I’m very pleased to announce two upcoming venues for my poster series There’s No One There.

In the month of April, the five posters have been invited to be a part of Telfair Museums’s annual Pulse Arts + Tecnhology  Festival, in Savannah, GA. It’s the first time my work has been associated with a museum, and it’s very exciting.

Then, in May, the posters come back up to NYC to be featured in a show at Studio-X, co-hosted with Ninth Letter, for the release of their new issue, of which the posters will also be a part of. It should be an amazing show and a great time. Thanks to both Studio X’s Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, and editor Scott Geiger, for all the support.

Stay tuned for additional details for both events. Excitement, she wrote!

There's No One There (2011)

A few years ago, I started having a vivid dream, one of very intense colors and very specific imagery. It’s floated around behind my eyes, but in front of my brain, for a few years, and I’ve been trying to capture it for a while with limited success.

Back in March, my good friend Scott Geiger approached me and asked me to be a part of a literary journal issue he was guest editing, and over a lunch of Korean BBQ sandwiches in Soho, he asked if I would be a part of his issue. I was really thrilled; Scott was one of my fellows in the Quarantine show back in March 2010, hosted by BLDG BLOG and Edible Geography, which was such a great success, and while all parts were great, Scott’s was one of my favorites, both in style and substance. Maybe a little selfishly, as Scott was describing the issue, I realized this was a great venue to try my hand at my next attempt at capturing what was in my brain in that recurring dream.

Some early studies

When I first tried to capture the feelings dominant in the dream, I thought they were paranoia, and so my code-name for the project for a long time was thusly. It felt suffocating, as if the bright colors, cartoonish malevolence, and barren landscapes were designed to get me, as I was chased by the infinite black of those dark windows. But as I ruminated more, I came to realize it wasn’t really paranoia at all; I wasn’t being chased by a thing, per se – I was being chased by a fear. And that fear was of desperate, unending loneliness.  A loneliness that can only be brought on by exploring every inch of your surroundings and finding yourself completely trapped by it, and by the expected nature of it.

As a 33 year old now, a great deal my youth was spent indoors, camped behind a computer screen, playing the early versions of first-person-shooters and walk-through RPGs in the Sierra line. My parents were barely on speaking terms, I was getting shit in school, and the glow of childhood was fading rapidly; I found solace in these games because provided not only a distraction, but a sense of real accomplishment – getting to the next stage, unlocking the door, gaining access to the spacecraft – these felt like real wins. It’s through this lens that a difficult level to beat was an acceptable challenge, but one in which there seemed to be no real solution brought bubbling forth some existential fears that stick with me to this day. To use a clunky metaphor, a man with a gun blocking my exit from a dark alley is a scary but solvable puzzle. However, if the man is absent, but the alley has no exit, and I’m forced to explore endlessly for a way out, one that doesn’t exist  – I find this terrifying beyond belief.

An early, failed attempt

Rather than fading into the bloom of adulthood, I find these fears are now magnified for all of us, on a grand scale. The role of loneliness in a public space grows in proportion to the intended scope of the space to serve the public, namely, a separation created by the manifestation of the rubric of “public space” – large cold monuments, open forums with nowhere to hide, grandiose pretensions that minimize the individual. Public spaces beget private yearnings.

We are also made more alone by our shared digital space. The conundrum of free public wi-fi, for example, serves to create digital walls which we can’t breach with normal every day interactions. Everyone is now in their own digital space of their own making. Our space perception is more and more confused with our digital perception of space; is the train station a level to beat? Is that bus to catch a challenge that will reward a player with points? Don’t I recognize this building from that video game?

You Can't Go Any Further (2011)

Suffice to say, I’m totally thrilled that Scott gave me the opportunity to make this work, and that it will be appearing in the Fall/Winter version of the Ninth Letter. I’ll post more when I know they are on newsstands, but for now, it feels good to get some of this work off my chest. I’m sure if it’s done yet, but at least I can put it aside for now and work on other stuff, guilt free.

The poster series can be seen in full on my Flickr stream here.

You can buy hand silkscreened prints of the posters here.

Thanks for lookin’.

Just a quick post to let y’all now the first Phaedrus silkscreen is on sale at Etsy, and there’s only 6 left! I’m also very interested in working up a trade, if anyone is into it; email me for more info so we can trade ideas.

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.

Above is a poster I did for 97bottles.com, a social beer site, which seems like a great idea. Inspired by some great WPA stuff.  See the full size here.

I’d thought I’d also show how I got there, just because when I do this type of stuff, I get that questions occasionally.

This is the scan of my hand drawing, after I’ve gone over it with ink. I take it into Photoshop, convert it to a duotone via the Threshhold tool, and then select the black out, and place another layer. Then I delete the background layer, so I just have the line work on Layer 1.

I lay down a new background layer of that light, elementary-school-bathroom green, and apply a reverse gradient, with the Dissolve brush selected of a nice dark green, also on a separate layer. Pretty much everything I do from here on out I do on a separate layer: it creates a lot of organizational hassle, but to me, it’s worth it, to have the total control of having everything of a separate layer provides.

I create the big blocks of color with the straight-lasso tool, which mocks the big blocks of color laid down in silkscreening. Obviously, the blue here is the lowest layer, and so on. I choose a distressed brush, again select the ‘dissolve’ brush type’, and shade upwards in sweep motions, making sure it’s not *too* even, with my stylus.

I apply the small blocks and shading and color in similar ways to the previous step, using the gradient tool to mock the airbrush effect on the WPA posters. Again, the “dissolve” option is my best friend here.

I add a second reverse circular gradient around the top most layer of the image, to give it a nice vigniette. I also cut out the line work from the line layer, that contains the bottles, place them on their own layer, and use the “Color overlay” layer option to apply the light green.

Finally, I lay th type on top, and in a stroke of inspiration, I turned off the line layer for the objects, which alluvasudden made the whole thing sing. I love when stuff like that happens.

And there it is. Hit me with questions.

Firstly, apologies for my blog absence, dear readers: a long life is a busy life, and all that that entails. The blogosphere exhausts me, but also emboldens me. I only hope that, on the balance, I give as much as I take.

I’m proud to announce the long awaited web portfolio site of my great friend Matt Rebholz, at www.mattrebholz.com. Any one of you that are on the web and a Rebholz fan will know that this was a long time coming, and is sure to enrich the web art community in untold ways.

I have a complicated relationship with Matt: I met him during play auditions in 8th grade. I was up for the role of a young Christopher Columbus (the older iteration of which went to this chump), and he was drawing manga before manga was cool on the auditorium floor. I rudely told him I thought the arms on his character were too long, he rightly rebuffed me haughtily, and we’re still strong friends today.

Let me riff for a sec on Rebholzian art, and say that it is, unto itself, a very organic beast. Rebholz’ obsessions with teeth, penises, liquids, scales, fur, and hair, parlay an animalistic and raw notion that is constantly attempting to break through a constructed fabrice: even buildings, structures, and mechanics all have an organic tilt in the world of Rebholz. It is a monstrous menagerie of imagination, deviancy, and nightmare-ish illusions that (at least my take on the) art has little seen since Maurice Sendak. Besides being one of my best friends for more that 15 years, I also inhabited the great City of Angeles with him for a period, and that too comes through: the raw, heretical, beastial notions of existence that Los Angeles proffers up to it’s profane gods. Rebholz’ artistic vision, still in it’s early stages but already frighteningly good, captures with outrageous poignancy the obsessions of our obsessed culture, ranging from drugs to conspiracy to the commodification of art itself.