Madrepores

"Out of Sequence" in Denver--correction!

I was wrong--it turns out that "Out of Sequence" hadn't opened yet, it's only opening tonight:

http://www.belmarlab.org/ex_outofsequence.php

Do click on that link--it features a detail of one of my pieces in the show. And have I mentioned that there are some pretty cool reproductions of my work in the catalog (which is like a work of art itself)?

Also--it's 5280 Mag's "Best Art Bet."

In case you've been wondering...

All the materials for my book, Nautilus, are as of tonight off to the publisher. (Well, unless he wants me to design new endpapers. Which I might do anyway.)

Now I'll turn to fixing the final details on the anthology.

So it'll still be a while till you see any new art here.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with an installation view of my pieces in the "Out of Sequence" show at the Krannert, which I don't think I ever got around to posting. The show has already moved to the Lab at Belmar, in Denver--so if you live around there, please check it out.

"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."