Buffalo Building

My recent drawings have been part of a three-part installation for Buffalo Exchange Colorado. The other two pieces are open-ended, topic-wise. The second piece grew from my mental image of the Buffalo Exchange store in its new location on Broadway in central Denver, which I have never had the pleasure of seeing in person, so it remains an object of surrealism for me.

If any work of art inspired the subject matter, it is probably the giant tiger roaming New York in Jonathan Lethem's novel Chronic City. Not to worry; the tiger doesn't really affect the story in any substantial way. Whatever anybody says, comparisons to Catbus from Hayao Miyazaki's animated film My Neighbor Totoro happened only after I had finished the drawing and began showing it to savvier anime consumers.

I can't help but wonder whether Catbus, in Japanese, is also a bad pun that gets funnier beside the word for Pop Tarts.

I wish that Miyazaki could design my breakfast and commute to work. For my ideal workplace, see two pictures above.

Stylistically, I've been feeding on a steady diet of fluid line drawings of Killian Eng, Adrian Tomine (featured this month in Drawn and Quarterly!), Malachi Ward, and most dominantly, the poster wizardry of Jay Ryan.

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Work from Home

The reference for this piece is a known work of fine art: a photograph by Peter Mitchell, a lorry driver who traversed West Yorkshire and occasionally snapped photos. The piece is titled Eric Massheder, Leeds, (1975) . Eric is the man in the doorway, a drippings refinery worker who posed in his home, adjacent (really, attached) to the refinery where he worked for 12 years. Eric woke up in his home in the morning, walked one room (or so) over, and began his shift. I have changed and omitted a few details for the sake of composition as usual. I've now been working from home for about four years, and I make a similar commute without stepping outdoors. My house even resembles Eric's a bit, though there's no factory nearby. I enter my workplace by transferring a USB cable, which joins all of my input and output devices from my personal computer to my work laptop. I stoop under my desk to make the transfer, so possibly a similar amount of exercise is involved—the digital equiva...

LD3: Neutral Coloration

My third illustration for Lucy's Dance treats the delicate topic of the missionaries who visited Stebbins in the late 1920's and stopped the Curukaq festival . . . or rather, tamed it into hiatus. A Jesuit missionary, Fr. Martin Lonneaux, overlooking the support-system of the Yup'ik community, perceived that the gift-giving portion of the festival was costly enough that it left several Yup'ik families destitute. Lonneaux concocted a watered-down version of the potlatch that would involve smaller, church-supplied gifts, but in the process amputated the festive spirit of the festival such that his "pretend kassiyuq " never caught on. For further details, see Stebbins Dance Festival (xxiv). The wording in Lucy's Dance focuses neutrally on the cultural misunderstanding. It would have been easy to use powerfully-charged language when summarizing this cultural loss. From what little I can find about him, Fr. Lonneaux, SJ seems to have been a relatively toler...

Argument from Final Consequences, feat. Jack White

In the SG definition, "Such arguments (also called teleological) are based on a reversal of cause and effect, because they argue that something is caused by the ultimate effect that it has, or purpose that is serves." As the White Stripes put it in their song, " Effect and Cause ": "first comes an action, and then a reaction, which you can't switch around for your own satisfaction." Another fitting example from the song: "if you're headed for the grave, don't blame the hearse." I've decided to be a bit abstract in my interpretation of the fallacy. Normally, the negative space , or the space around the snail shape, is an effect of the snail. In this drawing, I have shifted the negative space to the foreground, allowing it to cause a shadow. I have effectively cut out the negative space and placed in front of a telescope. The fallacy is sometimes called the "teleological" (end/purpose) fallacy because it makes effects, o...

Design & Execution

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