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Postmodern Animal Exhibit, 6-9 pm Dec. 2, 2011

2011-11-29T06:16:00.001-08:00

For anyone who’s interested,

I’m having a new art show for the ArteReyes Gallery entitled the Postmodern Animal that encompasses several years of work. The opening is upstairs in Building B at Blue Star on Friday, Dec. 2nd from 6 – 9 pm. The work will include paintings, drawings, quilts, mixed media, sculpture, artist-proof prints and illustrated books. It would be great to see you there.

After the show opens, I'll be posting the new work to my website at: www.karlfrey.com

Karl Frey
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...And Another...

2011-08-15T07:44:00.000-07:00

How I've Spent My Summer Vacation...

2011-08-12T05:08:00.000-07:00

The World is a Lovely Place and I'm Afraid to Die

New Show: Brouhaha

2011-04-24T06:04:00.000-07:00

Real American's Views on Art

2010-12-21T11:22:00.000-08:00

This is from a short-lived series called Creature Comforts. It was canceled by CBS after only three episodes in 2007. It's made by Nick Park and Aardman Animation out of Bristol, England.

A Labor New Imagined

2010-11-29T05:45:00.000-08:00

I have an exhibit of all new work opening on Friday Dec. 3rd at ArteReyes contemporary studio space at Blue Star in San Antonio. The opening will run from around 6 - 10 pm. So check it out if you get a chance.

I've also added a lot of the new show images to my Redbubble site and they are now proofed and ready for ordering as prints. I'll also be selling my signed artist proof prints at the show, but there are very few available as I only needed two or three prints to proof each image.

Absolutely Amazing...

2010-09-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

I currently find myself teaching digital photography and being acutely aware of all the visual phenomena that can be captured by a camera lens but remains relatively invisible to the human eye. I mostly appreciate this in matters of depth of field and selective focus in still images, but this brilliant stop-motion film team manages to make the way we perceive light itself newly revelatory. This small team simply uses iPads and long exposures with regular DSLR cameras to create a unique and unbelievable experience. Enjoy...

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

The Process of a Glump: The Aesthetic of Butterfly Wings II

2010-06-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

STEP 1: I collect many, many examples of some subject that I consider indicative of contemporary popular aesthetic tastes, either because of the sheer number of images represented in the culture or because of their prevalence in hyper-aesthetisized contexts (i.e. greeting cards, clip art, decorative art, trapper keepers, wallpaper, skateboard decks, etc.)

The example shown in process draws from my collection of various presentations and representations of butterfly wings. All images referenced here are public domain.

STEP 2: I then make a digital 'Glump' collage. I composite a select number of found images together with varying levels of prominence, opacity, scale, etc. until I’m happy with my Glump’s overall composition.

STEP 3: I simplify and attempt to essentialize the aesthetic qualities of the subject by tracing over my digital composition as a vector image. This distills its initial complexity to a mere collection of hard edged, flat-colored, interconnected shapes. Vectors are the way computers reduce complex images into a series of mathematical equations, which makes it a much smaller and easier to process digital file. It also makes it so it can be enlarged without any distortion.

STEP 4: I then do my best to plot and transfer an enlarged version of my digital vector image lightly onto 140 lb. handmade rag paper in order to work with more traditional media. This gives me a rather ghostly imprint of the design on paper that I can work on top of.

STEP 5: I work experimentally, painting the collection of shapes using a variety of materials (watercolor, inks, colored pencils, pastels, crayons, charcoal, even bleach). I freely drip, splatter, erase, tape lift, and generally obscure the basis of the original composition through drawing and painting, in an attempt to understand the rhythm and momentum of the shapes and colors inherent in the original subject matter.

STEP 6: Lastly, I selectively refine and reestablish various elements through more deliberate drawing and painting over the surface of the paper. I do this to give the image a sense of structure and overall cohesion.

I see each Glump as an experimental Petrie Dish of visual tastes and an opportunity for contemplating our contemporary aesthetic anthropology.

FiN

All that glitters...

2010-05-10T12:15:00.000-07:00

I wanted to share a couple more of my recently completed Glump projects. I call the one on top, Gemstone II, creatively enough because it is my second Glump that combines the aesthetics of various gemstones. Gemstone II is cloudier, softer edged, and I suppose you could say more painterly than Gemstone I (below), which feels to me more like a drawing even though both were created with inks, watercolor, and pastel off of original, vectorized computer designs. My goal with these is to challenge my usual aesthetic leanings by using the computer's amazing ability to mash-up so many different images and to surprise me with the outcome. I then enjoy the challenge of executing and improving those unusual aesthetic accidents by hand in traditional techniques, though I am rather fond of the digital vector designs as well.

A collection of these experiments will be the backbone of a December show at ArteReyes entitled,' A Labor New Imagined,' because I feel that this digital to traditional media approach is truly a new imagining of the art-making process for me, and my interest doesn't seem to be fading. Soon I will have found my Aesthetic Alphabet and the complex internal grammar of this Glump work will be revealed.

A Better Mousetrap...

2010-03-04T17:23:00.000-08:00

When I initially set out to posting yet another art blog for public consumption, I was intending to use it solely to explore my personal and historical taste in images and illustration and how that is shaping the consumer, visual junk, and fine art culture around us in these confusing and opulent times. Recently a lot of stop-motion work has been getting my attention because it is certainly enjoying a renaissance in the hands of the YouTube generation. This video is not animation and thus even has a more tenuous claim to an art and illustration blog. It does relate in one way however. It is, by far, the best modern interpretation of a venerated illustrator’s most remembered concept; The Rube Goldberg device. Add that to the fact that the game ‘Mousetrap’ was something of an obsession of mine as a toddler and it relates perfectly to my guiding thesis. It’s also just tons of fun, even if you don’t like the song, I actual watched it through the first time with the sound off so as not to disturb my own sleeping toddler.

For all things OK Go, here’s their link.

And here's a small sample of their inspiration...

Now that's a flip book...

2010-02-23T05:45:00.000-08:00

This innovative little example of stop-motion was created by a design student in Singapore going by the name "Saggyarmpit."

The Masterpiece of the Twentieth Century Now in 3D!!!

2009-12-04T14:49:00.000-08:00

In the classes I teach, I sometimes have trouble making the accomplishments of Art History seem relevant and exciting to my young college students. Videos like this make my job just that much easier.

This inspiring examination is by Lena Gieseke with music by Manuel de Falla, Christopher Johns and Matthew Anderson.

Aesthetics of Angels...

2009-11-18T16:44:00.000-08:00

This is one of my newest Glump drawings. I thought it was appropriate for the holiday season. Here's what I say about it on my Redbubble Site:

This piece is a celebration of life, spirituality, and mystery in glump form. Not to be too optimistic, but if you were to fill a Petrie dish with joy and discovery, this is what would grow. Or it might just be a creepy glump of eyes and feathers with extremely healthy self-esteem.

This piece was created with watercolor, crayon, and colored pencil on 140 lb. hot-press rag paper.

What's my Redbubble Site you ask? Well, it's where I am currently selling original designs on American Apparel T-Shirts for very reasonable prices along with a select group of Fine Art Prints. Please feel free to check it out and feel my ego bruise beneath your mouse as you browse.

The Glumps are Taking Over!!

2009-11-08T12:22:00.001-08:00

I've been working on a series of pieces called, "Glumps of Fun" for many, many months now and I don't know what draws me to lumpy, clumpy, glops of form. But it's something that seems to be spreading through the public consciousness as evidenced by the new Grizzly Bear (a great band) video as directed by the painter Allison Schulnik.

Allison's personal aesthetics are very different than mine, but there's something of a kinship in the fun she seems to have with distorting recognizable imagery. You should certainly check out her site, it's kitschy, ugly, uniquely strange, and strangely lovely. It's what would happen if a cat ate up your Urban Outfitters decor and hocked it up as a hair-ball. Here's a piece I especially liked called Cottage #6.

Charlie Harper equals Illustration Genius

2009-10-08T06:24:00.000-07:00

More often than I would like a truly amazing artist fails to show up on my radar. So it was that I had never heard of Charlie Harper until earlier this year while I was researching 1950's modernist animation styles. I fell in love and bought a few children's books, but what I really wanted was the oversized, 424-page collected works volume called Charlie Harper an Illustrated Life. Well that book has finally been published in a more manageable size with all the same images (only at a quarter of the size), and you can get it from Amazon for an extremely reasonable price. For any fan of illustration I would call this the most buy book of the year. Now if I could only get Amazon to pay me for saying such things.

Enjoy...

Click here for a link to a Flickr Gallery from a 2009 exhibition of his originals:

Other Blogs Inspire Me...

2009-10-02T21:53:00.001-07:00

I was up in the middle of the night not too long ago and happened upon cartoonist Robert Goodin's Blog called 'Covered' where artist reinterpret comic book covers in their own style. I immediately grabbed the first random comic I could from deep within my nerd closet and spent the next few hours reinterpreting the third issue of the 1990's Jim Lee overworked masterpiece WildC.A.T.S. Enjoy.

Why Are We All So Afflicted...?

2009-09-25T05:40:00.000-07:00

Those males of my generation all seem to have a serious case of toy nostalgia. (All except my brother who I could never manage to pull away from his rock tumbler to play G.I. Joe with me.)

Super saturated artist Robert Burden from San Francisco, clearly has it pretty bad. All I can say is, I know where you're coming from and good luck with your issues.

The Voltron painting is double human scale (and my favorite toy of all time), and I was a little amazed to see the lead character from Silverhawks. No one remembers Silverhawks... except me.

A Real Housing Investment...

2009-08-31T15:25:00.000-07:00

Because of my occasional artworks on walls of Lego blocks, I get a lot of e-mails about Legos used in unusual ways, for animation, for sculpture. But I recall that while I was first making my canvases with them I had the thought that they would actually insulate quite well as a traditional building material.

So this James May guy is giving it a shot using over 816 MILION Lego blocks to construct his home. I'd just like to know how much it all costs, because my Lego dealer refuses to give me a bulk discount and those little bits of plastic are EXPENSIVE!

Pics of the process are here.

A Blast from the Past...

2009-08-07T15:29:00.000-07:00

I was reminded the other day of some comic book characters I created back in Junior High with my friend Adam Davis. I rooted through my old portfolios and found these examples amidst the silverfish.

The only character I remember anything about, I called 'Roulette.' He's the one with the silly little earflaps. As you can see, he started out as a Gambit/Wolverine clone, then became a Gambit/Spawn clone, and finished as a Gambit/Grifter clone. You can easily tell that Adam and I were swept up in the Image comics revolution of the early nineties. Adam designed the Scarecrow and Android characters and I took the as yet uncompleted comic book project so seriously that I sketched and resketched the first page (borrowing heavily from the legendary 'How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.')

The first page is meant to show our main character, Roulette, out of costume, being pick-pocketed by a homeless girl who can make herself invisible, (oh how the social metaphors run deep).

As it so happens Adam now has his own blog with his great sketches and he even takes requests on occasion. See below the fabulous Mobster Lobster he did for yours truly.

This quirky Stop-Motion thing is now totally Mainstream

2009-08-04T14:04:00.000-07:00

A little band named Coldplay has released its latest video directed by Shynola for a song called Strawberry Swing. Kids don't make this at home unless you can get the permits needed to close the street. Until then, stick to chalk on the driveway.

Kids, no matter how cool you think this is, don't make this at home... unless you can get the permits needed to close the street. Until then, stick to chalk on the driveway.

2009-08-01T07:55:00.000-07:00

These fabulous photographs are from Brock Davis in which he ‘shatters’ our collective perceptions of the physical world. I like how these images give so much power to the objects, and I’ve always been all about the objects.

More examples can be seen at Cyana Trend Land or if you want to see his other weird imagery visit Brock's site.

More Goreyesque Weirdness...

2009-07-31T10:14:00.000-07:00

Here is another demo piece from one of my Summer Workshops at the McNay, exploring the work of Edward Gorey.

Landfill Art...

2009-07-26T19:36:00.000-07:00

I was asked to participate in the Landfill Art Project out of Pennsylvania. You're asked to customize a hubcap that they send you and to treat it as a "metal canvas." I got one from an old Pontiac and decided to do a hodge-podge, current events piece I call 'Bankruptcy Blues.' You can see more submissions to the project here.

1st Angel Arts Magazine Interview

2009-07-22T07:25:00.000-07:00

I was lucky enough to have an interview published by 1st Angel Arts Magazine. It's based in the U.K. but you can see their site online here. They have many great artist interviews for you to explore.

Happy Independence Day

2009-07-03T12:25:00.000-07:00

Here's a short and quirky set of fireworks by the animation group PES. enjoy...

Gorey Alphabet Page

2009-06-30T09:53:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I ran a workshop at the McNay Art Museum here in San Antonio that related to their Summer Edward Gorey exhibit.

E is for Escape or Extricate was one of the demos I did for the workshop. We came up with unusual Alphabet Book pages by making drawings that included at least one element that related directly to Gorey's massive portfolio of illustration. In this example it was the 'beak' and the 'leg.'

More Homemade Stop-Motion

2009-06-24T07:26:00.000-07:00

So there must be trend nowadays to make stop-motion projects in your living room, or in this case, a really big, hardwood living room with a camera suspended birds-eye-view from the ceiling. This short film is just as imaginative, inspiring, and amazing as can be and those involved show you a little bit of the process over the closing credits. Enjoy…

The video artist is Tomas Mankovsky who is Swedish and works with a lot of help.

The Future of Graffiti

2009-06-09T12:15:00.000-07:00

Allright, that title might be overly grandiose, but I do want to direct your attention to the lovely urban artwork of New Jersey collage artist D.Billy.

This is what he says about his street art in his statement:

"Using colorful media such as twisting balloons, party streamers, and artist tape, I have begun to add visual representations of sound effects to public spaces as a sort of dimensional graffiti. After embellishing the found scenes and photographing the results, I leave my additions in place to engage passers-by for as long as the materials hold up. For me, this process encourages a reexamination of surroundings and objects that are usually taken for granted, and injects a hint of the fantastical surreality that I have established in my other work.

Or, at the very least, I hope someone thinks these things are kind of funny."

This is not a Museum Opening...

2009-06-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Forgive me for the inside art history joke of a title, but I wanted to share some pictures with you from the new Magritte Museum in Brussels, officially opening tomorrow, June 2nd, 2009.

These images are from illustrator Dave McKean's Twitter page yesterday, live from a special preview opening.

Magritte has always been my favorite Surrealist painter because his humor acts to make his ideas more humanist than psychotic. And something about that humor is just contagious. Whether it's played with in a popular movie or imaginatively used to cover up the renovation prior to the museum opening.

The fact that he started out as a wallpaper designer and commercial artist only adds to my affection.

Speaking of the Future...

2009-05-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a short little video of my son, Vonnegut Charles Frey, working on creating his own visual tastes, opinions, and vocabulary. I think of his current aesthetic sense as being bold, deeply intentioned, and not afraid of open space. It will be fun seeing it evolve.

We used to dream in color...

2009-05-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

I don’t know who’s winning in this cultural battle between the hope for change camp and the devastating global economic, infectious disease, cataclysmic environmental warming crisis group. The negatives are at least winning in the arms race of nifty adjectives. That’s why I never know whether I’ll hear someone on the radio news who's chipper about something or about someone being wood chippered. (I stopped watching my news after being in Boston and having the infinitely repeated visuals of the two towers collapse permanently shatter my most necessary delusions).

1950s House of the Future Illustration courtesy plan59.com

For visual artists absorbing too much reality through our sensitive microphone eyes is akin to making car designers work in the scrap yard, endlessly undoing what they had hoped to create. The creative mind works overtime to conjure an escape in such repressive conditions, but it is invariably populated by the nightmares absorbed through daily life. As a visual culture our collective attitudes, be they negative or positive, inevitably become the raw material for our creations. And that’s why I prefer the phrase “Doom and Gloom” to "Reality" because you can’t say it without infusing the appropriate twinge of sarcasm and ironic detachment, as if you know thinking in such a way is self-defeating but you accept it as the premise for contemporary dialogue. So enough of this "Let's be realistic" nonsense, at least when it borders on the visual domain. Anyway, what’s wrong with us? Please let it be that optimism isn’t an endangered visual language. I hate to say it, but having been modified, corn-syruped, and made ubiquitous by Pepsi’s new add campaign, the Obama symbol has lost a little that initial luster of hopeful delusion and is seeming more and more like how the business of reality is done.

What brought these thoughts to mind you may ask? I recently saw on PinkTentacle.com that the four leading Japanese carmakers just released images of their transportation concepts for 2050. Their best (and most marketable?) visions of our future range from the polished white of classic iPods and Star Trek Bridges to the grey and bottomless black of new iPods, reminiscent of H.R. Giger’s Aliens. The first image by Mazda doesn’t suggest the future to me so much as the apocalypse, its aesthetic reminds me of the cicada carapaces we have littering our landscapes here in San Antonio and not of a brighter tomorrow. It is as though this husk of inevitability is something we must endure and cocoon ourselves within before we can ever break free into something resembling joy.

And all I can think is that we used to dream in color…

These images of a future traffic system from 1959 (above) and a 1967 painting showing the subway of the future (below) were by German illustrator Klaus Burgle.

Artist and illustrators used to think of the future as an imagination fueled glee club and not as the over-engineered burden we often see presented to us now.

I thought this new poster conceived by David Malki and illustrated by Carly Monardo (available at topatoco.com) successfully melds the old visual optimism with our impossible to shed modern cynicism.

So I’m calling for a rebirth to color, joy, and optimism. No matter how misplaced, remember that the 50’s and 60’s certainly had their share of crises and yet the visionaries were never more colorful. I think that whole Cuban missile thing conjured a much more depressing rain cloud than our recent swine-flu pandemic and yet it gave us a revolutionary rainbow design for the appropriately named Life Savers candy. It certainly beat the original packaging featuring an old seaman throwing a life preserver to a drowning damsel… talk about a downer.

1940s 1950s 1960s

If you think the odds are against the collective subconscious lightening up a bit, consider that at least in the microcosm of my own experience, a similar rebirth has happened before in our history. No, not the birth of the color movie musical in the heart of the Great Depression, nor the glorious invention of the printing press that opened up the imagination to overcome the Dark Ages. I am referring instead, to the subtle change in the tone of print illustration in the mid 1990’s. I was at design school at the time and witnessed this transition first hand. Its effect on me resulted in my subject matter shifting from the Holocaust to singing birds and multi-colored, patchwork trees. When I started design school in 1996 the preference of major publications was for the work of Marshall Arisman, Brad Holland, Sebastian Kruger, Jonathon Rosen, and the aforementioned H.R.Giger. By the time I left in 1999 their reign had been seceded to the Clayton Brothers, Anita Kuntz, Mark Ryden, Barry Blitt, Gary Baseman, and a handful of other apostles of humor and color. I still see it as a very welcome change and one that hasn’t yet been convincingly overturned.

Tastes shifted from gritty illustrators like Marshall Arisman (above) in the early 1990s to more colorfull and cartoony illustrators like Mark Ryden (below) in the late 1990s.

So hopefully the noticeable lack of joy from these auto companies is simply a reflection of how much it sucks to be an automaker right now, and I pray that this sort of heavy handed practicality doesn’t overwhelm the whimsy in our lives, especially the dreams of our future. I’m just saying that the environment is ripe for sunnier sensibilities to prosper. For example, I hope Spike Jonze’s upcoming adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are is good, because I’d love to celebrate a story about a boy who dreams of vicious monsters but instead of being devoured, is delusional enough to be made their king.

Just in Time for Swine...

2009-05-02T15:18:00.000-07:00

Thanks to all that made it to my show opening last night despite the widespread dread about la influenza porcine. At the opening I saw only one person wearing a surgical mask but if the trend grows, here is an artist that is thinking ahead.

Yoriko Yoshida specializes in more than just timely illustration, but this small sampling of his new surgical mask series, including 'Mask of Death' and 'Mask of Mt. Fuji,' really caught my eye as an engaging and artistic approach to international current events and media hype.

Why Draw at All?

2009-04-21T07:16:00.000-07:00

I thought I would keep the stop-motion love fest going with this very clever and deceptively low tech animation by Takeuchi Taijin. “A Wolf Loves Pork” uses no drawing or digital manipulation, only 1,300 printed photographs that travel across the walls and furniture of his small Japanese apartment. Work like this really makes a spectacle of the precision and technical beauty of animation.

Tax Day Frivolity

2009-04-14T18:52:00.001-07:00

A Gorgeous Act of Vandalism?

2009-04-09T09:36:00.000-07:00

To continue my theme of public art often confused with garbage, I bring you this graffiti animation project from Buenos Aires. It is shot frame by frame on the walls of the city and I like to think that it served to whitewash all the graffiti that had already defaced the fair city. But enough for my apologist ramblings and on to the video:

The artists responsible are known as BLU and they have a few other paper-based animations on their Vimeo site here.

Green Design

2009-03-25T13:54:00.000-07:00

I felt a little bad about posting those disrespectful pictures of Bert the other day and I wanted to share a postmodern use of a Sesame Street character that actually brings joy to the world and still tugs at the old conceptual heartstrings. This is the opposite of cynical; it is actually using design and our global visual culture as a tool for positive change and environmental conservation.

These illustrated garbage bags are being distributed free of charge at select outdoor events and to schools and volunteer cleanup groups throughout Japan. Produced by the Tokyo-based design firm MAQ Inc., the bags feature a design of Oscar the Grouch that was illustrated by Lily Franky in collaboration with Sesame Street. They are part of an environmental awareness campaign aimed at children and are just one small example of how art and design can be used to make the world a better place.

Ahhh, Karma cleansed.

Sesame Street Urban Myths

2009-03-21T19:19:00.000-07:00

I was watching some Sesame Street on PBS with my son and I was a little surprised at how many of the segments remain unchanged from when I was a preschooler. With the small exception of the completely digital background that accompanies the ‘Elmo’s World’ segment that now routinely ends the show, nearly all the segments seem to have been produced in the seventies or eighties and were almost instantly familiar. Some of these are just charmingly full of nostalgia and also showcase some stunningly well-done, watercolor animation. My all time favorite came on just yesterday and I decided I needed to share it here:

I suppose the reason Sesame Street’s consistency surprised me is that through my teens and college years I was led to believe (without ever confirming it for myself) that Sesame Street had succumbed to a great deal of pressure to change due to the new climate of diversity and political correctness. Of course these changes seemed all the more believable because of their ridiculousness… Cookie Monster developing diabetes, Bert and Ernie coming out as homosexuals, and even having Ernie die from Aids as a lesson in the importance of safe sexual practice.

In truth, it seems that Cookie Monster often extols the virtues of fruits and vegetables but still loves a good cookie and that Bert and Ernie remain alive and just good friends despite their opposing personalities. In looking for the source of these rumors, I found a few contemporary ones that actually happen to be true. The most surprising being that Bert appears on some posters used in rallies supporting Osama Bin Laden. The truth behind this bit of truly humorous trivia serves as an example of our global interconnection as a visual culture, and that our instantaneous access to images often reveals incongruous and humorous misinterpretations.

The original image of Bert with Osama was created by a satirical site called Bert is Evil. The crux of the site is that, as a running joke, they paste Bert into images of infamy (i.e. JFK’s assassination, consulting with Hitler, etc.). The truly humorous part of the story is that someone in Bangladesh picked up this image from a web search and used it on collage style posters meant to celebrate the world’s most famous terrorist. Subsequently images of the rallies, using these posters of terror, were picked up by Reuters and the Associated Press and were widely circulated. Sesame Street is shown in over 120 countries and I like to think that the presence of the globally well-known and lovable Muppet, seen over Osama’s left shoulder, works to undermine the messages of hate and fear that these posters were originally meant to spread.

I also have to ask myself, why Bert? Is it because he seems to be the only Muppet that goes out of his way to seem grown up? Do we instinctually pick on entities fighting against their prescribed nature? Or do we simply need to critique those sweet and well-meaning memories of our youth in order to bolster our own sense of cynical adulthood. Sesame Street is not the only target, but these two bits of particularly satirical artwork from the Internet exhibit titled, “Illegal Art,” demonstrate that it ranks right up there with Disney as a singular cultural expression of our youthful innocence.

Diana Thorneycroft
"Man with Large Nose"
Graphite on paper, 2002

Wally Wood
"Disneyland Memorial Orgy"
Poster, 1967

To end on an upbeat note, I thought I’d also include one of my favorite musical sessions from Sesame Street. It’s hard not to overturn chuckling cynicism for joy when hearing Stevie Wonder in his prime. By the way the fabulous singers backing the pinball animation are none other than The Pointer Sisters.

Beast Eats West

2009-03-16T06:07:00.000-07:00

Relations between America and Japan have been tested by our shared history; Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima…Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai. Even as recently as the 1980’s the American media went out of their way to portray the economic threat of the Japanese corporate structure as being made up of dangerously repressed businessmen reduced to reading pornographic comics on their suspiciously efficient mass transit. But now our associations with Japan are very different. In the visual arena, it would be hard to argue that any country has impacted our post-modern, consumerist visual-junk culture more.

The success and broad acceptance of the work by Japanese ex-illustrator Takashi Murakami in today’s Museums and finest art galleries bellies a fascination with the connections between Japanese culture and our own. In his show “Mushrooms” he slyly hints at our troubling history and, at the same time, is able to turn it in to a humorous, whimsical, and slightly unsettling cartoon dreamscape.

This new spirit of acceptance and cooperation is especially found among young illustrators, to whom the problematic past of internment camps and dehumanizing propaganda is but a chapter in a textbook they don’t particularly enjoy remembering. I’ve chosen the work of three young American artists/illustrators who I think epitomize the changing relationship, tinged with a gooey, bubble-tea admiration of two-way pop culture but also seeking to humanize the cold, round edged efficiency of Japanese design with the hand done awkwardness of American individualism. It should go without saying that all their sites are well worth a visit.

Chicago born Ken Taya’s Nihon Town illustration for his Enfu blog takes the mash-up of Japanese and American visuals literally, click the image to see it larger and see how many cross cultural mutations you can spot… You’ll be busy for a while. Even Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant isn't safe, it is crossed with Giant Baba to create Oubei Baba.

http://enfu.com

Brooklyn based Saimon Chow was a classmate of mine in undergrad and has gone on to influence nearly all aspects of visual culture. One of my favorites is this clay-mation piece he did with his brother Albert for a show in Hong Kong celebrating the 30th anniversary of Hello Kitty… This chacter is also riffed on in Taya’s illustration as Hello Miffy. I’ve also included a silkscreen print I traded him for back at school and I hope he doesn’t mind it seeing the light of day, it certainly shows that he was very aware of his mish-mash influences early on. Click on the images for the video or a closer look.

http://www.saimanchow.com

The Los Angeles based illustration team KozynDan have a history of creating truly unusual visual collaborations of their own. My favorites are their panoramics which paint a postmodern landscape in 360 degrees. Click the image to see it larger. Click here to see it in virtual 3-D. http://www.kozyndan.com

My personal observations of this cross-ocean visual dynamism come from seeing my art students get more and more enraptured by Anime, starting with second graders eschewing Garfield for Pokemon back in the mid nineties to current college students using Kirosaywa stills to inspire their video game concept art. Similarly American bookstores stock their shelves with roughly 80% more Japanese comics (Manga) than their American counterparts (sorry Spiderman).

My first awareness of this cross-cultural potential came when my sixth grade class voted to watch ‘Transformers the Movie’ instead of ‘The Care Bears Movie II’ (a rare victory over the cutiefied girls). This 1986 animated feature was simply the capitalist punctuation on a very successful toy line and animated TV show at the end of its second season. The film boasted a blended crew of largely American writers and character designers and Japanese storyboard artists and animators. The Transformers TV shows in Japan and America were always separate and very, very different (as were the toy-lines), but for the feature film all the elements came together. As a child I understood its power immediately, and nothing permeated my psyche more than a John Wayne accent accompanying the fluid machismo of 80-foot, cell-shaded robots destroying each other as gracefully as a bullet train ballet. It was of course scored with a truly memorable hair metal soundtrack…all this and there is still no Blu-ray release.

The movie was meant to introduce a new line of more modern-looking toys, but after my generation of sixth-graders saw the film we simply couldn’t stomach returning to the creative limitations of the TV show, or its token plastic spawn, and the trend precipitously subsided (only to be eventually revived by computer graphics in the mid-nineties and by Michael Bay in recent live action.)

James Jean's Farwell to Illustration

2009-02-27T09:42:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while I will post artwork that is not my own and I will always attempt to include the web link beneath each piece so you can see where it comes from. In short I hope to direct you to this interesting artwork instead of passing it off as my own in any way. What else are Blogs good for?

http://www.processrecess.com/index.php?uid=D32B18
This exquisite comic cover is by James Jean and can be found on his outstanding Blog:
http://www.processrecess.com

He has worked as a very influential and critically acclaimed illustrator for only the last handful of years, but with this final cover, to the comic series Fables, he says that he will focus only on his fine art from now on. I have no doubt he will be successful but I will miss seeing his unique work in mass production. Please visit his Blog and his website at www.jamesjean.com to see what I'm talking about.

Jim Dine on a Dime...

2009-02-27T08:26:00.000-08:00

Last week I taught a session at the McNay museum's Evening for Educators in which I taught techniques with cheap art room materials that can mimick the advanced techniques of contemporary artists. I was particularly happy with my experimental, Jim Dine influenced demo. All it took was a lot of crayon and then a lot of erasing.

Shepard Fairey's Legal Woes

2009-02-27T07:44:00.000-08:00

As you may know Shepard Fairey's Obama Hope poster was the graphic highlight of the 2008 Presidential campaign, and now he is in and out of courts defending his use of the photo reference he found for the poster. What you may not know is that he was arrested last week in Boston, on the way to his own art opening, for graffiti related charges in Brighton, MA dating back to 2002. I did a cartoon in the Allston-Brighton Tab that alludes to that. Shepard's tag is 'Giant' because of his long time use of his Andre the Giant image coupled with the word 'obey.'

I was lucky enough to do a show with Shepard and many other great artists back in 1999 in a show curated by Taylor Mckimens called "Factory Reject" and I got to see his paintings first hand. He is much more than just a silkscreen printer or photo manipulator, everything I've seen him do is very much hands on. I know artists all over the country are watching his copyright proceedings nervously because we all worry about our ability to utilize reference under 'fair use' in the future.

My best wishes go out to him.

Trying Out This Blogging Thing...

2009-02-27T07:16:00.001-08:00

I have a show coming up in May and I figured I'd put up the information here just in case it's useful to anybody. It's a public opening and all ages are welcome... I'm hoping to see a few toddlers there to shake things up. For further details too small to see above, simply click on the black and white image that looks like the cross-section of a Minotaur's brain (that's what I see anyway, please feel free to share your own interpretations).