Everlasting Faint

I got invited to be in a Mythology themed group show in March so I decided to throw another project in before I work on the bat show piece. I just couldn't pass up a show with this theme. I spent half a week going back and forth on my design. My issue is usually that I have a lot of ideas I've been thinking about for a while, just waiting for an appropriate project. It's never the case that I don't have ANY ideas I just sometimes have trouble figuring out which one is the RIGHT one. Anyway, I stopped freaking myself out and in two days designed, drew and inked this:
I'm pretty excited about how it's going so far but it's going to be a lot of detail work (snake and fish scales take foreverrrrrrr for me) so I need to get painting as soon as possible.

More info about what it is when I have a finished painting to post.

I also made an experimental etsy store last week to sell off the remaining heart pins from the heart show (there are actually a lot left) once I get them back. I'll probably put some really old prints in there too for really cheap since they're just cluttering up my studio. I'll update when that actually happens but for the time being here's the link. My heart pins in the Storage Heart Show didn't do great but my bigger piece in the Jinxed show sold right away which is cool!

In other news, the Alice Bag show/reading went really well two weeks ago and I have to say it was one of my more fulfilling experiences making art. It just feels great to contribute something to someone whose body of work has meant a lot to me. She's extremely nice and inspiring and somehow she ended up asking me for my autograph right off the bat. I did get her's too though:Ahhhh enough mooning, back to work, D'Angelo.

Until The End Of The World

SO, I finished the piece I've been posting little bits of for a week or so. This will be in the OTHER heart show at Jinxed/Toothless Cat Gallery also this weekend. I know all this heart business is making me look very romantic but really I just love group shows.

When I was planning my trip to Portugal I came across the story of Dom Pedro and Doña Inés which is one part a tragic romance and one part a grotesque bit of folklore and I was instantly obsessed with it. To make a fairly long story (which you can read here) short, Inês was the great love of Dom Pedro and was assassinated by Dom Pedro's father the king in response to political pressure from advisers who feared the influence of her Castilian family. This prompted a war between father and son which eventually ended in a truce of sorts until the king died.

"As soon as he was crowned in 1357, and in spite of his promises of forgiveness, King Dom Pedro I recovered two of Inês' assassins from Castile, where they had sought refuge (the third had escaped to France). He then had them tortured and executed in a barbaric but highly symbolic way: from one of the men who had killed the love of his life, the heart was ripped out of the body through his back, and from the other, the heart was pulled out through the chest."

According to folklore the newly crowned king then had Inês' corpse exhumed, dressed in finery and crowned and had the entire court come to pay her respect as their queen and kiss her hand.

He also commissioned grandiose tombs for both of them which I went and saw at the Monastery of Alcobaça and had her body moved from its original resting place in a candlelit procession "between two lines of stars". The tombs are placed contrary to tradition foot to foot across from each other in the chapel of the monastery so that when the world ends and the dead rise they would each (theoretically) sit up and see each other first.

The phrase "Até ao fim do mondo" (until the end of the world) can be found at the foot of Dom Pedro's tomb which includes a carving of the wheel of life. It's not really visible in my picture but at the bottom of the wheel there's an upside down corpse that has this inscription:

Anyway, I'm not the most sentimental person but I found this story irresistibly melodramatic and macabre so I've been thinking about it ever since my trip and a valentine's day show seemed too perfect an opportunity to do a painting about it. The weird little skull cherubs are something I had sketched out a while ago, with references to biblical cherubim in the wings covered with eyes and the confusion with the European putto (I first learned about that reading a Wind in the Door in elementary school haha). I don't paint babies often (or really even LOOK at babies) so they might not be the best haha. A couple photos of it mounted to the wood heart and hanging on the wall:

Here's the info for this show:

Jinxed Philly

1050 North Hancock Street, Philadelphia, PA 19123

Saturday, 2/11. 50 + Artist. This Show is Cash and Carry. No Sunday reception, just a big one on Saturday...

And tonight is the Alice Bag/3Jane/Brillian Colors/Carmen show at the Marvelous. It's gonna be a cool weekend. I'll also be starting some bat show work!

Like A Wet, Red Stain

Celebrated my birthday with my awesome friends this weekend then spent two days cranking these out for the heart show at Storage Space this friday! 13 mini hand painted wooden heart pins. Super fun to make, not a lot to say about them really haha.


Show info:
Over 50 artists and all art $100 or under!
A Cash/Carry show!
You can't beat it!
*refreshments served opening night Friday February 10th 7pm-midnight

Also open Saturday, Feb 11th and Sunday, Feb 12th 1-4pm

www.theheartshow.org

Up Close

Just a few close ups of what I'm working on now (and almost done with). For some reason I took on another project to finish by next week so maybe I'll be able to post them up then.

And hey, if you live in NC the benefit show my tiger painting is in is tonight! Check it out!

The Bats Have Left The Bell Tower

So I figured it was about time to announce some info on the show I'm working on right now. Mike and I decided to do this show late this summer while making plans to go hiking and see one of the largest bat populations in our area leave their roost at dusk in Canoe Creek. We called the park to see if it was too late in the season to see them and were told "Most of our bats are dead. White Nose syndrome. Sorry." This is a population of bats that in 2006 was around 3,000 in a single roost. It's always pretty crushing to hear about extinction on the march but it really hits home when it's so local and affects animals you grew up around and are so accustomed to seeing and wrongly assumed you would always see.

White Nose syndrome is caused by a cold-loving fungus that grows on the faces and bodies of hibernating bats, causing neurological damage and causing them to awaken from hibernation and leave their roost at which point they starve to death. Fungal spores are hard to contain and built to survive and the spread from cave to cave is rapid with fatalities in affected areas around 98% and in some communities 100%. It's estimated to have killed more than 5.7 million bats since just 2006 and to make matters worse, with the slow reproduction rate of bats even if the death stopped NOW it would take at best 200 years for bat populations to return to previous numbers. All of that damage done in just SIX YEARS.

One of the issues that further complicates bat conservation is the general perception of bats reinforced in hollywood:


and the misconception that bats are largely responsible for the spread of rabies. In general the lack of interest in conservation for animals that aren't deemed "cute"(come on, really?) or useful to humans (though bats are VERY useful) or are considered dangerous (one of the issues affecting shark conservation, and issues related to wolves and wild dogs) is indicative of the larger attitude most people have towards animals; the idea that they exist for our use or amusement to be tamed by us or that animals that are threatening to us simply because of the way they exist in nature don't deserve to exist at all. As a result there's a lack of concern for what is a genuine natural eradication happening right under our noses (and not just to bats obviously, I'm talking about the entire natural world here).

I realize that part of the mystique of bats which attracts me to them as a horror movie loving, death rock creep bag is also responsible for some of the struggle involved in conservation and I feel like after a life-time of exploiting and enjoying bat imagery it's time to turn it into something advantageous for bats at a time when they need help the most. The proceeds from the show we're planning will be donated to Bat Conservation International and all the artists participating will be making new work or donating old work related to bats and using bat imagery. So far everyone seems really excited and we're just getting to the stage where we're finalizing a list of participating artists (which so far, is HUGE). We've had two shows like this in Philadelphia so far(For those to Come and From Whence we Came which was organized by Ryann who's helping with this show too), both of which I've participated in and they've both raised a ton of money and probably a good amount of awareness.

The show opening will be on 4/20 (harrrrharrrr) at Grindcore House here in Philadelphia and it'll be up for 2 months. We're working on planning some kind of movie night and also some purchasable items to help raise money. In the meantime I highly suggest checking out this half hour special called "The Race to save Pennsylvania's Bats"

Check out our artist list so far:
Jack Barfield
Vanessa Lucas
Alex McWatt
Jeremy Hush
Avalon Zimmerman
Joe Boruchow
Anthony Pedro
Phil Sloan
Ken Miller
Halsey Swain
Keely Dolan
Jen Zie
Derek Reverts
Ryan Slegel
Adriane Dalton
David Cook
Amanda Moore
Patt Whelan
Dilek Baykara
Alina Josan
Amy Duncan
Alan Brown
Ketch Wehr
Jeff Pfeil
Kathryn Moran
Emily Kohl-Mattingley
Chris Shockley
Doug LaRocca
John Mitchell
Mary Price
Stephanie Dimiskovski
Kristin Scholz
Lucy Price
Jonathan Schoonover
Dylan Smith
Eric Clark
Joseph Hasenauer
Bonsky
Justin Gray
Sarah Grocholski Breitenstein
Alicia Neal
Paul Romano
Elizabeth Siegel
Tamara Waite-Santibanez
Kyle Miller
Greg Kamerdze
Justin Quinlan
Matt DeFillipo
Josh Robeson
Jeanne D'Angelo (duh)
Mike Bukowski
Ryann Casey

Babylonian Gorgon

Had to take a week break from what I was working on to do a quick flyer for the Alice Bag reading/show which I am so excited about. Alice is a personal hero of mine and since finding out she was maintaining a pretty intense web presence a couple of years ago I've been following her writing and her interview series and finally got her book which I've been reading any time I get a chance. It's a series of short anecdotes about her life so it's really easy to pick up and put down (well, it's a bit hard to put down once you get started) and as it's been said in many reviews it's about much much more than punk. I had to do the flyer quickly (no time for anything but black linework) so I could get it out there since the show is quickly approaching.

Here's the full Northeast Tour info:

2/5 Cambridge MA, Boston Lady Fest, Cambridge YMCA Theater. Alice will be backed up by Terry and Melissa from Foreign Objects
2/6 Easthampton, MA Flywheel Arts Collective 7 pm. Alice will be backed up by Meghan of Ampere/Won't Belong and Ally of Honeysuck, Outdates, and Potty Mouth
2/7 New York NY at Bluestockings Bookstore. Backing by Angie Boylan of Aye Nako and others.
2/8 Batimore MD at Golden West Cafe with War on Women and Big Mouth. 8 pm
2/9 Washington DC at Joint Custody. 7 pm
2/10 Philadelphia PA@The Marvelous w/ Carmen and 3Jane 8 pm
2/11 Providence, RI at Providence Public Library with members of Whore Paint and Lolita Black providing backing 7 pm
2/12 Jamaica Plain, MA at Aviary Gallery. 8 pm with backing by Terry and Melissa from Foreign Objects and DJ Danny Gromfin Spinning LA punk classics before and after the reading!

Yesterday despite the fact that I'm pretty sick right now I managed to put in some time with the painting I posted linework for last week. This is going to be a fun one to paint!

SOPA/ PIPA F.U.

Hey, since I'm too dumb to get the SOPA strike page up in my html, I'll post this video explaining what SOPA/PIPA would do. And what you can do. And I'll just say being in the age group that grew up without the internet and remembering desperately wanting access to radical ideas and underground music and art and my friends and I scrambling to find and share those things amongst ourselves I can recognize how many more people can find those things now and how vital and amazing that is, and why it's worth protecting. I think sometimes even I take it for granted and it's good to reflect on the past in a way that's a little less nostalgic. The reason we thought zines were important then is the reason sharing on the internet unfettered by corporate intervention and censorship is now.

The Dead Queen

So, I finished a couple of things in December but they were all presents. One was a painted recipe box for my mother which actually came out better than I thought it would but someone accidentally erased all of my pictures so I can't show you that.

Every year for Christmas my brother gives me a gift card to the place where I buy paint. I used to use them because they carried the Pelican Plaka paint I like but they seem to be phasing it out. Luckily their general selection is pretty great and I make an order every January to restock things I've used up or to try new stuff. In order to really get a grip on what I needed I looked through everything I had to see what colors were lacking and to throw out stuff that was too dried out to use.

I find that really pleasing to look at.

I ended up buying a few metallics (seems like I buy a new gold every year) and some new white and black to test out, as well as a new ceramic palette to hopefully curb my compulsion to mix paint on any surface I can find (note all the jar tops in the picture). Exciting, I know. On a slightly related note, how cool are impossible colors?!

I got to do another art trade which I love. I traded the urn painting I did for this amazing hand of glory necklace (top) from Amanda Moore aka Adelina Mictlan:

The original hand drawing was also by my buddy Patt Whelan aka Patt Attack.

I had my eye on this thing for so long since I love anything related to the hand of glory and I love big weird jewelry. Amanda's stuff is really well done with a nice heavy style and she uses a lot of interesting etching methods to make the more graphic pieces. I've also got one of these finger pendants coming my way as part of the trade and we're chatting about some kind of collaboration AND she'll be making some small bat pendants for the bat show. Neat!

This weekend I finally got to work on a new painting for a Feb. group show and got everything drawn, inked, and ready to paint. The pencils:
and inked:

Also working on my piece for the bat show. I'll say it involves a secular icon, bones and an attempt to cast faux rock crystal pieces in resin for the frame. Excited to get to work and plan the show a bit more.

We, The Bones That Are Here, Await Yours

I got back from Portugal over a week ago. It was ten days of looking and walking and looking and walking. I paid for the trip with most of the money I made from art this year, and saw tons of things that will probably make their way back into art I do this year, making the whole endeavor somewhat self sustaining. It was hard to pick pictures to post here because we took HUNDREDS but here are some of my favorites.

One of my favorite things we did was a little day trip to Sintra from Lisbon. It's only a couple dollars on a train and the town has castles and huge gardens and public parks. We saw the Castle of the Moors ruins there and Pena Palace:
The best part of the day in Sintra was Quinta da Regaleira a huge house with expansive gardens built by an opera set designer, full of hidden alchemical symbols and experiences.

There are pitch black grottoes and catacombs underground the whole garden which you can wander through to come out of various wells with long twisted stairs leading up to the light:
We wandered around here for hours and it was great. The house itself is even aligned according to alchemical and astrological principles.

Portugal also has a lot of ossuaries. A LOT. We saw 5 but there are many more.

The first picture is of the Capela dos Ossos in Evora, probably the biggest one we saw, with painted ceilings covered in symbols and two mummies mysteriously hanging on a wall. The second is in Faro and was eerily situated mere feet from a daycare center where children screamed and ran around the completely silent outdoor chapel. Some are indoors, in churches or crypts and some are little outdoor chapels in tiny rural villages we had to hike several miles to.
In each of them we were alone or virtually alone and in one we actually found a skull cap just laying on the ground. While I'm talking about ossuaries I should mention this excellent book I got for Mike that contains pictures, information and insight into the culture of ossuaries:
There was also a lot of impressive religious art. I'm always really torn by my admiration for this stuff since it's funded by and an outward sign of the immense wealth of the Catholic church. It was made in a time when the most ambitious art was made for religious purposes so it's some of the most over the top, gilded, time consuming, intricate and monumental stuff you'll see in Europe and I can't help but be drawn to it. Also it's incredibly creepy.

From the Templar knight monastery in Tomar where made a bunch of stupid Tombs of the Blind Dead jokes to each other while we ran around unattended.

Stained glass in a church in....Evora? Maybe Lisbon.

Witchy window in the Acobaca Monastery.

We also saw tons of reliquaries but were denied access to the insanely creepy reliquary alters at São Roque because they were practicing for some sort of Christmas event but I managed to get a picture from pretty far away:

Who is creepier than Catholics? No one! Not even me.

I also spent a lot of time creeping around the cemetery in Evora. There were a lot of really interesting monuments with symbols I hadn't seen before in the US and a lot of family tombs with glass doors so you could see several generations of coffins.
Finally, I saw what is now the probably the oldest man made thing I've ever seen (older than newgrange), the Neolithic standing stone grouping of the Almendres Cromlech:

The best guess is that this functioned as a huge community solar calender with the sun rising over the center stone at the equinox. It's situated in the middle of a cork orchard and we got to see it on a misty atmospheric morning. There's also a huge dolmen not far away in a pretty tragic state of disrepair which was still fun to see. The cap stone had been BLOWN OFF WITH DYNAMITE during the excavation so you could actually stand above and look directly in.

I don't have pictures from it but we also caught an exhibition called Aljube a Voz das Vitimas: The Voice of the Victims. Staged at Lisbon's old jail the exhibition was about victims of Salazar's military dictatorship under the New State and the role of the PVDE (later the PIDE) in the surveillance, torture, imprisonment and murder of Portuguese activists and citizens. They did a great job of highlighting both the victims and their experiences and consistently naming and displaying photographs of the perpetrators to make a public record of who was responsible. They also list companies who collaborated with the secret police and spied on and reported their employees and unsurprisingly there were several american car manufacturers on the list. Anyway, really good exhibit we basically stumbled across.

I haven't been super productive this month because of the trip and the holidays but I have a few things to post around the new year hopefully if I'm not too lazy.

Domingos Zine

Posting from a hostel in Portugal since I forgot to post this before I left. I sent something along to Sundays zine and just got a couple copies in the mail (wet, envelope torn open, thanks USPS). I didn't have time to make something new and figured my goofy old S.T. fan art (with some details changed and touched up) was fitting for a skate/art zine. I sort of wish I had time to make something a little more intense because I'm nestled in among some really cool artists here.

Best of all the whole back side is this beautiful painting by Tamara:

I just have to say this is a really good idea for a zine! Newsprint is cheap and easy, it folds down so no assembly. Free art! If you're trying to find a copy I'm pretty sure you need to be in NY in a coffee or skate shop, but those are all really great places to be anyway so get on it. It should also be available to look at online.

Like I mentioned, I´m in Portugal. It´s great. Two days in and I´ve already seen so many castles and mummies and Roman relics and a church destroyed by an earthquake (the best kind). I´m pretty sick but I´m uh...walking it off. Next few days- more castles, ossuaries, standing stones and Roman ruins.

The computer here has the spell check set to Portuguese and I´m a pretty uselss speller without it so I´ll shut up before I type anything really stupid.

Standing On The Frozen Floor

Mike Brennan and I printed the pre-order insert posters for the Des Ark record and everything went so smoothly thanks to the folks at Reclaim who burned perfect screens for us. We only had a few hours in the space after work so having the screens burned ahead of time meant we could just get right to work printing.
We also printed the limited glow in the dark ones (top). They're black and teal glow ink on tan paper (with a couple on the orange and blue as well). Glow in the dark is a gimmick I never grow tired of, and we included the skull in the glowing screen so with the lights out you get a floating skull and the smoke. It was really fun working on a project with another person since pretty much all the art I do is so solitary, and I haven't printed in a long time so that was fun (even though my back is killing me now).

I also saw the printed lp covers for the first time and they came out great.
I was worried that the smoke effect wouldn't work, but it came out exactly the way I wanted it to. When you tilt the record into the light it becomes more or less visible and opaque which is neat.
It was great being included in this whole process because sometimes you hand artwork off to someone and it comes back to you printed terribly, with weird colors, or disrespectfully cropped and chopped up but we all had input into the final presentation of this which is great. I redid the smoke lettering when I found out this would be the cover and we laid it out to be wider and stretch across the fold.

I also popped that tiger painting in a frame last night.
The funny thing is that this used to be a bright red frame with an astonishingly well matted picture of Santa in it. It's come a long way since I bought it for a couple bucks at a flea market. I also wanted to grab a photo of the back of it since pretty much no one except people who own paintings I've done get to see those:

Totally unnecessary but I like the backs to look fancy.

I might be a little slow posting for the rest of the year because I'll be out of the country for a week but I'll probably have some sketches and my end of the year mix soon!