Vampires - Phil Hale

This past month marked 10 years since I last got a paycheck after deciding to move full-time from the sciences to the arts. It’s been a crazy, fulfilling, and rough ride. I survived thanks to the endless kindness of friends and family but also in large part by selling off my art collection piece-by-painful-piece. At no time was this more true than while in Chicago during a five-year period where I worked 80+ hour weeks to make MONOCYTE, start 44FLOOD, and make the TOME anthologies and many other books while receiving next to no income. I honestly don't know how I did it.

So it’s an uplifting start to 2019 by being able to hang this fantastic Phil Hale painting up on my studio wall.

I’ve shamelessly coveted this painting for more than 10 years. I think Phil called it one of his strangest while in its original brown backdrop with water tower version, which he reworked by changing the background/setting entirely, as well as the color scheme along with adding the cloaked skull and jettisoned…eggs? It took the piece from industrial furor to an almost enraptured, metaphysical representation of the same.

Back in 2013, Phil was kind enough to let me use this piece as the incentive cover to the last issue of my four-issue book MONOCYTE with IDW Publishing. It was the final piece in the unfolding of the series, following successive incentive covers by some of the very best: Ashley Wood, Bill Sienkiewicz, and George Pratt. Whether Phil intended it or not, I took it as an encouraging “you’re OK, kid” moment. And sometimes you need that.

HUGE SPECIAL SHOUT OUT + MASSIVE RESPECT + GIGANTIC BEAR HUGS TO MR. GREGG SPATZ, one of the genuine good people out there whose boundless energy and love of art is an example to everyone. Gregg went out of his way in 2013 to have this monster piece professionally scanned for us to print, then years later remembered my love for the painting and again went out his way to make sure it would come into my home.

And, of course, all thanks go to Phil.

Framed art has an overall size of 47x64” and is oils on linen. For the record, the wooden crate weighed 154 pounds.