LINKS!

Website links:

Jackson Hunt

Eric Diehl

Bushwick

Getting ready for the first stop in our journey. Bushwick rooftops!

Hey folks! Daylight savings is giving us some more light and its wonderful! Here is a picture of us on Eric's studio's rooftop and a brief tour of some current projects. Excitement is building in preparation for the trip! Lets do it!

Hi, we are Jackson Hunt and Eric Diehl - two Brooklyn-based painters and alumni of Pratt Institute. We both share a common aesthetic of figurative-realism and being broke.

We have planned a six-week road trip from New York to California in which we will document the nations landscape in paint, stopping in 9 locations making no less than 3 paintings per stop in addition to many sketches. Using the internet- especially facebook – we have been contacting other artists in these cities to interview and use as cultural tour guides for their specific region.

Planned route: Brooklyn, NY, Seaside, NJ, Lancaster, PA, Detroit, MI, the twin cities MN, Keystone, SD, Santa Fe, NM, Las Vegas, NV, and Los Angeles, CA.

In addition to documenting this trip in pencil and paint, we will be shooting every location in HD digital to create a documentary of the journey. Afterwards we hope to take this show on the road displaying our paintings in a gallery setting to share this trip with as many people as possible.

The massive country in which we live has become smaller. The United States faces stereotypes, shrinking and homogenizing locals, media labels, economic collapse - which smothers the voice of individual interactions. With the creation of the Internet every community and individual has access to images and articles illuminating the nation. However, much of our media exposure is based on caricatures of customs, opinions, and dialects from every regional corner. Current TV and Internet depictions not only bring ideas and people together, but also focus on what keeps us apart.

Our mission is to shine a little subjective light between these polarized communities. The WPA projects of the 30's and the 40's designed to record the effects of the Great Depression are incomprehensible to the Federal Government at this time. This does not eclipse the value and need for artists to go forth and create. Whether it’s densely urban or sparsely rural, we aim to capture tastes of living in these far flung communities. Using traditional plein-aire and on-sight techniques, we hope to transcend our medium and create a socially relevant story that only painting can tell. Jackson and Eric will take separate approaches; one artist focusing on the figures within their context while the other depicts the landscapes to which we travel.

Leading up to our sojourn, we will be warming up with on-sight sessions in our current home of Brooklyn, highlighting what we already know about the trials and tribulations of creating in a metropolitan environment.

-Eric and Jackson