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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Artifact Studies and Random Notes

In junior high school I collaborated on a project with a small, mostly-female group of students. We were to design a unique, fictional culture and build illustrative cultural artifacts. We would bury said artifacts in a cardboard box filled with soil. Another team would then excavate our artifacts and guess about our culture. After several days of creative deliberation, we designed a pyramid-based matriarchy wherein men were kept underground as slaves, brought out occasionally to build more pyramids. Elvis was God. According to the artifact of my memory, middle school was a confused and hostile culture. I began this week's illustrations, again, with visual research. I still don't know everything about these artifacts, but my Stebbins Dance Festival book has some interesting statements about them. Part of what I do know I impart below. According to their cultural artifacts, the Yup'ik people practice artful dancing to drums while waving furred objects. They also spend time ...

Ad Hominem and the Carney Lexicon

Ad hominem is one of the better-known fallacies, perhaps because it is so common. In Latin, it means: "to the man." In American, it translates fuzzily to: "Oh yeah? Well, you're ugly." Broken down, the ad hominem argument looks like this: Person 1 makes claim X There is something objectionable about Person 1 (maybe ugliness) Therefore claim X is false Ad hominem is one of the many red-herring arguments, fallacious when it diverts attention from the core argument to focus on some flaw about the arguer. In creating my illustration, I needed a distracting character, and what character is more distracting than one of those bellowing circus-game people with the rings, bottles, and inflatable dolphin prizes? I quickly realized my vocabulary lacked a word for a purveyor of state-fair gamery, other than the generic "carney." Perhaps this is because I have never played a circus game, due to my lack of coordination and my dominant interest in spending my tick...

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...

Design & Execution

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