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when i first started painting arrowchitectural decograf i was using canvas. i’d buy them pre-stretched from blick. since i mask my paintings i need a smooth surface - obviously, canvas was a poor choice. in order to get a smooth surface i had to do 3 coats of gesso and sand between each one. the only advantage to canvas was that i could hang them as is, no framing required. but still, it was lacking. so then i moved to masonite. cheap, smooth, can cut it to any size. i also painted on other wood surfaces like hollow core doors and plywood. but it’s always bothered me that i don’t paint on metal. metal just fits better into the concept behind my work. i mean, graffiti was painted on metal trains and most of the architecture i love was built on a metal skeleton. a couple reasons i hadn’t started using metal yet - one, it’s expensive, and two, it’s hard to paint on metal with acrylic (as i’ll explain and show below). which leads me to the two reasons why i paint with acrylic instead of spray paint, even though it’s always bothered me that i don’t (again, it fits better into my world). first, acrylic is very fast drying. i can paint an area and within less than 5 minutes i can put masking tape right over it and won’t come off when i take the tape up. with spray paint you have to wait significantly longer than that before putting masking tape over a painted area. not that it would peel off, but if it’s not completely dry you’ll get marks where the tape was. the other reason for using acrylic is that there’s infinite possibilities for colors. i can mix 2 or more colors together and make any shade or color i want. you can’t do that with spray paint. even with companies like montana offering almost 200 colors, which is a lot, it’s nothing compared to acrylics range of any color i can think of.

so anyway, i decided to start painting on metal…with acrylic. i went to material sales in national city and picked up a couple scraps of aluminum sheet to test it out. when i was working as a preparator for mcasd i met a great guy named jack brogan (an absolutely astounding individual. a jack of all trades, master of everything kind of guy). jack was helping us install robert irwin’s “who’s afraid of red, yellow, and blue”. joey and i worked closely with jack for about a week installing that piece and along the way we got pretty friendly. anyway, i asked jacks advice on how to paint on metal with acrylic and he suggested i prime the metal with etching primer. he even gave me a can of it to try out. so i used it, and laid my first layer of acrylic down on top. then i masked out another section and when i pulled the tape up it took my first section of color with it. ugh. well, i turned that peice of metal over, primed the other side, drew out my design again, and started the painting all over (this is a couple weeks later). this time i had mixed in some gac 200 medium, as i had heard that it helps acrylic bond easier with metal. i didn’t mask another area like before, i just put some tape over what i had just done to test out the bond. it didn’t hold. the same thing happened again:

aaaaarrrrrrgggghhh!

that was the deciding factor. if i was gonna paint on metal, i had to use spray paint. so…i flipped the metal over again, sanded all the first try crap off with my trusty milwaukee orbital and some 80 grit, primed it, and drew out my design for the 3rd time (by the way, those little letters in the drawing are where i was pre-visualizing my color scheme. usually i do a marker color test on paper, but for this one i didn’t. i just wrote in the color because i knew exactly what colors i was gonna use)…

then…i went and bought some paint:

in the future i’ll probably order some montana or belton or some such paint, but for now i’ll be using krylon (not that krylon’s bad paint). the thing that sucks about buying krylon though is that it’s only readily available at 3 stores in san diego. the first two, ace hardware and michaels, sell it for almost 5 bucks a can, and they never have any good colors. the third choice is wal-mart. ugh. the very thought of stepping into that store makes bile rise in the back of my throat. but, they do have lots of colors at a cheap price (about $2.30 right now). and today i found some cool new colors:

some of the stuff i bought is part of krylons new line of cans. they have a lid that’s a hell of a lot easier to take off than the original (although not as cool looking), and they also have the dreaded “slit-spray” cap (it’s not all that dreaded in my case. since i’m just masking and filling in color i don’t need a cap with any kind of control).

ok, so i have my paint. i’m ready. i masked off my first area:

then filled it:

so far so good. i waited about an hour before i masked the next couple sections and everything was fine. i’ll wait until it’s done to show you the results.

there we have it. end of an era. and another journey begins.

when i used to work at MCASD as a security guard it could get pretty boring. there would be stretches of up to 2 hours sometimes where there would be absolutely no one in the museum. thankfully, during those times we were allowed to sit and read. i did a lot of reading when i first started. titles such as “the master and margarita”, “1984″, “hunger”, and one of my favorites, “the confederacy of dunces”. after awhile though the museum got a little busier and it got harder to concentrate on reading when you’d have to stop and put the book away every 5 or 10 minutes. so i didn’t read on the job too much anymore and went on to doing crosswords. well, i suck at those so i went on to just drawing. i’d carry a clipboard with a few sheets of printer paper that i’d get from the front desk, and whether i was sitting or standing i would draw (usually with a ball point pen, sometimes pencil). i amassed quite a few drawings during those long boring days. most were complete garbage that i’d end up tossing out as i left to go home. but some were worth keeping. most of these are smaller than the picture implies. i blew them up in order to see them better.

this was my view across the street of the new museum location at the santa fe train depot from the front desk of the old downtown location at one america plaza. “concept is king” was a stab at the museums choice of the jenny holzer permanent installation on the front of the building. not my cup of tea. same thought was behind this drawing which is based on the museums “X” logo:

this is about as controversial as i get in my work. heh. on to less agenda oriented drawings like these:

want to see the other 26 sketches? check out my FLICKR page.