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.
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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.
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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.
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The Sunday before last (part two of our sci-fi Sunday – part one is here), Glade and I drove down to San Antonio and watched District 9 with my parents. It was really intense and riveting, although maybe unnecessarily gory. I’m going to discuss the plot, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to pass on this post. I tried to avoid any foreknowledge of the plot of the movie going in, which definitely enhanced the experience for me. Ok, you’ve been warned, here goes:
I’m sure that many of you are already familiar with the premise, which is in the six-minute short Alive in Joburg also directed by Neill Blomkamp:
Unfortunately, this short showcases the main problem that I have with the movie: District 9 is a Halo movie set in Slumdog Millionaire. When Millionaire was up for many Academy Awards this past February, it was accused of fetishizing poverty, but District 9 takes it a step further – the physical setting of the slum called District 9 was a slum that was being evacuated while the movie was being filmed, according to this interview with director Neill Blomkamp on io9, which makes the movie mirror reality a little too closely for me to be entirely comfortable with it. Similarly, all of the quotes in the short from non-actor South Africans come from asking them about immigrants to Johannesburg from other parts of Africa, according to that same io9 interview.
As far as the Halo connection goes, all of those action sequences in the short look like Halo cut scenes to me. And then we get to District 9, and all of the action sequences (not to mention the weapons and the mech) look like they were lifted straight from the Halo movie that Peter Jackson and Blomkamp were gonna make until it got canned, and they decided to go with District 9! I enjoy good action sequences, but these had too much in common with first-person shooters and they made the movie seem unbalanced to me. I was hoping for more sci fi ideas and less guns.
It may seem that I disliked the movie, but I enjoyed it. It just didn’t live up to the hype for me, especially when it came out a few months after Moon, an intelligent, minimal sci-fi movie following the footsteps of 2001 and Tarkovsky’s Solaris. All that being said, there was one thing in the movie that really, really worked for me, and that was Wikus’ slow, horrific, and grotesque transformation in a prawn. No matter how unrealistic it may be scientifically (unless, of course, DNA has been seeded thruout the cosmos by benevolent urpeople), it really worked for me emotionally, and it’s the fulcrum around which all of the action and character development of the movie takes place. I’ve always been fascinated by the role that limnal beings play in narrative and myth, so it was excited to see a major movie take that up as its central theme. I also appreciated how important the Nigerian gangster’s belief in sympathetic magic (which can manifest as “If I eat you, I’ll gain your power”) was in the movie. So, despite District 9‘s shortcomings, I think it was one of the better sci-fi movies that I’ve seen, and I’ll see the sequel, District 10, if they make it.
I can’t tell you much about the person (or people?) who made this since the site is in Dutch. It reminds me of this scam that the 419 Eater would play on spammers where he would get them to carve objects for him out of wood, like this Commodore 64:
I took most of the content from my old blogs and imported them to this site last nite, so please, feel free to browse the archives and experience some nostalgia. I’ve been blogging sporadically since May 2007 and started to blog at least twice a week since December 2008. I’ll be going through those old posts over the next several weeks and updating their formatting and the size and source of the images.
Last nite I also went to my Okaymountain studio to work on my drawings for the upcoming show No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery in Chicago, which is curated by Corinna Kirsch and Katherine Pill. I’m doing medium-sized (18″x24″) drawings that I’m coloring with gouache. I tried out a bunch of different materials because it’s been a while since I’ve colored something off of the computer. Here’s one of my gouache experiments:
In the end, I decided to do flat color with gouache and then add outlines and details with india ink. I’m going to do six drawings like that for the show which will replicate one of my MELT pages from TRANZ.
Here’s the promotional image for the show, Jolly Ranch by Alex McLeod:
Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
Following an investigative curatorial model, Concertina Gallery’s first exhibition inquires into the simple yet seldom insignificant gesture: the greeting. Although an invitation can take shape in a myriad of forms, the works in No More Worlds invite viewers to enter – through tactile engagement or with the aid of imagination – captivating yet unsettling environments. Featuring artists who use a variety of mediums, No More Worlds showcases works that deftly combine the fantastical and mysterious with elements of the everyday, reminding us that even our wildest ideas of new worlds are anchored in and mediated by our own experiences of reality. Reveling in the unknown surprises of the grotesque or the extraordinary sensuous qualities of the idyll, the impossible tableaux constructed by these artists hover between real and imagined worlds. These liminal environments give way to partially obscured narratives, both enchanting and monstrous.
I’m excited to be in this show alongside amazing artists and I wish I could be there for the opening. If any of y’all are gonna be in Chicago September 12th, be sure to check it out!
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