Artist and animator Fons Scheidon’s show, Revolution Deformation, which opens November 6th at Concrete Hermit in London, is in a similar vein to recently mentioned Secret Still fav Stephen Tompkins. It takes the traditional form and structure of a cartoon character and bends and shapes it around new visual ideas while maintaining that subtle sense of hierarchical “cartoon” identity. Blah blah blah, it’s fantastic, and, regardless of my analytical diarrhea, you should spend some time seeing your own ideas reflected back at you from each piece.

p.s. If you’re in London and you take pictures of this show, and then subsequently send them to me so I can post them here, I will totally be your best friend. In a completely non-commital and hands-off way.

Fons Scheidon

I was just informed that Jason Sho Green, the artist who is literally responsible for my interest in art in the first place, has been royally fucked by recession. Some of his major clients for this year went out of business, taking half of his yearly income with them. So now Jason is selling off as much of his art as possible to try and make ends meet. Not only should you want to buy his art for the rewards of altruism, but also because he’s a fantastic artist, and your life will be better for having one of his works around. Trust me on this. Snatch it up now before it’s all gone. Help a brotha out.

Jason Sho Green Emergency Art Sale

His paintings for sale

Prints (for those of you scrounging change from the couch)

Nothing makes my morning more than having an artist contact me about their work, and then subsequently having that work blow my fucking mind. Such was the case with the work of Stephen Tompkins this morning. The twist is that I wrote about Tompkins a ways back when I was working for Juxtapoz.com. And yet here he was again with new work, melting my axions left and right. I would be mad about the decreased brain function if it wasn’t so worth it. Like a Merry Melodies hit and run or some boiling hell for all the forgotten toons, Tompkins’ work is just abstract enough to be visually amazing, with enough pop reference to be unsettling. He’s doing a jitterbug on that fine line between pure ideas and the visual torture of my childhood icons, and oh my God do I ever dig that.

Stephen Tompkins

When you say that you’re in love with printmaking, you’d better back that shit up with proof. And proof is in abundance on Christopher Koelle’s portfolio site. That’s not to say that there’s nothing there but printmaking projects. Far from it. But it’s the printmaking section where you can see the real love for creation shining through. Dude puts a lot of heart into that work. I really appreciate the variance of the line quality depending on the subject. It’s the little things like that that show me someone is paying attention. Not to mention that it takes a high level of talent in any medium to vary styles from piece to piece to create mood. Koelle’s got it in spades.

Christopher Kolle

Nature, badass bitches, and anthropomorphic animals. Douglas Alvarez paints a lot of things that you don’t see much of in his home city of LA. I take that back, they’ve got some pretty badass bitches there. Where does the rest of that imagery come from though? According to Alvarez’s bio, practically everywhere. Let’s hope that everywhere sticks around for a little while longer so he can keep bringing the newness. We’ve got until 2012, right? I mean, I’m not an Aztec calendar expert or anything, but I was a very high ranking priest to Quetzlcoatl back in the day so…

Douglas Alvarez

Found through B/D. I tried to place his style by comparisons, but there’s too much originality. Isoe’s got his own incredible style and it will be a basis of comparison from now on rather than a product of it. I’m a fan to say the least. I even like his webpage design. Isoe for the win.

Charlie Isoe

I keep trying to look at the work of South Carolinian Hollis Brown Thornton without thinking I’m asleep. But the quality of his work is so dreamlike that I just can’t manage it. There are vague, ambiguous shapes drifting through static points in time, like every dream I’ve ever tried to grab onto while asleep. It’s the shock of grasping something intangible that is constructed from my collected ideas of tangibility. I don’t know how to make that sentence sound any less pretentious. Regardless of me sounding like a complete douchebag, the work of Hollis Brown Thornton is definitely worth a look. Several looks. Just openly stare at it for a while.

Hollis Brown Thornton

I found out about New York artist Larissa Bates through Beautiful Decay. They have a great interview with her up on their site. But before I read anything about her I thought “wow, it’s like Neo-French Renaissance or some male obsessed Gainsborough. And then she mentions those influences in her interview. It’s nice to know sometimes that I’m not completely uneducated. What I really thought was that her work looked like Henry Darger trapped in the French Renaissance. There’s the same kind of oddness about her subjects and the way they fit into the background, mostly that they don’t fit at all. Although I can’t pin down why. Of course a lot of her other work doesn’t look like that at all. She’s just a giant enigma wrapped in bacon-y riddle. Figure it out for yourself after reading the interview.

Larissa Bates

What is up, Takashi Iwasaki, my colorful, Japanese painter friend. I dig your Dalek meets Chagall, bright abstractions, and I’d like to get them tattooed on the insides of my eyes so they can warp my dreams. Like a giant punch in the nightmares from Dr. Seuss. And for some reason your works make me really want a pastrami sandwich. I don’t know what that’s about, but I vowed long ago to report honsetly the entirety of my reactions. Regardless of my cured meat fetish, Iwasaki is tits in my book. He’s the sugar frosted cereal of my balanced art breakfast.

Takashi Iwasaki

Queens-based artist Brandon Friend has a mixed media style unlike anything I’ve ever encountered. His works consist of a variety of materials pasted onto the canvas, then torn, treated, or removed, then combined with acrylics. The outcome is an amazingly complex and active surface, and a beautiful composition. His Master’s Thesis was the first group of work that I saw, thanks to this video. Just overall incredible work from this recent graduate. Brandon Friend is definitely a name to write down in your little black book under “work I need to buy now while I can still afford it.” Shit, if Damien Hirst can make over $200 mil with his crap, there’s no telling how much Friend can make with work that actually means something.

Brandon Friend

Video: Brandon Friend