The End of the Era of Gage

I kind of faded off in updating this blog and thought it would be nice to give it a final conclusion.

I finished up my studies at the Gage Academy in June of 2013!  It was an amazing experience and I have made many lifelong friends along the way.  My initial plan of one year turned into three and I never expected to have improved as much as I did.  I will continue to promote this place, probably for the rest of my life and carry what I have learned with me in whatever I do.  An unexpected epiphany for me was that while sharing a studio space with many other people and as I became more and more of a senior member of the Atelier, I discovered that I had a passion not only for the work but also teaching and helping other people discover similar passions in themselves.  I have experienced and witnessed improvements that were all but unimaginable.  The next step for me is, as was always the plan, graduate school and I am writing this final post from my apartment in San Francisco where I have just started to path for my MFA in Traditional Illustration at the Academy of Art University.  I'm not quite sure where I'll land in the giant, weird spectrum between fine art and illustration but I'm going for it, whatever it may be.

Reporting now from the beginning of the final push of schooling, this blog has come to an end but this is just the beginning of my artistic career.  I still have a web presence at www.joshpemberton.com , http://joshasartist.deviantart.com/, and the most frequently updated www.facebook.com/JoshAsArtist .  Once I process and focus in one a specific direction I will resume updating my site to reflect this.  Until then it's facebook!

Clothed Model!

I haven't had many opportunities to draw from a clothed model so i'm very pleased with this

Here's a better image

I had a show deadline for this.  I still might tweek it some more but who knows...

Here's some 3hr liferooms

Decided to finally update

First off I'd like to apologize for not updating this blog for so long and the amount of backlog info i'm about to dump into this post.  I gave my website an overhaul too at about the same time as this post so there's a bit of overlap.

Been fairly busy and sidetracked with painting and life.  I was fortunate enough to have been able to show my work along with Jameson Hubbard, Lowell Poisson, and Mark Kang-O'Higgins at the OK Hotel this past month.  All of these guys are great so check them out!

Lowell has pictures of the space on his blog.  A bit of after-the-fact promotion but it went really well.  Thanks to everyone who made it.  Special thanks to Kirk for lending back a few pieces for the show and more...

We just took down the show this last weekend but instead of whisking them off again, I am proud to announce that two of my pieces, "A Bird On It," and "CJ feat. Chancy" are now up on display at the Jamie O'Neill Salon and GRUB on Queen Anne!  

Along with all this excitement, my class (KOH Atelier) is having a show at the Rosen Gallery at Gage Academy April 12 - May 3.  The opening reception is Friday, April 19th, 6:00-8:00pm.  

The best news of all is that I got into grad school for Traditional Illustration so I'll be starting up at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco starting in the fall!

Busy busy!  Now onto what I've been working on... PAINTING!

Our Atelier seems to have amassed an impressive collection of skulls and bones from all sorts of creatures so while they're there...!  Besides the obvious person, these are coyote skulls. 

I liked this one more before it got super dark but unfortunately I only have a blurry cellphone picture

The rest were studies for this.  It's not finished yet but here's what I've got so far...

I've mostly been painting but I've got a few quick liferoom sketches too.

We were lucky enough to get the opportunity to draw a very pregnant lady.  The baby kicked a few times and we could see the shadows change.

I sorta accidentally drew a cover for a romance novel...

We had done this once before where in life room we would switch places with someone else part way through a pose.  Besides being really fun, it's super helpful to keep everybody from getting caught up in the same patterns of drawing that we always do.  In this case, the below drawing was started by Christine, then Beth, possibly someone else, and then myself.  By the end of the day everyone's drawings were all sorts of awesome.