Hui No’eau's 2012 Juried Exhibition

A nice start to a New Year, I got several pinhole photographs in this years Hui Noeau Juried Exhibit. I've been working on a set of encaustic and india ink drawings; hopfully I'll be ready to submit them for the up coming Art Maui Annual 2012. Thanks to my friend John for the encouragement to keep steadily working.


Popo kapa wai lehua- Wring out the dark rainclouds



Me ke 'ala o ka lipoa- With it's fragrance of the lipoa (seaweed)

Vegetable Oil and Sumi Ink Prints

Panel with "found papers", sumi ink and beeswax

An artist friend of mine shared with me a very entertaining technique using vegetable oil and sumi ink. You take a vat or small plastic tub, fill it with water. Then you work with two sumi ink brushes- one in each hand, one brush gets dipped in vegatable oil and the other dipped in sumi ink and you then alternate tapping the surface of the water with the ink brush and the oil brush. The oil resists the ink making a sort of marbeling effect that floats right on the surface of the water. After you get a pleasing composition,take a sheet of paper and just sort of gently 'kiss' the surface of the water in the tub, and quickly, carefully lift the paper right back out. The marbeled ink composition will transfer onto the paper. The effects are really lovely.

Encaustic and Mixed Media

The Egg detail


The Egg, Panel with "found papers", sumi ink and beeswax

Cyanotype & VanDyke- studies with light sensitive materials

Camera Obscura

Zero 2000 Pinhole Camera 30 minute exposure

"In the high-tech world pinhole photography becomes perfectly an outsider, but a tiny hole is the oldest optics which led the Renaissance scientists to invent "Camera Obscura", ancestor of our modern cameras". Mieko Tadokoro

Lensless Photography

Here is a small preview from a very happy new assignment that I have been asked to participate. It is a collaborative project that revolves around a series of wearable tapestries, created by New York artist, Susan David. She has separate designs for each piece making them one of a kind and has painstakingly sewn sequence, beads, applied photo transfers and fine stichwork onto the backs of vintage jean jackets that she had been collecting over a period. Really superb work.
Susan and I have been hauling around a seamstress mannequin to different locations in Hawaii and photographing the jackets using all sorts of alternative photo techniques.
These are several of the images we processed using a pinhole camera.

My Grandfathers Drawings

These are classic. They are renderings or homework assignments that my grandfather had when he attended New York University College of Fine Arts- Dept. of Architecture back in 1935. They have a stamp in the lower left hand corner from the professor who issued the grades. D plus, B, C, etc. Interesting to try to apply a grading system to a drawing, even if it is from an architectural point of view.

One of the major challenges in art production is learning how to balance our thinking, about our role or responsibility as artists and balancing our thinking between true economic possibilities and the lack of economic possibilities. It is so important to find ways to strengthen our belief in ourselves and our art, to avoid putting too much emphasis on what other people think and to keep building on our belief in self-motivation and self-reliance and have the confidence to know that our creative abilities will make a significant difference in a world of intense competition and rapid change.