"lets meet in the middle"

a friend of mine, Kristen, called me up one day and asked me if i could paint her a painting to hang in her room that would represent world peace and have bright colors and be kind of hippy looking. so i decided to paint a "suicide candle" wish is a double ended candle that people some times get tattooed on them in remembrance of some one they knew who committed suicide.the reason its called a suicide candle is because if you have a normal candle lit from one end it will burn and the flame will go out after a long period of time when its destined to. but if you light one from both ends it burns quicker, and the flame goes out long before the candle was suppose to. meaning some one who commits suicide dies before they are suppose to. so i put a peace cymbal in the canter of the candle, and the two ends of the candle are suppose to represent the two half's of the our divided world, hence the tittle " lets meet in the middle" meaning lets bring the two half's of our world together to peace... i dunno its the best i could come up with for world peace... and i just added the daisy's in there for hippy effect.

"Lifes hard work" 5-7-08

So one day Falicia called me and started telling me about this dream she had had the night before. she was walking through a forest talking to this giraffe, just having a normal conversation with this animal like it was normal to do, only strange thing was it was warring high heels. so after she had told me about this dream she asked me if i could try and paint a giraffe for her that was warring high heels. so i took on the challenge and this is what i came up with. a giraffe fallen on the ground laughing hysterically and warring high heels. and if you notice it only has 3 high heels on, the fourth is missing because it fell off when he tripped and fell on his ass. and of course i did the back ground three different shades of purple, since that's Falicia's favorite color. the original design that i had drawn up had a large puddle of urine under neither the giraffe, since i figured he was laughing so hard after falling down that he laughed until he pissed himself! but even though it made since to me and i thought it was hilarious, i figured Falicia wouldn't find it as funny as me and since she asked me to do this one for her i left the puddle of urine out. the painting is tittle "lifes hard work" because the giraffe is obviously having a hard time walking on high heels, but it still laughs and enjoys the fun in life.

"Hope flys" 5-6-08

There's a funny story behind this one, it actually started out as an entirely different painting. it was originally a gypsy head with 4 red traditional looking roses around it, but at the time i didn't have any skin tone paints so i just started mixing colors together to try and make a skin tone but once i painted her she ended up being too dark and you couldn't tell she was a gypsy, she looked more like Mrs. Butters worth, so painted over all of it with white paint. all but the one rose at the base of her neck since it was the only rose that was full and wasn't half behind her face. so then i had to come up with something else to paint on this piece of canvas. then i had the idea to do a human heart, but with wings and a key hole on it, representing, a heart that's locked up and kept save, but is still free to fly and take flight with its wings and soar. it was gunna have angel wings, but then i thought, why would and angel's heart be locked up, the reason this heats locked up is because its been hurt too many times, so its been beaten and torn and hurt, so its dark and ugly, so i drew drooping bat wings on it instead.then i had this little open spot that needed to be filled, so since in a lot of my drawings i usually did banners with script written on them i decided to try and paint one. so i added the banner and wrote "Hope" in it. the reason its called hope flys is obvious, theres wings in the painting meaning flight, and a banner that says "Hope". so even though this heart has been hurt and been locked up to protect its self from being hurt again, it has wings to soar, and with hope of a new love to take are of it, it takes flight. thus "Hope Flys".

"Scooter" 5-5-08

ok well early that day my best friend Nick had called me from Kansas to tell me all about this little tiny baby turtle him and a friend of his had found at work. they named it "scooter", on account that this little turtle moved so fast it took them a wile to catch. and latter that evening after Falicia and i had returned from our date and she went back to her house, nick called me back and said i should paint a picture of scooter for him. so i told him i would do a painting just for him for his birthday (which was a month before) since i didn't have enough money to buy him anything for his birthday. then he told me i should paint it kind of cartoony looking so it would look like a little kid painted it. so i decided "hey i did cup cakes earlier today, why not do a birthday cake now?" so i added in the birthday cake with a bite taken out of it, a party hat on Scooter the turtle, a red balloon in the air, and i added a cigarette on top of the cake, since Nick is a chain smoker, so i felt it was appropriate. which latter on everyone would tell me that was their favorite part about the painting, the "motha f@#$in random cigarette,".

"killer cupcakes" 5-5-08

This ones real simple... i was looking through one of my tattoo magazines i have and in the back of this magazine thy always have flash art that different artists have drawn up and sent in, and in this magazine one artist had drawn a picture of two cup cakes sitting next to each other. so i thought to myself, "hmmm i wunna paint a picture of some cup cakes" plus i had just bought a new bottle of bright pink paint and had not painted anything with it yet so why not do some cup cakes? they can have pink frosting! so i painted the first small one off in the distance, then thought to myself i gotta do the other one differently so its not just a boring picture of two cupcakes just sitting there. so i had the idea to have the closer one stabbed to the table by a dagger. and the hole time i was painting this one, Falicia was sitting next to me at my table drawing me a picture that i would latter use as a design in one of my other paintings. but we had planned to go get some ice cream that night at the Kemah boardwalk, so she finished drawing her picture for me and i had just finished doing the green in my painting but hadn't added the back ground just yet, i was still having trouble deciding what color to do the back ground (which is one of my BIGGEST problems with most all my paintings). so i mixed a few colors together and got this dull yellow color and thought to myself it might look good, so i quickly just brushed it on around my painting, just to see what it would look like. since she was done with what she was working on i told her i would just finish my back ground latter and we could go ahead and leave to go on our date. after wards once i had gotten home and sat down to finish my back ground i realized i didn't need to, it actually looked good the way it was, it even looked like i meant for it to look that way! so i left it.

"Shes my cherry blossom" 4-20-08

This was my second painting i ever did. it is a dead tree that still produces beautiful blossoms despite it being dead. Ok so basically i wanted to do a dead tree for a wile because i had just got my leg piece finished. which is a huge dead tree with a vulture in the branches, a zebra skull in the grass below it and a bleeding moon in the night sky. my friend and tattoo artist Shawn Will had drawn up this tattoo for me and spent 13 hours and 3 sessions working on my leg. and well it inspired me to try my hand at painting a dead tree. so that was my inspiration for this painting, and once i decided to add the cherry blossoms blowing in the wind is when i came up with a meaning behind it and gave it the tittle. basically the dead tree represents me, its worn, ugly, dead, and not to mention tall and skinny. and the cherry blossoms growing from it and blowing in the wind represents my girl friend, Falicia, adding color, and beauty to what was my dull, dead, life. yeah yeah yeah i know its corny and kinda sappy. but its true.

"Thea rt of my heart is the heart of my art" 4-19-08

This was my very first painting i ever did (not including finger painting and water colors when i was a little kid). so here's a little back story behind this painting, it was in April 2008, and my best friend Nick was in town from Kansas getting tattooed at our favorite tattoo shop (Bay Area Tattoos) and me and my other good friend Daniel were just chilling up there watching Nick get a sweet tattoo from the owner Bill Greenman. of course like our normal adventures to the tattoo shop, it was gunna be an all nighter before Nick's piece was finished. so me and Daniel stayed up there for several hours, at least until 2 or 3 a.m., watching and visiting with out friends and some of the other artists in the shop. then we finally decided to leave, and since Nick was gunna be in town for a few more days and the three of us wanted to hang out again the next day, Daniel decided to just stay the night at my house. so him and i get back to my place, go inside to my room and start listening to some music and just visiting. we started talking about art and how we both wish we could paint. Daniel started talking about how he wanted to learn to do water colors, because a few days earlier he had been up at the tattoo shop watching Bobby (one of the tattoo artists that works there) using water colors. and i started talking about how i wanted to learn to paint with acrylics since i know if i ever decided to sale some of my art no one would ever pay money for my pencil drawings since the majority of them were done on rice paper. so we talked for a wile about our desires to learn to paint, then we realized the sun had already came up and there was NO way either of us were going to be able to go to sleep now. so i said to Daniel, "well do you want to start painting? ya know since we're not gunna go to sleep now?" and he loved the idea! so we jumped in his car and drove up the road to the wal-mart here in Kemah and went straight to the arts and crafts department. Daniel grabbed a small package of cheap brushes and a pack of starter acrylic paints, and i grab the obviously appropriate choice for me, the "acrylics painting for dummies" starter kit, which came with several brushes, paints, pallets, tools, and a book on how to learn to paint. then we grabbed some cheap canvas pallets and checked out. on our way back to my house we stopped at sonic to get some drinks to help keep us awake while we discussed what the each of us wanted to paint. Daniel decided he wanted to do some thing abstract, and i decided i simply wanted to do something with the words "the art of my heart is the heart of my art" some were in it. Daniel quickly snapped to it and said "you should paint a big heart in the middle of it then take some broken shards of a mirror and glue then in the middle of the heart so then when you look at it you see yourself, because your art comes from YOUR heart, and the heart of your art is what you feel inside!" i loved the idea! so when we got home i found a mirror, smashed it with a hammer and got some shards and we both sat down and started painting. by the time i had finally finished this painting i decided not to glue the shards of glass to it, it was an awesome idea don't get me wrong! but i just felt it would take away from all the hard work i just did on painting this big reddish heart! so i left it how it was, and that's when i started painting and a whole new world of art was opened up to me.

Introductions...

Hi, my name is Jake Overton, but as you can tell, to most people I'm known simply as "Shaggy". I got that nickname from my tattoo artist, Shawn Will, up at Bay Area Tattoos because i had my display name on my myspace page as "shaggy" for a while (because I'm a big Scooby-Doo fan), and since he didn't know my real name for a while every time i would come up to the tattoo shop to get some more work done he would always call me Shaggy. After that the name just kinda stuck. but its fitting since I'm rather tall, lanky, a little whiskery on the chin, and will not let my hair be cut any shorter than my chin, i still resemble the great Shaggy from one of the world's best Saturday morning cartoons! enough about my nick name though, moving on. i am 20 years old, and i am a "starving artist", quite literally at times. Ive been drawing all my life, from growing up as a little boy in a Baptist church in Tennessee doodling on any piece of paper i could find, to now painting with acrylics on stretched canvas, to designing tattoos for myself as well as my friends, to sanding down the hood of my old totaled car and drawing on it with chalks and clear coating it, art is definitely my passion, and i hope one day to be my career! when people ask me what my plans are for my distant future and my career path i simply reply "if it ain't art, i don't want no part!"(you can see the mountain accent coming out in me when i say that). the purpose of this blog is rather simple, i want to write an autobiography style art book explaining my paintings and some of my other art work, and my mom (who is a professional quilter and fanatic blogger) told me, "why not blog it first and get feed back on it before you actually sit down and write it?". so here i am, and here's what to expect from this, I'm going to upload one photo of each of my paintings in a blog post and then explain that painting. what it is, what it represents, what the meaning behind the name is, what my influences were for that particular painting, and basically a small look into my mind and the madness behind some of my paintings. so i hope you all enjoy this, and i am eagerly awaiting your feed back on what you all think of my paintings! i will try to put all my paintings in order as they were done so not only will you be able to see how Ive progressed in my self taught painting, but also in how Ive progressed in being able to express my thoughts, feelings, and ideas through my art work.