Present Company Excluded

I've recently been notified that my new painting titled, "Present Company Excluded," has received a Certificate of Excellence Award in the Portrait Society of America's 2011 International Portrait Competition! I'll be traveling to Atlanta the last weekend of April to accept the award and attend the annual PSA conference, which looks like a lot of fun. The competition recognizes only 35 paintings out of over 1,750 entries this year so I feel highly honored to receive this award. You can see some of last years award winners here.

Present Company Excluded - Oil, 18 x 24 inches

Also coming up, tomorrow I will be an guest artist at Montserrat College of Art, north of Boston, to give a short talk about my work. I don't know if it is open to the public.

San Francisco Story

A little out of the ordinary for me, about a year ago I illustrated a chidrens book for the Penguin Readers series through Pearson Education and Penguin Books. It's titled San Francisco Story and it has recently been released.

The story takes place during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. My guess is that the writer/publisher thought it would be relevant after the earthquake in Haiti, but of course had no idea it would be released just before the quake in Japan.

I had less than a month to paint all the illustrations for the book. Here are a few of them...