David Sandlin and Gary Panter

Gary Panter came to the University of Iowa to talk about his art while I was in grad school there. When I told him I was having a hard time dealing with coming back to civillian life after my year in Afghanistan he gave me a hug. He is the artist who dreamed up the set for Pee Wees playhouse, you remember Chairy and the Genie head inside the box, right? He makes really great drawings, and I occassionally see his work in the cooler bookstores (I saw some in Chop Suey in Richmond VA, and the comic bookstore in the ped mall in Iowa City IA). He teaches in NYC at the SVA.

David Sandlin, I have never met David Sandlin, but I like his work. He teaches at the SVA too. His website is good, it has a lot of his work, and an interesting biography.

-Bill

P.S. I have been making one page zines and I will post some later.

NYC on wednesday (Joan Linder!), My Drawing, McSweeneys

I saw a really good show of drawings at Mixed Greens gallery , they are selling a catalog of the show for $10. The artist, Joan Linder , made two different groups of drawings, one was something along the lines of the sexual confessions of an humanish(oid) female bunny rabbit, and the other was a (not immediately) funky, convincingly realistic rendering of a wall(s) behind a bar with all the liquor, political stickers, street signs, and celebrity ephemera on it. Very, very good drawing. The drawings were mostly ink and pen from what I could tell.


I had never been in Mixed Greens gallery before, and I was surprised and pleased to find a new artist to enter into the group of artists I like. Also the staff at the gallery was friendly.


I walked over to Printed Matter after I went to Mixed Greens. Printed Matter is the mecca in the US for artist books. It is very interesting and engaging to walk into this store, because there is a lively hand formed quality to the place: tables covered in books with shelves on the sides of the tables filled with books, bookshelves with books piled into them, cabinets with glass display cases filled with books, counters covered in books. If someone could illustrate my brain when I die I hope it metaphorically looks like the inside of printed matter.

Here is a photo of the drawing I am working on now. Laur says it the best face I have drawn in a while, the photos at a bit of an angle because (I am lazy) I ran out of room to hang and shoot it.


The 4 McSweeneys books came, I can not recommend them more strongly. I actually feel bad having gotten them so cheaply, (I just checked and they have raised the price 5 dollars, so you may want to act quickly).

The copyright notice on book 13 was an extraordinarily moving letter detailing a meeting between the books editors and the books namesake in Ireland, Timothy McSweeney. A book where the copyright notice is so well written and heartfelt it made my eyes sting has a lot of potential (and I think the books will continue to provide unorthodox, thoughtful, and interesting entertainment and reading) (it could have been written by Rudyard Kipling) (and I was a frickin soldier), if you need any further proof that there are more people out there like you (me). Then just spend the 20 bucks, scratch that, they raised it to 25.

Ok, I am going to work on my drawing. You re a better man than I am Gunga Din.

Fort Thunder, books on Amazon

Kramer's Ergot 5

Kramer's Ergot 6

Ninja

I bought 3 books on amazon just now. Kramer's Ergot 5, Kramer's Ergot 6 (both Kramer's are compilations edited by Sammy Harkham), and Ninja by Brian Chippendale.

I found them by searching for Fort Thunder, a (legendary) group of artists that were based in Providence Rhode Island in an old building that was torn down in 2001. I guess they must have been RISD people. But anyways, they made great posters, and neat cartoons, and I don't really know what else they made. They are Providence's equivalent of the Hairy Who from Chicago.



I have been seeing painting and drawing in NYC that I think may owe a debt to these Fort Thunder folks, and so I bought these books to be able to think about it better. To know what I am looking at better. To see what there is too know.



Plus, maybe, potentially this is the direction things are going.



Living next to NYC is the best when it comes to getting ideas for art making, I had basically slowed to a complete crawl before moving here, and now I work on my painting and drawing for at least some time every night.

I will let you know what the books are like, if they are worth the money, etc...

The Drawing Center, Gianna Commito and Jered Sprecher

I went to the Drawing Center on Wooster St yesterday to see Non-Declarive Drawings. Two of my friends from Iowa were in the show, Gianna Commito and Jered Sprecher, and it was a good feeling to see their work in New York.

The show was curated under the auspices of a theme that is difficult, and does not give enough credit to the viewer. The idea behind it being that some drawing/painting is Non-declarative and leaves the viewer to form their own meanings when contemplating the image, as opposed to the painting dictating what to think. Or maybe that an agenda is dictated, but its a false lead, and after your first impression your left swimming in your own thoughts wondering where your first read went. I guess I would like it better if it acknowledged that the drawings are starting points, provide clues, instead of insisting on muteness.

I think some of the work was very hard to approach and think about directly, and lead to tangents that were generated by me, by my day etc, but in other cases the work was speaking a visual language that left it in a more accessible place than the show would have you think. Some of the drawings were just quiet, and I went to school in the Mid-West, quiet is not the same as Non-Declarative, you just have to down shift your mind to think in quiet thoughts and understand them.

I did think the show was quietly provocative. In that it forced you to still your mind and search for where the work is.

Ok, enough on the curation. Back to Gianna and Jered, who both made very interesting contributions, and for me made the show very special.

Gianna made some very exciting drawings. I was looking at them, trying to think of the best way to explain them, and I started to accumulate visual analogies: dirt devils with leaves, polygon explosions in video games, shattered glass, something made by a schizophrenic architect, exploding stained glass, they made me think of California too (I have never been there...). The drawings are dynamic and situated in a shallow pictorial space, they pull you around the space in a way that was interesting perceptually because your eyes moved around, under, and over spaces/planes. I like when paintings are objects that can be meditated on, or provide a static illusion of change/flux, in other words when the can be non-specific illustrations for life, like instrumental music on the radio that you realize is synchronized with your driving. You can approach Gianna's work with either a quiet or a loud mind and enjoy it.

Jered Sprecher makes such benign looking things that they can make you nervous, and you wonder if hes pulling a joke on you. If you assert your mind forcefully you will bowl over the image, if you approach it with skepticism you will miss the lyricism, if you can approach them with a calm mind I think that is when they are best. I have a painting of his from about 4 years ago, and it is very subtle, very interesting, it references old photo albums and Renaissance portraiture with the same set of marks. Jered definitely made work for the show that fits in with the curatorial theme, because you will impose yourself on the work unless you have enough self-control to be patient and look closely. There are definite stories being told (or at least re-constructable processes), but it takes a while to understand them, its a slow read. The work itself has become simpler and sparser than I remember his work being, but there were at least three very rewarding moments of contemplation trying to retrace his thoughts/process and pick through the limited info to detect a story.

I found something and I was not looking for anything

I started reading a pretty famous book about Zen, The Beginners Mind, that I made fun of when my father gave it to me as a birthday present. It is really interesting, and has a lot of genuinely profound insight.

I think this book could hurt no one, and help most people.

Click here to see the book, and 2 others

especially click it if your life is crazy, or if you feel like your brain is a chaotic swirl of mashed potatoes, pasta sauce, and a show from the adult swim programming on cartoon network.