My friend Victoria F. Gaitán decorates her portrait subjects with meat or blood or candy to create intimidating baroque flesh and blood still lifes. Maybe one day she will ask me to get covered in horse heads and ice cream. Look for her work up with Patricia Piccinini at Conner Contemporary in Washington DC through December.

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My latest series, Metropolitan, explores imagery associated with wealth and secretive power. A former Vanderbilt estate is blackened and decorated with regalia while the Alibi club comprising Washington DC’s most powerful men takes on the properties of fabric, gently blowing in the wind. It’s an ongoing series that happens to be quite relevant at the moment.

My friend Jordan Kasey, who does amazing, surreal, and terrifying oil paintings, has a show up at Honfleur Gallery in DC. You should go check her stuff out, it’s really good.

I live in Baltimore, a city defined by row houses, so Studio 27′s row house project in nearby DC is pretty interesting to me. The owners of the Rincon Bates House in Capitol Hill commissioned the K Street-based firm to re-imagine the 104-year-old unit as an eco-friendly dwelling for a single family.

The final design is pretty amazing, retaining the original facade but reworking the rest to be more open, bright, and clean-feeling. The house is warmed by tank-less gas-powered water heaters and features low-flow plumbing fixtures, locally-sourced recycled building materials, and a host of other elements that minimizes its environmental impact.

If you ever wondered how the fine people from DC dressed, Curator of DC Style has the answer for you. One of my favorites, this blog features pictures of DC citizens in creative and fashionable attire.

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Washington DC-based sculptor Christian Benefiel creates elegant pieces that are as much about the history of the scavenged and re-purposed materials he uses as they are about the forms he molds them into. His inflatable pieces are reminiscent of both Claes Oldenburg and Buckminster Fuller.

Washington DC artist and designer Pete Morelewicz really likes Bob Ross. No, I mean, he REALLY likes Bob Ross. So much so, he’s created an entire series of prints bearing the TV painting icon’s bushy face. I have to say I’m pretty partial to Phreno-Bob with his ‘happy accidents’ and ‘puffy clouds’.

If you’re in or around the Washington DC area, swing by illustrator — and sometime Lost At E Minor contributor — John Malloy’s first full solo exhibition at the Art Whino Gallery in National Harbor. The show which opens on February 21, takes its name — One Out of a Hundred — from his personal series of seven fine art works that center around the side effects of drugs as a metaphor for the media culture’s long-term effects on the human spirit. There will be more than forty limited edition prints and fifty works of original art on display and for sale, including illustration, fine art, and comics work.

Shortstack are a Washington DC band that not many people know about outside of the the city. They recently released an EP of covers with some sweet choices on there — The Kinks, Captain Beefheart, and The Pupils, among others. Once again a band takes different styles, sounds, and time periods, and owns it like an extra finger.

Listen to the Shortstack track, House On Fire.

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