Friday, October 19, 2012

Back to the printing press

Closets
Drypoint, edition size of 12, 2012

I'm getting back into etching and drypoints, now that I have access to a press.


Saturday, March 17, 2012

Self Portrait Fossil


Here are two versions of a relief, of fossil sculpture, using some of my collection of Laramie objects. Is that a finger bone or a rabbit femur?

The medium is plaster with polychrome. The molds are latex rubber supported by expanding foam insulation. This allows for surprisingly deep undercuts, the bane of any relief-maker.

Most of the objects are cast from toys from the 1950s/60s--a rich era of pop expression. Included are some totemic charms, at that time made in Hong Kong. The cochlea is probably Jurassic, making the next oldest object, the arrowhead, a youthful soapsud of trivia in comparison. The maze, which appears fragmentary, is the youngest artifact, based on Pac Man, the meditative game of the 80s.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Fossil from Laramidia


This is a scan of a recent work of painted plaster, castings of figures, fossilized artifacts from childhood in Laramie, Wyoming. I am pleased to read that Laramidia is now the official name of a vast island continent of North America during the Cretaceous period, when the continent that we know now was split by a sea. It is named after Laramie Wyoming. Though the objects fossilized in this work are recent (even the arrow head, relatively), this region of Wyoming is a fossil-land, offering up objects of such ancientness, my mind is boggled when I try to picture them in relation to time on a human scale (dinosaur bones, for example.)

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Dictatorial Morgtage

My recent morgtage:
Source material for a coming toon inspired by Russia and China's veto of the UN Security Council resolution, regarding Syria.

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Walt's Wonders


A morgtage for a large painting called Walt's Wonders, to be a large painting. This incorporates 10 different wonders of the world, potentially a messy and chaotic composition. The Great Wall of China helps to give a zig zag, or perspectival path for the viewer to follow.

I am attempting to coin this word, morgtage, which is phonetically pronounced, unlike mortgage; morgtage =morgue + montage, a montage of reference material, filed in what old time illustrators called a morgue, or swipe file. Illustrators, cartoonists and artists have always kept swipe files; appropriating or stealing images has been the stock and trade of the artist, just as much as a secret cavity has been the primordial organ for the smuggler. Perhaps google and photoshop have facilitated visual appropriation, but Picasso and Braque were collaging a century ago. Soon afterward the Soviets made airbrushing a verb, at least to kremlinologists and westerners, discussing political photo manipulation.