"Bolt" Common Artist Project + LAX/TXL

Bolt

Acrylic on Wood Panel

16" x 16"

2014

On May 17th, 2014, Los Angeles based gallery Thinkspace teamed up with Urban Nation in Berlin, Germany to present ‘LAX / TXL’. For this event, artists were asked to develop artwork on a 16" x 16" canvas. Since I've never shown in Germany (or at least I don't recall ever showing there), I decided to use this opportunity to showcase something a little more 'pop' art. 

For the past couple months, I'd be developing a t-shirt design for the Common Artist Project. The design I came up with was intentionally a little "Rock n Roll". Inspired by the artwork from David Bowie's "Aladdin Sane", I took my trademark bear head and scrawled a red zig-zag bolt across its face. However, instead simply recreating the Aladdin Sane artwork, I thought it'd be fun to try something a little more graphic. So rather than painting the bolt as though it were on the bears face, I illustrated it so the bolt extended beyond its face, like it were floating above it. When it comes to t-shirt designs, I believe it's the simplest designs that translate into the best designs. 

For LAX/TXL  all I did was recreated the design, However, I ended up flipping the face from right to left. When I create the CAP version of "Bolt", I wanted the bolt to blaze across the bears right eye. To make that work, I had to draw a right facing bear. Unbeknownst to the layman, most illustrators usually have a directional preference. For my LAX/TXL painting, I wanted to compose the bear so it was looking my dominant direction: left.