Design & Execution

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...

I began a draft of this project years ago when I was living in central Denver, a region that naturally keeps its finger on the pulse of Buffalo hipsterdom. This was really more of an emo buffalo. My grasp of hipsterdom during the making of this sketch was as tenuous as it is now. Where was I going with that spiked wrist cuff? This never quite blossomed into a finished piece, but Buffalo Exchange fished it from the archives a few months ago and suggested I put a bow on it. I was overjoyed, but my zeal was soon tempered by the realization that hipsterdom of all kinds might have been redefined during the period between drafts. I decided to crowd-source my research on Facebook.  Some comments have been censored due to requests for buffalo nudity. From this thread, I gleaned that a fixed-gear bike would be an unavoidable accessory. Try though I might, I knew I wasn't going to find a photo of a buffalo riding a fixed-gear bike on any Flickr album to serve as a model...

. . . or it will be on April 22. Recent business of life has crippled my blogging effort, but I enjoyed creating this commissioned sketch for Buffalo Exchange's Earth Day Dollar Sale benefiting the Humane Society. Is the squirrel eating the earth or protecting it? This is a question I often ask about myself.

Behold Buffalo Exchange's Halloween banner, which references the iconic cover of Meat Loaf's album, Bat Out of Hell .  I redrew the entire piece in Photoshop, tweaking the layout to allow my substitution of the motorcycle with a buffalo. I understand that bison seldom blast fire from their hindquarters, so I tried to adjust the flame to look more like a fiery geyser spewing the ungulate and his rider from Beezlebub's home turf. As I drew, I tried to engage the spirit of the artwork by listening to some heavy-ish rock selections from my own library. My choices were few and largely inherited from my brother, who co-hosts a semi-ironic metal radio show at the University of Alaska called Larry and Harry's Heavy Hymnal . His name is Andrew.  Me--I wasn't familiar with Meat Loaf's music. However, the name "Meat Loaf" and title of Bat Out of Hell , to say nothing of the typeface, inspired certain assumptions. As I culled a few music video...

My snail fallacy posts can get a bit abstract, so it's nice to have a project that brings me down to earth a bit, or, in the perspective of this drawing, to a hover slightly above earth. Buffalo Exchange and Beauty Bar Denver  commissioned this adjusted rendering of 13th Ave. as one side of a flier for a night of music involving one Garth , influential house DJ of Wicked San Francisco, and one DJ Nedza . Beauty Bar, besides offering a fine combination of martinis and manicures, provides the unique experiences of reclining in an actual 1950s hair dryer chair, and drinking at a counter underlaid with glittered emery boards. I'm not required to advertise here, but I couldn't help but take a few photos at the opening. Nearly all my work for Buffalo Exchange is referential, and this piece references a famous cover of the New Yorker, depicting New York, specifically, 9th and 10th Ave.s, as the center of the universe.  I felt well qualified to complete this i...

This Christmas, I find myself surrounded with a banquet of non-electronic sources of entertainment, including silly putty, books, family, as well a literal banquet. However, I also find myself without internet for some ten days this Christmas. Today, the withdrawal symptoms have been punctuated with a trip to a local Panera. I feel like an alcoholic slipping down to the corner bar, only my cup contains mango ceylon tea which delivers a fresh smack of fishtank pebbles with each sip. The wi-fi, however, is slicker than I-80 in January. In a brief (and and slightly overdue) detour from Lucy's Dance , the book for which I will shortly produce my first polished illustration, I thought I'd post a Christmas illustration I recently revised for Buffalo Exchange . The request: "I'd like to show a bunch of buffalo pulling Santa's sleigh, which will be driven by a [Star Wars] stormtrooper . . . all drawn in the approximate style of Ralph Steadman ." I did my best. ...