Hey ya’ll sorry I missed posting on Tuesday, I’ve been busy moving. I was going to post something about the Devin Flynn show/screening here in Austin this past week, but I missed that too (also because of moving), so here’s something I dug up from deep in my swipe file:
via cpb.tumblr.
This is how I should’ve reinterpreted Herakles for the 21st century.
Sorry this post has been a bit delayed y’all! I’ve been busy moving and finishing up my submission for Taffy Hips #5. Here’s a panel:
The one-page comic is called “Herakles of Mars Attacks the Lion of Tharsis”.
The opening reception for Dispersal/Return will be this Friday (9/25) at the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque from 5 to 7 pm. If any of y’all will be in the area, be sure to check it out – it’ll feature a special performance of “America’s Big” by my two good friends the Dirty Monke (AKA Jonathan Loth) and Li’l Bunny Krunk (AKA Gabriel Romero). You can also view my installation, Cryptostructure, alongside many other thought provoking works by Land Arts of the American West alumni.
Smudge Studio recently reblogged my post about my installation, and you can scroll down and view the work of the other artists in the show here.
I spent a lot of time working on different animations for that installation, and I’ve collected together some of the remnants into a new video animated GIF, check it out:
7/12/22 update: I replaced the old video, embedded from Flickr, with an animated GIF hosted on my site. Same content as before, but now it seemlessly loops!
The floating, segmented being with yellow eyes that you see in the beginning contains the longest bits of hand-drawn animation that I’ve done to date. This is definitely something that I plan to do more of, as I find the time in between comics and drawing projects.
We don’t want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly.
We don’t want other worlds; we want a mirror.
–Dr. Snaut, Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972
If those of y’all in Chicago missed the opening of No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery, you can go check it out every Saturday from 12 to 5 pm until the last day of the show on Saturday, October 10th.
Corinna Kirsch, co-curator of the show, has written an essay on the exhibit that mentions yours truly, here’s an excerpt:
Mark Hensel, another artist interested in the “reconventioning” of conventions, has uploaded old science fiction paperback covers onto his Flickr account. Documents of what was, the covers on these out-of-print editions–populated by scenes of a lonely cosmos or solitary wanderers–echo the oftentimes desolate landscapes in Hensel’s own comics and installations.
You can read the full essay here.
The inimitable Reynard Seifert has just launched his newest venture, hahacleverdotcom, a platform for him to continue the publishing effort he began with Candy and Cigarettes. The site will be updated every other Wednesday with new comics, short stories, other text, and audio. My comics will show up there in the near future – I’ll keep y’all posted on that, and you can always check the hahaclever tumblr for updates. This past Wednesday, Seifert put out his short story zzzombiezzz as an eBook.
Go check it out, I provided an illustration for the story, which is a clever, weird read with some science fiction elements.
The show No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery in Chicago opens this Saturday, the 12th. Here’s the promotion image again, Alex McLeod’s Jolly Ranch:
If you’re going to be in Chicago this weekend, go check the opening out, from what I’ve seen the other artists are amazing.
I’ve been working furiously on my drawings for this show the last three weeks, and I finally finished them on Monday, a little too late to enjoy the pool on Labor Day, unfortunately, but early enough that I was able to photograph them and package them to be sent by Express Mail to Chicago on Tuesday.
Here’s one detail shot from each of the six drawings:
I think that adding the india ink really changed these from what they were when they were just gouache drawings. I didn’t have as much time to work on these drawings as I would’ve liked, but I’ve been working close to deadlines my whole life, so I’m used to it. I think that, like most procrastinators, I really need to feel the pressure to actually finish something. Otherwise I just dabble and consider all of the possibilities before making a move. With the time constraints that I was working under, I just chose gouache and used it, even though I had limited experience with it before. If there had been more time, I would’ve spent more time playing with different options and practicing techniques. Now, however, I feel really comfortable with gouache and I’m going to start producing more pieces like this. And one thing that I’m going to put together is the comic tools DIY stay-wet palette, check it out. It sounds pretty awesome. I wish that I had remembered that blog post earlier. Having to carefully note my color combinations and then try to replicate them every nite was frustrating. Even with the DIY stay-wet palette, however, I don’t think I’ll be doing narrative drawings any time soon. I didn’t like having to keep the color palette consistent between each piece, I would’ve much rather been able to experiment.
Duncan Malashock is exhibiting at Co-Lab, 613 Allen St., Austin September 12th from 7-11pm in a show called Fake Fun in the Real World. Duncan’s videos are mind-bending fusions of video techniques. Here’s a sample:
He explained his process to me once but I didn’t recognize the equipment that he was talking about. I think that basically he processes video through a number of different filter and equipment until he achieves the desired effect. A lot of his stuff is based on looping, which I’m into. Animated GIFs have ruined long-form video.
A Houston artist, via The Great God Pan Is Dead. Apparently the colors in this image don’t quite match up to the day-glo reality, but I think it looks good like this.
I’ve been working on my gouache drawings for the show No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery almost every day of the last two weeks. I’ve finished the gouache parts of five of the six drawings (I still have to ink them), but I’ve been having some trouble getting the final page sketched out, so I’m taking a couple days off to doodle out a solution. Sketching out the first page took me several days too.
Once the six drawings are done, they’ll show a simple narrative of a structure melting into a huge lake of some sort of colorful, liquid plastic substance. Here’s part of my (uninked) drawing of the structure:
Here you can see part of the building as it melts:
It’s important, for me to achieve my desired effect, for the structure to go through one or two phase changes as it melts. What I mean by phase change is, as the buildings begin to melt, I draw the same structure, with the same color pattern, it’s just squashed and drawn with increasingly wavy lines. But, at some point, the melting takes on a different color pattern and I don’t redraw the same structure, but modified; instead, I draw a new structure. That’s a phase change. Here’s an example of that happening:
In this image, you can see the unmelted structure in the lower left and the lower right. In the middle and in the upper right, you can see that same structure, with the same color pattern, but drawn with extremely wavy lines. This is the beginning of the melt. But then, along the top and especially in the upper left quadrant of the drawing, you can see the phase change, where the structure has been replaced by the repeating, drippy polygon patten. For the final drawing, I’m trying to come up with a second phase change, which is why it is giving me trouble. I’ll post some pieces of the final drawings once I’ve got them documented.
