mixed media artwork

New Challenge-Based Artwork: Construct

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Once again interrupting my Japanese posts to remind you that the invitational You Want a Piece of Me? exhibition which I previously posted about here ends on August 17, 2025, so due to the gallery’s open hours you have two more dates left in which to stop by! I’ll get more into that below, but first, let’s do a deep dive into what I did.

This show asked artists to create art using a jigsaw puzzle, or puzzle pieces, as part of the art - and to leave at least some portion of original puzzle visible. You may recall that last year we did a similar challenge using board games, and here is what I did for that Advance to Gogh show in 2024!

For You Want a Piece of Me?, I needed to recycle puzzles - but I don’t own any, so I stopped by a thrift store and perused their offerings. I ended up buying three puzzles, mostly based on the differing scale of the pieces. I hadn’t decided what to do yet, but I figured owning these puzzles was a good first step. They were, in order of scale: L.O.L.Surprise! Floor Puzzle [large pieces], Milton Bradley lambs puzzle [medium pieces, 1 original piece held in an octopus tentacle], Milton Bradley Big Ben waterfall puzzle [small pieces, 1 original piece held in an octopus tentacle].

I pondered what I wanted to do with them for some time, as I wanted to make something that was still my own but that also satisfied the challenge parameters. I eventually decided I’d make a sort of topography out of the puzzles. This required actually building them, which for the 1000 piece puzzle took far longer than I wanted it to; I ended up building the other two easily but only assembling a few sections of the Milton Bradley Big Ben waterfall puzzle until I had enough connected material to satisfy my needs.

Then I built up a patchwork foundation, purposefully rejecting any edge pieces as I wanted the sculpture to communicate growth potential along its full border. After I glued it together and somewhat leveled its base, I then sculpted an octopus atop it. I formed the octopus out of QCC, clutching a mid-sized puzzle piece in one of its tentacles and a small piece in another. I also added some sand ridges. After curing, I painted the whole sculpture! Here are some progress pictures:

And here’s the finished piece! This is Construct, acrylic, QuickCure Clay, glue, and puzzle pieces, 16x25.67x3.25", 2025.

If you want to see Construct and the other Gallery 103 You Want a Piece of Me? entries in person, you can stop by either tomorrow (Saturday, August 9th) or next Saturday, August 16th between 10am and 1pm. Gallery 103 is located on the ground floor of the Ho-Chunk Centre located at 600 4th St, Sioux City, IA 51101.

Arts Itoya 2025 Residency Artwork 3: Blue Hour (藍影)

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Painting tanuki (Nyctereutes viverrinus) unintentionally became a multi-year quest, which lived up to the yokai version’s reputation for illusions and light-hearted trickery.

I decided to paint them on the fan-shaped washi paper which I dyed with indigo (aizome) in my workshop in Tokyo in mid-May. Due to the coloration of the washi and the folkloric aspect of tanuki, I chose to paint them in a limited color palette which isn’t completely monochromatic but which has indigo as the key color.

Tanuki are nocturnal, so the English title Blue Hour felt appropriate as the blue hour is a term for the short period of twilight just before sunrise or just after sunset. The Japanese title is 藍影 (Aikage), which means Indigo Shadows.

This is Blue Hour (藍影), acrylic and traditional indigo dye on fan-shaped washi paper, 7.7x15.75”, 2025.

LSU Vet Med Artist Residency Artwork 5 Process

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And here are process pictures of Singularity from start to finish!

LSU Vet Med Artist Residency Artwork 3

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The adorable Nigerian Dwarf goat model is named Morticia, and she came into the large animal area in need of a Caesarean section. While she has been waiting for her labor to commence, she posed for me. The ways in which humans and animals coexist in domesticated relationships were inspiration for this piece.

Lineage is a mixed media painting incorporating goat halter rope, debudding tool marks, and acrylic on panel, 13.5x13.5x1.5", 2022.



LSU Vet Med Artist Residency Artwork 2 Process

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As I mentioned in my first post about this painting, the coloration of the background comes from my novel usage of veterinary stains and medicine as art media, and I continued that color palette into the subject as well. However, there was a lot of trial and error in the creation of the background, and a cyan coloration that was produced ended up quickly going almost entirely fugitive (bleached out). I reinforced it with acrylic droplets as a final step, but as the painting continues to age, the background purple coloration is also beginning to fade. I may need to redo the whole background eventually, but right now I am adopting a wait-and-see approach!

This painting has already had a number of failed backgrounds, because two of the chemicals I tried to use for pigmentation clearly did not work from the start. The first I attempted was chlorhexidine, and the second was light green stain from Histology. “Wait a minute!” you might say to yourself. “Those chemicals are still listed in the mixed media!”

You’d be correct - I left them in because I kept sandwiching new chemicals between layers of acrylic medium, and I can’t be sure that some of those initial layers didn’t create the compositional effects that later resulted from the Diff-Quik methylene blue counter stain. That is the chemical that brought both the purple and strong cyan into to the background, but the cyan came from watering down or thinning out the stain and it began going fugitive quickly. The purple stuck around long enough that I thought it was permanent, but now it too is beginning to fade. I’ll continue to update you as to where this painting ends up, in terms of both aesthetics and process!

LSU Vet Med Artist Residency Artwork 2

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Here’s my second finished piece from my LSU Vet Med artist residency! I’m still mulling over the title - my current tentative selection is Wild Card, but I’m open to other suggestions.

I’ve met a lot of very cool animals here already, so this is high praise indeed - this is my favorite animal I’ve met thus far. ZooMed has a superstition they observe: you cannot name a wildlife patient, or its health will go downhill. This little fellow therefore doesn’t have a name, but he’s a real character. He has charisma and attitude in spades. When I arrived, he was a nestling and still had these “Einstein” feathers he’s rocking in the below image, but he’s now a fledgling and is getting closer to release every day!

I specifically chose the elongated landscape aspect ratio of this panel as mimicking the dimensions of the pathology slides. The coloration of the background comes from my novel usage of veterinary stains and medicine as art media, and I continued that color palette into the subject as well. However, as you’ll understand more clearly in the process post I’ll make soon, there was a lot of trial and error in the creation of the background, and a cyan coloration that was produced ended up quickly going almost entirely fugitive (bleached out). I reinforced it with acrylic droplets as a final step.

This is a mixed media painting of a wild brown thrasher nestling including Clinical Pathology's Diff-Quik methylene blue counter stain, Histology's light green stain, ZooMed's chlorhexidine antiseptic, and acrylic on basswood panel, 10x20x1.5", 2022.