Life Imitates Art
When my aunt and uncle saw Sunday’s blog post, they immediately realized that the drawing I had done of my father, dog, and grandfather was strikingly reminiscent of a photograph my uncle had taken of the same subject. But believe it or not, I had not seen this photo at all when I drew that picture. I wish I had drawn my dad’s hand on the back of the chair – it would be a better composition.
Also: I realize that a lot of people who read this blog also read my webcomic, but I figured I might as well post this pin-up here as well. It’s a SNitLoE tribute to Roy Lichtenstein!
My dad, his dad, and my dog.
Though my dog Scallywag is now almost 13 years old and is suffering from arthritis, she is still capable of being immensely comfortable. When she lay at the feet of her beloved, my grandfather “Grandpat,” sunken into the armchair, the two were the picture of contented senectitude.
Next to them was my dad, slightly impaired in the comfort department by his long legs. He can only cross his right leg over his left knee, not the reverse, and even then, his right knee sticks way up in the air.
Read MoreSketching in Church
Though I’m normally a pretty attentive churchgoer, two things get in the way on Christmas Eve:
1.) You’ve already heard this story, this sermon, and these songs a zillion times before. And even though it’s very important to hear the message yet again, it’s not easy.
2.) The pews are generally packed, often with people you have never seen before, or, even more distractingly, people you haven’t seen in years.
The guy at the bottom is Rev. Gene Finnel. I had really wanted to do a full-portrait. Both of Gene’s hands freeze into an emphatic gesture, fingers spread stiffly wide, and they float around like that for the whole sermon, seemingly unconnected to his body by any arms beneath his voluminous black robe. I would describe the effect as “muppetesque.”
Anyway, Merry Christmas to you all, and be sure to check out my Savage Nobles/Three Wise Men crossover pin-up over at Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment!
Read MoreWonder Woman Day 2010!
Every year, a very cool nerd named Andy Mangels organizes a big charity auction in Portland, OR and Flemington, NJ where people bid on pictures of everyone’s favorite Amazon Princess to raise money for various domestic violence programs. These can be by awesome famous artists like Steve Lieber, Scott Koblish (never heard of him, but that drawing kicks ass!) and the guy who painted what I think is the best entry this year, David Chelsea. Or they can be by schmucks like me who had to look on Wikipedia to determine if Wonder Woman can fly. (And if she can, why does she need an invisible plane?)
I probably should have read David Chelsea’s book on perspective a little more closely before I started my own Wonder Woman artwork, because the burning building on the right still looks a little wonky to me – I’m not sure why, because I constructed my grid pretty carefully. I also feel like the architecture in general has the wrong amount of surface detail, though I can’t tell if it’s too little or too much. I am pretty happy with this piece though, my favorite parts being the firefighter’s gesture and Wonder Woman’s gams.
Please, please, please check out Andy Mangel’s online Wonder Woman Museum. It’s as charming and non-creepy as such a thing could feasibly be, and I have shared but a fraction of the terrific auction artwork on display. And of course, if you are in Portland on October 24th, drop a Hamilton on my artwork, for a good cause. (If it doesn’t sell, I wonder if I get it back? If so, I will put it on my Etsy store and donate the proceeds to Andy when it sells.)
Read MorePotAWHIT Board
Last of the five drawings I did for “Portrait of the Artist When He Isn’t There,” a head-on diagram of my trusty bulletin board. Among these treasures is a flyer I designed for the Philolexian Society to promote the 2005 Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest, an oversized postcard depicting Al Capone’s luxuriously appointed prison cell from when I visited Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, a weird polaroid of me and my friend Andrew Liebowitz, and two postcards from Vox Pop. One bears the clever slogan “Man is born free, and everywhere is in chain-stores, and the other is this gorgeous reproduction:
It’s “International Solidarity of Labour” by Walter Crane, drawn in 1897. It may not live up to our PC standards today (why are the American and Australian white? why is the Angel of Freedom white? etc) but this was 1897! Who else was promoting an image of total racial equality at that time? Practically nobody but the socialists, that’s who. The central motto is, of course, “Workers of the the world, unite!” It was true when Marx said it, it was true when Crane drew it, and it’s still true today.
One last explanation: the long skinny drawing tacked above the bulletin board is the original drawing of Theo crawling through the desert that I incorporated into this “animated” jpeg used to advertise SNitLoE on the internet:
PotAWHIT Desk
When I got to Portland, I knew I’d need a drafting table for comics. I bought one from somebody’s grandparents and brought it home on the bus. The driver was not happy.
Hanging to the left of the bulletin board is a print that I bought of one of my favorite webcomic strips ever, a guest strip for Pictures for Sad Children by KC Green.
Read MorePotAWHIT Rack
Here’s part three of “Portrait of the Artist When He Isn’t There,” my coat-rack. Found it on the side of the road near the Hollywood Max stop. Prominently featured are:
– the cassock and supplice I wore during the Byrd festival
– my limited edition t-shirt: “Local Roots Farm Team 2009: This Bunch is Rad-ish”
– my hat from when I worked at Brooklyn’s greatest coffeeshop, the late Vox Pop.
– my piece-of-s*** shoes
I am still a little distraught by the foreshortening of the ellipses in this drawing. As you can deduce, my eye-level was about 75-80% up the full length of the rack (I was sitting on my bed). Maybe the rack itself is bent a little bit.
By the way, tonight was a rad party for the release of Stumptown Undeground’s “Birthday” issue. My “screaming baby” piece made the inside front cover, probably because they didn’t want a blood-spattered infant penis on the front cover.
Read MorePotAWHIT Bed
This was the second drawing I did for the “Portrait of the Artist When He Isn’t There” series. It features the Nigerian blanket given to me in primary school by my best friend Sule Otori, my severely dilapidated schoolbag “Ursula,” some Renaissance sheet music, and a copy of G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I’ve gotten in the habit of piling crap on my bed so I’m not tempted to sleep on it during the day.
Read MorePotAWHIT Shelf
The theme of October’s Stumptown Underground compilation is “Self-Portrait/Self-Reflection.” I’ve never been one for auto-biography. So though many of my friends have worked in the genre, and I enjoy many auto-bio comics, I’ve never been able to do one myself. Even when I tried keeping a daily “comics journal” in the style of Chelsea Baker at the beginning of 2010, I was unable to stay on the topic of my own life (which in January was admittedly pretty boring) – I would end up describing the book I had just read or the movie I’d just seen, including only a cursory auto-bio framing narrative, or none at all.
I hardly want to come off sounding like some righteous crusader against solipsism or attention-whoring; after all, I have a facebook page and TWO blogs. I’m certainly not above the frothy foam of perpetual self-reinvention that characterizes my generation of rootless hipsters. But nevertheless, I do think a certain diligence is required to look beyond the confines of the self, or at least an acknowledgment of the self’s permeability. Increasingly I think of it as a duty to understand that “who I am” is not some secret identity locked in the vault of my own skull, but a complicated network of relationships, many of them mysterious to my own subjectivity. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said something like “the self is not that part that is known only to me and to no one else, but precisely that part that is external and unknown to me, who I am to others.” I could write on this subject endlessly, but this is an art blog.
Anyway, this mush of Anglican theology and waaaaay too much structuralist criticism resulted in me not wanting to draw a traditional self-portrait or an auto-bio comic, but rather a series of still life drawings of the things around my room entitled “Portrait of the Artist When He Isn’t There” (PotAWHIT) Talk about the absent core of subjectivity! I think somebody snooping around my room when I wasn’t there could get a better idea of “who I am” just from looking at the books on my shelf, the drawings on my desk, and even the clothes on my hangers, than from briefly meeting me in person. I’ve left little pieces of my self strewn on the floor.
Read MoreI’ll be at the Portland Zine Symposium this Weekend
Just a personal update: this weekend I will be tabling at the Portland Zine Symposium in PSU’s Peter W. Scott Main Gym. If you are in Portland, OR (and honestly, why aren’t you?), stop by and pick up one of the three zines I will have for sale at $1 each:
Wakey-Wakey is a short anthology of various comics and illustrations I’ve done, most of them while I was interning at Periscope Studio, and some of it previously published in Stumptown Underground. There is nothing in this zine you haven’t already seen on this blog.
The Savage Nobles Preview Zine includes pages 26 through 51 of the comic you are reading right now. (That’s right, if you buy it this weekend you’ll be able to see page 51 a full two days before it hits this site!) This is mainly intended to serve as a “gateway drug” for the website. At 5.5×8.5″, it’s a little smaller than I’d like to publish it eventually, but it still looks durned good in print if I d.s.s.m.
Flight of the Flightless is the 24-Hour Comic I drew in (one day of) April of this year. It’s based on a true story as comically reimagined by me and my ex-roommate Turhan Sarwar about evacuating the penguins from the New Orleans Aquarium after Hurricane Katrina. (yes, a comedy about Hurricane Katrina – it’s about time!) It’s got cute animals, madcap action, and has a super-happy ending with a wedding and a rainbow; it will one day make me a millionaire and relaunch Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s career.
See y’all at the Symposium!
Read MoreByrdSeed
Hey internet stalkers – sorry I have been so delinquent in posting. August has proven to be a crazy month, singing for the William Byrd Festival and prepping for the Portland Zine Symposium. The only time I’ve had to draw is between rehearsals! (see below)
Barnaby a.k.a. Fatty
I mentioned that my house has two cats. The younger one, a kitten named Javier, will never sit still long enough for a portrait. The older one, Barnaby, definitely will.
Read MoreThe View From My Window
I’m finally back! Apologies to the regular readers of this blog (and Google Analytics tells me there are THOUSANDS)for not having posted something in over a month. This is really the unpardonable sin of blogging.
But the damned are full of excuses and here are mine:
1.) Since I stopped being allowed to hang out at Periscope every day, I haven’t had regular access to their two industrial-strength scanners. However this is not really an excuse, since I have taken out a membership at the Independent Publishing Resource Center here in Portland. The IPRC is a veritable Jerusalem for the city’s zinesters and comics people. (Indeed, both the Zinesters and the Comics people claim the IPRC as their ancestral homeland, with every outburst of comicaze attacks provoking new levels of Zineist oppression – but that’s another story.) They have something like six scanners, one of which is often functioning!
2.) I spent the better part of June erecting a website for my graphic novel, Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment. If you haven’t seen this site yet, don’t waste any more time here! Go! Click! Now!
3.) I’ve been grappling with the usual “starving artist” problems this month as well, since the loss of my purely symbolic job led me to realize my very actual lack of income. I am still busily looking for work here in Portland, which at 10.2% unemployment is not that easy. (My hometown of New Orleans is at 7.0%) Especially not with all these #$%!*@^ lazy artists taking all the barista jobs!
4.) I also moved to a new house! It’s a great place with two cats and five people. Many of them (the people, not the cats) are also into comics/graphic-fiction/visual-narrative/sequential-art/making-up-your-own-fake-undergraduate-major. Our “Mad Woman in the Attic” is Katy Ellis O’Brien, who’s putting my work ethic to shame churning out panel after panel of hand-painted comics. Literally panels – she paints them on pieces of wood.
Anyway, the above sketch is the view from one of the two windows of my new room. We live really close to highway 84, though the ambient noise is not that annoying; I can pretend I live by the ocean. Less endearing is the enormous Budweiser logo that tops the Freud-inspired tower across the street. The neon red “B” shines at me nightly like the eyes of Dr. T J Eckelburg. That’s right, I just made a simile comparing a sign to another metaphoric sign. This is why I am a natural graphic novelist.
Homeless TV
These guys “live” near my house in Portland, and whenever I pass by, it seems they are watching a little television set on their shopping cart. In reality, there are three of them, but I thought this had a more romantic impact.
Preliminary digital sketch:
Pencils
Inks, before adding digital grayscale. This could be a free standing image, but I think that without the extra gray, it looks like the TV screen is as bright as a spotlight.
LOST Doodles
Jack was the first and most spontaneous, and unsurprisingly the one I’m most happy with.
