Aug 6, 2011, Rockwagon created 4 paintings and 25 limited edition screen prints  of the Statue of Liberty for a veteran benefit auction in Guthrie, OK at the Lazy E Arena.

For more details about the event and the organization that brought us out please visit www.rustyholdmyhand.com

Worked with the Cordova Youth Group on a 30 hour lock-in art project. I was really impressed with the attention the students paid to the ideas going into the composition. While they didn’t always have the tools to talk about what they read in the piece, you could definitely see the cogs turning. That alone is priceless.

This May, armed with passion and a duffel bag full of paint, I headed out to the west coast for a month of intensive art. What I ended up with on my journey was 21 paintings in 28 days.

The teens working on the collages for the "30 Hour Famine" Lock-in. Very dilligent.

As a prototype for the Europe trip, it was successful. What I learned is that connections are key. If we are to succeed with our vision, we will need strategic partnerships at every stop along the way. We will need friends who will guide us and care for our melted brains after painting for 8 hours at a time.

The next big thing for Rockwagon

The other thing we will need, and desperately so, is an automatic documenting strategy. I was relying on myself to take pictures of myself. See how dumb that sounds? So we are trying out the GoPro Hero HD, a tiny waterproof POV camera that we can clip to the top of the canvas, strap on the end of a brush, or wear on our chest. The best part is that you turn it on and then forget about it. This means the likelihood of success goes up exponentially. We should post some of our experimental footage soon.

Sketch for "Christ Descends into Limbo," The painting performed during Chris Goldman's Class at Pepperdine.

3 paintings from Northwest Church in Seattle.

Overall, the trip was great and it made Penelope and I fall in love with Seattle and the rest of the Northwest. It was easy to be creative in such a lush, beautiful landscape. Not that Pepperdine was too shabby down in Malibu. We will be working on some new projects in the Memphis area for the rest of the summer.

Any other candidates for a region to do a second trial run? Do we have enough contacts and potential venues out east? I hope so. Lets hear from people in New York, Maine, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and D.C. that are ready to have us come out!

The finished Easter painting from Highpoint’s Easter service

The child shall strike the Serpent's head

Here is a quick recap of Friday night.

Europe 2012

Our vision is to take a tour of Europe recreating similar updated versions of other renaissance works. The renaissance masterpieces were commissioned by the church as visual aids for a mostly illiterate population. Today’s postmodern audience need visual aids speaking directly to them.

Earlier this year, the TED prize was awarded to JR, a French street artist. In his presentation, he requested that everyone participate in a global art project to “turn the world inside out.” He has a very specific vision of how anyone could participate in this by continuing his method of pasting enormous photographic portraits in high-traffic areas across the globe. A year ago, Rockwagon began to dream of a similar project. Just like JR, we want to turn the world inside out, but with our own methods.

Loren

“While studying renaissance art in 2005, I was in and out of cathedrals all over Europe looking at the original pieces. No prints or reproductions, these were the canvasses the artists had toiled with. It was breathtaking to encounter the brushstrokes and pigment in their actual physicality. Near the end of my studies, I began to notice something hollow and haunting about the rooms where the pieces hung. Often these spaces were empty or under-utilized. When we would spill back out onto the street outside, there was no shortage of people, but they had no idea what incredible treasures were inside. I wondered, “is this what was intended when the art was made?”

After a little prodding into historical accounts like Vasari’s “The Lives of the Artists,” I discovered that no, the paintings were not meant to be entombed. They were visual aides! The church had commissioned them to help tell their greatest stories and to reach a mostly illiterate population. They were intended to help transport the viewers to a different time and place so that they could grow and deepen their understanding.  Armed with this understanding of art as instructive, character building media, I recast my purpose as an artist. My job is not to make pretty things that make pretty homes. My job is to use my inborn gift of observation to help others refocus and see the world from new perspectives, to remove boundaries of time and space and help people feel things they may have always known.”

Kyle

“I’m sure Loren and I are not alone in our struggle to understand exactly what type of context we live in. The indecisiveness of our Post-modern thought closely rivals the illiteracy of our brothers and sisters of the Renaissance. Sure, technology is exponentially pushing the boundaries of communication, entertainment and medicine, in its speed and fluidity but has our walk through this world really changed much in the last one thousand years.We humans live and die and are constantly hoping for something more than that. Wars and marriages are still built upon the moments when two conflicting sides either reach a brutal crossroads or make beautiful compromise. 

I often describe the birth of a painting as a two part process: there is the physical act of putting paint to canvas and then there is the ever more insidious…watching. Waiting for things to reveal themselves. Waiting for the strokes that you overlapped and colors that you mixed to settle into a state of transition, even if its just for a moment, so that you can rush in and reveal it, to uncover what you saw. When Loren and I meet at a painting the process is mutual but somehow staggered. While we are both working simultaneously on the painting, we’re focusing on different sections. We are making decisions in those areas that the other will need made when he arrives there. So the watching time that is necessary while working solo is eliminated by the other’s working.”

Its a sort of tango – One of the reasons why we desperately want to share this kind of experience in a public forum is so that people might be able to associate that experience with an area, and give it good baggage. If this is an unfamiliar phenomenon, perhaps they will begin to seek out these odd encounters on their own.

As you came in this morning, you passed by a painting in progress. The artists will be working feverishly to complete their painting while we share ideas today.

Rockwagon is a performance-painting project that consists of a tangled mass of 4 hands and 2 brains that come together to create arresting interpretations of abstract concepts.

Loren and Kyle have been painting live as Rockwagon since 2007. Their collaborative painting style has taken them from coast to coast, but many of you will know them best for their local work in arenas, churches, schools, and the installation in the AAR terminal by Will Rogers airport.

This evening, we will hear more from them about what they are creating today and what they are planning for 2012.

Why St. Jerome?

Today you have watched us paint an updated version of Carvaggio’s three portraits of St. Jerome. St. Jerome is the man responsible for translating the entirety of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek biblical texts into the Latin Vulgate – the common language of the time. He finished his translation in the year 405.

St. Jerome at TEDxOKC stands for taking today’s big ideas and making them not just accessible, but also making them personal.

OK, but the Tattoos?

The eighteenth verse in the eleventh chapter of the Bible reads:

“Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.”

In the Orthodox Hebrew tradition these words from God are interpreted as a literal command to seal tiny passages of scripture in small boxes that are to be tied to the forehead and left arm with leather straps. These are known as phylacteries.

St. Jerome was a literary man. He understood what he read deeply. Our St. Jerome takes a vivid postmodern turn by switching  out black leather straps for black ink. We must go deeper. Jerome shows us the type of commitment we must have to internalizing our greatest lessons.

They must become a part of us.

Click here to see where Rockwagon is headed with this idea.

Video created in 2010 to help describe the process and idea behind Rockwagon’s live painting experience. The challenge discussed in this video is how to appropriately combine growing older and more mature with staying fresh and open to the abstract feelings in life. We attempt to open up some of these issues when we paint publicly, inviting people to share the space and the energy that we use to create art together.

The stoic look is in this season

Rockwagon is the live performance painting project from Kyle Taylor and Loren O’Laughlin.

Who is Rockwagon: Kyle Taylor and Loren O’Laughlin find common ground in surrendering their individual creative processes to work collaboratively on live paintings.

Roots: Both Kyle (Memphis, TN) and Loren (Sacramento, CA) graduated from Oklahoma Christian University’s BFA program. During their undergraduate studies, they took mutual interest in trying to rectify the disparity between the art world, which seemed to survive on the new and edgy and the church, which was so crucial to its evolution. Rockwagon is currently based out of the greater Memphis area and travels to various locations around the country to complete commissions.

On the record: “Painting isn’t nearly as hard as thinking. There is a video out there of a chimpanzee painting. He was having a great time – that is how performing feels. The preparation is the hard work.”

“Along with all of your goals, ambitions and truth seeking, find peace in reminding yourself that you are the first time that anyone has ever been you.”

Honors: The work that Rockwagon is most proud of is being able to partner with schools, churches, sports teams and corporate clients without changing gears. In the summer of 2010, they were honored by having their work permanently installed in the AAR private jet terminal at the Will Rockwagon can also be found on Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. Who is Rockwagon: Kyle Taylor and Loren O’Laughlin find common ground in surrendering their individual creative processes to work collaboratively on live paintings.

Roots: Both Kyle (Memphis, TN) and Loren (Sacramento, CA) graduated from Oklahoma Christian University’s BFA program. During their undergraduate studies, they took mutual interest in trying to rectify the disparity between the art world, which seemed to survive on the new and edgy and the church, which was so crucial to its evolution. Rockwagon is currently based out of the greater Memphis area and travels to various locations around the country to complete commissions.

On the record: “Painting isn’t nearly as hard as thinking. There is a video out there of a chimpanzee painting. He was having a great time – that is how performing feels. The preparation is the hard work.”

“Along with all of your goals, ambitions and truth seeking, find peace in reminding yourself that you are the first time that anyone has ever been you.”

Honors: The work that Rockwagon is most proud of is being able to partner with schools, churches, sports teams and corporate clients without changing gears. In the summer of 2010, they were honored by having their work permanently installed in the AAR private jet terminal at the Will Rogers Airport.

Online: Rockwagon can also be found on Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter.