work might only receive a passing glance truly bothered me. For the record there are many great artists, illustrators, and designers that generate an idea and translate it to paper or the web and do it in such a way that is amazing. For myself, I needed to merge my fine art and graphic design skills with an appreciation of what's around me in order to generate a fresh, unique, and highly functional body of artwork.

As for moving my entire portfolio and web prescence to my blog...I decided that a blog is the perfect communication tool to display my body of work and convey myself as an artist that uses a journal/documentary approach. I'll post new work as it's created but will also upload it to the portfolio section. As usual, I'll post new articles so check back regularly for consistent updates.

featured artist 10.07: Danny Gregory

Normally, an artist will post his/her portfolio online and most (if not all) of us sit there in awe of their amazing talent. Well, with this month's featured artist, I not only sat there in amazement but found numerous articles that both inspired me and helped me figure out a few things about myself as an artist. His website is entertaining, helpful, inspirational, funny, focused, and an overall wealth of knowledge about creativity and life.

www.dannygregory.com/toc.php