What’ll I draw? What’ll I draw? Sometime, you just go with what’s in front of you… anything works to get one started. My youngest son, who’s not a kid anymore, had a menagerie ‘friends’ when he was a child, most of them, like this little Gorilla, stuffed, some– creatures of the imagination (Red Rhino and the Blue Gnu)… It was like a running repertory theater. Destined from the beginning to be an actor/director.
What to do with it all? Climb up from my basement dungeon studio… stacking and organizing and picking out what to paint over, what to trash.
So much stuff.
Think I’m gonna start taking pieces to A-Space and leaving them in the take-it-free-or trash-it corner. A lot of early assemblages–a few have held up, but they were all experiments (big grown-up word for ‘play’); making them was fun and gave me courage to go on to do other things–but I have to do something with the clutter. The nicer pieces get coated with cement dust from the walls.
Really depressing.
This weekend. Take maybe a dozen or so pieces to A-Space. They’re all at least interesting, in a conceptual sort of way. Compositions of street debris: old can lids, stucco flakes, roofing tar, nails, cigarette butts… dirt. Glued, nailed, tied with string to trashed pieces of weathered plywood or composition board. Capitalism in decay.
What ever possessed me?
I’ve got the larger pieces and paintings stacked face to the wall. Keep them a little cleaner. Some nice pieces. Come see them. Make me an offer and they’re yours.
O-1 liner pen & Neocolor. A rough sketch for practice.
To a few, “Gibson Girl” might ring a bell… but mostly, this artist has been lost to memory. (though if you search down in these images, you’ll see New Yorker Cover… 75 years in embryo)… I mean, the 4 women on the subway: the nun, the religious prude, etc… ) and a brilliant illustration of Mansplaining. Though the Gibson Girl was a commercial pin-up, she was a woman not to be messed with.
And Gibson’s ink drawings are brilliant… crow quill pen and India ink. Think: Walt Kelly (Pogo), Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes)…
My mother, who was a wonderful artist with pen and ink, had a book of Gibson drawings. I wish I knew what happened to it.
Gibson, as an artist, may have vanished from memory… but he was brilliant. I love his work. Check them out. There is nothing like the “Gibson Girl” in pop marketing now… she was fucking not to be messed with!
And his penmanship… excuse me, penship… was exquisite!
32″ x 32″ Acrylic on canvas. I see cosmic space-scapes in micro images, and cellular patterns in cosmic images.
View GALLERY HERE.
This is a color inversion of #506 
.01 Staedtler pen … also did some courtroom drawing this morning, cop dragged a women from her home, wrongful arrest– Acquittal! Michael Coard is a warrior for justice.
5″x 5″ Silverpoint, colored pencil.
This is the essence of artful play! How we move on from one piece to another.
5″ x 5″ Silverpoint, color pencil (sold)
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5″ x 5″ Silverpoint, gouache highlights, on clayboard. I see where this is going… picked up a free copy of Gray’s Anatomy. (Click to Zoom!) Thinking–histology, microscopic structures of cell and tissues. I mean, really–look at these!
First art I was paid for–microscopic studies my professor in an embryology class had me do for him. Crow quill pen… all stippling. Took me forever, for $5.00 each.
It just occurred to me that THIS is what I was responding to in the patters I saw in broken pavement (HERE for instance).
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Jacob Russell's Magic Names 