Asemic Scrawl

A close up of a pencil poem

Hold your pencil higher up so it feels like you have less control over where it would go if you pushed down and away while letting go. Add branches to the lines you've made. Twist the pencil with each slight release. See how and where it goes. Repeat.

The Hidden History of Mail-Art

As an occasional mail artist and a full-time collector of books and ephemera I came across this battered old copy of a Ripley's Believe It Or Not paperback. In it's yellowed pages was this account of the popularity of the brand.

Here is what the man himself, Robert Ripley had to say in regards to the scads of post he received as ringmaster of the sensational and the bizarre.

Expansion

I've expanded the pages on this blog, adding some CV material under a couple of headings (Books, Art Shows), elaborating a bit on my work speaking on and teaching art as well as telling the reader a little about myself in a new Bio section.

I'm unsure how these pages will grow, if their headings will change, if I'll forget to update them, etc.
I'd like to add a 'press' page but maybe Google is good for that. I'd love to add a collaborations page, documenting the fun I've had working with other artists. We'll see.

As it stands I'm trying to consolidate basic information onto this blog until I get my act togetherish enough to go for a dot com. That may not be necessary depending on how frustrating or not I find working with blogger.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the additions.

The author as a young man poses with the inimitable Sorrell Booke
at a Montreal auto show circa 1983

Making Faces

I can scribble at a frenetic pace. I launch into asemics and soon enough see faces. That place between calligraphy and cartooning becomes evident.

There is a certain collection of gestures I trace when drawing with a pencil or a ball point. Those tools allow a certain grind not feasible with felt tip markers or brush. The line coils out tightly into vertical drops and spins back up, jags along the page, spirals out, repeats. It happens over and over again. The above drawing is more an illustration of me trying to break up the gestures into discrete parts, otherwise I get a long 'run-on sentence' wobbling all over the paper.

Profiles and three quarter views of faces emerge, ugly rockers peeping out behind hairy helmets. These faces come easy, a scribbly dowsing, some lines suggest that nose, others that squint. There is a direct lineage between these faces and what used to be the alien bean motif I was obsessing over years ago, a voluptuous mango replete with fleshy folds. These are the raw cousins of those beasts, the brutish toss offs vs the anal line work of clean hard psych.

These guys are immediate and brooding. They satisfy me and prod me towards pure cartooning. They become finished if I have the patience. They become people, at least the masks that people carry.