Self Portrait in Red and Blue

Self Portrait in Red and Blue © 2006 Jeff Thomann
Media: Oil Painting

I created this work back in 2006 as a way of keeping my oil painting hobby going. At the time that I created this work I didn’t have the best studio to work in. We had purchased a house with a large basement that I was trying to use as a studio, but it was dark, moldy, and had a lot of dust and mildew in it. I did light up the place with some hanging lamps, but it still was definitely not the best place in the world to be doing oil painting since there was not much ventilation. There was a small garage door that I put fans nearby but this was still a horribly ventilated area. I fondly remember smelling the chemicals from the studio one floor up in the main living room several days after I created this work… that was something Tekla and Genesis didn’t care for too much. After that incident I went to trying to do works that require less fumes such as acrylic, color pencils, etc.

I believe that this painting was exhibited at the Columbia Art League the year that it was created.

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The portfolio site…

The portfolio site is not complete yet, but it is slowly coming together. I’m sort of doing a combination of revising and adding new content to this blog while working on the site so some of the links over there may very well not work as they should, etc. That’s because I don’t have the full content on the site live yet, or even created locally in some cases. However, over the next few months (or possibly even years?) I’ll be adding more and editing more both here on this blog and at the site… I plan to get it all put together strategically and working well cohesively as my next ‘big project’ that I’m working on an hour or three every day as I find the free time to work on it.

In the not-too-distant future that free time will start going down a bit as our new baby is on the way. However, I’m sure that I’ll still have some time for this ‘hobby’ to finally come together the way that I’m wanting it to. It’s been something that’s sort of been on the backburner since 1999 that I always wanted to do, but never took the full time to actually do til now, at least not as completely as I plan to do this thing… The artfolio part of the new site is the part that is most put together thus far, and only a few pages of the oil painting is really up so far… That is at http://jeffthomann.cwahi.net/artfolio/index.shtml.

Most of the other sections are not up yet…

The ‘old’ portfolio site at http://jeffthomann.cwahi.net/ is still up and running for the here and now… but over time it’ll be phased out and replaced with the new site… It’s just going to take some time, and I don’t want to completely delete the old one all the way until the new one is at least fully working.

I plan ultimately to have a cross link from every blog post with the artwork to the page on the site with the artwork, and use the blog to sort of have an ongoing commentary about each work of art on the site that is probably a bit more lengthy and more of a dialogue than really needs to be on the ‘official’ site… but is still related, so there will be the cross linking to make it all easily accessible…

As time goes by, I’ll probably edit the blog heavily on past posts so that stuff that is really ‘portfolio’ quality is all that’s in the portfolio category, etc.

As I do this, I’m also starting to keep a spreadsheet of all the links, titles, copyright dates, etc. of everything much more complete and in depth than I ever have before. I may publish some portions of that spreadsheet in the future so that it’ll help any viewers or collectors out there find things just as it’ll eventually help myself find things as sometimes finding stuff you are looking for in a blog is not the easiest thing in the world to do… As I create new works of art in the future, they will get added to this ongoing project… so it’s really sort of just establishing a groundwork to eventually build my art career from at a level that I haven’t taken the time to do yet for a variety of reasons.

Remember, the ‘artfolio’ is more about all of my artwork, including works in progress, works never completed etc. as well as more thoroughly completed works that I’d consider ‘portfolio’ quality. The ‘portfolio’ is just that – completed ‘portfolio’ quality works, i.e. top notch stuff, at least in my opinion. To get to the ‘artfolio’ portion of the blog you can use the artfolio category tag, and to get to the portfolio part of the blog you can use the portfolio category tag.

Happy viewing! 🙂

Table from the BFA Exhibition

Table from the BFA Exhibition © 1999 Jeff Thomann
Media: Oil Painting
This Work was one of several in a series I created for my BFA exhibition back in 1999. The BFA show was based on images from my dreams that I tried to remember via a dream journal/sketchbook. I’m not exactly sure what the symbol on the paper that the hands are holding means, but it was a part of the dream that I remember in detail, along with the composition of the painting including that window in the distance that sort of backlit the room, making it difficult to make out the details of the features on the individuals in the meeting room. The framing of the room is odd looking as the walls don’t seem to match up, but that too was a part of the dream.

In many of my dreams the architecture and location of images in a composition I see in detail seem to have some sort of deep and profound meaning to me. At the time that I created the BFA show I was studying Carl Jung’s theories on dream archetypes. I believe that both a location in a dream as well as the individuals can become archetypes. That is why we have dreams that are located in the same, or very similar settings multiple times throughout our lifetime.

I do not practice magic or the black arts (well at least not directly even though art creation itself is a bit of a magical act in some ways), but do sometimes read about these things as they interest me somewhat since they are sort of related to psychology and art history, both of which are topics I have a lot of interest in…

I think that new age ideas about astral kingdoms created via meditation practices are directly related to lucid dreaming techniques that we all experience at some point in our lives and that the architecture, objects, and figures (archetypes) we see and interact with in our dreams can play somewhat of a major role in the worldview and in that way can psychologically help us alter the world around us… but it’s not truly ‘magic’ – it’s psychological manipulation and self therapy techniques that can alter the way we think about the world as the objects, places, and things in our dreams are really our subconscious thought patterns communicating with our conscious brain, picking up patterns and connections that we may never have noticed before, allowing us to become aware of things in a new light that we have not seen them before consciously, etc. Dreams can and do play a role in our waking world realities every day whether we acknowledge it or not.

Below 250 lbs!

Well, the weigh in today shows that I’ve lost about 17 lbs since last weigh in a little over 40 days ago! I can finally officially say I weigh less than 250 lbs. I have not been exercising a lot, but have taken on a job that has me on my feet all day doing a lot of bending, lifting, and other types of moving. I had noticed that my old pants waist line was looking way to huge so figured it’s time to do a weigh in.

It’s an evening job, and the pay’s not all that great, but at least it is full-time and apparently it literally is causing me to “work my ass off” so it’s not all that bad… kinda nice to get paid to workout so to speak instead of paying some gym.

The last couple of days I’ve been doing a little bit of a workout before work too, mainly aerobic stuff with a wii like Just Dance, or some simple little aerobic exercise tape, etc. If I can keep that up consistently and keep the job at least a few months, perhaps I can get below the ‘red line’ that was my original goal target before I slacked off a while back and had to create that second ‘goal line’… It’d be nice to actually be able to get to my bmi weight, especially now that the young one is on the way in a little over a month. Got to get in shape to keep up with the young ones.