dready art – the kids are alright #3 – 20×21 – original commission on canvas

as part of a whole commission of a family I was asked to separate out the kids and make some art of their own based on the characters I’d developed for the family portrait

                   dready – the kids are alright #2 – 20×21 – original commission on canvas

when you look at a family of 4 kids and how their personalities differ eh, not just by age difference but the things that they grow to like …

                 dready – the kids are alright #1 – 20×21 – original commission on canvas

how they see themselves in the scheme of things and the family dynamic …

                dready – the kids are alright #4 – 20×21 – original commission on canvas

and how, despite the family unit, become these individual humans …

youth …

                       dready art ‘Richter’s Blues’ – 40×16 – remarque on paper

another dready remarque in July was this for a family in North Carolina – drawing in characters and changing colours in the dready catboat – was also a secret anniversary gift that I couldn’t share until it was delivered.

love was in the air in July is all I can say to you, because there’s yet another dready, an original commission of a wedding, from July that I am fine tuning and still can’t show because it’s not public knowledge yet …

so despite all the dramas in the world, or perhaps because of it, people are realising the love they feel for their partners and family, the importance of them all …

romance …

                        dready ‘a wedding at good hope’ – 20×30 – remarque on canvas

although, if you look on the dates of the blog posts below it looks like i had a quiet July, the truth is there was a lot of sneaky art going on in the background, things that were secret and couldn’t be shown …

this little anniversary dready remarque was one … this couple had been married at one of my favourite places, good hope in Jamaica, a place where I have spent a lotta lotta time … and he wanted to surprise her with my adding them to the existing coach house drawing.

i’ve always loved this for the vibe and the colours

wowness …

       dready-bird ‘coconut mask’ – hand carved, cedar, paint and clear coat – life size

when John asked me if I would dreadyfy a coconut he had carved I said yes – the deal was he would carve two and I would paint on one and the other would be for me.

they were lovely, the wood grain was gorgeous.

I think that John had in mind that I would draw a dready scene on the coconut, but as I looked at the raw thing it looked like a face, especially in profile; eye, mouth, protruding tongue, long rounded nose … it really reminded me of mayan drawings of themselves.

and john and I had both gone to school in british columbia, canada, different schools but both on vancouver island … and i started to get this idea in my head of a mash-up between mayan (because I had spent many years growing up on my holidays in belize.) and haida imagery, a tribal mask kinda vibe, throw in some jamaican iconography …

and I didn’t want to paint over all the wood, it was too beautiful …

the mouth is very haida, the eyes a bit of a mashup between the two, the nostrils as well … tribal masks so often have the tongue sticking out … the hair line very mayan … the red yellow and green, rasta colours used at the tips of the coconut leaves, but all reminiscent of a headdress …

and in the end the profile very like the images of the mayan deer god Tohil …

i had a lot of fun doing this, something completely different for me, challenging – and the final ‘art’ light and fun and playful

stretch yourself …

                              dready art ‘skyline drive’ – 40×16 – original commission on canvas

Kingston, like Rome, is a city surrounded by 7 hills, one of them is Jack’s Hill …

and connecting Jacks Hill back to the Papine-Buff Bay road, across the spine of the hills, is Skyline Drive.

a family I know developed skyline drive and their son has fond memories of it and his wife wanted to do him something special to remember skyline drive, his m3 bmw and his dog, all the important things in a boy’s life!

looking up from the savannah to jacks hill and skyline drive is one of my favourite views … if you go up and look back down the view ain’t bad either.

memories of the roads we’ve travelled.

walk good …

                    dready art ‘how to cook curry goat/the 3 amigos’ – limited edition fund raising print
                    available in 3 sizes … 16×5, 24×12, 36×18 inch (or by special order)

in the lead up to the cayman cookout at the ritz-carlton, grand cayman in 2018 the ritz asked if i would do a special dready of the three chefs, Jose Andres, Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert, hosts of the cookout …

I’d done art for the ritz and for the cookout before – am very very fortunate that dready art hangs in the gallery at the Ritz and is for sale on merchandise in their gift shops …

there was a hint that maybe i could do a beach scene for the project, but instead i imagined that here were the 3 visiting chef’s showing a ‘local’ audience how to cook curry goat … and in the corner of the art the goat shows up looking out and looking surprised that they’re talking about him …

The art was for sale, and for them, the Ritz, to give as PR gifts to media and VIPs and was signed by the three chefs …

                         signed by the chefs.

and I had to show up for people to meet me …

it turned out that that cayman cookout was to be the last time all three friends were together in one place … and it turned out that the art meant something to them.

so, last month, when in an IGTV chat Eric Ripert and Jose Andres announced that June 25th, Anthony Bourdain’s birthday, would be Bourdain day, and given the extraordinary times we’re living in, we decided to break out the print and the PR around it for a cayman food bank charity … and the NYT liked our idea …

and one on the wall in california ….

big love …

so, you have a gorgeous well lit house, bright and airy inside … it’s on a lake …

and you want to make the walls pop with a little colour …

I am a very fortunate artist that people choose to give dready the light and space and care in framing … the customers I have are amazing.

big love …

                          dready art ‘John’s Canoe’ – on custom Orlebar Brown shorts

last year we did a spate of custom made shorts through luxury brand Orlebar Brown who have this very cool in website app for custom ordering shorts with your image on it, super easy … it’s not inexpensive but it is very cool and very custom.

I had just done a piece of a art for a house in jamaica – the art was called ‘John’s Canoe’ – and we put it on a pair of shorts for john …

John Canoe/Junkanoo is a festival, bigger in the Bahamas than most other places I know of, but it  was a big new years day festival in Jamaica when I was a yute … made particularly memorable because of one man who used to get dressed up and stand at a crossroads we used to drive through in country to pass between my grand parents farm and other peoples – and we would stop and give him money …

according to wikipedia “John Canoe was the European name given to an Akan warrior from Axim, Ghana. He was a chief of the Ahanta people in the early 18th century, who established a stronghold in the defunct Fort Fredericksburg and held it against European encroachment for 20 years. It fell finally in 1725 and his followers were transported as slaves to the Americas. He is commemorated in the Junkanoo festival held in the Caribbean each December.”

for me it was just a play on words, because Jamaicans even have a kind of boat that other islanders refer to as the ‘Jamaican Canoe’ – long and narrow, high bowed and with an engine on the back and not a ‘canoe’ at all – and I was drawing a boat …

 
                             dready art ‘John’s Canoe’ – 20×18 – original on paper

coolness …

                                dready ‘beach day’ – 15’x9′ mural – original remarque on 3m laminate

a company in cayman islands was redoing their 5th floor lobby into a staff meeting point, coffee station come lounge and asked me to do a mural for the back wall …

you come out of the elevator and boom, there are two chairs a coffee table and a blank wall (except now the wall ain’t be blank) … and so the elements are spaced out in the art to accommodate the placement of chairs and stuff …

At the end of last year I had created a kind of beach series – really starting with a dready called ‘us in dreams’ and then expanding to ‘the beach walk’ in which I added more and more beach elements to them culminating in using all those elements together for Avis and then following on by creating the surfer man called ‘dude’ …

I repeated and used a bunch of all those elements here … and added a few more like the cooler and the dog to create a cayman ‘style’ beach scene for the wall …

life, they say, is a beach …

big up …