The Fine Art Blog of Darren Daz Cox

 I’m referring to a metaphysical concept of big rather than about scale of artwork but I am striving to make paintings as big as I possibly can to really maximize the effect of the grandeur of art (and as they did in the Renaissance, the grandeur of mankind imbued by the gift of creativity from God).

Look at what happened when the Medici decided to take their personal love of creativity and invest heavily in it – The Renaissance, resulting in  art that has dominated the art world for five centuries due to the saturation of mega-talent given a chance to flourish.  For those of us living in the Peoria and Pekin Illinois area in the 21st century we have people like Todd Thompson to thank for a re-birth of culture in Pekin Illinois.

Todd and Steve Foster took a chance and invested in the building at 353 Court Street and with the help of Pekin Main Street Director Leigh Ann Matthews and the legendary artist and teacher Doug Goessman that investment is paying off in ways far beyond mere money.

Last night was the opening of the show for the artist’s that have a studio within the Speakeasy Art Center and the show will be up until Aug 28 2010 when another great group of artworks will be exhibited. See the flyer at the end of this post that I took from the Speakeasy Art Center Facebook page (please friend them!). I also borrowed this picture that they posted of the show to show how well they lighted my huge painting, which really made me happy! Thanks Doug! (he also made the Warhol-esque silkscreen on canvas painting next to mine in this pic)

Speakeasy Art Center Pekin Illinois 353 Court St. Resident Artist Show August 2010

Check out Ed Emmons’s blog http://www.ourtimesinpekin.com/ for some great photos of the show and just about every Pekin Illinois cultural event of the summer so far! Awesome artist’s like Alec DeJesus, Trinidy Patterson and Nikole and Eric Cooney (all of which have art at the show!) have really been putting in the time and effort to make this excellent for all of us and it’s a wonderful thing.

Below is a painting I have at the show that I will send to my friend Jane who was literally there when I decided to become an ‘great artist’, not to just do art for fun like I did but to make art my life and I have stuck with it ever since. Jane has become pretty famous under her alter-ego of Wynx Whiplash and is still the same sweet goth chick I knew back then. In fact, pretty much all the artist’s I knew from that time period have stuck with art and have really excelled. I will honor you all in a future blog post!

Goth Girl oil painting by Darren Daz Cox

I wanted to put the painting below in the show but the frame I had broke and it really needs to have a gold frame to make the blue really blue!

Time Traveling Dolphin oil painting by Darren Daz Cox

and here is the flyer (I didn’t make this so all rights reserved by whomever did) for the resident Artist’s show going on until August 28 2010 at 353 Court St. Pekin Illinois (across from the court house!).

Residential Artists show until Aug 28 2010 at The Speakeasy Art Center 353 Court St. Pekin Illinois

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My awesome artist friend Lysh aka Scroobilus Pip wrote this comment after I mentioned that I was enjoying drawing things directly from my imagination rather than from using a photograph to copy from, "I sometimes wish that I could draw just from my imagination. I’ve read that it comes with practice. I’m going to challenge your assumption that you would already know what the picture would be if you used a reference photograph. I frequently use reference materials when drawing but I NEVER know what the picture is going to be. Perhaps it is a question of whether the reference material is there to copy, or there to give you a start. Or if you are a bad copy-er like me and just somehow deviate"

I didn’t mean to make it sound like drawing directly from your imagination in any less valid or creative than using a model or photographic reference, after all, that would be saying that Edgar Degas was somehow capable of ‘better’ work, which just isn’t the case.  His famous "bathers" were from photographs and they are perfect!

I’m not perfect, none of us are but we can be happy in the moment. Life is just a succesion of ‘nows’ rather than the past present and future, and as John Lennon famously said, Life is what happens while you make plans to do something else.

I have many different styles and phases of my art and  I get well intentioned ‘art career advice’ from people who assume that because I’m not selling any art or showing my art in galleries on a regular basis that I’m somehow not reaching my full potential. The advice I generally get offered involves me deciding what style I should concentrate on and then cranking out a portfolio of art that all looks similar, then, with a little smoozing and luck I can sell my art for a modest price and perhaps work towards the ultimate goal of being self sufficient and be a marketable brand etc blah blah blah.

You know, I’m perfect right now, in this moment I love my art and I do not feel the need to cater to anyone except the inner children of people who might cross my path. I did some really sweet drawings recently for my (also really sweet) friend Marisa, some of my best pencil work and you’ll never see it (unless you walk by her cubicle at work haha). The point is that I gauge my success on how quickly I can take inspiration and create things out of my head to make someone happy.

 Oh, and just because I don’t sell anything and I’m not in an art gallery doesn’t mean I’m not a successful and famous artist, in some ways I’m the most famous and successful artist in the world, after all you’re reading my blog and looking at my art (I have printable sized work on my Flickr account for you to download and print without any strings attached). have an awesome and creative day my friend!

Cat Yea! acrylic and feathers on canvas by Darren Daz Cox

It Is Complicated – pencil and digital paint by Darren Daz Cox

I joined Bloggersbase.com today here’s my url http://bloggersbase.com/users/Daz/  I trust Jeff keni Pulver so I’ll see if it’s fun or not!

oh, and according to compete.com, 11% of the people who find this blog are searching for "why people put animals in the pond"  and not only that, I get 974 people a month visiting because they searched for "chris brogan walmart"  haha!!!

Oh, and my new punk band is called Warcasm Awesomesauce! and our new CD is called why people put animals in the pond

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Originally posted 2009-02-22 09:11:30. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools. – John Muir

This is the current phase of my landscape, what you see right now is almost all light blue and dark blue with some white in the sky!

I love Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s art, especially his trees, they are so lush and puffy and after watching countless Bob Ross shows over the years I think I can paint something similar. I also love the harsh surrealism of Salvador Dali (I know, everyone loves Dali!) and while I’m not going to consciously try to do something similar, I do want to add that feeling of dreamlike strangeness if I can.

First of all I blocked in the foreground with india ink mixed with (clear) acrylic medium (as you can get a variety of shades of dark greys this way rather than just black). I wanted to have a nice contrast to start with. I also like to have a pile of gold coins around when I paint to invoke the spirit of Raphael! (they are just those new US one dollar coins not real gold!)

After the acrylic/India ink dried (pretty quickly in this warm weather), I added a thin layer of white oil paint over the white areas and painted an inch or two over the dark areas too.

I see the sun low on the horizon every morning through the trees when I take a walk down to the beach so I remember that the sky is darker at the top. I know I could take a photograph and work from it but it’s so much easier to ‘see’ it in my mind than to rely on my eyes, even though I have excellent eyesight which helps when you put the finishing details in.  At this point I have an idea where the sun is in the painting and where the light will cast the highlights and where the shadows should approximately be.

Then I started to paint in the sky, I roughly mixed white with cerulean blue (a light blue) and smacked the brush on the canvas to make a nice texture that has pure white, pure cerulean blue and a mixture of the two. I started to place the texture in a direction that suggested where the sun was coming from, sort of in a subtle van Gogh way.

I then added a darker blue, Prussian blue that is (all oil paints now mixed with drying compounds, as I don’t want to wait six months for this to dry!!!). Now I worked on getting the shadows and then highlights and then shadows etc, it took several hours to get to the current stage. You can see how the tree at the front is becoming strange, more Dali than Fragonard and to interpolate Devo interpolating Jimi Hendrix, it’s not not necessarily beautiful but mutated! hehe!

No white nor red was ever seen
So am’rous as this lovely green.
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress’ name.
Little, alas, they know or heed
How far these beauties hers exceed!
Fair trees! where s’e'er your barks I wound,
No name shall but your own be found.
-   Andrew Marvell, 1621-1678, The Garden

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Originally posted 2008-06-11 16:40:05. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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My niece Morgan drew me a piece of art for my birthday! I added it to an illustration of mine! So I went to the bookstore to get a present for myself and bought a P.K.Dick book, upon reading it I find that the protagonist is the same age as me. There were only two PKD books I considered buying so that’s quite a coincidence, I mean how many books give the age of the hero in the first few pages anyway? so in my strange interpretation of reality there must be some (personal for me) meaning in the book! yea! My sister took me out to dinner and gave me a gift card for my favorite store, Michaels (it’s a big huge arts and crafts store in America)! Today I added another layer on my dragonfly painting I’ll photograph it soon. Oh, on my birthday it was caterpillars on the beach day, I found one in the tide line so I took the flotsam it was on and put it in the grass (like 8 feet higher than beach thanks to the tremendous erosion from the storm) then I saw more caterpillars running back from the tide as if they had taken a dip and were going to sunbathe. they were all over the place running around on the beach! Do caterpillars swim? They sure made it look like they do!

And below, the awesome art of Emily Farmer (25 July 1826, London – 8 May 1905, Portchester) , an English watercolour painter.

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Originally posted 2008-05-14 20:17:16. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Angels aren’t pious or solemn they have fun and dress glamourously but their duty is their Raison d’être. Angels aren’t religious as they already know the truth, they don’t have to trust faith and because they don’t have a core of uncertaintanty, they have confidence. Which makes them good models for paintings, even if I can only see them in my minds eye!

Angels enjoy competitive things but not because the reward for winning gains any more favor with god, they compete for personal growth and for the good of the angel population in general as competition allows for risk taking and best guesses and random factors.

Creativitity is the ultimate risk taking as it is new territory and people see you through the work you create, often this is the reason why people stop feeling creative as they do not want to be identified by what they feel is imperfect work. You don’t have to be perfect or angel-like, that’s one of the perks of being human!

I was going to work on this painting some more today but I ended up working on an even bigger angel painting, here is the pencil sketch for that one (I’ll post tomorrow!).

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Originally posted 2008-06-23 03:51:24. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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