December 4, 2006
Cleaned and organized all day yesterday, finding many gems and as many piles of poo poo paintings. For starters, here's two unfinished paintings that go way back. The first is of The Apache Kid which goes all the way back to 1987. The model is Flint Carney and it has good potential. The second goes back a couple years and is of a certain Apache scout (who shows up later). Both are unfinished, but have potential. The next one is a Custer portrait I did for Hutton's issue on the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It also has potential and I need to find time to flesh it out. Same for the fence sitting Honkytonk Sue (far right). My daughter Deena posed for this about seven years ago up at Barro's corral.



Back in 2003 we had planned on doing a Pancho Villa cover. At the last minute, we did the Digging Up Billy cover and all my Pancho efforts came to a halt. Here's two paintings that were in my Failure Pile, which I pulled out this weekend and added some paint here and there, and I think they are pretty cool:



On the scratchboard front, I pulled all of the images I have done for the Top Secret Project and layed them out on the breezeway (below, left). Quite an impressive array of images, don't you think? Virtually every character in our project is represented here, including Tom Horn (center). At right are a smattering of Honkytonk Sue images with Lee Harvey Oswald, E.J. Radina and Billy Hamilton thrown in for good measure.



Of course, through the years I have always corraled my kids into modeling for me, and here's Deena and Tommy posing for a piece I did on the Stones appearing in Phoenix back in 1995, or so (below, left). It ran in New Times Weekly. And here's a study of Johnny Cash (below, right) which I did for an issue of Old West Journal (a short-lived title we did way back in 2000). Not bad, or not as bad as I thought they were at the time.



And finally, here's a whole bunch of paintings I can only describe as It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time (evidently, Buddy Boze Hatkiller agrees, look at his disgust!)



There's more, but I'll save them for later this week.

"Art for art's sake is a silly notion made up by artist's who have no clue."
—"Vincent Van Google