{ Category Archives }
There’s probably nothing that gives me a bigger art-boner than excellent draftsmanship. Well, I’m gonna need to find some metaphorical books to put in front of it, because the work of Melissa Cooke goes beyond excellent into some realm that I don’t even have a word for. Perfecterrificent. Nailed it. Prepare for mental explosions and awkward pants times.
As a tattooed person, I’ve never really been too into the American Traditional style of tattooing, what most people would think of as the Sailor Jerry style. I don’t hate it, but I don’t particularly love it either, although I do respect what it represents and means to tattooing as an artform and an industry. However, all that is about to change, as today I will get my first and last traditional tattoo. It’s just an impulse that I have; an impulse with a week’s worth of planning because that’s how I do impulsive. But I think that french artist Odö is partly responsible. Nico Odora’s paintings are complexly built of traditional tattoo imagery coupled with all that pop goodness the French love so much. The other half of my tattoo’s impetus is that I have a friend who specializes in traditional tattoos, so let’s not go giving the French all the credit. That’s just what they want us to do. So while you’re giving Odö’s work an eye-bathing, you can think of me sitting in a shop somewhere getting a needle driven into my hand thousands of times per minute. Lucky me.
If there is one thing that I have never stopped loving in art and illustration, it’s the cutaway. If you have drawn a cutaway, I will be in love with you forever, even if everything else you’ve ever made is crap, even if your cutaway is crap…mostly because I don’t believe it’s possible to make a shitty cutaway. Each one is a magical little window into the overall operations/layout of something. It’s like an architectural schematic with the added character of something that’s already built and in use. I can’t completely explain to you why they’re just so amazing to me, but they are. And Domitille Collardey has more than one in his repertoire. Thankfully everything else he makes is also incredible, so I don’t have to make the tough choice of whether or not to love his work just because he made a cutaway. The answer is always the same, but that never makes the choice any easier.
Because I’m going to be gorging myself along with millions of other Americans in the coming week, I will just leave you with the work of Laurie Lipton. If you examine every detail of one of her paintings per day, you still won’t be done looking at all of them by the time I come back. Visual feasting is a great compliment to stuffing your belly, so put your eyeball’s fatpants on, piglets.
I…I just don’t even know what to say about this. Part of me is skeptical that this is really graphite, and thinks that someone is just being a clever dick with Photoshop. And the other part of me is pretty much shitting himself with disbelief and awe at the level of detail and reality here. I mean, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I will never look at a pencil the same way again, that’s for damn sure. Honestly, I may never look at the things I see with my eyes the same way again; so thanks to Paul Cadden for sufficiently fucking with my perceptions of reality, which were already pretty maleable to begin with.
I’ve mentioned the work of Ryan A. before. And then, as now, I mentioned just one of his comics specifically. This is not to imply that those two comics are the only parts of his works worth paying attention to, far from it. It’s just that those two comics were particularly poignant and significant at the time that I read them. The newest comic, Our Blood Stained Roof, is a great piece of comic arts, perfect pacing, interesting story, simple but well-developed characters, and plenty that I can relate to. The story itself is great, but the way Ryan renders the images is the perfect visual counterpart. I am now a lifelong fan of this dude’s comics.
As artists come to balance working in both digital and traditional mediums, the possibilities for creation are slowly expanding, while in some ways the techniques are dying. This is an old argument, and not one I’m going to dig into here (though for the price of a beer at a bar I will talk about it for hours), but take a look at the work of someone like Cam Floyd and you will see that there can be a happy medium between the two. Cam creates work with the traditional tools like charcoal, graphite, paint and ink, but then brings that work into the digital realm to add subtle details and hues. And it’s exactly what needs to happen with his work. His style is smudgy and rough, and the digital gives it some sharp lines as counterpoint to the coarseness. This is a balance, and in Cam’s case it’s done beautifully, creating a mix of smooth and blurry, washes and overlapping values that create a richer, more complex emotional pull. Juxtaposition like this has been used for centuries in all the arts, and now with digital tools refining their controls and behaviors, there are two more ideas to be pitted against each other: digital and analog. Like I said, I won’t drag out the pros and cons of either one, but rather I might say that in that ages old argument the right answer isn’t necessarily one or the other, but possibly both.
I found a Charlie Brown Halloween coloring book on the street once. I took it home, flipped through it, colored in a picture or two, and then proceeded to caption most of the pages with the most horrifying things I could think of. My mother would disown me if she ever saw it. I feel like Tom Neely and I would get along well for that reason, except that he’s got talent and I scribbled in a child’s coloring book. If I wanted it to be art, I would have to put it back on the shelves of some store for a kid to buy. I’m sure that’s a statement on something.
Wendy MacNaughton is a minor miracle worker. Flipping through her “Meanwhile” series has made me enjoy living in the Bay Area just a little bit more, and for a homesick southerner, that’s really saying something. Plus, who doesn’t love to see stories and pictures from places that they’ve been in/on/past? She keeps her pictures loose, warm, and personal, like a Maira Kalman for the West Coast. Even if you’ve never set foot in San Francisco, you can still connect to the pure humanity that shines through in her work. See, minor miracles.
Wendy MacNaughton found via Drawn!
In my experience, with most street artists there is a disconnect between the style of their outdoor work and their works on paper. Both can be equally amazing, but they usually look very different, and rightly so. One is being drawn larger than the artist themselves, usually quickly due to the illicit nature of the work, and on a rough wall surface, the other is being drawn very small on smooth paper with very precise instruments. Of course they’re different. But somehow Spanish maestro ARYZ makes them the same. And I’m not talking about a burner on a brick back alley, I’m talking about a 40 ft. high multi-color masterpiece. I’ve never seen anyone with that kind of consistency before, maybe he should get some kind of crown or at the very least a scepter that is also a paint roller. Long live King ARYZ.