A month sans internet and a million other committments/distractions have left me without a lot to show for the month that was October; as for now, here’s a wee private commission I cranked out over the last few weeks, soon to be offending people’s eyes in a living room near you.
Posting has slowed to a crawl while I reacquaint myself with civilisation, after 4 days hiking in the Cairgorm mountains; on top of that I’m moving home in a few days time, so the most artistic thing I’ll have time to do will be packing boxes of crap.
In the meantime, I scoured a bunch of old work and found a really simple little sketchbook thing I did several years ago while studying in Toronto – we had to produce a piece of work on the theme of apocalypse, i.e. the end of the world. I decided to dodge the more obvious route (destroyed cities, mushroom clouds – basically a shitty Roland Emmerich movie) and instead played with some photocopied text from the book of Revelations, which (as far as dénouements go) is pretty damned brutal: oceans of blood, skies gone black and torn open, etc.
What elegant imaginations these fellows had, eh???
“Wild, dark times are rumbling towards us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of Saint John will seem like cooing doves and and cupids in comparison.” – Heinrich Heine
Life is busy right now, yet I don’t seem to be busy with anything I would *like* to be busy with.
That aside, I recently spent a coupla days stitching together another short film – it’s a sort of amateur science film, visualising the timeline of evolution from the appearance of single-celled organisms through to great apes. Like my artwork, when it comes to film I have a total hard-on for anything old: ephemeral imagery, cracked, muddied, scratched, faded, bleached old 8mm film that jumps like a Tourette’s-struck paint-shaker.
Just a quick sketch I cranked out last night; lecherous drunken jerk though he was, the sonofabitch could write.
“If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose”
Here’s a piece of artwork I fixed up recently for my good friends in Call Me Ishmael, a hard rock band from Glasgow.
Due to their literary monicker I seem to do them quite a lot of cetacean-themed visuals; recently their sound has been getting a little darker and more aggressive, and they wanted an image to reflect that. Hence, this blood-flecked monstrosity. Anyone who browses through my back catalogue will see a number of similar images – it’s the absurdity of it that gets me, not the gore. I’ve never been a fan of slasher flicks and stuff like that, but I do enjoy the subervisive nature of taking these heavy, cartoon line drawings and abusing their place in the art spectrum with disturbing scenes of violence.
Here’s a little more detail of the caricatures. I wanted the eyes to have that kind of sub-Disney, vintage animation look: the sopping big pupils and awkward body language make me think of little boys who’ve just killed some small animal for the first time, and regret it.
I never loved the book of Moby Dick, but here’s a pretty earth-shaking passage that got my attention…
“All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”
The official website is inching ever closer to completion, after 6 months of sweet Aunt Fanny.
I’ve just finished a poster for Glasgow band Call Me Ishmael that’ll make it onto here just shortly, and will be slopping together an EP cover for them in the coming weeks also (I’m fast becoming their artist in residence).
Next on the “To Do” list is some roughs for a private commission – it’s very nice when somebody just asks you to do whatever the hell you want, knowing it’ll end up on their living room wall.
Once the website is up I’ll also get my ass in gear and start selling prints and such, through this very platform. And also begin the treacherous, unrewarding march towards playing grab-ankle with some illustration agencies.
More people should be aware of Kaz – subversive art uberweirdo, from the same stable as Drew Friedman and other oddities of the 1980’s NYC School of Visual Art, which had a faculty line-up from a comic geek’s wet dream, including Art Spiegelman, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner.
Kaz has worked on a lot of stuff, notably as a writer and storyboard director for Spongebob Squarepants, but his own work is just a dirty, twisted mess. Check out the Underworld series of comic strips he posts on his site every week, and start with this one right here…
[All work copyright of Kaz]
This is just a sort of logo thing I whipped up, for reasons to complex to explain here.
Stephen Kelly is a freelance artist and illustrator. He also dislikes anchovies. No way. Absolutely not. Blech.
