July, 2008 Hello from Santa Monica! Summer is here with a vengeance and the beach is packed. As always I find myself torn between locking myself in the studio and hanging a “gone to the beach” sign on the door and vanishing for a few weeks. Balance is always a difficult thing to strike when the weather demands copious sun exposure. A touch over ten years ago I spent the better part of a year rooming with a guy who described everything as being “like ass.” “This thing tastes like ass” or “that sounds like ass” were common utterances. Looking to do something a bit different, I decided to explore a literal translation of his adjective use of the word “ass” and see what it might really be like to have something “feel like ass.” This month marks the official unveiling of the “Five Senses of Ass” project I’ve been working on for the past two years. Each of the resulting images combines real photographic elements with hand painted "ass" to challenge the zone of comfort and incite discussion of our own experiences with the senses of “ass.” All five images from the series are now on display in my online Senses of Ass gallery and are featured in the July edition of Downtown LA Life Magazine. As always I have a variety of sticks in the fire that should bear some fruit in the near future. I continue to push forward with my defocused architecture project as well as some new abstract work. Hoar Frost - 2007 - Early the morning of January 28th, 2007 I hit the road between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles on my way back from the Sundance Film Festival. Leaving at the unnatural hour of 5:30am in an attempt to avoid crazy Sunday traffic in Las Vegas, the glow of the morning sun had yet to even make an appearance over the horizon. With temperatures right around 0°F and massive amounts of low-lying fog, just about every square inch of the landscape that wasn’t already blanketed in winter snow was covered with a thick coating of hoar frost. As the fog began to lift and the sun rose above the mountains, I ran the car off the road somewhere in Southwestern Utah, jumped a few fences and captured some nice imagery of the delicate crystals before they were ravaged by the rays of the rising sun. This print is currently showing online and is available for purchase as a fine art print in my Geometry gallery. Cheers, Walt Jones