Ballew Art

RYMAN SHOW 2010

2010-09-25T12:42:00.001-07:00

The Ryman show AFFAIR OF THE ART is next weekend. I did these five pieces just a few days ago.
THE GRIM KITTY

GOOD DOG

THUNDER MOUSE

DOGS PLAYING RUSSIAN ROULETTE

WHITE
This one was done as a companion piece for an older painting RED. They're shown here side by side.

RYMAN SHOW 2008

2008-11-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

This year for the Ryman I decided to try to find an artistic voice: specifically Lowbrow Art. Oh, sure, I guess that's what I've been doing all along, but not with a consistent style or message. So this year I did five pieces that worked together. Each of these is painted on deep canvases, and the painting wraps around the edges.

People really loved them... however, nobody bought one. I can only ascribe it to the fact that the audience for this type of art may be a bit younger, with cashflow problems. I heard more than once, "oh, I'd buy that if only I had enough money." As it was I thought I'd priced them fairly. Oh well.

The good thing, though, is now I have five paintings, enough to participate in a group show at a Lowbrow art gallery, where they will find the crowd that they're meant for. later this year I will start looking into possible galleries.

INTERVENTIONIST GOD

NO MORE HUGS

IGNORANCE

CUTEASTROPHE

ADORABLE DESTROYER

2007 RYMAN SHOW PAINTINGS

2007-09-17T14:59:00.000-07:00

BLUE FAIRY

BRIAR ROSE

THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN

PEACE OFFERING

SORE LOSER

JUMPIN JACKALOPES

2007-02-14T13:35:00.000-08:00

In 2007 I made this logo for a volleyball team I was on.

ASSORTED ORPHAN IMAGES

2006-09-18T16:21:00.000-07:00

SANDY AND ROBERTO ALOMAR POSTER
Many years ago a friend asked me to make this poster, because he was trying to get hired as an accountant for Sandy and Roberto Alomar, who at the time were the only brothers in the big leagues who played on the same team. But before I could totally complete it, one of the brothers left that team for another, so the whole idea no longer seemed so great. Still, its the only sports portrait I've ever done. Unlike most of my paintings, I did this on my computer, mostly using a program called Painter.

BETH'S OTTER
I painted this for my friend Beth as a birthday gift. Later on I painted a larger version of the idea for the Ryman show (see images for 2006 below)

SCOTT and BETH
This was for Beth and her husband Scott. He's a big believer in American Indian religeon, and his spirit animal is the dragonfly, and Beth's is the otter, so I made them this card.

MOTIVATION

PEA EYE AND GUS
This is a painting I abandoned becasue I didn't like how it was turning out. Its a scene from the novel Lonesome Dove. Maybe I'll finish it someday.

ROCK SHOPPER
This is a digital painting I did based on several photos I took of a little girl who was walkign around on the shoreline shopping for rocks. The ship was indeed behind her in the photo, and its none other than the SS Constitution, which was participating in a regatta. The photo was taken in Glouchester Mass.

2006 RYMAN SHOW PAINTINGS

2006-09-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

ART CRITICS

BEACHED

HUNGER

SURVIVAL

MARTY'S COMMEMORATIVE ART GLASS

2006-02-14T13:55:00.000-08:00

I did this artwork as part of a gift for Imagineering's head VP, when he was retiring from the position. It went in a box with many other pieces of art created by other imagineers.

CHARITY PET ART SHOW SUBMISSION

2005-09-18T16:14:00.000-07:00

DARTH VADER'S DOG

2005 RYMAN PAINTINGS

2005-09-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

TEMPTING FATE

HIGHWAYMEN

THE IMPOSSIBLE HOUSE - Note: this illustration is full of structural illusions. Can you spot them?

CHERRY BLOSSOM PICNIC

CARDS FOR FRIENDS AT WORK

2005-02-14T13:18:00.000-08:00

Here are a random assortment of cards I did for friends at work between 2003 and 2005. I was mostly working on Tokyo Buzz Lightyear at the time, which explains the little green men!

2004 RYMAN PAINTINGS

2004-09-18T15:49:00.000-07:00

MACHU PICCU WIENERSCHNITZEL

RED

CLEM AND THE CATTLE RUSTLERS

SEA STORY SET
These two paintings were designed to work as a set. They tell the story of a man who is marooned out at sea, and his wife who is wondering what ever became of her man.

MAROONED

SEA WIDOW

2003 RYMAN PAINTINGS

2003-09-18T15:50:00.000-07:00

A WALK IN THE WOODS
I did this unique painting in a shadow box. It had four or five layers of watercolors which were cut out in layers. It's lit inside with several little LED's that I wired into it.
When looked at straight on, a hiker is seen taking a stroll alone through the woods.

But if you look at it from any other point of view, you can see several bears hiding in the underbrush!

THRILL RIDE

PHAT JAMS

AN IMPROBABLE EVENT

2002 RYMAN PAINTINGS

2002-09-18T15:50:00.000-07:00

OVERWELMING

A BEAUTIFUL VIEW

SEX MACHINE

HIKING THE TERRIER WILDLANDS

IT COST ME FOUR DOLLARS!

2001 RYMAN PAINTINGS

2001-09-18T15:59:00.000-07:00

For the first time ever, I am invited to submit paintings for the ryman show. Ultimately only one of my paintings sold, but that's okay, they weren't all that great anyway.
WHAT'S THIS?

ARRRGGGGHHH!!!

EBENEEEEZER SCROOOOOOGE!!!

SANTA MONICA PIER

CREATURE OF THE BACK BATHROOM

JOE GETS PROMOTED

2001-02-14T13:54:00.000-08:00

I did this painting for my friend Joe Lanzisero, when he got promoted to a Vice President level at Imagineering.

RADIO SHOW

2000-09-17T17:53:00.000-07:00

In 2000, I did this piece of artwork for a radio show I performed with a bunch of friends. (I'm the big fat hairy one in the back row). For a live audience, we performed a variety of authentic old time radio shows, complete with live music and sound effects. We only did two performances, even though it was good enough to have performed in a regular theater. I wish we did it more times, because when else am I going to get to perform as Tonto?

GI CHUCK

1998-09-17T17:34:00.000-07:00

In 1998, when I still had a beard, I made a custom 12 inch action figure of myself. I did it mainly because a friend of mine had made a headsculpt of himself, and I wanted to one-up him by making a head AND an illustrated box. I ultimately made about 10 of these and sent them to various longtime friends who I thought would appreciate it. I sculpted the head, and made a cast, and then used a Gi Joe body and basic modern uniform with a padded belly to complete my inaction figure, complete with junk food grip!
PHOTO OF FINAL FIGURE AND BOX

BOX ART
The box art was designed to fit onto a Cotswald box, since I had several of them lying around.
PLEASE keep in mind, that this was PRE-war. I have nothing but pity for the poor national guardsmen dragged away from their barbeques to Iraq!

A 3-d view of the box.

Around the same time, my friend Moe made his own special action figure, so I did this logo for him.

Indiana Jones Adventure 1993

1993-02-14T13:52:00.000-08:00

I did this drawing of the Showset Design team for the Indiana Jones Adventure. I only finally got around to adding color and sending prints to these guys in 2006!!! I am a master procrastinator!

RAY BRADBURY'S LOST CITY OF MARS

1989-08-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

I attended Graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. I had a double major: Costume design and Scenic design, in the Theater department.

Before graduation in 1989 I had to do my THESIS PROJECTS. For me, as a double theater major, this meant doing all the designs for a fictitious production, as if it had an unlimited budget. Unlike the rest of the students, I was uninterested in doing a play, musical or opera. Instead, I wanted to do a MOVIE!!!

This was a problem because movie design wasn't part of our education, although I did design a television set for a special project. My professor, Cletus Anderson, was a movie production designer who worked primarily for George Romero, and I figured he'd be well qualified to advise and judge my work. Well, to make a long story short, I eventually wore him down and he let me do the project. He came up with an assignment:

Pick a short story.
Turn it into an outline or treatment to show how it would be a movie.
Do production paintings of all the major sets.
Do detailed design drawings and color boards for one of those sets.
Do costume designs with fabric swatches for all the costumes in the movie.
Do storyboards for enough scenes to identify all the necessary sets and movie scope.

Cletus knew that even a small movie is extremely complex, so he hoped I'd pick a simple story to keep the number of sets down.

Instead, I picked an EPIC short story: RAY BRADBURY'S LOST CITY OF MARS.

Why this story? I have no idea now, so many years later. But I was looking for something totally 'out there', and this story features a voyage into a completely alien city, and I loved the idea of inventing my own idea of architecture, without having to rely on historic architecture, which I've never had that much interest in.

I worked at it for months, drawing, sketching, planning... It was fun! I never did quite complete the assignment, because it was true that the project was way more complex than I thought at first. In the end, what I came up with was more of a movie proposal than a full-blown design. However, I did so many drawings and designs, far more than any of my fellow students, that Cletus passed me based solely on sheer amount of work done (it was strictly a pass/fail type of thing).

After I graduated I occasionally thought perhaps I ought to do something with the project. At the very minimum, I thought it would be fun to show it to Ray Bradbury. But ultimately I got a job at Walt Disney Imagineering and got so caught up in my career that I completely left my movie design plans behind.

Fast forward to October, 2007. I received an invitation to attend a special celebration at Club 33 at Disneyland, where Ray Bradbury was to be the guest of honor! He was being honored for his longtime work with Disney. 32 years previous he had published his book "The Halloween Tree" and now Disneyland had decided to add a Halloween Tree to Disneyland, with a commemorative plaque, which every year on Halloween will be decorated and embellished. Basically giving Ray a place in Disneyland forever!

So it occurred to me that I could cut together all that artwork and create a proposal that I could hand to Ray! Not necessarily to turn it into an actual project, but as a commemoration of my own, a thanks to him for his inspirational work. Lately Ray, who is very old, is traveling the world receiving honors and attending new theatrical productions based on his work.

So I put together these pages, and bound them together into a book and Tony Baxter, the Imagineer who organized the event, introduced me to Ray so I could hand it to him. He's a bit hard of hearing, and I wasn't entirely sure he understood what it was. But a little while later I took him MY copy of the proposal so he could sign it. Inside the first page he wrote "A+! Ray Bradbury". Yay!

I have no idea if Ray has ever looked through this proposal, or if he likes it or hates it. He's a pretty persnickety dude, and I wouldn't be suprised if he didn't like it, but hey, I did it a long time ago.

DESIGN NOTES: I changed the plot slightly from the original story, but not that much. Mostly to add elements that would make more scientific sense, as well as elements in the end to give a more happy ending to the story. The short story ends in such a way that it feels quite bleak and bizarre, but I thought it needed something more romantic, or at least more conventionally romantic.

MOTIFS: The main motif I used throughout was the shape of an eye. This is due to a theme of 'observation' found throughout the story. The astronauts are observing distant planets, and the Martian city observes the occupants. Therefore I worked a lot of eye shapes into the martian scenery, mirrored by the eye shaped telescope of the astronaut's space telescope.

HUMAN STYLE: The colonists are recently arrived on Mars, so their equipment is mostly functional and kludged together. But some of the characters are very rich, so their private weapons and vehicles show a swooping, elegant design. The costumes I specifically designed to appear unrelated to modern dress, as if this story takes place far into the future. One of my pet peeves in most sci-fi movies is that they usually keep modern clothing basics, such as buttons, collars, shoe shapes, skirts for girls, pants for men etc... which I believe will disappear eventually. So I came up with a completely different way to shape collars, generally pointy and asymmetrical. And I made the shoes have a strange bridge over the top of the foot, primarily because its one of those arbitrary style things that people adopt to create a silhouette, not for any practical reason.

SCIENCE: I designed this as if Mars is being terraformed, and is to the point where people can walk and breathe freely, but they need small blowers in front of their faces to get enough oxygen. Also they need to wear clothing that will cut out the UV radiation from the sun. So each character has some sort of hood or had incorporating red transparent materials to eliminate UV in addition to red being the color of style on Mars.

MARTIAN STYLE: to contrast with the Human world, I tried to make the architecture mostly sculptural, avoiding human things like symmetry and geometry, and structures like arches and columns. Inside the city itself the technology is so advanced that the structure is completely hidden, so vast buildings can be entirely sculptural, without even the smallest hint of the mechanical systems that support them.

I doubt this project will ever become a movie, particularly because its a pretty obscure piece and there are a lot more famous Bradbury stories that would be made first. But if there were a movie version of the Lost City of Mars, I like to think it would look something like this.

Chuck Ballew