Get it? He's a buff! And he's a big fan of geysers! Art humor, you guys!
Yellowstone National Park is starting to show up in the studio now. We came home last September with a lot of photos of shooting geysers and lumbering buffaloes, but no pictures of buffaloes lumbering by geysers. So continuing my occasional series of Paint: The First Photoshop, here is a buffalo lumbering by a geyser.
One way to make art of impossibly beautiful places is to have some fun with them.
This series began with one of my favorite paintings - of Drew "saving" a little bear cub, which, in the painting, occurs in a nonexistent ponderosa pine in front of our house. The actual bear was from a newspaper clipping from Colorado Springs, showing him getting pulled from a tree by some volunteer firefighter, trying to do a favor for a dumb homeowner. I love the little bear cub, who was just tryna get up a damn tree, and I love my Personal Firefighter Drew, and I love ponderosa pines. So I squished 'em all together and made a Paint Photoshop.
The next in the series was a self-appointed challenge to paint one of my favorite pieces of Photoshop art ever, the Raccoon Carrying a Cat.
The "original" photoshopped raccoon and cat.
I made the raccoon into a real savior, and gave it to a friend who took a shine to it [enter pun apology here]. It doesn't appear in the "Art to look at" gallery, because it wasn't much of a win, but it was fun to paint, and I may return to the subject again someday and try to improve upon this first attempt.
Yikes.
As first-year art students learn, you don't have to paint what you see. You can paint what you want.