My Museum Show

An exhibit of my work is coming up this weekend in Homer, NY at the Center for the Arts there in its Borg-Warner Morse TEC Art Gallery. Thirty-nine paintings will be on exhibit. The opening is on Friday Oct. 27th from 7pm to 9pm. I’ll be there. The paintings are split into four categories: book covers, illustrations for The War of the Worlds, illustrations for The Three Musketeers and illustrations for Gnemo. I wrote the explanations for each category. The title above is a link to the museum’s calendar of events, scroll down when you get there. You'll find directions are on the site as well.

Below is something a little different for me. I struggled with it quite a bit to get it to have the correct feel. Actually, it was a mess and I don’t understand exactly why I get lost sometimes on something that should be fairly simple to do. My excuse is that I hadn't done anything like this for a while. Here’s how it went down in pictures:



Above: Bad and I know it.



Above: It gets worse.



Above: Progress. It took a few extra drawings to discover my problem areas.



Better and there's no reason that can't continue.

Gnemo Update

Yesterday I gave a slideshow and talk at Western Connecticut State University. A studious and pleasant group of artists attended and they all had very good questions. Later I critiqued the work of some of the students and I was impressed with their talent, skill and dedication. I put some of my Gnemo Sketchbook into my slideshow and I’m putting up some of those new pages on that blog today.

Below is one little piece that appears in color here but if you click the link above you’ll see it’s just a drawing on the Gnemo page. I’ve turned most of the Gnemo sketches into full color watercolors but I want my Gnemo blog to look like a drawn in only sketchbook. I’ve changed the first entry into this blog so that I can put the pages in order. It would’ve been confusing if I left as it was. Gnemo’s Sketchbook begins on page 3 so that I can add a title page and dedication page later assuming it’s ever printed. The printed version will be the full color watercolor version. "Dad's Medal" below:



My slideshow was mainly about the making of my book Kiddography. For fun, here is the title of that slideshow and its subtitles to intrigue you:

Successes and Failures but Mostly Failures

Failure is the new success?
How to make your own art book
Why you shouldn’t write and design your own art book
Fabrications, Tall Tales, Prevarications, Balderdash, Mendacity and Fibs
Exercises in frustration
How I brought down a corporate giant

And here is a bit of advice that occurred to me just before my slideshow. It’s something I’ve thought of before but I quite often forget to follow with all the distractions of life such as earning a living, the human desire for fame and deceptive nature of accolades:

Real success is filling your days with interesting/involving/challenging work and building a body of work that you can look back on and not be embarrassed by, maybe even feel some pride in. Having said that, accomplishing this for most people will require a strategy and some compromising. I haven’t worked out an exact route for myself yet but it’s good to have a direction if not a detailed map.

And, since we're on the subject of failure, here's a failed super hero (below). I've drawn quite a few of these in search of the most pitiful super being of them all: