Bass Guitar

“Last Friday Night” – Water Soluble Oil Pastels and India Ink on Watercolor Paper

Nicotine Ink

“Nicotine Ink”- India Ink on Cardboard

Dali on Hitler

Salvador Dali had a curious preoccupation with Adolf Hitler.  While his famous work, The Enigma of Hitler, was painted before Hitler’s ultimate rise to power, Dali completed two lesser known works on the subject long after the war ended: Metamorphosis of Hitler’s Face into a Moonlit Landscape with Accompaniment (1958) and Hitler Masturbating (1973).

Like many surrealists, Dali arguably reached his artistic apex prior to the end of World War Two.  The end of the war signaled inevitable, major changes for the movement; the surrealists’ official position of exile during the war garnered much critical flack, as did their apparent lack of artistic response to the changing times.

Magic Marker Mayhem

A couple of years ago, my roommate’s girlfriend was working on a craft project involving good ol’ fashioned Magic Markers. One night on a whim, I decided to see how the colors would interact with Bristol board. The slickness of the paper paired with the globby translucency of the cheap pigment allowed me to smudge and blend the lines in a manner similar to working with oil pastels, resulting in a very strange effect. Below are a few of the results.

Parlor Etiquette

John the Baptist and Dolphin Jim

Quixotic Rape

Chip Off The Ol’ Block

Check out this ‘Doritos’ spec ad that I wrote.

Directed by Andy Knapp.
Produced by Lin Qiu.

Watch Him Blow That Horn!

Pasta Prismacolor

No particular narrative or intention for this one, but I’ll be posting one or two more portraits of other characters within this universe over the next couple of days.

Bizarre Bazaar

“Marketplace” – Pen and Ink on Bristol Board

For Evelyn

Her name was Evelyn and she married the boy across the street when she was a teenager.

For a long time she painted her eyebrows; her real eyebrows fell out when she was thirty.  Eventually she grew tired of the daily ritual and had them professionally tattooed.  They were just slightly crooked.  She wore her hair in short, silver curls, or “frizz” as she called it.  And she never went outside without her jewelry- one gold bracelet, one gold ring with the initial “E”, her wedding band, wedding ring, and something around her neck I can’t remember.  Her ears were not pierced.  She kept her nails long and polished and nearly always wore a vest with her slacks.

Her husband was a photographer, and she always wondered why she looked like a movie star when he took her picture.  It wasn’t until years later that he confessed he retouched each photo by hand to make her perfect.  After that, she rarely posed for pictures.