"Betty's Walk" in Blurred Vision show at ArtLexis

The good folks at ArtLexis have put up photos of their inaugural show and of the opening reception. I'm shamelessly hotlinking to the installation photos of my very large (73" x 50") print of "Betty's Walk":







Thanks, Kevin, Alex and Melissa!

By the way, because the opening reception happened to coincide with a Nor'easter that hit NYC, there will be a "do-over and Holiday party at the gallery from 3-6pm on Saturday December 20th." I still can't be there, but would kill for some of that egg nog...

Kirby fluke

So, I've been digitally inking this Kirby piece... It's going very slowly (the inking you see so far has taken me at least four hours of work). Anyway, I clicked some button by mistake and got this weird halo effect. It's kind of cool, so I thought I'd post it, especially since, given how slowly it's going, I may never actually finish inking the whole piece:



In case you're wondering, I'm inking it digitally a) to get used to my new Wacom tablet, and b) because I adore Kirby, but whenever I've tried to ink some of his work before with real ink on paper (from scans, on a lightbox), I've ended throwing up my hands in disgust. Every line has to be just perfect--I have no idea how Mike Royer did it. This way I can erase each stroke 10 times before I get it anywhere near right--and that's why it's been taking so long.

It has a bit of a "Large Glass" effect about it, don't you think?



P.S. Here it is without Kirby's pencils:

Narrative Corpse!!

I participated in the recently finished Narrative Corpse. Here is page 1 and page 2 of my (very atypical) contribution... And here are a couple of my other favorite contributors:

Mat Brinkman (first of his four pages)

Warren Craghead (first of his two)

and, finally, Fufu Frauenwahl's fantastic finale!! (first of four)

And keep in mind that most of the pencils and all of the inks for my contribution were done in one night... I really have to go back and re-ink that sucker.

ink drawings, ca. 1990-92, part 2

As you can see, the main building bricks of my abstract vocabulary at this point were: loose, Zen inspired, flying-ink/broken-ink brushtsrokes; Rorschach blots; and blots carefully drawn to look as if spontaneous, and also similarly drawn blot-like lines around the genuinely spontaneous part of the images. I liked that dichotomy between genuinely spontaneous and only apparently spontaneous--the real blot and the fake blot--and it has stayed with me ever since. My primary influences were Jackson Pollock and Zen calligraphy but also, to be honest, the first and last pages of the sixth issue of "Watchmen." Overall, though, I would say I was trying to do a kind of Zen painting that questioned the demand for simple spontaneity that you find in traditional Zen art theory.

Edit: looking again at the images, I can't help but feel that the main influence on the first one in this post--influence remembered, subconsciously, since childhood--was Kipling's illustrations to "Just So Stories."

ink drawings, ca. 1990-92

So, I've decided not to post online anymore the pages of Ruins as I make them (actually, I came to this decision a while ago, I'm just fessing up to it now), especially since once they're made they'll require some serious resequencing plus other editorial work... I just don't think the work as I'm intending it can be properly experienced in the piecemeal fashion in which I'm posting pages. So you'll just have to see it in its completed form (and on paper), a year or two from now.

This does leave me with a certain gap in material to post here, though... Fortunately, the work that Troy Lloyd has been recently posting on his blog has made me go digging through my basement for some old drawings, some of the earliest ones in which I began playing with inkblots, etc. Here are some of them, in roughly chronological order (and do keep in mind I was about 22 to 24 when making them):













And here is one done in September 1991 in collaboration with my friend Eva Struhal (I know the exact date because it's the only one signed and dated). I think she contributed some of the more landscape-y, as well as figurative, elements:



These are all 18" x 24", Sumi-e ink on paper. More to come later.

Group Show

I'll have one very large piece in this show:




Unfortunately, I can't make it to the opening, but if you're in the area please go and let me know how it looks.

More info here.

Little painting with dragon script

Betty's walk

Dragon script

Introducing guest artist Alex Molotiu!!!

"Jellyfish"

Alex's work has been published in the journal "Asemic," no. 5. He will celebrate his fourth birthday in late December.

A little painting

It's official! Plus, museum show.

Since Amazon sez so!

Also, have I mentioned that I'm in this traveling show--Currently at the Krannert Art Museum in Urbana-Champaign, to move to Denver in January, and then other places too? Please come see it if you have a chance--you'll see all eight pages of the original art of "Exhibition to the Interior," a nice digital print of "The Panic," plus a super hi-tech 3-D version (with 3-D goggles included) of "Alcoholalia," my Maakies remix.

As to that "underrepresented" thing in the subtitle: I'm not sure experimental and gallery comics are "underrepresented" in the same way that women and minority artists were under (read: non) represented in the "Masters of American Comics" show, to which this one was conceived as a response--but hey, I'm grateful for the company, and companionship! By the way, try to get a hold of the catalogue--it's beautiful, really well designed, and there's a lot of my stuff in it. (It's not on Amazon. I know it's available from the museum, but I can't find a link, sorry.)

One more "by the way": I'll be at the Krannert this Saturday, for a panel discussion connected to the show. More info here.

"Brain Trust redrawn" details

...as requested by Troy Lloyd:









or did you mean like this?

Psychedelia!

The Brain Trust redrawn

[click for larger image]

24" x 19", ink on paper (the margins are wider in the original)

Drawn entirely* with a Winsor & Newton Cotman no. 2 brush, which, dammit, works better than my much more expensive series 7.

*well, except for some of the larger expanses of black, where I used an older beat-up brush

compare: the digital original

see also: part of the same project and brief explanation of the process

While I'm making book announcements, I should point out that "24 x 24: A Vague Epic," on which these hand-redrawings/completions are based, will be printed in my book "Nautilus," coming this spring from Danish publisher Fahrenheit.

What passed for abstract comics back in 2001

http://web.archive.org/web/20011113040600/palladio.arch.kth.se/~henke/comics/strange.html

Courtesy of the Google January 2001 index, http://www.google.com/search2001.html

If there are any readers of this blog who still don't know that the anthology of abstract comics that I've edited is set to come out from Fantagraphics Books in June 2009, well, now you know.

Incidentally, I made my first abstract comic in the fall of 2002, and published it in my mini Blots, 2003. Now it's been reprinted in Asemic no. 5.

"Pym" redrawn

ink on paper, 17" x 14", 2 sheets

Two of the missing pages from "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym"

After troylloyd. See here.

UPDATE: color version.

Once more onto the beach!

Question: do you folks prefer it with thumbnails or with full images, as before?

Flutters (in a specimen box)

A day by the ocean

Or is this version better?



I can't decide. Let me know.

Ruins pp. 7-9

Portland, OR

This one's for Mike G.

Off Chesapeake Bay (saturated)

Outside Cleveland (positive/negative)

Mississauga, Ontario (barely transformed)

And detail: