NOURS Magazine - Kyozo Hayashi

 

Well there I was, rooting around on Archive.org, as I am wont to do, and I came across a collection of Japanese gamer mags put out by NAMCO in the 1990s. I can't read a word of it, but am immediately seized by awe at the covers. 

At first I was, "How?" Was it an early use of computer graphics? Seemed too smooth. Are they amazingly deceptive trompe-l'oeil paintings? Is it done with paper cut outs? Then my mind begged, "Who?"

After some internet sleuthing, utilizing the only clue I had – the signature "Kyozo" under the little umbrella mark on the lower righthand corner of a few of the covers – the only hint I was able to glean that pointed to an answer was a couple of copies of the above-pictured book for sale on eBay. Kyozo Hayashi is an artist and designer who seemingly specializes in working with clay figures for his work. 

I absolutely love the meshing of Art Deco and Pop Art in Kyozo's aesthetic. At some point the art direction seems to have been revised to fit a more "normal" newsstand gamer mag aesthetic, with Manga-style art or pictures of the characters from the games the magazine was reviewing that month. It makes sense from a marketing standpoint, but man, these covers are works of art!

If you want to go spelunking in the cave of NOURS digital back issues, the gateway to your cavern is here.

As for Kyozo Hayashi himself, he was born in 1939 and graduated from the Industrial Art department of the Nagoya Municipal Polytechnic High School. He began his clay illustration career around 1967, and received multiple awards for his design work and had a number of traveling art shows in the late 1980s. He appears to have an Instagram account, where he primarily showcases digital illustration these days. 

Sinister Folk

 

"Sinister Folk" collage on paper.

Most of my creative output takes the form of a painting or a drawing, but sometimes I get the urge to harken back to my punk flyer days and do some collage work. This particular one was done sometime around 2018 - 2019. 

I'd been submerging myself in the Finders Keepers records catalog at the time, and reading a lot of folk horror, like Randalls Round by Eleanor Scott and collected works of M.R. James. Growing up in rural-adjacent small town Minnesota, I've always been subjected to, and interested in, folk horror. Lots of legends about haunted fields, farms with grisly backstories, even some odd shenanigans involving long dead relatives. 

I also stumbled upon the pre-solo Terry Jacks material when he was in The Poppy Family, with his then-wife Susan Jacks. Songs like "Shadows On My Wall" and "Where Evil Grows" definitely had a hand in inspiring this cut and paste effort. 

Above: click to hear the eerie and amazing "Shadows On My Wall"

Above: click to watch Terry and Susan Jacks lip sync to 

"Where Evil Grows" on the Kenny Rogers Show, 1971.

Moon Pies For Misfits

 

Above is a painting I finished a while back. It's an acrylic on canvas piece I've titled, "Moon Pies For Misfits." You may or may not be aware I have a certain yen for the titular confection, and I guess the picture is autobiographical to a degree.  

Yes, I am aware that the band Hot Water Music has a tune called "Moonpies For Misfits," but I've not heard it. 

I wanted to make sure the scene outside the window was very sunny, bright and commonplace, and the interior, the focus of the picture, was dark and off-kilter. Not sinister, not "bad", just different. The point of view here, without giving too much away or forcing a viewpoint on the looker, is that on any given day, every street everywhere is filled with home filled with people who are out of sight, doing who-knows-what. And sometimes you get a peek into those sequestered little worlds and they can seem like magic, with strange rituals and codes of commonplace all their own. I'd like to think the central figure here, as odd as he may look aesthetically, is happily going about his business being himself, pursuing his own interests, and maybe rewarding himself with a Moon-Pie. Maybe he feels ostracized by the world outside his window, maybe not. But everyone needs a treat now and then.

Despite My Education...

 

"Despite My Education..." acrylic on canvas

Frankenstein's Animated Monster

 

Graphite on paper

Shark Cautery

 

"Shark Cautery" acrylic on paper

 

Here's most of a recent painting. My scanner trims a little off the edges. Also, my Canon PIXMA scanner has a weird tic where it refuses to identify bright, brilliant colors, so will wash them out. The sort of salmon-y color in fire coming from the shark's mouth is actually a neon red color, but most everything else looks real-to-life (color-wise that is). 

I've always loved those sea monster illustrations in the margins of old nautical maps. This is partially a nod to those.

Works In Progress

Two paintings in progress above. The top one is "Half A Goon & Half A God" acrylic on canvas, inspired by the line from DEVO's "Gates Of Steel". The lower one is "The Electric Ascension Of Bela Lugosi", mixed media on gessoed cardboard.

Print-At-Home Zine

You want a small, easy to manufacture zine you can make yourself? Great!

Here's how you do it!

Step 1: Save the 2 images below to your desktop.

Step 2: Print them back to back on one sheet of paper. That's double-sided printing, y'all!

Step 3: Fold the final printed paper into quarters. Feel free to use the handy-dandy fold lines already on the page! If you done did it correctly, all of the drawings should be right side up. 

Step 4: You're going to need a pair of scissors (get your parents' help!) to carefully cut the top two folds, so you have eight individual pages!

Step 5: Staple the pages together in the center of the crease between the 4th and 5th page!

Boom shaka laka! - You Just Zined Yourself!

Technical notes: The above images are scanned in at 300 dpi resolution. They're not going to look as spiffy as the originals, but remember, it's free! Also, the images are provided for the free zine activity only. Don't take one of these images and stick it on a t-shirt or a throw pillow or a pair of pasties without asking me first. Pretty please?! Thanks!

 ALSO: Please send me pictures of your finished zines! I'd love to see what configurations you get, putting what panels as the front, back, etcetera. I certainly had a plan when I started it, but you can get a few different permutations with this setup. Which drawing is your favorite? Why? LET ME KNOW!

Gods & Monsters 2022

I have been invited to participate in the Otherworldly Arts Collective of Minneapolis's "Gods & Monsters 2022" Halloween art show! An open invitation was placed online and after submitting digital samples of my work, I was chosen to participate. There is a two piece maximum per participating artist, due to space restrictions. The actual show is in October, and I'll post more information regarding that later. 

The two pieces I'm bringing to the show are posted below.

"Tombyard Troubadour" acrylic on gessoed cardboard.

Music plays a large part in my life, and obviously, as a result, is something I draw a lot of inspiration from. "Tombyard Troubadour" is the result of a number of colliding influences. I enjoy country, country western and "hillbilly" music from the 1920s through the early 1970s, and believe it or not, there's a lot of darkness to the genres. Aside from seasonally appropriate novelty tunes like "Tennessee Hill-billy Ghost", which has been cut by Eddie Arnold, Red Foley and others, there are a lot of suicide and murder ballads as well. I had the idea of a sort of guardian ghost musician wandering around a secluded backwoods graveyard, strumming out spooky tunes on a coffin shaped guitar. I wanted something that would fit perfectly on a bubblegum card, a bright, poppy image that would sort of tell a whole story or set the tone for a whole visual world in one image.

"Zombie Surf Punk" acrylic on paper.

I love comics, but one of the biggest missed opportunities in the comic page/panel layout, as far as I'm concerned, is how artists don't do anything with the word and thought balloons aside from plotting out how they're going to position the artwork around them. In the world of the comic cartoons, so much of the page realty is taken up by the dialogue bubbles, that you'd think at some point someone would treat them like a functional part of the reality and incorporate them into the action. That's why my risen-from-the-surf Surf Punk Zombie's speech bubble is draped with seaweed and dripping water. Our undead friend has surfaced, potentially to attend a Circle Jerks show or something, and his words have risen with him, thus they are subject to the same ocean detritus that he is. 

The Otherworldly Arts Collective can be found online at their facebook and Instagram accounts. 

Haunted House

Late last night I was flipping through the August 1983 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine, a British video game enthusiast publication, and came across this great illustration for the game Haunted House. Apparently the magazine was initially aimed more at coders than your casual arcade enthusiast, as most game spotlight articles feature pictures of long blocks of code rather than any in depth look at the games themselves.

The illustration is signed Gulbis. I have no idea if this is some early work by the self-proclaimed "Football Artist" Stephen Gulbis, or not. When you Google his name a lot of early home console video game packaging comes up, none of it explicitly linked to that same Steve Gulbis. Gulbis is British, and though he touts having built a career on solely drawing soccer players and American football players for various markets, I have to imagine he'd had to diversify somewhat at some point. You wouldn't know it to look at his website, though. 

The subject matter, obviously, made the piece stick out for me, but ghosts and skeletons aside, I really like the limited cool color palette with the high contrast of the black shadows. I also really like the Dutch angle perspective, it really adds a sense of high drama to the image that a straight-on version of the image would lack. 

Eye On Art: Dominick Di Meo

 I first came to know about Dominick Di Meo in 2019, when I visited the Minneapolis Institute of Art's showing of work by artists associated with the Hairy Who collective from Chicago. You can see pictures from that visit here. I don't believe that Di Meo was part of the Hairy Whos, at least not formally, but rather was living in Chicago around the same time, making him more of an accomplice-in-art than a group participant. 

Whatever the case may be, when I first saw his piece Untitled (Red line with heads) (above) it smacked me square in the attention zone and held it for quite a while. The juxtaposition of the mask-like, almost skeletal faces floating around the amorphous background, and the red hot laser beam of color shooting across the otherwise gloomy canvas seemed so intriguing in the presence of all of the pop colors and very precisely dictated forms of all of the other pieces on display. 

Even if Di Meo's aim isn't to necessarily produce something aesthetically ghoulish or sinister, there's definitely a haunting, otherworldly vibe to it. Maybe it has something to do with all of those ghostly  not-quite-skulls silently moaning in three dimensions from his canvases and sculptural pieces. Of course if you do even a cursory web search on the artist, you'll be told first and foremost, repeatedly, as if it's the only thing anyone has to say about the guy, that he spent a fair amount of time during his formative years in a polio ward, which is credited as the source of his darkly askew output. 

Another common visual in his work is the collage of common household objects, usually presented in a jumble, and rarely as true representations of those items but rather as hazy absences of them; almost as if someone took an x-ray of a junk drawer and transferred the negative image to canvas.  You can see what I mean with the assemblage of scissors, bits of string and other household junk floating within the menacing amoebic form in the 1973 piece Untitled (face on yellow) below (from the Corbett vs. Dempsey website here). Are these the commingled specters of the items we consider garbage but refuse to wholly part with, confronting the viewer to let them know that they may have been confined to a darkened drawer somewhere, but that they do in fact still exist and can still serve a purpose (for if they couldn't, would they have been kept around in the first place)? Is that somehow related to the artist's interment in a polio ward as a child? No idea.

Whatever it is that drives Dominick Di Meo to produce the art that he does, I am a definite fan of the output. He eventually found his way back to New York where he continues to live and make art. Collected below are some more of my favorite Dominick Di Meo pieces.

"The Soft Torso Breathes" 1964; synthetics on canvas.

 

"Invalid With Mirror" 1973; synthetic polymer transfer on canvas.

"Untitled" c. 1970; acrylic, polymer, shaped elements, and tacks
on three canvases.

"Harlequinade" c. 1965; oil on canvas. 

Eye On Art: Alexander Archipenko

 He was born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1887, but his pursuit of art took him to Moscow, Paris, and eventually New York, where he was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, when he passed in 1964. Archipenko is credited as having been the first to apply Cubist principles to architecture and the creator of "sculpto-paintings", which are pieces that combine 2-D painted art with 3-D sculptural components on a canvas. 

"Médrano II" 1913-14. Painted tin,
wood, glass and painted oil cloth.

My introduction to Archipenko was entirely incidental. I had biked over to my local library and was looking at a book on Cubism, hoping to find some spark of inspiration that might ignite the pilot light of my imagination and result in a sketchbookin' session. I don't recall the exact title of the book, or its author–not that it's entirely important here–but on a page amongst some quarter-page reproductions of Fernand Léger's and a couple of Braques, was this tiny black and white picture of an Archipenko sculpture. It was this tiny, Post-It note-sized reproduction of Médrano II (1913). It stuck out like a neon sign. As much as I adore Léger's cartoonish pop color compositions, and Braque's broken-mirror-reflection building scapes, this tiny little insert photo was able to draw my eye away from the featured stars and put a bug of determination in my brain that buzzed to know more about this artist and his work.

"Femme assise" 1920. Gouache on paper.

"Femme Marchante" 1912. Sculpture in bronze.

There's a certain dynamism in Archipenko's pieces that vibrates with an aesthetic resonance in tune with those to whom Mid-Century abstraction appeals. Archipenko's work not only encapsulates everything that I find appealing about Cubism, both in form and principle, but also, as stationary, inanimate objects, his sculptures seem to resonate with a frenetic energy that other Cubist sculptors like Joseph Csaky and Jacques Lipchitz don't. I'm not disparaging either of those artists, Lipchitz's series of angular figures Le Guitariste (1918), Pierrot (1919), Harlequin With Clarinet (1919-20) and Man With Guitar (1920) would be tempting purchases if money were not an issue; but speaking subjectively, it's the negative space that Archipenko incorporates into his forms that create a sense of movement. He commented on this practice by saying:

"Traditionally there was a belief that sculpture begins where material touches space. Thus space was understood as a kind of frame around the mass... Ignoring this tradition, I experimented using the reverse idea, and concluded that sculpture may begin where space is encircled by the material." 

"In The Boudoir" 1915. Oil, graphite, photograph,
metal and wood on panel.

"Der Tanz" 1912. Sculpture in plaster.

"Carrousel Pierrot" 1913. Painted plaster.

"Venus" 1954.

"Red" 1957.

"Torso In Space" 1952-53. Lithograph, screenprint and embossing on paper.

Obviously this is just a taste of Archipenko's prolific output. Some of the pictures above were gleaned from Archipenko.org, which is an amazing resource that breaks down his life by decade and allows one to really see how his process changes, how his work progresses. It's definitely recommended to dip your toe into, even if you just want more eye candy.

Macumba Noir

 

Acrylic on black paper

Ruff Neighborhood

 Acrylic and spray paint on paper. 

4PM FRIDAY AFTERNOON - A PINBALL ZINE

 

Hello! I've created a pinball zine! It's free to download here! I know there are a few typos on the PRESS START intro page, I'd compiled the unedited file into the mass pdf, but if you can look past that, you might find something to enjoy within. 

Working on a second zine now, waiting for inspiration to strike to finish. It will not be pinball related.

Hammerlocks Will Never Hold Me

 

 

"Hammerlocks Will Never Hold Me!" gouache on paper 8.5" x 5" $30.

The Return Of Dr. Tongue

It's a painting in progress.

Ghost Robot Versus The Mad Magician

Gouache on watercolor paper. A work in progress.

Little Richard

Cráneo de vaquero

"Cráneo de vaquero" colored pencil on paper

I've never been very skilled with colored pencils as a medium. I guess the same could be said about other mediums as well, but I've been watching some tutorials and trying to get more into it, since I got a spiffy new box of colored pencils from my employer recently. This was a simple layering exercise, blended with some nail polish remover. Still some trouble areas to work the kinks out of, like pulling darker shadows out of the greens without making them too muddy or adding black, which sort of grays everything up.