Chris Kerr

Chris Kerr emailed me this morning, and I found his website, click here, which is great by the way.

He is a Chicago based artist.

Just another super cool artist brought to you by me. Guess you should bookmark this webpage...

This is a study for a large drawing I am starting on Bristol board, it is going to be made with multiple sheets glued together.

Interning

I am interning for Diana Cooper, and it is going well.

I like her work a lot, and it is interesting to get to be part of it. Plus we are going to install a big show at Postmasters.

Other event:

The show at Transmission opened tonight. I wish I could have been there, but it was impossible for me to get to Virginia. Mostly because I am running on a minimal spending budget at the moment.

You can get a drawing or painting of mine if you go to Transmission. Bret Payne is the director there.

Maybe:

Maybe I will go to Chelsea tomorrow evening and hit some openings.

Coins

I have a coin collection, these are some of my favorites. They are not very valuable, but I like them for the images and the history behind them. There are American, Roman, Afghani, and Sassanian coins in this photo.

I especially enjoy the portraits, they really fire my imagination.



From top left to top right:

American Quarter 1854, American Penny 1853, American Penny 1852



From middle left to middle right:

Roman Coin The Usurper Claudius Gothicus, Roman Coin The Usurper Victorinus, Afghani Rupee from the Muslim year 1273 which is about 1900 AD, American Half Cent 1834



From bottom middle to bottom right:

Sassanian Dirhem Khusru II 590 to 627 AD , Sassanian Dirhem Khusru II 590 to 627 AD, Roman Republican Denarius sometime BC





This is a British coin from India depicting the Empress Victoria. It is a 2 Annas coin, and it is from the late 19th century, 1897. It is about 1 cm in diameter.

Painting in Progress

John Prine

I was sitting in Texas on a rainy Sunday afternoon, waiting for training to start up again on Monday. We were getting deployed to Afghanistan, a place I did not know too much about at the time, and I was feeling alone, tired, and dejected. I had just had to dropout from graduate school during my final semester, and I was feeling frustrated for the first time in an otherwise charmed life.

My friend Dan Attoe (a pretty famous painter in his own right) sent me a mixed CD of music he thought I would like, he named it MRE 1, after the Meals Ready to Eat in the Army. I was sitting there on my bunk, miserable, and I put the CD in my player, and I heard this song by John Prine. Man I started crying so fucking hard, I was beyond being embarrassed, and I cried so hard my throat got sore and swelled so I could barely swallow. Afterwards I felt better.

John Prine has a myspace page. If you search his name on YouTube there are a bunch of great videos, especially some duets with Iris Dement who has a phenomenal voice. The guy is pretty old. I already said what I had to say about his music.

Update: Click Here for John Prine singing and talking at the Library of Congress, John comes on stage at 10:40, there is a lengthy introduction

I found some photos from Afghanistan I thought I had lost

It is cathartic for me to present these photos to the world to see. My time in Afghanistan was so stressful and so hard to relate to people who have not been there, that it remains a secret despite my trying to talk about it. The top photo is me, the middle photo is a food stand next to a highway outside of Kandahar, and the bottom photo is the kids that lived next to our base.

Hey, hey check it out!

If you have been visiting Ink Stained Hands for very long you realized that the website address (URL) was http://billdonovan.blogspot.com

Which is impossible to remember, and useless to try and give to people in a conversation unless they also use blogspot.com to host a blog.

Now, I have got a real URL www.inkstainedhands.com the blog is still the same, and you can still enter in the old address and get to this blog.

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.

New Drawing

The new drawing, zombies religion searching for a way to live

(close up)

26 x 20 inches, marker, pencil, acrylic paint

Great Deal at McSweenys

You get 4 issues of McSweenys Quarterly for 20 dollars plus shipping. A years subscription is 55 dollars, and to buy an individual book is 24 dollars. So this is the deal of the century: 4 books for less than the price of one, especially if you are a miserly artist who counts pennies and thinks 9 dollars is alot of money for dinner.

Having said that, I have never read the magazine, a british friend just told me about how awesome the book is and I saw this deal, and I thought, hmm, that will make a good post.

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...

I have to take some time

I have to take some forced time away from my computer, check out Brandon Buckner's blog instead.

Great Art Book

If you are looking for a great new art book, look no further, Neue Rollen, a catalog of painting by Neo Rauch is an awesome book. <---- click there.

The reproductions are very good, and there is a lot of text, which I am sure is interesting (I have not read anything except the quotes from Neo Rauch that are positioned on opposite pages from the reproductions). The words are secondary in this kind of book.



It has been a while since an artist really captured my imagination, but Neo Rauch does the job. His quotes are provocative in a not overbearing way, but he does not seem to rely on art theory, instead focusing on an almost surrealist motivation (which is the last thing I think I should be interested by, but here I am, interested).

The reproductions are interesting because they cover paintings that the artist is less well known for, and that are obviously less sucessful visually, so there is a narrative that becomes apparent of someone who figured something out, and this something is how to stop making quirky unsucessful paintings and make blockbuster international fame paintings. It is a rags to riches book.



I recommend buying it.






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Other Blog....

I made another blog to catalog abstract images I make on photoshop. I am hoping people on myspace use them for backgrounds, I know, I know, I know, I thought Myspace was lame too, but I have *met* some very interesting artists, writers, and editors in cyberspace, and I enjoy meeting creative people...

If you want to see the other blog:

Click here for new blog

This is one of the images:

Jesse Albrecht

My friend Jesse is a genius, click here to see his art displayed in the Arizona landscape.