Fellow Artists

This page is dedicated to some of my fellow artist friends and their websites. Here, I plan to link to websites, blogs, and other interesting online projects that some of my fellow art friends have created, run, or maintain. I’ll try to keep the list narrowed down to artists that I personally know, or have some affiliation with.
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Columbia Art League
I consider all members of the Columbia Art League as “Fellow Artists” since they are all local folks. I am not currently a member of the Art League, but was a couple of years ago. I quit because the gallery was only open during hours I could not get to it, and because real world cash flow issues kept me from having a lot of free flowing cash to spend on art membership fees and art supplies over the last couple of years. Since my work schedule will be changing in 2010, I might look in to joining again.

The Columbia Art League’s “Online Artist’s Village” is located at http://www.cal.missouri.org/village/index.html
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Ben Mudd
Ben and I were in college together. He was a photography major and I was a painting major. We had a few classes together. He got darn lucky because I think Truman State University closed down the photo part of the Fine Arts Department about a year or two after he graduated. He may have been one of the folks that got Grandfathered in. I am not sure if they ever brought it back, but am guessing/hoping they did. It was a pretty good program. Ben shot the photos that were used in my Senior Exhibit.

Ben’s website is http://www.muddphotography.com/.
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Rachel (Micheal Tiger) Elliott
Rachel and I were classmates together at Truman State University in the late 1990s. We attended quite a few painting classes together. I remember fondly having some in-depth discussions with her as we both sat fatigued on the painting studio floor after having been in our own little corners of the room pulling all-nighters.

Her work has a serene beauty to it. A few of her drawings are sometimes simple on the surface, but very narrative and complex under the surface. I really enjoy her mastery of color and simple lines to evoke a lot of feeling. Her use of compositional space draws the viewer in to the little worlds that each individual painting or drawing depicts and describes. Her works may be small, and intimate since they require the viewer to get up close and personal with the work, but they pack a powerful punch.

Rachel’s Blog is located at http://michaeltiger.wordpress.com/. Her blogging is one of the many things that have inspired me to start blogging again.
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Chris Mast
Chris is the webmaster for the popular gaming websitehttp://www.merqurycity.com/

I’ve known Chris since high school. He and I were on the high school newspaper staff together at Boonville High School way back in the day (16 years ago, geesh, I feel old now). Back then, Chris lived one and a half blocks away. Chris, Chris’s brother, Sam, my brother, Danny, a few other close friends, and I used to play many video games and pen and paper role playing games together. The main games that we played were Heroes Unlimited, Beyond the Supernatural, Ninja and Superspies, Rifts, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT – no longer in publication since the Copyright and Trademark owners dumbed the TMNT down and made it in to a kid’s cartoon instead of the gritty, urban ninja comic it originally was intended to be). In my college days, we even played a few games of Nightbane, and a weird role playing world that I created using Palldium Books game system with modified versions of World of Darkness characters on occasion. (I won’t publish the conversion rules here in this post, but might in a future post – they are fairly simple).

I have many fond memories of role playing with Chris. Him and I used to take turns being the Game Master. Role Playing is one interest of mine that got me interested in taking up theater in college. Chris was one of the grooms men in my wedding. I keep in pretty close contact with him and see him about once or twice a year most years nowadays. He’s a very talented artist, and with two bachelor degrees behind his name, is about as well rounded of an artist as there can be.

Chris’s portfolio website is http://www.chrisjmast.com/.
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