2009 cracker van beethoven poster : color sketch

for the cramper folks. the 2009 end-of-year poster. they have been really sweet – this is my third year making a year-end poster for them! here’s the first, here’s the second. this will be printed in two colors. i wanted something holiday-like, but not *too* holiday. dig?

xm

Happy Halloween!

xm

new stock images up @ the wertzateria

hey folks,

i just uploaded a new set of stock illustrations to the stock site at the wertzateria. check out the sample below. these and many more are a click away.

xm

A few notes from the Alternative Press Expo

A few highlights from the Alternative Press Expo (a.k.a. ‘The Temple of Spendy’):

First of all, I have to mention my yearly APE companion: Anne-Maria. I love going to these things with AM. She talks to everyone. EVERYONE. She is not afraid tell the scary metal-obsessed tattooed boys that she wants their shirt. She draws out the shut-ins and makes them feel human again. She’s a gem.

The Queer Comics Panel hosted by Justin Hall is always a lot of fun. A good discussion of Genre: Slice of Life books vs. Fantasy books. Sat with the Verasphere for this talk, and I think they should start a Mrs. Vera comic ! Was most interested in Cedric Hollows by Sina Grace. I need to get myself a copy. Liz Baillie was also amusing: need to check out ‘My Brain Hurts’.

In other gay comics news: Wuvable Oaf. Bought a couple of issues, and they’re hilarious. I was laughing at loud in the aisle at the image of Baby Wuvable Oaf emerging from his mother’s loins, already sporting a thick beard and hairy arms. Too much.

Big news in lynda barry land (straight from the mouth of the D&Q guy): ‘the near sighted monkey’ is turning in to to a ‘what it is’ style work-book about drawing. All hail LYNDA BARRY!

A few new hardcover books (I budgeted $100 for the expo, aaand spent every thin dime) HOT POTATOE by Marc Bell, and Masterpiece Comics by Robert Sikoryak (who also gave a talk on Sunday with my friend Isabel Samaras). Got these fine fellows to sign my books.

xm

‘Singing’ for Cats this Sunday!

Friends to the Four-Pawed:

Andy and I are doing another ‘Singing’ for A Curious Collection of Cats (a children’s book lovingly illustrated by yours truly) this Sunday at Clayton Books in Clayton, California. If you are in the East Bay, come on out and getcher book signed and see Andy & I act like goofballs! Here’s a little bit from the book launch party:

What: Ukeleles and Kitties and Drawings
Where: Clayton Books, Clayton California
When: 3 pm. Right after naptime.

See you then? xm

campout 2009 poster (color sketch)

Yee-HAW! See you in the desert? xm

What’s up, my delicious friendlies?

Hello peps –

Back from a week in Santa Cruz for a silkscreen intensive. The teach, Jane Gregorius was amazing. I learned so much from her and was thrilled to be in class every day. Thanks to the kindness and hospitality of my friend Janet Fine, I had a nice place to stay. Met some cool new folks, and got to know better some old acquaintances (Hello Janice!).

In other artists news: got a cool package in the mail from my buddy S. Britt, including his oh-so-groovy coloring book Coloring Can Be Funny. Get one for the twisted 8-year old in your life! Also got a cool patch from Andy Arkley of the Bran Flakes (as well as his new CD, Twizzle). Oh, yeah, and Carolee sent me a nice letter and a postcard and some really great stickers. A letter! It had writing and thoughts and stuff! I love the mail. I love mail art even more. Thanks guys!

Just finished a few color sketches for the DSC (in conjunction with Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science). Feast your peeps on my favorite one “Colors in Nature”. Camouflage and blending colors: what use are these in the jungle?

xm

p.s. I’m going to rest my toes in the sand for a little bit. See you soon.

The Bride and the Bachelors

Hi ladies,

I was reading the chapter on Robert Rauschenberg in The Bride and the Bachelors – Five Masters of the Avant-Garde by Calvin Tomkins yesterday. These paragraphs stood out for me, and I thought I’d share:

In the early 1960s Rauschenberg began to notice that more and more collage was turning up in the art galleries – work in which the collage technique was the whole point rather than just a means to an end. This disturbed him and gave impetus to an urge he had been feeling for some time to paint “flat”. A large 1962 canvas called Ace showed the transition; it was basically a flat painting, whose relatively few collage elements were easliy absorbed into the composition. After Ace, Rauschenberg abandoned collage altogether and turned to silk-screen painting, which he adpated (freely to say the least) from commercial art. The images he wanted he took from magazines, newspapers, and such sources, and he had a commercial firm transfer them by a photographic process – in any size he ordered – to silk screens. Then, placing a screen over a canvas, he poured paint over it and forced the paint through the porous silk design with a squeegee. Next he worked directly on the surface of the canvas with brush, palette knife, fingers, turpentine-soaked rags, or anything else.

..snip..

The new technique has not made painting any less of an adventure for him. “It’s as much like Christmas for me as using objects I pick up in the street,” he said one day in 1963, to a visitor who had dropped in at his loft studio on lower Broadway to watch him work. “There’s that same quality of surprise and freshness that I have when using objects. When I get the screens back from the manufacturer the images on the look different from the way they did in the original photographs, because of the change in scale, so that’s one surprise right there. Then, they look different again when I transfer them to canvas, so there’s another surprise. And they keep on suggesting different things when they’re juxtaposed with other images on the canvas, so there’s the same kind of interaction that goes on in the combines and the same possibilities of collaboration and discovery.”

xm