$pread final

This is the final version of the poster design for the $pread event- text and layout and photoshop cleverness by my friend Oz. I wish I had had time/energy to do one final version before we made this to clean up the legs, but it worked and the event was smashing. I fooking love making posters.

God forbid, the three days I took off touching chalk pastel actually got my fingers working for me again- on school projects no less. Half of my art juices are lingering with the screenprinting projects I started, but I'm going to reroute those to finishing my show until the term winds down.

Emotional blackhole status: still sucking. Stupid emotions.

$pread poster design

My brilliant organizer of a housemate Christa has been putting together a benefit for $pread magazine (http://www.spreadmagazine.org/) and asked me to come up with a poster design. This was the first rough- I'll post the final version tomorrow, and it looks quite spiffy if I do say so myself.

As you will note, the text I mocked up mentions that the party is May 30th. Why, that's tomorrow! If you're in Olympia, I damn well better see your face at the Midnight Sun tomorrow night at 7PM. There will burlesque and go-go dancers and other good stuff along those sexy-type
lines and I will be wearing very few clothings. Come out!

The Reach (WIP)

One of the first things I learned when I started performing was that unless your parents were somehow coming to every show you did, no one in your audience actually wanted to see you succeed. The reason we incorporate dangerous things into our acts, the whole basis behind dumb stunts for money, the sharper or more on fire your props are- the more the audience is hoping you'll fuck up, just for them.

I like to motivate myself before I go on by deciding not to give them the satisfaction.

Another piece for my class show, although it's drawing from the emotional black hole that has reared its ugly head yet again. I used to incorporate a lot of garroting wire into my work back in high school, this is another iteration of that.

I'm pretty unhappy with how this is looking, and it's a struggle to get art to work at all right now for me. Suggestions appreciated, particularly for a background.

Stenceel

If I can't get my stupid hands to do work for class, I can at least put an exacto blade in one of them and make it cut stencils.

I'm still wiped from Folklife, emotionally and physically (see: bruises featured in post previous), and trying to push myself to do work has just been an exercise in frustration. I'd put up the stuff I'm working on, but frankly I'm embarrassed by how godawfully bad it is at the moment.

(New tactic- shame art skills into doing better work!)

I printed this one on the back of the shirt that saw me through all three days of Folklife. It reads "Circus Freak" on the front, courtesy of another stencil I slapped on there a few hours before we left. I have much fondness for this article of clothing thanks to all we survived together, including all the creep-fucks who used it to ask me if I was a freak in bed too and inquired after my acrobatic skills in a highly non-professional manner.

Back and bruised!

Back from busking Folklife all weekend, and sporting this very fine souvenir. The official story is that I was going around punching hippies and one of them threw a gourd at me. Or I got in a fight with a rival performance group and had to defend my troupe's honor- disseminate whichever version you think makes me more of a badass.

Unofficially, Jeff and I were doing chaos during a Cirk du Fantastik street show and his head was coming up as my face was going down. But we're the only ones who need to know that.

Learned a hell of a lot about performance this weekend, all of which will be fueling my last push to make tons of work this term for class. I'm thinking about immortalizing this black eye in acrylic- the colors are coming up really beautifully right about now.

Koi-maid

Ah, you lucky bastards, as I have a sudden inexplicable free half hour before I depart on adventures, I'm throwing this one up as my piece today.

I don't know how much art I can make it a day- I DO know that after a certain point my creative juices get sapped and trying to force stuff out of my hands is just pointless. I did this one the same day as the first mermaid piece, and I had a really good concept and color scheme in mind, but it just didn't work as well as it should've. Ah well.

I have such a hard on for drawing koi, I have no idea why it took me this long to think up a koi-person. Definitely a concept I'm going to keep playing with.

Mer

When I was living in the print studio last term, (I was a little ink-splattered serigraphy monkey for three months in Fall), I noticed all these scraps of heavy weight, expensive paper lying around the studio. They were all left-over from cutting paper down to size, and I always wanted to take advantage of their ubiquity around studios to make really cool art with weird skinny dimensions.

So the other day I took one of my cut-off scraps of butcher paper and tried to make an image that worked with the dimensions. And I really liked working like that, which is convenient, because now I'm never going to run out of nice paper to work on.

This is piece is really reminiscent of the illustrative quality I like to try to put into my work sometimes. And again, I was thinking back to a beautifully illustrated book I had as a kid. When I head east over the summer I'm going to raid my store of children's books and drag them back to the west coast with me.

I know the concept behind this blog is "a piece a day", but I never actually specified a POST a day (loopholes!). I'm still going to shoot for it regardless, but the internet isn't going to come crashing down if it doesn't happen. THAT said, I'm spending this weekend doing Cirk du Fantastik shows at Folklife, so there probably won't be any updates till Monday.

(Cirk du Fantastik will be performing at the very exclusive, VIP "sidewalk 30 feet outside the venue" stage all weekend if anyone cares to look for us. We will be the loud ones wearing silly clothes and asking for your money.)

Have good weekend adventures y'all!

Fuck yer audience rough

This is another in the dual performative self/personal self series. It's really just roughed out at the moment, but the character is holding a mask that'll have a cheesy grin on it, and the right bicep will have a tattoo that reads "Fuck yer audience". My housemate Michael sparked the idea for the concept this time, all thanks to their artistic genius.

I have a loooong, much-meditated on bit of writing to accompany this one to the effect of what I as a performer REALLY think of all those beautiful people I weasel money out of, but it's still taking shape and will probably hit articulation sometime when the art is finished.

Still struggling with the eyes, although they're not as bad as the soulless pits my camera makes them out to be in the shot.

Holding this facial expression so I could use it as a reference with the mirror was hilarious. I didn't even know cheek muscles could cramp.

WIP Sundays, Second Rough Mondays, Finished Product Someday?

Oh, yes. Very much yes. I had no idea that it was going to take this direction, and I was struggling with the bottom left corner, but then it all fell into place deliciously today. I'm still unsure where the detail on the face is going (suggestions anyone? I'm a fan of the facial star, both with make-up and compositionally, but I don't know if I should darken or lighten or how well it reads) but this piece has done such a good job of telling me where it wants to go thus far, I'm just going to fix it, toss it on my wall and keep my ears open to what it wants. Hopefully it has ideas about the hair, too, because I'm at a bit of a loss there. Ideas?

With sheer luck and any sudden unanticipated free time, I'll have prints of it to sell at Folklife with weekend when Cirk du Fantastik is performing.

Works in progress sunday!

This is the first rough of a poster I'm working on for class, thanks to some very clever parlaying of my need for circus promotional material into a homework assignment. All my class work for the rest of the rapidly disappearing quarter is going to deal with the duality of the self I promote for performance, and the self I experience while performing- kind of a backstage, on stage thing. The "I can't do this any more" piece I put up a few days ago was the first part of this series, it more or less sparked the whole idea.

I really want to do a poster that has us all looking bright and shiny and posed, and accompany it with a sketch of us all smoking and ranting about the audience backstage. My life is chock full of material for this concept right now (cough, last Friday's gig, cough).

We're Cirk du Fantastik (as in, Cirk do Fantastik things for your viewing entertainment), and we're here to shout at you and take your money!

Sleep

So when I said I was putting up a piece a day no matter how badly they turned out....this proves I meant it.

Creating work while physically compromised (exhausted, drunk, ect) can turn out brilliantly. More often than not, for me, it really doesn't.

I was trying to evoke exhaustion and unconsciously referencing a children's book with illustrations I loved when I was a kid about this princess that was only awake at night. She slept in this big, flowy hammock that looked so ungodly comfortable I used to dream about it.

I should've gone in and worked this one more, but I feel like it's too far gone. C'est la vie. There's always more art tomorrow.

Finally

The other day, a friend said I was a saint. I said, if I was a saint, I was a seriously burnt out one.

It got me to wondering if martyrs felt relieved when they died. You spend all this time among people who hate you, or fear you, and generally never understand you, and you create death as this place where you can go to finally be understood. I wanted to develop the crowd at the bottom more to suggest a world that despised the person they were killing, but I never got around to working back into the piece.

In my head, when I read the "finally", I imagine the martyr thinking "took them long enough".

(chalk pastel and charcoal on butcher paper. As if there is any other media.)

I realized today that if you click the image, it blows it up to full quality. Hit that!

I can't do this any more

I love circus. Dear god, do I love circus. I eat it, I breathe it, I live it, I.... herd a mercenary band of flaky performers (myself included), deal with clients, book gigs, drive us all, arrange the music, then put on make-up and tease money out of recalcitrant audiences. Usually in one night.

I love circus.

But some days I feel like I can't do it anymore.

(I did this piece a week ago, during a seriously performance heavy weekend when I was also handling the bureaucracy for the circus group I run on campus. The original text over the head was a thought bubble reading "i can't do this anymore". Life quieted down on that front for about a week, but it just recently picked up, and I found myself hitting that same place again as I'm suddenly staring down an unorganized performance in Ranier tomorrow night, an unconfirmed show on Saturday, and three new clients as of yesterday.)

I got my grubby hands on the copy stand at school today, and replaced the piece from yesterday with the copy I took today. O glee!

Blaargh

From the outside, I'm a highly functional being, capable of walking upright and completing a ridiculous amount of work in a single day. On the inside, I tend to feel like this. Prone exhausted and with a furiously twitching leg that just wants to KICK EVERYTHING in the FACE.

This is the first piece of a backlog of about a weeks worth of images with notes from that day I drew them. As much as I like posting work as I make it, the buffer comforts me. Once I streamline the reproduction of work to interweb process, it'll be a lot more immediate.

Apologies for the quality- tomorrow I conquer the copy stand at school and all will be light balance and roses.