Der Hexenhammer

I guess I should update! My show went really really well. Lots of people showed up despite a bunch of conflicting events (most people found a way to go to everything which is awesome), I sold a lot of stuff, and people seemed into it. I definitely think I outdid my last show and managed to keep everything consistent in terms of quality and style and theme since I had a smaller space to fill. My friends and family were all so awesome, helping me hang and photograph work, helping me make frames, baking Russian tea cookies for the opening (!) and telling people about the show and coming from out of town. Everyone is great, especially me. Just kidding.

Possibly one of my worst work habits is my desire to rest endlessly on my laurels. I have absolutely no trouble convincing myself that I deserve breaks and rewards for sometimes the most basic of tasks (going to the post office, cleaning the litterbox, writing a long email) so I worked through it to jump into the next thing since it turns out I actually still have tons of stuff to do. Here's the line drawing for a blog header I'm making for a friend's blog:
I went COMPLETELY overboard here, but it's mostly because I liked his idea so much. A satanic goat-horned vulture? OK. It's pretty muddled to look at at this stage but that's a dove he's tearing apart. This will probably take a while to finish since I insisted on putting so much tiny junk in it but I've already got a good start (background is painted).

I was also invited to participate in the art show that corresponds with Exhumed Film's 24 hour Halloween Marathon. It's called Video Violence and the idea is to alter or repackage a favorite cult movie VHS to be displayed on a shelf as part of a mock video store. I love this idea, as one of the last cavepeople to still own and watch (and BUY) vhs tapes and being the right age to have come up during the advent of vhs, with strong memories of some of my favorite video stores and all the weird and awesome movies I found there. I had a million ideas for this but I'm pretty sure I'll be doing Haxan and designing a fake spellbook box for it. Haxan might not exactly qualify as "cult", as it falls somewhere between "classic" and "holy shit, someone made this weird old thing?!?" but I'm really in the mood to do something witchy and I actually really enjoy the message of the movie and all of the imagery.

Since I decided to start actually trying with art a couple years ago I made the decision to take every possible opportunity to be in group shows and to NEVER FLAKE (ps- this is my second bad work habit/personal habit and one that I have almost totally eliminated from my work. Not so much for the personal). Last year the Exhumed show was the only thing I flaked on and it still eats at me. The idea was to screenprint a poster for a fake grindhouse movie. I love the idea and I actually drew the entire poster but totally failed when it came time to print and I discovered that the screenprinting studio in my basement was busted in the middle of a prolonged winter illness delirium. I basically put my hands up and said "fuck it!" Here's the poster I drew for that show, for my fictional movie called "Devil Mummy"
Looking at it now there are of course a million things I would change but I still think it would probably have been cool if I finished it. I'm partly writing all this here to make flaking this year totally shameful and impossible. Mark my words, etc etc.