Trapeze

Another one from the sketchbook I kept in Sao Paulo. I went through a pretty difficult time for awhile in Brasil, and as usual, my aerial work helped keep me grounded (....heh) and sane. Sometimes, when I'm in particularly dark places, I feel like my trapeze is all that I'm clinging to to keep myself together.

In pleasanter aerial news, I have a performance in Manhattan this Saturday! It's this event at Santos Party House. I'm excited and nervous-I haven't had nearly enough time to prepare for it because I don't have a studio to rig in back East and I've been relying on the kindness of my friends at the Baltimore Free Farm who let me practice in their warehouse. Send me all the luck on Saturday night, and if you're in the New York area, come out and see me!

Set Phasers...to Delicious

I don't bake.

Except when I do.

And when I do, it's because there's a damn good reason for it, like my hugely talented and excellent friend Heather Danforth graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art. I could think of no better way to celebrate this momentous occasion than baking a cake with a giant Starfleet insignia on it, to match her Official Starfleet Pin that she wore on her MICA issued graduation beret.

So while the other graduates were getting flowers from their families and posing for pictures, I got to present one of my dearest friends with a Star Trek cake that I painstakingly iced with no less than three tubes of icing before the ceremony.

It tasted of pure sugar and geekery.

And ACCOMPLISHMENT.

Heather, you kicked ass through all your time at MICA and I have no doubt in my mind that you're going to continue to do so for the rest of your artistic career and life. You're amazing, and I count myself lucky to have you as my friend. Especially when it means getting to bake you a sugar-bomb of a cake to celebrate how awesome you are.

Tank Genderqueer

Okay.

Updating daily while in the midst of bringing a show into existence and splitting my time between four cities may have been....ambitious.

But! Here's a sketch I did in Sao Paulo, while watching Tank Girl. It's a gender ambiguous tank creature, who enjoys wearing hot pink tops and whacking things with it's equally ambiguous weapon thing.

It uses it pronouns and enjoys all things neon.

PS. Hundred and first post!

Metanol Recording Session 2: Brian

Apologies for the radio silence- blogger.com went down for a few days, conveniently at the same time that I was consumed with rehearsals. Universe serendipity?

Taking a break from my shameless circus promotion to return to my last days in Sao Paulo, here's the second piece I did during the Metanol FM recording session. My dear friend Brian, of Catharsis and more recently, From the Depths, did a live performance with Vanessa on air and it was....brilliant. Transcendent. Shiver inducing. Over the week I was lucky enough to spend with him in Sao Paulo, Brian explained to me how in the cartoon version of his life, his dreadlocks are highly animated and reflect whatever current emotion he's feeling, so I made an attempt at giving them some life in my drawing.

The photographic art of the Wandering Dream Circus pt. 2

In which Kevin Hollenbeck continues to be a goddamn photographic wizard.

We shot these in the barn on the farm, where I had rigged my silk as a cloud swing in possibly the tiniest space it's ever been in. I couldn't do much on it (and when I tried, I banged my shins into the sides of the stable) but we still got some amazing shots.

Before anyone asks, yes, there were a lot of ball jokes when the contact ball came out.

The photographic art of the Wandering Dream Circus pt. 1

Kevin Hollenbeck is a crazy genius wizard who made me into a fairy.

He also made Nathen into a circus-y Peter Pan counterpart, turned a farm into a fairytale, and did it all in one night without lighting equipment other than two desk lamps and the sun shade from his car.

Kevin Hollenbeck is a crazy genius wizard photographer and he is made of pure brilliance and I utterly love him for turning two remarkably silly circus kids into something kind of magical.

(Full set is over on the facebook, if you feel so inclined)

Metanol Recording Session 1: Vanessa

During my last week in Sao Paulo, I had the ridiculous good fortune to get to sit in on a live radio broadcast at Metanol.fm that two of my friends were performing on air for. I was armed with my sketchbook and a single fine point pen, and spent the three hours of sitting Very Quietly and Listening scribbling away at my impressions of the session. This first one, which was done during Vanessa's set, was an attempt to capture a little of the feel of broadcasting over Sao Paulo and the sense of connection with the city that Metanol created in that tiny space.

I filled in the yellows and blacks with prismacolors later, partially to lose myself in filling in vast amounts of white space with big fuck-off markers, and also to cover up my thumbnail sketches in the top right. The colors ideas came from a set of yellow and black speakers in the corner of the recording room and I was trying to draw disks surrounding the figure as if they were shiny black plastic speakers, to not-quite-accurate effect.

The art of the Wandering Dream Circus, Pt 3

This is the last of the Wandering Dream Circus sketches I did during my trip back to the US- if it hasn't been abundantly obvious by now, I get suffused with creativity when I find myself in any sort of limbo with lots of time on my hands. I'm less enamored of this one, though I like the positions and posing that came out of my initial thumbnail sketch.

Drawing these has made me very sad that I don't actually have a giant moon to do aerials on (or trapeze boots that go to my thigh, or hair that actually looks like that). Being as the hair and boots are unlikely to come into my life outside of drawing, I'd settle for a Moon's Eye for all my future airborne play.

The art of the Wandering Dream Circus, Pt 2

A second piece I knocked out during layovers when I was traveling back from Brasil. I'm not sure what direction it wants to go in- I like the sketchy pencil quality it has right now, with the line work. I'm always hesitant to add detail to work that appeals to me in it's unfinished state- I'm convinced (due to experience) that I'm going to pick the wrong direction to take it in and mess it up when it's still brimming with potential.

Ideas, internet?

The art of the Wandering Dream Circus, Pt 1

OH MY GOD IT'S HUGE.

(I finally figured out how to make images larger in blogger.)

Now that I'm home from Brasil, work is going full speed ahead on the Next Big Thing- the Wandering Dream Circus, a project that my performance bestie Nathen and I are putting together for a tour in June. This is some of the concept art I knocked out between flights yesterday, and it's one of three pieces that I'll put up here as I scrub the extraneous pencil marks off them in Gimp.

That would be me with the hedgehog hair sitting on the moon, by the way.

The website and facebook page for us Wandering Dreamers should be up by next week, but here's a taste of who we are and what we do:

"The Wandering Dream Circus is a fantastical exploration of a world beyond our own, steeped in darkness and whimsy, brought to a boil under a bruised and roiling sky, and served hot with a sliver of moon and a wink. Using acrobatics, juggling, fire and aerial arts to tell the story of two night travelers who find themselves lost in a strange world of darkness and dreams, the Wandering Dream Circus will conjure up stars in your eyes, spark wonder in your hearts, and plant deceptively simple questions to blossom in your mind."

The current tour, which is subject to change, takes us through Phillidelphia PA, Baltimore MD, DC, Carrboro NC, Chattanooga, TN, Tucson AZ, Monteray CA, San Francisco CA, Ashland OR and Portland OR.

What's that you say? You want fantastical circus artists to come to your town, conveniently located roughly along our current route? CONTACT US. My email is hungrily awaiting more Southern venues that we can cast out spell of childlike wonderment over. Feed it with ideas here: mishkotek@gmail.com.