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. 

A Few More Drawings

Space Tiki!

As you may or may not know, I've been trying to do a "doodle-a-day" drawing exercise. I've found myself sitting down to the old sketchbook and ending up more frustrated than productive. I think the major barriers are: A) Coming up with something I feel deserves the time and paper, and B) Trying so hard to make something I think I'll feel proud of, that it stymies my attempt to do anything at all, which is counterproductive and antithetical to the whole sketchbook idea in the first place, right?

Spectral Luchador!

So the whole idea of my doing a doodle a day was to help loosen myself up and just engross myself in something that only had to be as fleshed out as it ended up being, using whatever medium I felt like, with whatever subject matter rattled to the front of my little mind. I know I tend to have a variety of styles, in that sometimes I like to do more comic book-y cartoonish illustration, and other times I really like breaking out the pencils and trying to do something a bit more "arty" if that makes sense.

Anyway, here are some more recent doodles.

The Curse Of The Ghost Of Dracula's Skeleton!

Ugh!