Consider Worms

Sketchbook Therapy

Sometimes, when life's little downturns and inconveniences have me irritated, I find the best therapy is to whip out the old sketchbook and pencil and start to doodle the stress away. Conversely, when I'm sitting there staring at a blank sketchbook page, pencil impotently clutched in hand, that aforementioned irritation compounds like guinea pig poop.

Last night my television stopped working. Boo-hoo! you might chide. First world problems! you may sarcastically sneer. Yeah, I get it. It ain't exactly the end of the world. But I generally watch one  television program on one station, and I don't have cable. So when 7pm Central Standard Time rolls around this Saturday, and I flick the idiot box on to immerse my troubles in MeTV's Svengoolie, and see that my digital antennae has suddenly stopped functioning, I get a little chafed. Yes, I checked to see if it was plugged in, before you ask.

Well it turns out the channels needed to be rescanned or some nonsense, but for the night my television was out of order. After a good fifteen minutes of glaring at the thing like I might be able to magically fix it or cause it to explode with childish vengeance simply by glowering at it, I decide that that's maybe not the healthiest or most productive way to spend a Saturday night. So's I whip out the little pocket sketchbook and the mechanical pencil and I start to doodle; as a result I come up with this scribble about how the world might change if cats had pyrokinesis.

Halloween 2019 Creepy Consumption Day 4: Svengoolie

Day Four of Creepy Consumption continues with a quick sketch of the Patron Saint of my Saturday evenings: Svengoolie. While not a horror movie or a television show per se, Sven is the cool ghoul who hosts the Universal Monsters classics, along with The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, and a plethora of other Hammer Horrors, Universal and Warner Bros. monster mayhem from the golden age of monster movies, all wrapped in a heady helping of Vaudeville-esque humor (aka jokes your grandfather would tell).

If you don't know what Svengoolie is all about, go here, or check out MeTV on Saturday night, 7pm Central Standard Time!

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.

Gamblers, Brothels and Halloween in Winona

Two bits from page three of the Evening Edition of the Monday, October 30th 1893 issue of the Winona Daily Republican:

One detailing a skirmish between three drunken gamblers in a brothel on Second Street:

Another extolling the practice of observing my favorite holiday, even by intelligent people in the age of reason:

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.