I'm not dead yet...

Wow, where has the year gone? So, I've been lazy about posting. Acknowledge-move on.

Here is my latest sketch of a surrealist. This time, Oscar Dominguez, whom I know nothing.

I picked him because he had a great face, reminded me of Ernie Kovacs (he deserves a post all of his own), or at least a particular character that Ernie used to do.

I had to fight through my usual resistance to do this little drawing. The critic gets rolling right away keeping a running tally of all the "errors", "this is wrong",or "that doesn't work". The best advice I've heard for dealing with that evil little voice is to ignore it as you would a crazy person, and just keep working. I find that the "errors" are where all the life is in a piece of art work, where the humanity creeps in or as Leonard Cohen said, "The cracks let the light in". Amen.

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Luis Buñuel

I've been doing a series of little drawings of surrealist copying photos from an old book I have on surrealism. Here's my take on Luis Buñuel, artist and filmmaker. The photo I worked from makes him look like a giant, massive and looming. I love the blown out old photos of these wacky guys. They always look crazy as lizards on a hot road and have odd shaped heads and look like they would always have something interesting to say. I especially like the group shots where everyone looks wild and drunk and ready to shake the world by it's throat. They were probably all insufferable pains-in-the-ass, but even so the fantasy of a troupe of artist against the world together, making art, talking art, all still noble believers in the possibility; the certainty that the world would bend to the heavy gravity of their mind's creation. Is that still possible in this post-modern world? Sometimes I still feel it's so and those are good nights indeed.

My favorite Buñuel quote:

"Thank God I'm an atheist."

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The Magnificent MANBORG!

I recent found this very cool trailer through a great film blog called Quiet Earth. "MANBORG" looks like all the best bits of the cheesiest 80s' Sci-Fi flicks all rolled up and ready for a Saturday night. I want to see more!

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While waiting for the Ocracoke ferry...

...we found this confirmed ex-bird on the beach. It's been awhile since I've found anything dead on a beach and had a camera with me. I love the way the feathers fan out, sticking up in the air and the stark white of the bones and skull bleached by the sun.

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The hard part begins...

I have been tracking down folks and publications whom either contributed to my old comix "Reluctant Sadist" (remember the book project I'm working on) or reviewed it to get permission to reprint their work. It's been a fun and enlightening bit of detective work. Everyone has been very supportive and cooperative so far and that has been encouraging me to get more done. My biggest enemy right now is negative inertia. It's too easy to let the job, socializing and household duties eat up all of my time (not to mention the TV and the intertubes). Getting all the material cleared is a huge step. Now the hard bit begins. I have to actually start writing something. To jump start that creaky chunk of grey matter, I have dug out the old journals from that time period and have been reading through them trying to get back to that time and place. Sifting through the petty gripes and endless blathering to find a live wire that reconnect me to the heat. Help me understand why I was doing what I was doing and why I stopped. Examining each issue again is setting off smoke bombs and bottle rockets, flashes of memory and insight and I know once I get the hand moving the words will lay down.

I added a link on the sidebar to the right to Brad Foster's web site Jabberwocky Graphix. Brad contributed a cool one page piece to the fifth issue of RS and has agreed to let me reprint in the book. Thank you Brad.

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Ralf Schulze Blog

I discovered recently that a good, old friend of mine, Ralf Schulze, has a blog about his art called Aardvark Farms. Ralf and I met through the underground world of self-published comix. He was a New York guy hammering out his weird, purposefully offensive punk art (check "Wah Tem Eye" left) back then and our mutual desire to shock the rubes made us instant friends. Twenty years on, we are both reasonably responsible adults now with families and jobs and such, but both still hold on to that sharp, rusty blade, carving out our strange visions, but man, it is much harder to shock people now or even get them to notice. Lots of competition for eyeballs and the underground is no longer so under, nor dangerous, or exotic. Just another page to surf through...

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