Blog
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Post-MOMEntum: Gallery Talk
The MOMEntum exhibition is drawing to a close, but before it’s over me and Zak Sally are giving a Gallery Talk about the show. So come to MCAD tonight at 6:30 pm and see me stumble around the gallery trying to sound articulate. Apparently MCAD is holding their annual Mini-Comics Expo at the same time.
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Morrissey at The State Theater
On Monday, Morrissey played in Funnyapolis. Some insist that he said ‘Fannyapolis.’ Either one is a pretty apt description of Minneapolis as far as I’m concerned. It was much more of a production than I was expecting. Huge sound, huge backdrop and a huge light show. Drawing was more challenging than I expected it to be. It was very dark and the only light I could catch was provided by the overactive light show. It’s interesting to see a drawing develop under a strobe light. The Courteeners opened. I believe they were from Manchester. Here are the obligatory drawings:
Morrissey and band. The huge figure flexing it’s muscles was actually an image of a sailor smoking a cigar… in the drawing it ended up looking more like some Egyptian Pharaoh… which is fine with me!
The Courteeners (left) and Morrissey during the ultra-dark rendition of Death of a Disco Dancer. -
Junior Boys, Max Tundra and Lookbook
Junior Boys and Max Tundra played the First Avenue Main room Friday night. Max Tundra’s hyper-spastic set was the highlight of the evening for me… but then I’ve been a big Max Tundra fan since his first, electronica inflected, Children at Play single (from Warp) and I consider his Some Best Friend You Turned Out To Be an unsung masterpiece. The audience was both baffled and dazzled by his impish presence and multi-instrumentalist prowess. But their latent inner raver was soon awakened by Tundra’s off-kilter take on KLF’s What Time Is Love? The Junior Boys, on the other hand, were almost aloof in comparison… Their icy minimalist synth-techno-pop sounded cavernous and distant… as if emanating from a forgotten mall built inside of an underground fallout shelter buried deep beneath the frozen Canadian tundra… good stuff. Minneapolis’ own Lookbook opened. Here are some drawings from the show.
Junior Boys
Max Tundra was so active on stage it was difficult to choose what to draw.
Lookbook (left), Max Tundra doing a spastic robot (right) -
Ectoplasmic Deflation: Process
Yesterday, I posted a drawing that’s part of the Cloudy Characters print set. Today, I wanted to show you the process. I’ve always admired the process posts on Dan Zettwoch‘s site (like this one), so here’s one of my own.
Nothing starts without an idea. The brief I had from David was simply that it had to be a ‘cloudy character,” nothing else. I didn’t want to do anything with clouds in the sky because I couldn’t think of an interesting way of depicting that. Instead I decided to think of ‘cloudy’ as ‘head in the clouds.’ The economy was tanking at the time (and still is) and it was pretty obvious that Wall Street has had their head in the clouds for way too long. My initial idea was to comment on the various bailouts by having Ransom Strange‚Ñ¢ magically inflate an empty suit:
That seemed over-complex graphically for the small image, and didn’t really make much sense. But I liked the idea the lost financial capital as magical (or fictional) and evaporating as if it was never there. My second sketch was much simpler. It’s just a Fat Cat deflating… blowing mystical capital all around around him:
I was happy enough with the above to work up final line-art (india ink over pencil):
Next was color. I scanned in the line art and printed out a few smaller copies. This way I could quickly play around with it using colored pencil:
I liked the last variation best, and worked up the background line art based on it:
The final step was compositing everything in Photoshop and coloring the art based on the color pencil guidelines above. Here’s the final art:
See (and purchase) the printed (letterpress!) version here… Hopefully someone will find this useful in some way. -
Ectoplasmic Deflation
I was invited by David Huyck to create an image for a collection of letterpress prints called Cloudy Characters. The print is part of a set that includes art by Meg Hunt, Bill Fick, John Martz, Amy Crehore, Steven Weissman, and David Huyck. The set can be purchased from David’s Cloudy Collections site. This is what I came up with:
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Understanding Watchmen
The Trans-Atlantis blog doesn’t pride itself on timeliness. The Watchmen movie is no longer the cinematic event of the moment. The movie’s been debated to death, chewed over, the hype has been sucked out and all that’s left is a gory twitching corpse of low expectations. What better time to see it!? Was I disappointed? No. Was it good? Not really. I’m not sure that I can give an objective opinion. I mostly agree with Zak Sally’s assessment and I think that Isaac Cates is onto something‚Ķ I think the film will have it’s greatest impact on the academic world of media studies. Zack Snyder’s slavish adaptation of the comic-book turns the two Watchmen versions into the perfect study-guides. The story is essentially the same so the student can focus on the unique properties of each medium. Take Marshall McLuhan’s ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media theories. The hot high definition film can now be studied side by side with the cool low definition comic-book. Watchmen the movie is the perfect example of film as a hot medium. Since the film can never approach the comic-book’s narrative complexity, it compensates with visual overload. Every texture, grain of dust, shard of glass, spark of energy, drop of blood and rain, is visible and rendered in loving hyper-real detail. Each frame is crammed with detail in an attempt to get as much of the comic on film as possible. Dr. Manhattan’s nauseating avatar (CGI has a long way to go before it ascends from the Uncanny Valley) represents the film’s high definition aesthetic. Nothing is left to the imagination. Watchmen the comic-book takes full advantage of the cool nature of comics. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons chose to tell the story mostly through a tight nine-panel grid. Each panel by itself doesn’t contain much detail. It’s too small for that. The complexity of the story unfolds though repetition, juxtapositions, foreshadowing, etc. It’s up to the reader to stitch the whole thing together; to fill in the gaps‚Ķ etc. I suspect that both the movie and the comic-book will very quickly become ubiquitous in college syllabi around the world.
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Stereo Total at 7th Street Entry
Stereo Total was the headliner at the 7th Street Entry, but most of the audience clearly showed up to see Leslie and The Ly’s. As usual the drawing conditions at the Entry were challenging. Half the audience was wearing some form of gem sweater. Unfortunately the radiance of plastic jewelry embedded in yarn did not make drawing any easier. Jonathan Ackerman opened the evening with a solid DJ set. Click on the images to enlarge them.
Stereo Total
Leslie and the Ly’s
Jonathan Ackerman -
Doodle Dump 011
After a brief hiatus, Doodle Dump‚Ñ¢ returns! Click on images to enlarge them.
