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.
