Strokes And Carvings

Welcome to my DIY gallery, works by a largely untotured artist punching his way through arts and crafts! Although I tried my hand at painting in the late Seventies I stopped for awhile and now find myself creating pieces just for fun, which is a nice way of saying I've become more of a hobby painter. The serious art days are far behind me, and that's alright. I like being a Sunday painter.

One of my favorite subjects is glam rock, so painting Seventies style hard rock stars rockin' out makes me happy. Right up above is a favorite of mine. It's a dramatic portrait of my man Desi rocking out some righteous metal a la Poison, Great White, etc. with his band Whiskey Starr circa 1988 at White Trash A Go Go, maybe English Acid, prob not Zombie Zoo.

In front of the stage is his rich Jewish American Princess girlfriend wearing the official band tee getting pissed off at some cheap poodle-haired blonde who's been shaking her shoulders to Desi rocking out. I don't know about you, but I think a catfight is imminent.

Or how about a painting of Iggy based on one of the photos in back of the Raw Power album? I liked doing this one, and took great care in rendering a stylized look to his crazy eyes and lipsticked mouth. I really invested as much glam realness to the image as possible.

At this point it should be pointed out that when I first painted I used oils, giving everything a rough, expressionist look. I used a lot of heavy black lines and really slathered on the paints. It was a really violent look, however, later on when I got back in the game I used acrylics for a smoother, more refined look.

Getting tired of paints, I tried my hand at woodcuts because I liked the raw, violent look it gave, so here's yet another picture of Desi rocking out on stage with a smoke impudently dangling from his lips. I printed it with black ink on colored paper. I thought it turned out rather well.

Here's another woodcut I call King Cactus, showing a very tall, happy cactus rejoicing in his native habitat. I always liked the way large cacti always had long arms reaching out for you, and this guy seems to be having himself a good time in the wild.

Pictured below is Payin' The Bill, a painting of Desi offstge enjoying margaritas and some taco combination plates with the his rich girlfriend paying the bill for her very kept boyfriend. Where are these girls??? I need to find me one, but that's another blog.

Flick*r Art Stars

Let's face it, like it or not, people will always have favorites in everything. The image-driven website Flick*r is no exception. I have five favorite artists on Flick*r who easily reign supreme above all the others, and I'd like to talk about them this week. In no particular order, they are:

1. Atelier Alesko (France): Completely original art, stoner art but way better because it has direction, his art is childlike but complex, colorful like Haitian art and actually flows with rhythm. Every piece is different than the last one - he always keeps you guessing.

2. Richard Mullins (Oklahoma): Gallery Director of the Blah Blah Gallery and a fine painter in his on right, Mullins' work is a wild cacophonous mish-mash of colors with an insane figurative busting into the foreground. Figuratives range from an organ grinder's monkey to Kermit The Frog to a kid with a paper sack over his head. His range is pretty darn wide, too: I think his best painting is the one of a faceless woman playing electric guitar.



3. Kittytown (California): Megan Gray aka Kittytown creates woodcuts that foil the current fever of big-eyed doll paintings (Mark Ryden rip-offs) that are so trendy these days. Gray's work is naive but has an almost early 20th Century romanticism added, where the sentiments are sweet but funny-weird like old Dick Powell numbers from the Thirties.



4. J.R. Williams (Oregon): Legendary comix artist who has a pretty funny photostream. His work actually had a Flick*r censor filter blocking his pictures because he likes to draw topless pictures of Penelope Pitstop, Wilma Flintstone and Sling Rave Curvette. He's hardly an unknown but his notoriety on Flick*r would almost rate a legend in itself!



5. Gregg Griffin (Oklahoma): Another member of the Blah Blah Gallery, but what makes him so awesome is his obsession with painting thousands of portraits of Batman acting psycho and yelling his head off at The Joker, punching Robin the Boy Wonder and scaring vampire bats with his bad breath. Frank Miller wishes he could portray The Dark Knight in such a brilliant fashion. Christian Bale take notes!

Tarantulas and Gummy Worms

Ø Rebecca’s pretty happy with her new assistant because she’s creative and eccentric, just like her. Her name’s Leah and all she eats are gummy worms and coffee and has a pet tarantula that keeps her company while she’s assisting Rebecca in her workroom. Before I create the perfect portrait of Rebecca I thought I’d warm up by doing one of Leah. The piece I created was called “Tarantulas and Gummy Worms” (‘nuff said).

Ø The sketch (depicted above) exhibits a skewered fusion of slacker lowbrow with German Expressionism (think of George Grosz or Egon Schiele). Leah’s shown holding a cup of coffee with gummy worms crawling out of the mug in one hand and holding a portable cage with her tarantula in the other. The splotch on her leg is actually a bitchen tattoo of her bat dog. The plaid micro mini is also one of her favorite things and has been immortalized.

Ø Rebecca increased the image on the scanner and then traced the image perfectly using red tracing sheets onto the rubber pad. This is interesting only because the format is called woodcuts but there is nary a trace of wood involved at all. It should be called rubbercuts because the pad utilizes the same substance used for pencil erasers, but hey, for the sake of this perverted blog, we’ll call it woodcuts.

Ø Rebecca loves to scratch things and if you even get close to the woodcut block she’ll bite you like an attack dog, so she pretty much carved the whole damn thing. Frankly I’m glad she did because she embellished it with creepy Vincent Van Go-Crazy ellipticals (“Starry Night”) complete with different kinds of moons, some with happy faces, malted balls, tumors, cannonballs, etc. Brilliant! This was becoming more of a collaboration and I thought it looked great.

Ø Once all the carving is done (45 minutes later) it’s time to make a pass, a printing pass with the brayer (roller) with one color over the pad (we went for dark purple). Watercolor paper stock was used – it’s practically card stock, a little harder actually so it’ll soak up paint without getting too soggy. The result is depicted below. Nice!

Ø Another few passes were made also with a small brayer rolling green on the foreground with the larger brayer rolling purple over the background. Several pads could have been used with registration lines just like a silk-screened image but we didn’t want to get too involved in this production. The two-tone image turned out pretty well, also.

Ø The end result of this project was most satisfactory to me. Rebecca’s embellishments and craftwork were highly complimentary to my artwork. Eventually I’ll have to carve something while she’s sleeping so I can acquire some experience. A few knockout drops should do the trick, heh! Just kidding.