The Art of Christopher McMahon
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Two New Paintings, William Gibson, and a Long Overdue Blog Update

Thanks to @GreatDismal and @JoeyHiFi for tweeting about my stuff.
Here are two new involuntary collaborations I've finished recently:

Thanks also to TwistedSifter http://twistedsifter.com/2012/04/adding-monsters-to-thrift-store-paintings/

http://chr15t0ph3l35.deviantart.com/

The Empty Swing

The summer months...full of such promise...time to work on some art.  Yet I find myself banging my head against the wall of stagnation.  Here's my first attempt to kickstart my brain:  another involuntary collaboration.  Original painting was purchased at Goodwill.  Thanks, guys!

The Empty Swing

Original Acrylic Painting

Zombie Incense Burner

Build a zombie incense burner out of clay.  Basically, cone incense can be placed on the tray (which reads, "SEND MORE COPS") and smoke pours out the eye socket.  A lovely addition to anyone's home decor!

30 Minute Painting

Try it!  Sometimes it's fun just to whip something off with no predetermined plan or vision.  Sometimes it's a significant glimpse into your psyche.  Sometimes it's some fuzzy spiderlike thing.

Fuzzy Spiderlike Thing

'Shopped some cyclopses into pictures from my home town.

New Strand theater.

Parking ramp.

Neighbors.

Kimberly Pool.

Fred's Feed.

I drew a chainsaw katana.

I drew a chainsaw katana after a friend challenged whether or not something like that was conceivably functional.

CLOSE ENOUGH.

The Forest Monster

Here's one I did last year. 

I believe I found this one at a Goodwill.  I like the mouth on this guy.  This painting was a struggle to finish, but it was an oasis of artistic outlet during a lull in the creative process.  I'm currently juggling five projects inbetween experimenting with making stencils, so right now it just seems there aren't enough hours in the day.  I've got two empty landscapes, a seascape, two people who have requested portraits of themselves as zombies, and a local art show this weekend.  Not enough hours in the day.

Corrected Paintings

I'm using today's post to spotlight a couple of my heroes.  These are people I've found on the internet who realized as I did that some paintings just lack that...certain something...

John Lytle Wilson

This fellow paints a lot of robots and monkeys. Sometimes he paints robots and monkeys into other people's paintings.  I'm fond of this one as well:

The artist is possibly Steven Leduc.  If I'm wrong here, someone correct me.

You can see the original here.

Sub-Arctic Land Narwhal

Here I'm showing the process.  This one I worked on a little differently than I would acrylics (or even other oil paintings), but I decided to switch it up since the original landscape was predominantly white(ish).

 Here's the original.

Here's the initial sketch.

Ever-so-lightly pencil in the beastie.

Blocking in the figure in white.

Some shading.  You can see she's "on top of" some trees at this point.

Finished product.

Sub-Arctic Land Narwhal!

 My first attempt at altering an oil painting.  I felt a little like I was destroying a bit of history since the landscape painting was done in 1965.  Perhaps a series of events put into play by unseen cosmic forces guided it to my hands.  Or maybe I'm an irreverent jerk.  Either way.

Other People Messing With Other People's Stuff

One thing I've learned through doing this is that other people are doing it as well.  As I happen upon other artists rocking the same concept, I'll post their stuff here.  Such as:

This is an altered print by user MayoFetish on reddit.com.  An awesome homage to Dr. Freeman.  Click here for commentary.

The Architecture Student

After posting the three monster-in-landscape paintings, a Reddit user who informed me he was an architecture student showed me images of his work. His scale model of a building included miniature versions of my paintings.  His professor had told him to include artwork in his building.  Not sure this is what he had in mind. :)

Here's the original post on Reddit.

The Mountain Monster

Out of the three paintings I initially posted to Reddit, this is the one that gets the most requests for prints.  But I don't have the original anymore.

I like this one because it has this almost confused animal expression.  And if you compare it to its surroundings (the mountains, etc.) he has to be crazy huge.  I've always liked giant monsters, from rubber-suit Godzilla to Cloverfield.

Just got a new landscape painting from my girlfriend.  That makes three that are waiting in the wings.  Must focus my attention on the oil seascape I got from a friend. My first oil collaboration was the Sub-Arctic Land Narwhal (coming soon!), and feel like I have a better understanding of how to make...alterations...in that particular medium.

The Swamp Monster

This is the Swamp Monster, the third one of these I did.  This one's hanging in the room of a college art student.  This is the first one that I added my signature below the original artist's.  A close examination of the Sea Serpent reveals that the only signature is mine.  I feel better if the original artist has signed his or her landscape - that way it doesn't look (as much) like I'm taking credit for another person's work.

At least I think it was the third.  The second, I believe, was a painting of some deer in a wintery woods.  With Bigfoot coming at them through the trees.  I don't think I have a digital copy of this image, but I'll see if I can track it down and get a photo up.  It's at another friend's house.  I think.

The Sea Serpent

This is the first monster-in-someone-else's-landscape painting I did, as described in my last post.  It's currently hanging in the house of a good friend.

My daughter was sick one day and I was staying home with her, and decided to post this painting and two others to a site someone had told me about a few weeks before called Reddit.  They were received better than I expected (thanks Redditors!), and soon other sites like boingboing, Neatorama, and Geekosystem started posting them.  The pictures themselves have a view count approaching 400,000, which has given me a definitive motive for keeping an eye out for more "insipid thrift store landscapes."

Origins...

I had, with perhaps less than honorable intentions, been buying other people's paintings for a while.  The first time I picked up a painting in order to destroy it was at a nearby auction house.  I had shown the painting to the couple of artist-types I was with, and the response was less than positive.  Bad painting, nice big canvas.  What if I bought this for cheap, I thought, and then covered it with gesso.  Then it would just be "nice big canvas", which, if purchased new, would have been brutally expensive.  After all, this wasn't an art auction.  This painting was in a lot with Nascar posters, dusty mirrors, and other junk people were just trying to sell for a quick buck in order to avoid paying fees at the local dump.  So I bought it.  For one dollar.  And from that point on, if I saw a painting at a thrift store, Goodwill, auction, or yard sale that looked like someone had followed along with a few episodes of Bob Ross, I would buy it cheap and repurpose it for my own art.

I found a painting at a yard sale with a $1.00 sticker on it, and proceeded to nab it.  It fit all my criteria, but for some reason, this one seemed somehow "better" than other landscapes I had picked up before.  It had an ominous purpleness to it - somewhat moody, with mountains in the distance and a large, empty pool of water in the foreground.  The landscape itself almost created a frame, the center of which, I felt, was notably absent a subject.  So for the first time, I decided not to destroy a cheap landscape painting, but to finish it.

I took it home and painted a sea serpent weaving in and out of the pool, trying to subtly incorporate my own work into this other nameless person's.  I was, in a sense, working with another painter who was completely unaware of our collaboration.  From that point on, I started looking for empty landscapes to "finish" rather than any cheap painting I could whiteout with gesso.

This space will include other people's paintings (that I have painted monsters, etc. into), and some of my other, random explorations with art.