Just a quick post to draw attention to my most recent illustration for Hilobrow, in which I illustrated Luc Sante’s small piece on one of my favorite photographers, Weegee. Not only was I totally honored to be able to accompany Luc’s terrific writing, it took me back to when I did my BA sophomore-year photography project on Weegee; the assignment was to find a favorite photographer, and then recreate the style ourselves. In retrospect, it’s a totally regressive and vigorously uninspired assignment, but my contact sheets, with my friends lying in pools of blood on the sidewalk, riddled with bullets in a bathtub, do exist. Somewhere.

One of the great ironies of influence is that one can’t necessarily pull apart what has caused you to be what you are, artistically, without removing a few of the key bolts that keep the whole structure in place. Asked to remove a specific influence from an artist’s work is a massive game of Jenga, and just because the artist is rooted in their field by the various flotsam and jetsam that they have been exposed to, it often doesn’t make the artist the sum of the parts. It is thus that, when my good friend Matt Rebholz approached me and offered for me to spend to a day make a silkscreen print with the infinitely generous and patient Greg Nanny of Drive-By Press that I jumped at the chance and told him to his shock I had never done one before.

Clearly, my work is heavily influenced by the analog printing process; my parents, founding members of the Graphic Workshop at Mass. Art, were old hands at the process, and our household was filled to the brim with incredible prints, from lithography to woodcuts to silkscreens. However, I also happened to come of age when the first Apple computer, the Mac IISE, entered into our house. Photoshop 1.0 was a revolution, and I totally taken with it. And so it went, me recreating the influences of my life (analog) with the tools of the future (digital). And last Thursday was my first dip back into the cool waters of influence. It feels good.

The above print is the first of a series of prints I’m planning on creating, based upon the lesser known tales of Phaedrus (Aesop), as translated by the amazing, amusingly old-school Christopher Smart . If you can’t read it, the text is below:

The Dog, Treasure, and Vulture.

A Dog, while scratching up the ground,
‘Mongst human bones a treasure found;
But as his sacrilege was great,
To covet riches was his fate,
And punishment of his offence;
He therefore never stirr’d from thence,
But both in hunger and the cold,
With anxious care he watch’d the gold,
Till wholly negligent of food,
A ling’ring death at length ensued.
Upon his corse a Vulture stood,
And thus descanted :-” It is good,
O Dog, that there thou liest bereaved
Who in the highway wast conceived,
And on a scurvy dunghill bred,
Hadst royal riches in thy head.”

You can see a larger version of the print on my Flickr page. The few still remaining will go on sale soon. Stay tuned.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been lucky enough to a contributor to the terrific cultural website, HiLoBrow. Edited by Josh Glenn and Matthew Battles, it’s an online journal that attempts, usually very successfully, to parse out the genuine cultural gems in our rapidly accelerating cultural from so much chaff. Glenn and Battles are experts at not only figuring out the real deal from what is an increasingly confusing brew of humor, advertising, self-promotion, art, and commerce, but presenting it in a way that reengages the audience in something they may have been trained to ignore. We all accept the precepts of Highbrow, Lowbrow, and Middlebrow, but Glenn and Battles take it a step further, finding the sliver of real deal in the grand Venn diagram. From it’s manifesto, HiLoBrow is

…a manifestation of engaged irony. (When the cast of John Waters’s 1998 movie Pecker toast the “death of irony,” they’re toasting the death of middlebrow sarcastic hipsterism.) The engaged ironist is a hilobrow.

It’s a great experiment in cultural semiotics, and I’m very glad to be a part. Over the past year or so, they have been running a series called “Hilo Heroes”, in which every day they celebrate the birthday of a Hilo Hero. I have have done quite a few by now, and I have now also collected some of my more favorite illustrations that accompany my text into a HiLoBrow Flickr group. I’ll be adding more as I do them. Follow along!

So I thought I’d give a quick run down of March, now that it’s gone, because it was SO FREAKING crazy.

My show, the aforementioned Landscapes of Quarantine show, was a rousing success, I would say almost too much so; the place was so rammed with tight-clothed young people that the art was definitely secondary to the scene. Which isn’t to say that’s a totally bad thing; I suspect the copious amount of FREE BEER might have had something to do with it, but all in all, a fantastic time was had. You can check out the photos of the event here. The rest of night after the opening was a blur, but I do know at once point, we closed down a Cuban restaurant in Soho, after which the very nice waitress flicked the lights on and off so we would leave. Sorry, mystery waitress! I had like 37 whiskeys, my bad.

You can see the full 8 pieces, generously published on HiLoBrow here.

In other totally amazing news, the show actually got written up as a Critic Pick in Art Forum, with yours truly being name dropped. Oh, dang!

I awoke the next morning after the show, hangover in tow, to find that I had a bunch of work to do for a freelance job, in between which I packed, spent some time with my lovely and patient wife, and then HIT THE ROAD to Austin the next morning.

South by Southwest was a blast, and the panel was a raging success, judging by the tweet feed that was the result.

Best comment: “Best panel ever.”
Worst comment: “Disappointed by #incol panel – too unfocussed! ”

Make what you will of that.

You can see images of the panel and SXSW here, which is kind of a condensed version of the full photo album I have. Friends and relatives, check out my personal blog for whole shebang.

The SXSW trip was amazing and fun, I saw all sorts of cool stuff, as expected, and there’s plenty of great places to check it all out. It was also rather watershed for me, though, and for something that concerns SXSW – or the trip at all – only tangentally. After the end of the panel, halfway into my second beer, I started to feel very ill; unnamed, nice bizdev woman taking to me, I apologize for abruptly leaving midway through our conversation, I had to run and upchuck in the bathroom. The rest of the afternoon was a blur, and it was only through the generosity of my friends and fellow panelists that I got home to where I was staying. and promptly passed out for the rest of the day and evening.

There’s a lot of prosaic explanations for this sort of thing – food poisoning, 24-hour-bug, or what have you. However, in my traditional fashion, I like to ascribe it to a more goof-ball reason: I think my body was telling me I was spread too thin and pursuing things in wrong fashion. Over the past nine months, I have been involved in a workshop with peer crit reviews every week, running Robots + Monsters, planning for the SXSW panel, acting as Creative Director for a small boutique web firm, and handling all of my big illustration projects. I think it’s time I pare down, and focus on the one big thing that I’ve been avoiding forever.

That’s right: building my Death Ray. Finally!

Page 3. Click for larger size.

I’m very excited to extend the invite to anyone in the area to the opening night of the group show I’m a part of, Landscapes of Quarantine. From the press release:

NEW YORK CITY – February 17, 2010 – On Tuesday, March 9, 2010, Landscapes of Quarantine, a group exhibition exploring the spatial implications of quarantine, will open at New York’s landmark Storefront for Art and Architecture. The exhibition consists of new works by a multi-disciplinary group of eighteen artists, designers, and architects, each of whom was inspired by one or more of the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political, temporal, and even astronomical dimensions of quarantine. Curated by Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh of Future Plural, the exhibition will be on view at Storefront until April 17, 2010. Entrance to the exhibition is free; the launch event on March 9 is open to the public and will showcase a one-night-only, inflatable quarantine prosthesis attached to Storefront’s façade, designed by architects Jeffrey Inaba and Joseph Grima, as well as a range of beers generously donated by Brooklyn Brewery.

This was a bit of an adventure for me, and, I suspect, several other participants, since we had 10 solid weeks of inspection of the subject matter, group idea sharing, peer crit, and a final group review with a stellar cast of all-star critics. As an illustrator by trade, and often a web-enabled artist by choice, I don’t usually have the luxury of ruminating on a project an entire season before putting it together. Often times when, late at night, I’m reading the working practices of famous artists I admire (as I’m wont to do, whiskey in hand), I’m envious of a time when artists were able to chin-scratch for years on one project, painting, or attempt. Maybe I’m romanticizing it, but from a pure economics point of view, unless you’re a really famous artist, what someone might get from selling a piece of work hasn’t kept up with cost of living increases, to say the least, so more work is demanded in a shorter amount of time. But maybe it’s also personal. I’m a type-A guy who’s also impatient. Regardless of the reason, the length of time was a breath of fresh air. To be able to share that with a select group of amazing artists who gave some un-sugar-coated honest critique almost felt like I was being greedy.

Detail from Page 1

My particular piece, titled Pages 179-187 is a result I came to after studying both the roots of quarantine in the modern age, as well as the plague epidemics of early times. As we were introduced to the historical material, I became fascinated with the power imbued in the  Powers That Be to make very real decisions of life and death, sometimes with very little real information at hand. The idea of The Word From On High, for the good of all, became, in my mind, inextricably linked with the power structure behind a quarantine, and the nearly-imperialist power that implies, on top of how that word was distributed to the masses. I quickly found a relation between what the elder times placed their faith in (God), and what our more modern forebearers trusted (technology), and came up with a kind of ‘lost fable’, told in a form that was a consciously reminiscent of both 19th century etchings and cartoons, and both Italian and Byzantine illuminated manuscripts. My hope is that the result is 8 pages that are nearly ahistorical, so universal are both the themes and the images.

My initial plan was to get these pages binded in a leather tome, but after some teeth gnashing and rending of clothes, I ended up abandoning the plan, due to both a logistical flaw: how do I get every page to be shown without asking the audience to touch the pages?), and a thematic one (isn’t that a little Epcot-y?). My final framing choice I think you’ll find both subtle and really cool and appropriate.

I’ll be posting all the pages, eventually, but if you’re in the area, please do come down and pull me aside to say hello at the opening on March 9th,  at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. It should be a blast, and not only can you see my pieces in person, you can see all the other fantastic stuff on display. See you there!

Download the original press release here.

…and we’re back.

Lots of changes to jabber on about, the primary one of which that we’ve relocated to the New York area for Molly to attend law school. So, besides playing the good husband, I now get to reorient myself to entirely new climate, work network, subway system and quality of sandwich meats available in the supermarket. (on this last point: I’ve been away for so long.)

It’s great to be here, and strange, too: I have spent the last 13 years on the West Coast, after growing up in the Boston area, and the shift is one both subtle and profound. I obviously visited quite a bit while away, but one always keeps an area at arm’s length when one is visiting. Too many obligations and distractions to let a city settle into your bones. The first thing that strikes me is just the truly different feeling the streets present to you, a combination of weather, architecture, and presence, if you will; the East coast is more immediate. It demands you pay tribute to it’s grubby walls and soaring pretense. The West Coast keeps everything at an arms length– one can take your SUV from your planned suburb out to the coast, and pretend no one is around. There is no fooling oneself about your fellow travelers here, and, at this point in my life at least, I think that’s probably a good thing.

I shan’t bore anyone with my personal rankings of cities, locales, places, foods: each place is exactly right for what it is. But I feel very, very good to be here right now. It is an awe-inspiring and knee-bending thing to be in the orbit of Manhattan. It is a cliched piece of garbage, but my god, it is true. Take a stroll and peer up above you at the windows that blanket the faces of the neoclassical buildings like a mosquito net to keep out the riffraff; behind each one is a potential lifetime. There is no weed strewn lot someone doesn’t have plans for, no tiny dive bar that isn’t someone’s favorite. But unlike other places, in which those of the hipper persuasion try to find the place unfound, there is a certain welcoming charm to this place like no other, an assurance that everything is already found. Everyone is a New Yorker, immediately. I’m sure this is the good old days for this city, and I would get a different answer if this were the 1970s. But for now, it is the prom queen who everyone wants to be seen with, and my, is she lovely.

Relevant stuff:

+ The new Robots and Monsters site is at near-launch. It’s been a slog, mostly because I’ve asked Glaser, my partner at Squonk, to do it when he doesn’t have time for anything else, and fortunately, that’s not too often. But it will be launched within a month or so, and included there will be the new ordering system, making the ordering process MUCH easier, on both ends. The above graphic is the smaller size of what will be the background. Check out the *HUGE* version to see the details, and that you can use as a background, too.

+ For the past two months, I’ve been working on fun tools for the new Photoshop.com site. Adobe asked me to concept and execute a bunch of fun add-ons to personal photos to jazz them up, and it’s been a blast. Check out the first wave here.

+ I’m one of the featured illustrators on Workbook.com this week, showcasing my new portfolio I’ve got up there: Check it out.

+ This guy is too fucking awesome. Someone needs to kill him. Ben Newman: thy work pierces my heart with the bitter-tipped arrow of jealousy. Nice work.

+ Got invited to a few sweet salons in Manhattan that I’ll be blogging about later. The upshot it that I’ll definitely be back showing some work in a gallery before too long, which makes me exceedingly happy.

+ I can’t believe that actually sell prosciutto and capicola at the deli here, to be sliced. In-bleeping-credible. I’ll trade the avocados for that.

That’s all for now. Mo’ later.

What a looker!

This amazing film is the 1933 animated film by Ladislas Starewicz, his opus, entited The Mascot. Perhaps best known for his 1912 film The Cameraman’s Revenge, The Mascot seems astoundingly unknown for the quality of work contained; if not an aficianado, at least I consider myself well-versed in early 20th century animation, and I had never seen it until a day ago. Regardless, it’s wonderful, and is evocative of the time when animation and narrative was created not with perfect CGI, but with whatever worked in a pinch – even trash. Judging from the rocky economic times ahead for all of us, we’d do well to take the lesson that one doesn’t need much to make amazing art.

And I’m obviously not alone in my feelings, since Chronicle Books feels the same way. I got a sneak peek the other day, and it’s a completely radtacular, even with present company’s contributions excluded (don’t get me wrong: the radtacular factor is increased to a 9.8 on the Radtacular scale, WITH the comics).

The stories are both Geoff’s, and involve some fanciful musings on architecture one futurist narrative, the other a simpler visual essay on what you could do with a whole lot of money, instead doing boring stuff like buying boats or giving it to Bernie Madoff. They were both a lot of fun to do, and like all my favorite clients, Geoff was very hands-off, and he let me tell it in my own way. Here’s hoping to more collaborations.

You can see both on my Flickr stream here and here.

Enjoy, and buy the book, while you’re at it, ya cheapskates. Whatsamattah, you think the internet owes you free entertainment? Oh, yeah.

I started a tradition last year that I thought might keep me a little more honest in terms of my career and what I want to happen in my life. I put down on paper (or screen, I guess) all the stuff that I achieved over the past year, and what I hope to achieve next year. Nothing like a little public failure to really move your ass into gear.

Without further ado, here is last year’s post.

Let’s take my goals one at a time:

• “- Get hitched to the greatest girl on the planet.”

GRADE: A+. I did indeed get married to the Greatest Girl on the Planet. The shebang was a total blast

• “- Get a publisher for Robots And Monsters: The Book.”

GRADE: B+. I do have several interested major publishers, and I also in the process got an amazing literary agent, Gretchen Stetler. So it’s sort of there. No contract yet, no check in hand, no book tour. The framework has been set. Which is totes sweet.

• “- Assemble the pieces for a solo art show.”

GRADE: C. I did start a few studies, and I know much more what the finished thing will look like, but I screwed up my show dates in Seattle, and had to drop out, and I haven’t done much in terms of actual piece production. Get it together, Alterio.

• “- Get some comics in a few newspapers.”

GRADE: F. Didn’t even try. I did get a comic in Mark Kingwell’s 2009 book, though, which is rad, so that’s a more than amazing consolation prize.

• “- Finally do something constructive with The Basic Virus.”

GRADE: D. There’s some talk about others wanting to serialize it, but that has been all talk up to this point.

• “- Fix my motorcycle.”

GRADE: A. I fixed my motorcycle, and then I sold it, which I’m actually very happy about. Owning a motorcycle in the city with a garage or parking space is a real drag. I’m strictly walking now, and it rules.

So, all in all a really awesome year personally, but just a so-so year in terms of accomplishing the goals I set out to do, which is always a little disappointing. However, when I take a stock of everything, I can be pretty proud of myself. I am getting more illustration work than ever, I’m still way busy, even in these lean economic times, and our start up, Squonk Studios, is on the verge of getting a big client, and Robots and Monsters is more popular than ever, with over 4 Grand raised for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

My grandma died this year, which was tough. But then again, Barack Obama was elected, which rules, and I also won my Fantasy Football Superbowl. So all in all, I’m pretty damn happy about 2008, on balance.

In 2009 I will:

+ REALLY nail down a publisher for R and M. Seriously.

+ REALLY do something with the Basic Virus. Seriously.

+ REALLY get going on a solo show. Seriously.

+ Go on my honeymoon to Hawaii, Land of Intriguing Tropical Drinks

+ Do my best to get my name out there more, be it throguh print, web, or word of mouth.

Here’s to your best health, a happy family, and a great 2009. Thanks for reading this humble blog.

See the full size poster here.

Above is my most recent illustration, for the German software company Emnis. I’d like think it’s part of a bigger trend.

Before I pontificate, I’d like to thank in particular Tobias Zimmer, who was as great a client to work for as I’ve ever had: it takes a strong confidence and a belief that people operate best when allowed to be free to excerise their expertise as they see fit, and he did both, giving me minimal notes and trusting my choices in the end. I think the piece turned out really well, and both Tobias and all of Emnis seems very happy with it, and which makes me happy, too.

In an unexpected turn, Tobias also told me that the work and a small blurb will be in the German magazine Page, which is great, and he asked me about the idea of “album art for software.” Since my work for Blue Flavor at the beginning of the year, this is the work that has gotten a lot of unexpected attention. I have to give some credit to Blue Flavor for giving me the venue initially, and for their completely hands-off approach, which let me take it in my direction. So I’d be deficit if I took total credit without Blue Flavor’s opportunity.

But I think the idea is a great one: it finally starts recognizing and putting on parallel the creations from programmers as well as musicians. Video games were actually the earliest iteration of such a trend – it’s only natural to assume that the software of more prosaic applications would start to get into the act, as well. In fact, the more abstract the idea or task that the software is engaged in, the more a simple and effective branding process is needed, so that a visual shorthand can rapidly put both users and consumers on the same page: this is best resolved by engaging art that not only speaks to the software, but creates a visual excitement in the viewer. Most smart, successful companies recognize this, and invest heavily in their visual output. In the end, humans love to spoken to in visual terms – from hieroglyphics to illuminated manuscripts, stained glass to instruction manuals, comic books to album art, they want and need something pretty to look at and give them a shorthand.

The other great aspect is that, with the advent of small, short-run, focussed printing, and larger bandwidth that allows for more involved and artistic websites, the strength of the small, underground artist or illustrator has never been stronger. While you will find many large illustrators who will bemoan the current state of stock illustration and falling usage fees, the reality is that the playing field has now been leveled, in the favor of smaller artists. This means that while huge fees are less common than they once were, young, interesting and edgy artists who once were sidelined now have an increasing number of venues in which to get their works seen. If every software company gave each of their products a great graphic edge by hiring a unique artist, the world would be better looking and more visually dynamic place.

Anyhoo, the long and the short of it is that I think every software sompany, or upstart website or whatever, should start tot hink about the idea of “album art”: far beyond just some simple BS color branding or some boring swoops and blocks of text, having the stones to allow an artist to provide you with super-compelling visuals without much input is a net-benefit in the end I’m convinced. It ups the companies “cool cache” (so important in this age of Yelping blogposts alternatively raising and trashing anyone’s reputation within moment), and makes the company seems forward thinking and concerned with a customer-viewer approach, rather than a top-down, old economy approach.

So, you companies: go hire weird artists! They’ll thank for it, you’ll be operating in the tradition of the Medicis, and in the end, you’ll get some great looking stuff.

Go! Go now! I’ll wait.