“Dead Meat” 2012

Recently started a new sketchbook, named it Dead Meat (obviously). This is the cover I designed.

The internet’s been down at my apartment the last few days, it’s been kind of frustrating. I’ll be coming down to my school to post any new work I’ve got. 

I must have first come across your work in a comics anthology in my senior year of high school, just as I was letting myself be swallowed whole by comics. I can’t remember for sure because I’m fairly certain I was horribly put off by your work and couldn’t for the life of me understand why it was among other great artists like Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman. I found your work hideous and crude, and completely lacking in any sense of beauty or poetry.

And yet as time went on, and I fell deeper and deeper into the bottomless pit of comic’s culture and history, your name just kept popping up. When I got more interested in the avant garde scene you just became flat unavoidable. I just didn’t get it. Even for outsider comic artists you seemed way outside.

Sense you were such a stumbling block, I resigned myself to at least become more familiar with you.

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Art of the Letter (2012)

This is one I just finished today. After the crazy semester I had, I took a week or two just to cool off. When I finally got back into a mode to create something, it was a bit of a struggle.
I’ve been working on this one slowly throughout the week. Still not sure what I think about it. I’ve been thinking Philip Guston’s work a lot recently and just started looking at Saul Steinberg. I enjoy how these artists are able to loosen up and create something that can be crude and fun, but at the same time poignant. It’s something I’m trying to tap into now.

Punch (2012)

This is the final piece i created for one of my classes. All of my collage work up to this point has only made use of painted paper. I’ve kind of been straying away from doing more media-based collage for several reasons. Mainly that gathering up a strong enough library of things to work from takes time, but also because I have a hard time wrapping my head around producing something that way.
I finally figured I should stop avoiding it and give it a try. Being an avid fan of comics and their history with a large catalog on my computer of golden age comics, I figured that’d be the place to go.
The obvious connection in terms of Fine Art History would be with Roy Lichtenstein, but it differs on several elements. Lichtenstein’s approach to creating his paintings was filled with irony and disregard for the comics medium. He addressed comics as a “low” art and the success of paintings only further served to mock the poorly respected comic artists.

My work doesn’t have the insincerity of Lichtenstein. It becomes simply about taking the subject and appropriating it to serve a new purpose. 

another piece from the same show.

This is a more “fine” art piece that I completed recently. Based off some drawings I did while seeing a performance by the Baltimore Symphony. I really seem to do my best work from those shows. These pieces really opened me up to letting the work be more violent in their construction. They are incredibly liberating. I’m definitely going to bring some of this language into my illustrations.

been feeling a bit like Sisyphus for awhile

been awhile since I’ve done one of these

an odd assignment for my illustration class. Apparently Portugal every year has an international sardine festival:http://www.festasdelisboa.com/2012/en/ Complete with a huge sardine designing competition. This was my entry.

A more aesthetic piece inspired by the late work Matisse