About This Work: Ed O’Brien In Blue

I’ve been creating art as long as I can remember, but I really hit my stride in high school. The work I created between 1997 and 1999 was unbelievable. During my senior year of high school, I was asked to be part of the honors art program. It was, for lack of a better term, an honor. By my senior year, most of my required classes were already taken, so I was able to fill up the majority of my schedule with art classes. I basically spent every day in the art room pumping out paintings, drawings, collages and anything else I could possibly create.

As I mentioned in my previous post, in high school, I developed the silhouette/shadow style of portraits that I enjoy painting so much. The first experiment with this style was a portrait of Thom Yorke of Radiohead, and the second was a portrait of Ed O’Brien of Radiohead. (See a theme, here?) For the portrait of Ed, I decided to use a solid background rather than the abstract expressionist-style background I normally use. I was pretty happy with how it turned out, and it went into the ever-growing stack of paintings I did. This was in 1998.

In 1999, one of my art teachers told me about an art show put on by the Walker Art Center‘s Teen Arts Council called “Hot Art Injection.” It was open to any teens in the Twin Cities area, so I submitted slides of a bunch of my artwork in hopes of getting in. I received a letter weeks later saying that they wanted “Ed O’Brien In Blue” in the exhibit. I was really excited about it. It was held at the Soap Factory, and there were a lot of excellent works in the exhibit.

During my senior year, I was in nine art exhibits (I think it was nine — it was a lot, I know that much), but the Hot Art Injection exhibit was the best one by far.

(Check out how dorky I am in that photo! I’m wearing my awesome Marilyn Manson shirt, too. My eclectic music tastes have not changed in ten years.)