I Do Not Play No Rock And Roll

•December 22, 2009 • Leave a Comment

Howdy, folks.

I recently began to work up some graphics for The Male Pattern Band, musical love-child of Chris McCrory; musician, production geek, wunderkind. The group’s fairly new on “the scene”, and not yet released anything officially, but I’ve gone ahead and started to produce some illustrations they might be using for posters and such in the future.  There’s some early demo’s worth checkin’ out HERE.

Running with the theme of pattern baldness, I picked out Communist whackjob Mao Tse-Tung and his incredible toilet bowl hairdo that still adorns many a wall in the Orient today. I’ve used the classic Red Propaganda-style portrait of Mao that hangs outside the Forbidden City for a couple of different images, and here’s one of ‘em.

I was just playing with a kind of silhouette portrait and then realised it had a lot in common with the now famous Obama “Yes We Can” portrait used in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. I already had an idea for the colour palette (unusual for me, colour ignorant as I am) and it’s sort of ended up like a cross between a Scooby Doo villain and those old animated Peter Lorre caricatures used in Warner Bros cartoons.

It turned out okay, I guess.

BEARDS: The Ultimate Facial Hair Saga

•December 18, 2009 • Leave a Comment

Due to an unnerving amount of interest recently in a piece of work I did sometime last year, I decided to post it here on the ol’ blogapollooza, too.

This was just my vaguely odd sense of humour taking control of my pen like some gibbering phantom limb, but it’s real nice to see people responding so positively to it!!! It’s a mix of literary greats, political stalwarts and other riffraff who couldn’t be bothered to shave. I also drew a partner for it, documenting the heroic moustaches of the ages – check ‘er out HERE.

Due to overwhelming demand (well, it’s not that overhelming…we are talking single digits here, folks), I’ve decided to list a few poster-sized copies of this beardy-weirdy image  for sale in my new Etsy shop.

Oh, and there’ll be new work coming this way in the next few days, not just more badly-honed sales pitch….

Moneyspender’s Blues

•December 10, 2009 • Leave a Comment

Just a quick post to let everyone know I’m now also selling a few canvas prints of my work over at my Etsy shop HERE.

Need shit for your bare walls??? Can’t find that poster of the tennis girl scratching her arse anywhere? Like art? It’s your lucky day!

Well…eh…I’m not so good at the ol’ sales pitch, so I’ll just let you take a look and decide for yourselves.

Here are the two prints currently available…

 

Fate of the Pequod

•December 6, 2009 • Leave a Comment

Hey, rube! Here’s another rejected bit of art I pitched to some musician friends of mine in the last month: I’ll eventually post the image they opted for (it’s not a million miles away from this here ink splodge) but I kinda like the dynamic of this one. If I had the tools available it would be fun to try it out in more of an expressionist, Lynd Ward-esque woodcut, but as it stands it’s like a really juvenile Charles Burns rip-off.

Testifyin’

•December 4, 2009 • Leave a Comment

I was really impressed when I happened upon this humble little art publication – Good VS. Evil Magazine


It’s got a decent roll call of small-time artists and illustrators showcasing whatever aggressive perversions, disturbances, congenital psychoses and pathological gross-out weirdness they care to sketch out.

MMMMmmm.

Go take a look HERE, or check out their BLOG (which I’ll also be adding to my ‘Illustration Links‘ section on the right).

Whalebone

•November 28, 2009 • 1 Comment

Something else I completed recently was some more artwork for the band Call Me Ishmael; a potential cover for their new demo/EP.

I worked up about three different versions, more or less along the same lines, and this is one of the rejects. More to follow.

A Real Challenge To Your Manliness

•November 25, 2009 • Leave a Comment

Here’s something to offend your moral sensibilities: sub-pornographic objectification of the female form. And some cars and buildings and shit.

This was actually done as a personal gift for someone who asked for a burlesque sort of image. I’m not just a drooling pervert by nature, y’know.

In addition to this razzmatazz, NEWSFLASH! I finally got round to setting up an online store over at Etsy – one of my more popular collages is now available to buy as an A3 digital print, and pretty soon I’ll be selling more, as well as originals. All this is in the brand spanking new ‘Stuff To Buy‘ section located to your immediate right, at the bottom of all the links.

Which also reminds me of this: http://www.spunky.co.uk/design/profiles/stephen-kelly - a T-shirt I designed last year for Spunky Clothing, which is still available to buy.

Not that you need to or anything. They already paid me, so what do I care, right??

“A Lion’s Whelp Is Judah”

•November 22, 2009 • 2 Comments

[Click on the image to see a full-size version]

Here’s a thing that could use some words alongside it.

The story goes: I listen to music like everyone else, and some of that music is from a long time ago. I’m interested in the history of American music, of blues and folk and country, the rural stuff from before the 1950’s, before everything went electric.

Context is everything. In music and art. The context of this music is pretty fascinating stuff, and I try to read what I can on the subject. Over the last few years it’s created this landscape in my head, this semi-fictional place full of imagery, full of scenery and characters and stories.

Drawing can be very interesting if you look at it in a stream-of-consciousness. All imaginative practice is, I suppose, instinctive by nature.

You draw what feels right where it feels right.

I don’t like approaching a composition that’s carved in stone. I like to start with a vague idea and just let it sort of unfold at it’s own pace.  It’s the same with collage art. The process is a bit like playing with a Ouija board: you gather all the pieces and just push them around the page until something happens.

I was once lucky enough to hear a lecture by German illustrator Thomas Fuchs (www.thomasfuchs.com) who said a number of things that got under my fingernails, particularly about the suggestive nature of the visual image. He said that most of the time you don’t even need to think of an idea: if you know where to look, and how to look, those ideas suggest themselves to you. They impose upon you.

And I think that’s about right. Some ideas really do give themselves to you. The shape of something, the texture, the colour, the size; in context, they tell you what to think. These things suggest ideas that are guilty by association. And then it’s so obvious you can’t believe you didn’t see it before.

The context of this image is: the music of the rural South, and what I associate with that environment. Not just from the music. But from the culture, and history. Especially prevalent is the religious association –  the rural American South of the 1920’s and 30’s lies in the shadow of church steeples and burning crosses.

Gospel music and blues music are brother and sister, one sacred and the other profane.  

The Lord’s music versus the Devil’s.

We are Holy, they are Pagan.  

In this context, the blues musicians are atavistic mutants from the ancient Greek woodlands, a physical perversion of carnal sin. Their songs were about lust, about genitals and intercourse and adultery. Make no mistake: half of these songs, these songs from the age of our grandfathers, these songs from an age we are always told was more innocent, these songs are about pussy.

So the players become satyrs, and the juke-joint dances they played become Dionysian frat parties in some Hellenistic myth.

From there it becomes a call and response thing. You look at the pagan religions of the ancients and the associations flow freely: the landscape becomes Mesopotamia, the Mississippi River becomes the Jordan, the Euphrates; the biblical inundation becomes the great flood of 1927 that crushed the levees; the death cults and slavery of Pharaonic Egypt become the mortality rate and servitude of post-Reconstruction existence.

Eventually you end up with this semi-mythological place, a surreal landscape where Hieronymus Bosch meets the cotton gin culture. 

Here’s some detail…

Normal service will be resumed just shortly…

•October 30, 2009 • 1 Comment

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.

[Click to enlarge]

And They Said It Was The End Of Everything

•September 30, 2009 • Leave a Comment

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 the end of the world. I decided to dodge the conventional route (destroyed cities, mushroom clouds, shitty Roland Emmerich movies) and instead played with some photocopied text from the book of Revelations, which (as far as dénouements go) is pretty damned brutal.

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