Warmblooded

russian posters

2008-08-15T11:19:00.000-07:00

1469 amazing russian posters

Periodic Table of Neat-o

2008-01-30T13:26:00.000-08:00

Here's a cool thing. The Periodic Table of elements made by artists.

Ninety-six printmakers of all experience levels, have joined together to produce 118 prints in any medium; woodcut, linocut, monotype, etching, lithograph, silkscreen, or any combination. The end result is a periodic table of elements intended to promote both science and the arts.

Completely unrelated, I was just thinking of doing a collection of prints. . A monster for every day of the week. More on that later.

Library of Congress Photos

2008-01-18T09:08:00.000-08:00

Here is a super amazing Flickr set, and a few samples.

Process

2008-01-14T20:19:00.000-08:00

This is pretty cool. Henry Contreras posted a process thread on gigposters.com showing the evolution of his recent poster for High On Fire. I've collected all of the images together here, check it out.

Evan's Book site

2008-01-08T07:48:00.000-08:00

I read a bunch of nerdy web design and development websites. It can be awfully dry, sometimes informative, and often helpful. This morning I was sifting through the always engaging designview site, kept by Andy Rutledge. In late December he posted about his 10 year old son Evan, who seems like a pretty cool kid.

My 10-year old son walked up to me last month while I was watching the news and said, “Dad, I want a website.” I turned down the TV and asked why on earth he wanted a website. “To talk about the books I read,” he answered. I said I wasn’t sure that his friends would be all that interested in what he had to say about books. “Well, there might be lots of kids out there who are wondering what are some good books to read. I can help with that.” Wow.

I recommend checking out the full post, and then head over to Evan's Book Site, which I find to be super cool and honestly inspiring.

Letman

2008-01-07T19:26:00.001-08:00

I stumbled upon this guy Letman's site his evening and my eyes are very happy now. Very very pretty lettering.

Inspiration

2008-01-03T13:56:00.000-08:00

It's a brand new year, full of new projects and things to plan and work on. So much to do! But before any of that happens, I need to dig around for some inspiration.

I've been doing some winter reading, Mostly nerdy stuff, but mixed with minor bits of fun and distractions. In between the piles of Christmas cookies, left over wine, and DVD collections I've started to find some inspiration on the interwebs. Here are a couple small sources of happiness for the creative brain:

Gemini G.E.L. Catalog Raisonne
Flavor paper
programmable press
sleevage
ospaal posters
polish posters
dino comics

A parade of self-congratulation

2007-12-31T10:43:00.001-08:00

I'm not much of a New Year's resolution guy. I'm not into setting myself up for the letdown of not fulfilling whatever task, promise or declaration I spit out in a wine drenched stupor at 11:45 on December 31st. Usually, when folks ask if I have one, I just say that I'm going to kick more ass this year than last.

The whole practice of new years resolutions is bunk, if you ask me. I certainly do not need to be told how to initiate a plan for self improvement, and while I could have high hopes for the upcoming year, I usually just look back on this year and make plans to top that performance. Something tells me it will be a tough act to beat.

I've been very lucky this year. A lot of hard work paid off this year, and my thanks go out to all of those who have supported me and been my anchor. I promise that this year I'll do my best to make you all happy and proud.

There are a lot of fun things on the horizon for myself, and Largemammal too. In February I'll be involved in Sweet: The Graphic Beauty of the Contemporary Rock Poster, a gallery show at the University of Maryland that includes some very spiffy poster folks and myself, with a poster sale event on the opening day. Then it's full speed ahead making plans for Flatstock 16 in Austin, TX.

Aside from that, I'm making plans to hit up as many Flatstocks, poster events, flea markets and gallery shows as I can, and to push my design chops and graphic mediums to new and uncharted waters. Ain't no half-steppin' this year.

Here's a raise of the glass to you and yours. Have a happy and safe new year!

Thoroughly enjoyed albums of 2007

2007-12-27T03:50:00.000-08:00

I am going to avoid any semblance of music snobbery and esoteric wankery by simply stating that here is a small list of records that I really enjoyed this year, in no particular order.

Richard Hawley - Lady's Bridge
My friend Paul laid this one on me, and every time I listen to it I swear I should have a glass of scotch and a dimly lit bar room to haunt. These eleven tracks skulk, sneak, and saunter in such a way that completely embodies Cool with a capital C.

With Lady’s Bridge (Mute), the follow-up to 2005’s sublime Cole’s Corner, Richard Hawley—Nancy Sinatra collaborator, session supremo and sometime Pulp cohort—has crafted yet another wondrous set of late-night laments. Like its predecessors, the songs are firmly entrenched in one of pop’s most unfashionable eras, that strange grey period directly after rock ’n’ roll’s initial explosion and just prior to the onslaught of the Beatles and the British Invasion. It harkens back to a time when girl groups, Brill Building protégés and smooth crooners ruled the airwaves. Echoes of Roy Orbison, Gene Pitney and Lee Hazlewood abound; it’s all in the sympathetic, tasteful playing of Hawley’s backing band, his own burnished, bruised baritone, the delicate string arrangements, and the little guitar licks that are more James Burton than Jimi Hendrix. It’s the kind of music that soundtracked the Northern English workingmen’s clubs that Hawley played in as a kid, and you can almost smell the acrid fug of cigarette smoke and warm beer. Above all, it’s unashamedly “grown up” music—not in a self-consciously, po-faced way—rather, it’s music that deals with longing and regret, music made by and for people who’ve lived and loved and lost. It’s sentimental, nostalgic and unabashedly romantic—and it’s all the better for it. [From MAGNET Magazine]

Okkervil River - The Stage Names
I've been interested in these folks since their last offering, Black Sheep Boy. I'd say it's like Bright Eyes without the sucking noise, but I may be completely wrong. This record grabbed me right away, showing a stronger and more effective instrumentation to fill out Will Sheff's increasingly potent songs. Not that the older stuff was less potent, but there is a more focused howl on this one that illustrates a band both united in purpose and in complete control of their craft.

Handsome Furs - Plague Park
This is a side project from the other guy in Wolf Parade. You know, the one who's not in a bunch of other bands. The one who guts out his vocals from a more ballsy Honky Dory-era Bowie ashtray with a measured helping of drum machine, guitar and synth.

Dark and minimal while noisy and earnest, the fabric of their record together was just as informed by late nights as it was by Scandinavian black metal. Truly, the point of creating Handsome Furs was to be as sparse and repetitive as possible with the help of little more than vocals, guitars, and a new drum machine. Through this, songs of earthbound captains, eggs made of gold and iron, and sleepless bodies were born. Boeckner’s affected vocals thinly resonate as they are ushered in by a frenzied undertone of fear and uncertainty, all punctuated by drum machine beats. Through the course of each track, a deep-seated sense of longing struggles with staunch realism as a restless disdain for both urban life and smaller towns collide. [From Sub Pop Records]

Coliseum - No Salvation
This album will punch you in the face. It will not apologize. You will like it, and will undoubtedly ask for more. Bad-assery to the highest degree.

120 Days - s/t
This album will not punch you in the face, though you may get intensely sweaty dancing your ass off to the Kraftwerk meets early U2 grooves that drive heavy and long in this desperate call to action of a record. Though the action may only be to get up and move your ass in your best Brat Pack movie prom dance montage dream, you'll be satisfied with the results. My attention span for this kind of nostalgic style jacking is usually pretty low, but something in these tracks tells me to stay tuned. Don't ask me why.

Loney, Dear - Loney, Noir
Proof that Sweden is good for more than just metal. So there's this guy, Emil Svanängen. He lives and records in his parents' home and has the fuzziest little band I've ever seen. I caught them opening for Low this year at the Unitarian, and it was truly entertaining to see these folks learning how to be a band and entertain a thin and fidgety crowd with the inevitable story of how excited they were to eat a real cheesesteak.

It is at once effervescent and resigned, exhilarating and melancholy, joyous and confessional. And we are under its spell. [From Sub Pop Records]

English to American Dictionary

2007-10-29T06:45:00.000-07:00

Here are a few reasons to go back to England, if only to immediately get myself into some kind of ill-fated physical altercation. A few too many derogatory terms here, but the definition of “fag” is quite enlightening, I’d say.

Get Smart

2007-10-21T18:10:00.000-07:00

I may be the last person on earth to know about this, but you can totally download free books to read off the internets. Here's a nifty site. I already grabbed The Art of War, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Good time reading...

We need a bigger boat

2007-10-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

Looks like it's time for a trip up to the Met, who just brought in Damien Hirst's Physical Impossibility of Death In the Mind of Someone Living. From the NYT

Ampersandland

2007-10-11T07:39:00.000-07:00

Here is a cool Flickr pool of, well, ampersands. Spotted at Simplebits

Giant Girl Doll

2007-09-18T18:30:00.000-07:00

I almost forgot about this.

Not a water pipe.

2007-09-14T14:00:00.000-07:00

Now that's good design.

Whatever

2007-08-18T05:31:00.001-07:00

I've got the 'tude!

Happy ICBM!

2007-08-01T14:55:00.000-07:00

Today kicks off International Canned Beer Month. I will observe this observance respectfully and dutifully.

Up in this JAWN

2007-08-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite words.

Why I love New Jersey

2007-07-30T21:15:00.001-07:00

My wife interviewed the two shirtless guys in this video for a City Paper article a few years ago. New Jersey is awesome.

Goodbye Jack

2007-07-26T22:21:00.000-07:00

I have a confession. I'm still in love with Jack. You know, the little Cingular Wireless logo, the one that danced into view in 2000 as a refreshing and humanistic identity in a cold and heartless wireless market.

I have passed by various Cingular Wireless stores in the recent weeks and months of the Cingular-to-AT&T Mobility rebranding, and I've become increasingly disheartened by the realization that the little guy is going away. I have no reason to feel such an affinity towards the brand, as I am not a subscriber, nor do I plan to be (at least until the iphone drops price by a few hundred bucks, wink wink). I think the point that I am missing is how on the eve of unleashing one of the most forward thinking communication tools in at least a decade, the exclusive wireless provider for said gadget firmly places its identity into a reverse time warp.

When I think of AT&T, I think of a bloated old mega-company that rolls its services upon you like a Borg "assimilation". The Cingular brand felt personal, forward thinking and young. Jack had celebratory and playful appeal that clearly separated their business as different from the rest of the pack. I suppose it's a moot point, as first weekend sales-figures tell, but AT&T really hung its' hat on the hope that the iphone launch would help anchor the rebrand.

Saul Bass' original 1968 planetary mark for AT&T achieved an impact on its own planetary scale.

It was the ideal graphic analog for a phone system that was hailed as the best in the world, a virtually indestructable monopoly posing as a public utility: Ma Bell, utterly reliable and as ubiquitous as air.

Michael Beirut, from Design Observer

It's undeniable that the AT&T identity has a long and storied history. But putting a "fresh and new" polish on such a weighted visual heritage doesn't pack the modern punch that will create a cult of loyal followers. If I am buying the idea of your company, then I don't want to buy "old faithful", I want some romance, some spark, people. I want to buy a product as ambitious and committed to success as I am.

How's this for a pick up line? AT&T describes the new logo as a "Logo That Stands for Telecommunications Revitalized for New Era of Integrated Communications and Entertainment". I must admit, I'm not flattered. That description doesn't mention its customers at all, only the service provided. And that's why the Cingular identity was so much stronger, because it was about the customer and the result of the service provided.

So, until someone puts the Verizon logo out of it's misery, or until people stop clamoring about the London Olympic logo, I'll raise my glass for poor poor Jack, a fine young identity gone too soon.

Legends of the Fall

2007-07-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

I'm prepping myself for a super busy fall concert season, with many posters to design and secret plans to hatch. I've already confirmed posters for Amy Winehouse, Feist, Animal Collective, Okkervil River, and about 6 more to be ironed out soon.

I'm also doing some smaller gigs that may be of interest to one and all. Black Moth Super Rainbow is playing the Khyber on August 17, followed by Shapes and Sizes on September 26. Don't sleep on 2 cool shows in the 50-seat Unitarian Church chapel. Tiny Vipers and Patrick Cleandenim are keeping it cool in August. Check R5 for details.

I'll see you dudes and ladies soon, I have a lot of drawing to do.

The truth hurts

2007-06-01T14:12:00.000-07:00

Here are a few images from the finished pieces. Thanks for checking it out.

screens

2007-05-28T20:54:00.000-07:00

I'm prepping screens for the print elements on the pieces.
Imagery will include:

Cable wire from my basement
floorboards
cement texture
ivy
rolls of tape
a folding chair seat
pencil texture
detail sections of one of the pieces
wire shelving

I am also working on putting some bamboo into the mix, but haven't found a solution yet.

Images

2007-05-27T22:36:00.001-07:00

Progress

2007-05-27T13:27:00.000-07:00

I'm well into things here. I've got some layers put down, and I'm prepping some screened elements to go down tomorrow. I'm still not sure where everything is going, but I feel good about it. I am going to trim some bamboo to incorporate into one or more of the pieces.

I found myself reading through some of my old notes and excerpts from some books to reinforce the direction I am moving in. Here are a few hot hits from the past.

"When the image of an object changes, the observer must know whether the change is due to the object itself or to the context or to both, otherwise he understands neither the object nor its surroundings."
- Rudolf Arnheim, from Visual Thinking

"to see, to perceive, is more than to recognize. It does not identify something present in terms of a past disconnected with it. The past is carried into the present so as to expand and deepen the content of the latter. Art is thus prefigured into the very processes of living."
- John Dewey, from Art As Experience

"Words have no value in themselves. That is their value."
- Daniel Chandler, from Semiotics for Beginners

Bio for Copy show

2007-05-25T13:16:00.001-07:00

I work in response to the space and context that I exist in.

PAST.
Years ago I made some paintings that were made to define my presence in an outward space. Constantly stripping away the image until there was just the context. I expanded those ideas into a video installation, using multilayered screens that changed the image as the viewer changed their placement in the room. Stripping away the idea further, I began an exploration of semiotics and visual language to see if I could separate meaning from its own visual signifier by changing the context of the sign system. That project is ongoing in the form of a site specific, time based installation print of all of the words that I know.

PRESENT.
This work is created in response to the new home that I moved into in March, and also to my new life in a married relationship. It has spurred an immense change in the way that my creative process works. For many years I worked in context to outside forces, attempting to define and understand the space around me. My focus has turned inward, which is an interesting change on both a personal and artistic level. The work uses automatic writing with found objects as printing materials, along with screen printing and painting with acrylics and water-based polyurethane.

Steps

2007-05-19T23:47:00.000-07:00

Here is a partial view of a first step I made with the work today. I used a number of items from around the house to make marks with, and I'm reacting to some things. More to come tomorrow.

I read all of my old journals and decided that the inquiry I was on doesn't hold any water for me anymore. I guess I just have a bunch of new problems. The old bit was all about reaching out into a space to see what the relationship was, and now I feel like I need to reach inward, as cliché as that sounds. I still have an urge to place one kind of order over another, still interested in chance, materials, and response. No better light bulbs here, just making a mess with my hands and head.

Work has begun

2007-05-14T13:35:00.000-07:00

I've decided to stop thinking about it and start making a mess. I’m using some of the more successful elements of my 25 Days A Week prints, and I’m going to work off of my feelings about finally having a home of my own. I’ll post process pics as I get them.

Confusion is Next

2007-05-02T14:19:00.000-07:00

"The absolute present is unattainable" –Doug Aitken

So I spent all of that time shooting holes in my understanding of the nature of painting, of form, meaning, figure and ground. And I then I studied semiotics, approached similar ideas from somewhat different angles. What did the early paintings, the video painting and the words print have in common? I suppose its the structure. The grid. Setting two grids against each other to see what happens. But not much really happened but some heady speculation and a quiet thud. I never really got into the “real space” with the video because of the presentation – placed in the middle of a group show of 2D works and small sculpture. But that brings up an important question. Shouldn’t it be able to exist without that spatial constraint?

I read a bunch about phenomenology after showing the video piece. This artist, Robert Irwin, had been playing with some of the same ideas that I was considering. He went way more in depth than I did, employing sensory deprivation chambers and NASA scientists in his cause. He was searching for a sense of “phenomenal presence” using some very sneaky and subtle installation works. His work shot a bunch of holes in the ideas that I had been working on, which is a kind of relief. The question now, is, what is the question? Where do I go with the line of inquiry that I dropped 6 years ago? Am I looking for a fresh start? Should I pick up where I left off? I’m headed over to the gallery shortly, I guess I’ll know more after I have a chance to react to the space there. Hmm.

One man's problem

2007-04-30T22:38:00.000-07:00

"How can you say any style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling that you have given up something" -Andy Warhol, quoted from "What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part 1," Art News 64

on big time failure

2007-04-30T22:05:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here considering some of the questions that sent me away from painting after I left school. I had worked so hard on a set of paintings that, as soon as they were finished and hanging, I was completely dissatisfied with them. They were square, about 67 inches, and the canvasses were laden with a delicate structure of painterly marks that formed a sort of pattern or field over the whole. In the center there was a small, screen-printed, gridded cell structure that I found in a textboook about symmetry in organic chemistry. I was working on some ideas about balance. I had placed a lot of unfocused energy into this small focused space. Painted the patterned surface over and over again with increasingly pale colors, until I had this eggshell fog and a huge headache. It was a failure. I was trying to figure out at what point the balance between the viewer's focus and the focused center would cancel out the overall pattern in the painting. But it never really materialized. And there I was, standing in the middle of a room covered with these things, kicking myself in the ass because I hadn't controlled the light the way that I thought I had been able to before. For years I had functioned with a "healthy distrust" of painting, and my proof was right there. I had to move away from controlling the paint, and into controlling the actual light.
Soon after I began toying with Karen's camcorder. I was admiring the way it made everything completely over-saturated, so much so that it started to take on a painterly effect that sent me into another feverish set of experiments. Hours and hours of strange imagery, neon lights, rain, clouds, and blank spaces were logged to tape, and I put them away. Within a month or two I was planning a show with my friends and I began to toy with ways to show the video footage I'd shot. I started with plain projection screens, and then played with different surfaces, varying papers, plastic sheeting, and wood.
I took some of the gridded area ideas from the paintings and expanded the idea into the screens. The final piece was this: Two screens, about 10 foot squares, hung one in front of the other about 2 feet apart. Each screen was dived up into 25 or 49 square blocks. Each block was made of either tracng paper, thin plastic sheeting, thick plastic sheeting, or a blank space. From behind the screens I projected a crudely constructed video piece. The video was in two sections, one a completely abstracted color study, and the second part a mood piece involving looped trucks on a rainy road, clouds slowly moving across the sky, and some other random imagery.
The viewer was encouraged to move around the room and see the piece from different angles, constantly changing their spacial relationship to the piece, and the varying screens and images would interact with the viewer in the room. It was a half-realized attempt in some respects, but it was also my most satisfying experience with painting. Perhaps it wasn't really painting, but I felt then as if I had stepped out of painting and was able to push people around the space like I wanted to with the cold, static canvasses from just a few months earlier.

4 weeks

2007-04-29T20:46:00.000-07:00

I am going to be involved with an art show, upcoming in June. I have approximately 3 weeks to make enough pieces to populate a wall of the gallery space. Holy crap, it's time to bust out some serious crayons and pencils. Insert Picture Pages noise here.

bring

2007-04-27T07:31:00.001-07:00

More projects to start working on more fully... I began work on a new set of art prints, called “bring”, or “bring down the heavens”. It would be another series of abstracts with some type included. Paranoia and destruction as some themes to run through it. Process images to come. I have to stop watching the news.

ideas

2007-04-25T22:28:00.000-07:00

Ideas I am working on:
-years ago I abandoned work on a project that I took up after a feverish study of semiotics and the psychology of drawing. I began to make a xerox transfer print of all of the words that I knew. First, I designated a time in which I would document the words. Then I wrote them down in a sketch pad, leaving out only proper nouns.
Next, I took the sketchbook pages and enlarged them by about 45% on a copy machine. I had devised a way of printing the words onto a gridded matrix of about 35 sheets of square paper. The words were contained in a grid of their own, sometimes running off the edges of one sheet of paper to reemerge on the adjacent sheet.
I had no idea what the real value of the project was, I was mostly interested in the process, which turned out to be grueling. I was to solvent transfer each word, one at a time, into the carefully gridded space. After a week I had only 3 sheets completed, and I was unemployed at the time. I'm not sure what prompted me to abandon the project, but I've had an urge to revisit the idea and perhaps complete what I had started.
-I've been also thinking about painting again. I still hold some of my original "healthy disrespect" for painting that eventually drove me away from it back in 2002. I would probably reconnect with some of those ideas and see if the years have shifted my approach, or if I'm the same old dog with a new brush.
Lots of work to do, not much time to do it....