Artwork

Painting collaborative, “Power Lines” by Erin Hamilton and Forest Stearns

This painting was a commission completed in 2007 for a surfer/botanist who wanted a “stacked vision” of the jetty in Eureka CA in the background up to the power lines surf spot in the foreground, stacking a view of the power plant and pulp mill buildings that line the coast in Eureka. The goal was to show nature in it’s relationship to humans and the contrast between these elements when most extremely juxtaposed. Forest Stearns was responsible for the buildings, power lines and the jetty with some line work in the grass and shading on the beach and ocean. I painted the grasses, beach, ocean and the specific birds chosen by our client. This painting is 4ft w x 1 1/2ft h and was done with acrylic paint on wood.

painting of susie bubble by Erin Hamilton, it’s small and sweet.

I’m new to blogging, and I don’t do it very often, yet I really appreciate it and the personal touch different people contribute in their posts. One of my favorite blogs, partially due to the person writing it and her way with words, is style bubble. It’s well written and details a tasty aesthetic for fashion I really appreciate. I referenced a couple photos off her site of her and put a bird in there along with a feather headdress of sorts. The strange part is the day I finished this, I looked at her newest post and she had a link and imagery of this designer Beddug who makes bird headbands. nice and synchronized right?

This is in progress, (I still need to detail the rest of the frogs):

I’m working on a painting of frogs with the idea of frogs being like the proverbial canary in a coal mine to humans environmentally (which according to science they are). Short story, they have all kinds of problems due to pollution from pesticides, water contamination from all kinds of sources, and due to a slight raise in temperature there is this fungus killing all sorts of frogs called chytrid fungus. mmm, light hearted and pleasant right.

Well I thought so too. My goal is to make this as pretty and delicate of a painting as possible to contrast the disease, much like the delicacy of life and the gruesome and also beautiful things we go through in the process of living and dying.

A detail of the skeleton:

New year’s eve 2007 was spent with a group of artists (carmen olsen, casey cripe, forest stearns, tyler cripe and me, Erin Hamilton) making a new and exquisite art baby at the ultra opulent San Francisco Westin St. Francis Hotel. We had 5 hours to finish a piece that was 8ftx8ft. The above image is the finished painting. The Pacific Art Collective set the show up for us and it was a pleasure to spend new years eve collaborating on a strange new piece of art with friends.

Here we are at the beginning of the night, staring at the blank walls.

Our initial concept was to simply mash up as many animal parts as possible and ty to create a composite creature.

Tyler, Casey and Erin Hamilton drawing on the beast.

Casey and Tyler Cripe (monkey brothers) who worked on this painting are two artist’s I think of as naturalist explorers from another generation who just happen to live in the present day. They have a website called MonkeysWithHumanHaircuts that shows just a bit of their diverse talents. It was really great to work with them, I hope to one day be able to draw animals as good as they can.

Here is Casey working next to the lovely and extremely talented Carmen Olsen. Up until the day prior, i had only known Carmen as an aerial goddess worthy of cirque du soleil and a theater artist; now I have another reason to look up to her as she is also just as talented in the 2D art realm. I have a new admiration for my friend and hope to collaborate with her again sometime.

Here we are being glamorous artist’s in the newly arrived 2008, yeah Carmen!!!

We worked next to artist Damon Soule who started one piece, decided it needed a change, buffed it out and started over making an image of 1000 burning square’s representative of the crowd we were surrounded by.

He buffed out that piece too at the end of the night as the drunken crowd began a photo shoot around our paintings and it turned into an opportunity for group participation, someone even did a jackson pollack impression on his wall. New Year’s Eve really brings out the animal in all of us right?

Here’s a shot of the crowd that night, I think 3000 people were at the Westin in a 5 room party including live music in several rooms, a giant gold Buddha, and a fashion show and stilt walkers in our room.

All in all it was a really fun night, even if the sound system made my ears bleed and we were subjected to a painful mix from the dj that somehow allowed him to work in all of the almost hits of 1982-1992. Ha ha.

Here is our group shot at the end of the night. Much love to Forest Stearns who is as always throwing down beautiful line work, is a lovely man and super skilled artist! (check out his website draweverywhere.com)

The result was a wild assemblage of parts giving us dreams of the future when all the animals and humans have mutated into a shadow of their former self. I think we all left pleased with our new creature.