Joshua Sidlowski | Art & Design

Mytheme: "The Year-King"

2012-02-09T20:38:00.040-05:00

First in my Mytheme mask series exploring folklore, ritual, and myth, The Year-King is a symbol of sacrifice and rebirth, growth and harvest. The concept of death and resurrection exists across all cultures and mythologies, and the perceived control over nature and the gods through sacrifice was especially evident in agrarian societies where the success of the harvest was a yearly matter of life and death.

acrylic | shellac | sandpaper | on oak panel

Singing in the Wilderness

2011-12-23T22:15:00.004-05:00

An experiment in color and texture,

now showing at the Waters & Brown design center.

acrylic | shellac | paint chips | metallics | sandpaper

On display at Waters & Brown | 13 Elliott Street | Beverly, MA

(sold as of January, 2012)

Process (Mask Series No. 1)

2011-12-04T21:58:00.001-05:00

The TR painting is mostly done but still camera shy, so this is beginning of the new series using a lot more mixing of experimental media and acrylic painting. This guy here is where I am on the first.

Process (St. Theodore The Brash)

2011-09-15T23:02:00.004-04:00

Quick Announcement

2011-06-13T13:59:00.003-04:00

Hey all, I have a small show hanging up at Waters & Brown Paint and Decorating (13 Elliott Street, Beverly MA), swing on by if you're in the neighborhood! (Gallery of work on the Waters & Brown facebook page)

Retronaut | acrylic, shellac, metallics on wood

Grigori

2011-05-06T20:57:00.001-04:00

acrylic | shellac | metallics | paint chips | sandpaper

St. Theodore the Brash

2011-03-13T14:30:00.000-04:00

Currently in progress (for a friend), Saint Teddy is a continuation of the mixed media experiment. If anyone knows someone with a Roosevelt-shaped head who would be willing to model let me know!

Green and Gold

2011-03-12T20:26:00.010-05:00

acrylic | metallics | shellac | sandpaper

A couple experiments

2011-03-07T19:31:00.002-05:00

shellac | paint | dye | metallics | sand-paper

In Regions Beyond Right Knowing

2011-03-06T13:04:00.007-05:00

"Wild West" piece completed:

{Full piece}

{Detail}

Sideboard Project

2011-02-25T20:51:00.010-05:00

{ Before (on the side of the road) }

{ After peeling all the veneer off and priming }

{ Finished product, complete with booze }

There's a mirror that goes with this guy that I'm not quite done with yet, but so far it's pulling its weight. For the top I used a low-sheen tung oil, and for the body finish I used a primer basecoat and grained oil stain over it to get that brownish-silver glazed look.

"Wild West" Theme Show

2011-01-21T19:42:00.003-05:00

The Illustration department at Montserrat College of Art does a show every year with a set theme, open to both students and alumni. Typically the subjects are pretty basic, leaving the artist plenty of room for creativity. This year's theme is "Wild West":

The deadline is next month, I'll post more as this piece is fleshed out.

Bat-Mariner

2011-01-21T19:24:00.004-05:00

For some reason I hadn't put this one up yet. A ridiculous little painting I did last year:

New posts imminent

2011-01-04T20:46:00.002-05:00

Two new projects coming up:

- In my on-going refinishing projects, the antique Arts & Crafts sideboard I'm working on is nearing completion. Photos to follow.

- For the Montserrat College of Art Illustration Department's Wild West theme show I'm working on a piece based upon the very "wild" part of Wild West.

Posts have been too far and in between, but rest assured I'll update as soon as possible.

Taman Shud

2010-06-03T15:32:00.007-04:00

Wow, have not updated in forever. Hopefully this one makes up for it:

For background, go here. It will demolish your time: Taman Shud Case

Painter's Progress (Stage 1)

2009-11-05T12:56:00.003-05:00

I haven't posted any kind of process shots yet, so here's a quickie mobile shot of the beginning of a new painting:

In other news I'm going to buckle down and do my damnedest to keep up with Illustration Friday, let's see if the schedule permits!

Pigment

2009-08-03T00:30:00.003-04:00

Accidental art.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

2009-07-30T21:22:00.004-04:00

I've been dropping the ball when it comes to posting new work lately but for good reason: we're moving into a new house next month with room for full studio space, so I've been gearing up for the move and have had to pack away most of the completed stuff. Rest assured I've been slapping plenty of pigment down.

Once we're done with the move, expect a full website to be in the works!

Uncle Zombie

2009-02-24T19:49:00.008-05:00

A family portrait.

Coming in from the storm

2009-02-22T14:11:00.002-05:00

New work is forthcoming; gird some loins!

PEM kabuki poster

2008-09-15T14:19:00.000-04:00

The Nightlife Is For You

2008-08-11T23:14:00.000-04:00

Tom Waits

2008-07-09T15:25:00.004-04:00

The back-alley god with the chainsaw throat.

I'd like to work more with caricature; this is a decent likeness all things considered, but I really want to work on straight up portraiture without going too far into abstraction. I'm probably going to try another one in paint, to get the gritty feel of his persona nailed down.

I also really want a skyscraper hat.

[edit]: I made a bunch of improvements on the original, and am much happier with it now. Horray!

Jalopy Dance

2008-06-30T22:12:00.004-04:00

So the very fine people at MadAtoms.com have used my drunk-driving skeleton illustration on the relaunch of their new website.

Help me thank 'em by checking out their hilariously colorful jibberings.

Bill O'Reilly will eat your face!

2008-06-21T00:28:00.005-04:00

This was a quick caricature experiment from last year that I thought I might include here:

Bulging head-veins are really fun to paint.

Quick color sketch

2008-06-09T16:49:00.001-04:00

Full painting in the works, with such sweltering hot weather outside the past few days it's nice to sit in the shade and just paint...

The Wandering Jew

2008-05-29T18:06:00.006-04:00

This is a modern interpretation of the biblical character of the Wandering Jew. I'm really interested in the concept of extreme longevity and thousand-year old people walking among us (see also the Count of St. Germain, the Bodhisattvas, Li Ching-Yuen, etc.) and I wanted to show what I would imagine the mythical figure to look like in his current state, doomed to walk the Earth until the Second Coming. I based the overall composition on Gustave Dore's representation.

And I haven't forgotten my painting/drawing a day pledge; I've been busy plugging away and will upload some work by the end of the week.

Nocturnal

2008-05-21T15:51:00.006-04:00

A nocturnal from the Maritime collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, drawn for a collections booklet for my internship project. Nocturnals were maritime instruments used to tell time at night, using Polaris and a number of other reference constellations.

(Adobe Photoshop)

Painting Factory

2008-05-13T20:26:00.003-04:00

Alright, so over the summer I'm going to try my damnedest to do a painting a day. I know a lot of people do this after graduation to keep themselves in practice and to keep themselves from being lazy bastards, and since I feel like I'll probably need both I'm going for it. I have a feeling that with work at the museum it may end up being more like a painting a week, but I'm determined to keep my paintin' brain in good shape this summer.

My dictatorially self-imposed rules:

1. One small painting/fully-realized drawing a day, any medium, any subject (imaginary or from life, but preferably at least partially from life)
2. If I have a painting started that I particularly like, I can forgo a painting a day to work on that painting for a week
3. If I miss a painting one day, I have to do two paintings the next day, and so on

I'll probably officially start after graduation, cause I want to get at least some laziness out of the way before then. If anyone wants to come over and paint with me, any time, just give me a call or shoot me an email.

One of the reasons why I'm so excited? This painting:

When Edward Hopper painted this, he was standing in the exact spot where my car is parked, across the street from my apartment.

[edit]: If anyone has any requests, let me have 'em. I can't guarantee I'll get to them (especially if I allow myself to get lazy) but I'd love some ideas, and if you bother me enough maybe I'll get more motivated.

Natural Science Illustration show

2008-05-08T10:57:00.005-04:00

Pictures from our Natural Science Illustration exhibit late last semester. The first image is a gouache painting of a Chinese Chestnut tree. The final project for the class, a Northern Woodland scene created in a grid with one square per student, is shown in the other images, with my contribution highlighted. This show was a blast to work on:

Earlier work

2008-05-06T21:59:00.015-04:00

These are some acrylic painting works from last semester and junior year that I hadn't had the chance to upload earlier. Horray!

Acrylic portrait of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, for my Advanced Figure Drawing class:

llustration for "Forgotten Cookies" recipe assignment, also acrylic:

Geothermal Crater Tower from the "Cityscapes" independent project, part of the Geothermal piece posted earlier:

The photo of the crater city is pretty subpar, I know, but I haven't had the time set up better ones yet, what with the Sisyphian task of finishing up college. A post about my summer plans is upcoming, as there's a lot I have laid out...

LOVE sculpture illustration

2008-05-05T18:57:00.000-04:00

This is an illustration of Robert Indiana's LOVE sculpture, done for the Peabody Essex Museum. Originally, they commissioned it as a museum shop tag for chocolates being sold for Mother's Day, but discovered that color versions of the sculpture are on shaky legal ground, so in the end they decided to go with a silver foil imprint of a flat version (Indiana didn't formally copyright the image when he created it so it's used all over the place, but apparently he eventually got some form of protection on 3D color versions):

Creature design

2008-05-03T14:05:00.002-04:00

More digital work, this time a creature design from earlier in the semester. This was the first serious thing I did with the tablet, but I'm not unhappy with it:

I devised a stupidly complex design for it; it's an amphibious animal that has a symbiotic relationship with a plant component, like algae, and it shoots seeds from the bumps on it's back. They're led around by this sect of monks who plant and nurture the land and live in a mountain monastery where they gather a massive vault of the world's seeds (I adapted the idea from the Norwegian Doomsday vault).

Alien Landscape - Subterranean Laboratory

2008-05-01T18:30:00.001-04:00

This piece is also for Sci-fi Illustration. In this assignment we had to create a strange or alien landscape, so I came up with a mysterious structure in the bowels of a cave, possibly some secret laboratory dabbling in bizarre and disturbing experiments.

It still needs work, so at some point I may take this down and upload a new one, but I just wanted to show the initial design.

The People's Automaton

2008-05-01T17:39:00.000-04:00

This assignment for my Sci-fi/Fantasy Illustration class involved designing a robot and creating a setting for it; I designed a top secret Soviet robot designed in the 1980's who was left all by himself in the abandoned military base he was created in. He basically wheels continuously around the base shouting Soviet slogans through a loudspeaker on his back.

This was also an experiment in Corel Painter, which I just got last Christmas.

"Illustrative Visions" senior thesis show

2008-04-09T20:32:00.001-04:00

That Noise! (early draft)

2008-04-09T20:28:00.002-04:00

Brief Intermission

2007-12-11T14:32:00.000-05:00

The semester is almost over, so hopefully I'll have time to post some recent work in the next week or so. Right now, Art in the Landscape final is the first priority.

Existential Brain Funk

2007-11-28T13:44:00.004-05:00

These are the two pieces from last year that really worked for me.

The top is a small painting from Advanced Figure Drawing, and the bottom is an illustration for the HP Lovecraft story 'The Tomb'. Both are examples of what I need to go back to and build on, because I've strayed too far from what both of those pieces were built upon.

Cityscapes: part one

2007-11-19T10:46:00.002-05:00

My Senior illustration project for this semester is to design imagined cityscapes, and so far it's progressed decently but not quite as smoothly as I had planned. I had a few grand ideas of what each city should be like and where they should be taken that just haven't panned out, and I'm left with the feeling that what I have is flat and undetailed. Part of the problem is my painting style, which has gotten more loose and sketchy since last year, which is fine at times, but this project is requiring more detail than my brain wants to include.

The main hurdle, however, is time: the rigors of senior life are starting to manifest, and at the moment I have more to do than I care to think about. It's a good test for life in the real world, and so far I feel I've stepped up to the challenge, but it's certainly taking it's toll on my ambitions and goals for my artwork. Ultimately, I am pleased with what I've created, and all three of these pieces are going to be reworked a bit (especially the abandoned city, which I'm the most unhappy with execution-wise) but they're a decent start and they've only been getting better.

The "Islamic Art Deco" cityscape was my first piece, and it's concept is the weakest. I wanted to explore the connection between Art Deco and islamic art, because the former was certainly influenced by the latter, and because the growing wealth in arab countries has produced a decadence not unlike the American 1920s; however, the amount of research I was putting into it became a bit too time consuming, with too much reading and not enough painting, and without the proper detail and knowlege the paintings failed to convey "Islamic Art Deco" and ended up looking like neither. So while I'm relatively happy with the painting itself, I'm very discontent with the execution and concept.

After this I moved on to my second concept, that of a city completely and abruptly abandoned by its populous. This project was inspired by a number of photographic series I had come across, such as a series documenting the abandoned Ukranian city of Prypiat within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and a series on the abandoned Japanese mining island Gunkajima. This piece is the most complete of the series, but it is the one I'm least happy with, as I have so far failed to get the right amount of light and detail that I had imagined in my head. It remains an incomplete world, but hopefully adjustments in the coming weeks and the addition of my other two paintings to the series (which are coming out excellent so far) will round it out much more effectively.

My most recent series is my most fully realized so far, as well as the most successful to date in my opinion. This particular piece was the most unfinished of the three posted here (though it's a bit farther along now) but it has a sense of light and completeness that was more elusive with the other ones. This series is a geothermal city located in a dormant volcanic crater, where it's powered by the energy being drawn from the ground by a massive tower in the center. The buildings in this piece are dwellings located on the crater's rim, and are fed energy through a system of pipes and aquaducts connected to the main tower.

Hopefully each of these pieces will be fleshed out by the addition of new works.

first post

2007-11-16T20:00:00.002-05:00

Turtle Shell
Originally uploaded by jsidlowski2

So I created this blog to showcase the increasing trickle of work that I'm producing this semester, now that skool is just about over. My cityscape project has taken a backseat this weekend while I try to finish up my natural science illustration pieces for the show after Thanksgiving break, which doesn't make me terribly happy, but so it goes. Hopefully getting to see No Country For Old Men tomorrow will give my mind a bit of a break.

Until I can get some proper work uploaded, here's one of the older illustration pieces that will hopefully be in the show.