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

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.

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. 

Macumba Noir

 

Acrylic on black paper

Ruff Neighborhood

 Acrylic and spray paint on paper. 

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.

New Paintings

Here are some paintings I've either just recently finished, or started and are works in progress. Apologies for the fact that some are sideways; my scanner is busted so all I can use is my crummy cell phone, and I don't have Adobe Photoshop on this computer. 

Hillbilly Hunstman From Outer Space gouache on paper

Brainburn For Bubbleglum (work in progress) acrylic on cardboard

Concerto For Violin and Hand Puppet acrylic on canvas

Casket Case acrylic on wood

Another Night In Prick City acrylic on canvas

Sci-Fi Still Life acrylic on canvas

The Experiment acrylic on cardboard

Nuclear Knight acrylic on canvas

Solitary Refinement gouache on watercolor paper

Science-Fiction Still Life

I actually made time to sit down and do some painting this afternoon and evening. I'm not sure if this one is done yet or not. I think I've reached the point of "Do I keep adding and fixing until it's ruined, or do I stop?" Of course there are bits that I think need tightening up, and this hyper-saturated-while-somehow-gloomy-because-it-was-photographed-with-an-ipone-in-weird-lighting-circumstances picture doesn't really help sell it, either. 

The Experiment

The lighting is abysmal, I know, but here's another acrylic piece. This one is on cardboard.

Another Night In Prick City

Acrylic on canvas. I’m still learning how to use acrylics; after the easy blending and quick drying nature of gouache, they make me feel a bit clunky, which is why it kind of looks like a six year old made this. I'm finding precision and clean lines difficult with them.

Native Women & Chicago Imagists

Mechanical bank developed by Daniel Cooke for the Hubley
Manufacturing Co., on display at the MIA.

A visit to the MIA is never less than inspiring. I made a trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Art this past weekend to see the Hearts Of Our People: Native Women Artists exhibit. I didn't take any pictures of the experience because: a) many of the pieces on display were prohibited from being photographed at the artist's or donor's request; and b) it was an immersive experience with lots of multi-media components, and constantly withdrawing from that to stop and snap dimly-lit pictures on my iPhone seemed to countermand the purpose of the exhibition itself. I definitely recommend the visit, though, and you can get a peek at some of the pieces here on MIA's website, including one of my favorites of the exhibition, a series of clay tower sculptures by Santa Clara Pueblo native artist Nora Naranjo Morse.

Here are some examples of her work, including a detail of the series of sculptures on display (bottom pic) at the MIA:

"Khwee-seng (Woman-man)" Nora Naranjo Morse at
The Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ.

I recommend checking out Nora Naranjo Morse's website here. According to her website she's moved away from ceramics and into utilizing recycled materials and recently opened an exhibit with her daughter Eliza in Redwood City, CA.

On my way out of the Hearts Of Our People exhibit, I walked out into the rotunda designated as Gallery G280, which had a number of recent acquisitions hanging on the wall; some pieces holdovers from the recent display focusing on Hairy Who and The Chicago Imagist movement. Up until that point I had been woefully ignorant of the Chicago Imagist movement as an art movement and of the MIA even having had a spotlight exhibit dedicated to it. I definitely left with a list of names to do further research on!

Art Green "United Opposition" oil on canvas, 1975.

Ray Yoshida "Miraculous Matriarch" acrylic on canvas, 1980.

Roger Brown "Skyscraper"  oil on canvas with painted frame, 1971.

Errol Ortiz "Astronaut Targets" acrylic on canvas, 1965.

Jim Denomie "Vatican Cafe" oil on canvas, 2014.

Dominick Di Meo "Untitled (Red line with heads)" mixed media on Masonite, 1952. 

There's a great website that gives a good overview of the Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagist movement here, though be warned it is quite media-heavy and even with contemporary internet speeds and blink-of-the-eye media plug-in loading, the media hasn't all been necessarily streamlined and compressed to modern standards. The navigation leans more towards the novelty than the user-friendly as well, though the site is packed with great information and examples of each artist's work.

You can read about a recent controversy involving Ojibwe artist Jim Denomie's piece "Standing Rock 2016" and a Minnesota House Republican's offense at his depiction of Donald Trump here.

The Experiment in Progress

My painting is still in progress. Not super familiar with acrylics, so the layering is taking some getting used to. For such thick paints, they sure do brush on translucent!

Painting In Progress

Painting in progress! Acrylic on cardboard. More soon (hopefully). 

Yetis Don't Surf (But We Think They Should)

Here is today's doodle-a-day effort, which came about as a result of the two rounds of Flapjacks And Sasquatches I played last night, and the Hawaiian shirt I wore when I got off work today. Yes, it's a surfing yeti wearing a party hat (he likes to party), accompanied by a raccoon wearing swimming goggles and tooting a party blowout.

It's just begging to be used for a party invite...or something.

The Wild World Of Exotica

Here are some mixed media pieces I did on a small pad of "printmaker's paper" which seems to be a sort of heavy stock combo watercolor / bristol board. I don't know if anyone would actually use it for screen-printing or lithography since the sheets appear to be postcard sized. 

Anywho, a mix of gouache, marker, Copic pen and graphite were used on these odes to the mid-century exotica craze and the floor shows of 1930s night clubs. 

Rattlesnake Skeleton in the Moonlight

This is a minimalist painting I did on some black construction paper. I felt like utilizing the existing darkness as suggestive space, so I could hint at shapes and create more of a mood than a realistic depiction of what a rattlesnake skeleton or a cactus would actually look like. This is gouache with a little bit of acrylic.