Above is a selfie made from the real blood of artist, Ted Lawson who created it for an exhibit opening tonight in New York City. I first heard about Ted through art dealer Casey Cleghorn, who has show my work, and is now involved with the Joseph Gross Gallery in Chelsea. (formerly Art Now NY) One day as an experiment, Lawson hooked up a pen to a CNC (computer numerical control) milling machine’s arm to see how it would draw – and it drew pretty well.

“I was doing a drawing of the moon and thought, ‘Oh, this could be really cool to do in my own blood,” he recalls. “It was a logical progression.”

To create this selfie, Lawson took a photo of himself in the nude, then he rendered the photo into vectors in Adobe Illustrator. As you can see in the video (complete with annoying metal soundtrack. Mute!) Lawson hooked himself up to a needle and funneled his blood into the machine. Lawson himself as “squeamish” when it comes to blood and needles but found that if you stick a needle in your arm enough times, it gets easier to ignore.

“Blood is just a medium. When you focus on something other than yourself, like making a drawing, it becomes ink and stops being blood.”

My friend, the distractingly good-looking Jordan Eagles, uses blood in a very different way, projecting it and encasing it in acrylic. He shows his work all over the world and he’s just collaborated with Skingraft to create wearable versions of his work, as well.

Eagles collaborated with Skingraft for their Spring 2015 collection

The Map Is Not the Territory, opens tonight, September 11 at the Joseph Gross Gallery, 548 W 28th Street in New York.