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.