10.29.2012

Violent World


Last week I was hanging out at a show and got into a conversation with a guy I ended up knowing indirectly and ended up invited to be in a show really last minute.  The power of punk networking!  I pretty much had five days to knock out a piece for a Misfits themed Halloween show that is all print makers aside from me.  They're one of my favorite bands and I've been way too interested in their baffling lyrics since I was a teen so the category was way too broad and exciting for something I had such limited time to finish.  I ended up just doing a small piece based on the first verse of Violent World in the style of an icon painting.

I'm a big fan of icon paintings and medieval art mostly because of the stylistic similarities to what I like doing (flat color and slick lines, rigid composition and bright color) though there isn't generally a lot of common ground on content.
Where there would be gold leaf I used a metallic acid green paint and I borrowed the color scheme from the cover of Earth A.D.
There are other projects I'm waiting to post because the new blog editor is being really slow and difficult and I have other things to do today. The show is up at Masthead 340 Brown St. Philadelphia and all the other artists will be selling limited edition prints inspired by Misfits songs (except me, I'll just have this weird painting).

In other news check out the light up paper mache space bat mask I made for Halloween!
       

cinemagr.am


Created with cinemagr.am

10.12.2012

Lord Of The Forest


So, I finally photographed the piece I finished about 3 weeks ago.  I made the mistake of using this matte fixative to try and make it a little more resistant to scratches and fingerprints and it gave the whole thing a cloudy light reflective quality that made it impossible to photograph inside using lamp light and my work schedule made it hard to photograph during sunlit hours.
 
Anyyyyyyyhow this was done as a donation for the Countdown to (En)danger group show this weekend. All proceeds benefit the World Wildlife Fund.  The focus is on endangered and threatened animals and ecosystems.  I decided to continue my focus on animals who are often overlooked in conservation and maybe seem less sympathetic because they are considered frightening or undesirable (snakes, bats, arachnids, insects, assorted wonderful creepies and crawlies, predatory animals etc).  I should probably note that I personally don't have an aversion or phobia of any animal beyond natural common sense fear when confronted with something frightened that could hurt me but I do have a few friends who can barely stand to look at snakes.  I asked a friend of mine who's into reptiles and amphibians to recommend some snakes to research and my favorite out of all of the ones he sent me was the Eastern Indigo.  They're absolutely beautiful all black snakes with a deep blue iridescent sheen. They also happen to be the longest North American Snakes and are completely non venomous BUT because of their immunity to Rattlesnake venom kill and eat Rattlesnakes (note: while researching this I learned that there is a word for this and it is "Ophiophagy"). There are some pretty amazing videos of it.

In Florida and Georgia they're threatened and in Alabama they're considered extirpated.  They're threatened for a number of reasons, first of which is a pretty much universal concern; loss of habitat.  They also have to travel as the seasons change to maintain the level of cover they need and with the expansion of human development they no longer have safe or clear paths to travel to get there.  Because of their attractive appearance and relatively docile demeanor they are commercially collected for the pet trade as well.  In winter months they also live in gopher tortoise burrows.  Because of human development resulting in loss of habitat and the truly disgusting practice of "gassing" to flush out rattlesnakes which involves rattlesnake hunters literally spraying gasoline vapor into burrows, many other animals who use these burrows are killed and the burrows are rendered toxic.  Among these animals is the Eastern Indigo.  The Gopher Tortoise is very threatened and as it dies off and loses habitat all of the other animals who depend on its burrows for shelter, breeding, and raising young will decline as well.  I thought this nicely illustrated the focus of the show and the ways in which every member of an ecosystem flourishes or perishes with the rest.  The coffin box with the symbolism of the egg is just a basic reflection on the natural cycle that's being interrupted all over the world.  A little bit of hope to cling to in the face of a whole lot of doom.
 
 

This was painted on a wooden box and it's about a 11 inches tall.  It'll be available at the opening along with a few prints of my 2009 painting of a Juvenile Bearded Vulture since it's one of the animals WWF focuses on.  It's rare for me to look at something I did a few years ago and still like it enough to put it in a show but I'm pretty fond of this one (though there are still things I'd do differently now). 
Come to the opening! And if you can't make it the show will be up all month!

October 13 6:00-8:00

B2 Cafe 1500 East Passyunk Avenue, Philadelphia, PA

10.04.2012

Consume!

Just a reminder, the Empty Night Skies etsy shop is still up. 100% of what you buy here get's donated to Bat Conservation International!

Also, if you've ever asked where you can buy my work online I currently have a limited edition  print up for sale on Shirts and Destroy. Tell your creepy friends and creepy neighbors!

10.02.2012

What Sees From Their Eye? The Snake.

As you may have already noticed, I have a new header! I've been meaning to make a new one for over a year now, but that's the sort of project that gets eternally pushed back when more pressing things come up.  I had a few sketches sitting around for it but actually ended up with an idea that came to me by way of keyword search.  I admit to obsessively looking at the keyword search portion of google analytics, because it's extremely entertaining to have a window into the weird ways/things people search on the internet and the words that bring misguided searchers to my blog. The search in question was "human skull bat wings snake body".  I have a secret hope that that person will try the search again and this time I'll have some real results for them.



I actually went through about a year of keyword searches to grab some of the best/weirdest/dumbest for this post. One thing I've noticed is that there are some running themes. Such as rats. So many rat searches. This is about 5% of them since a lot are redundant:

"rat face, rat with human ear on its back, screaming rat, dead rat drawing, anatomy of rats, closeup rat face, dead rat design, hairy cartoon rat, ratface punk, punk look like rat"









I also see a lot of really misguided searches for "cool" tattoos. I think this is because once I made a comment about Irish knots and bad tribal tattoos? They are really really barking up the wrong tree:

"intricate tribal tattoo symbols of sun, celtic sun tattoos for men, best mens tribal sun tattoos, big tribal round tattoos, intricate tribal sun tattoo"

Some are totally understandable:

"colored smoke, goat horned dude, half woman half bird, scrying bowl, slavic demons, british witch drawings,  crypt skulls, cult worship, demon blood and guts drawing, puke drawing (love this) , awkwardly interesting (accidentally accurate) , punk paints, satanic hell horror death painting (I actually replicated this search and it's mostly metal record covers and horror movie stills that come up but for some reason I also get Starry Night), scary people in the woods"

I see a lot of people specifically looking for me, or someone with the same name as me, in all the many weird attempts at the spelling. So, close but not quite:

"jeanne p. coffin" artist (jealous of this name), dr. jeanne d'angelo (well la dee da), jeanne s d'angelo february 25 2005 died maine (RIP, girl), chef jeanne d'angelo, fisherman painting by mr angelo "

There are also people looking for medical advice:

"blood in nose and spit, blood when you cough, blood in spit up, can you spit up blood clots?,  nipples not aligned"



 



And supernatural advice:
"what should you do if you want to see a witch?, are evil spirits real?, how do you know if you are producing ectoplasm? (trust me, you'll know.), real life genie for sale(I hope they found one) , how a ghost can be finished?"

And then there's just gibberish. Tons of wonderful gibberish:

"a bird that is called same, murdered ghost, most haunted tattoo, a strega sucks, adrian balboa from rocky gravestone(phill-y, phill-y, phill-y!), ancient fish find hunched over, awesome mushroom drawings, bat tattoo for ceiling fan (wut.), bear fur coat for men, bunch of armadillos (I love that someone used "a bunch" as the set amount of armadillos in their search criteria) , corny white guy,  the bone of a human after getting tattoo, dead person bone after tattoo (I actually saw this searched several different times and different ways. Maybe it's a common question or maybe it was one dedicated creep who needed an answer fast) paintings drug free, easy paintings to copy (heyyyyyyyyy) , ectoplasm vagina wiki (I can't imagine there's a whole wiki just for this), female evil, folklorique blousons, genie painted with pencil (allow me to explain painting to you) , giant lake serpent?(good question), goofy drawing of yourself, happy cats paints, how to get rid of from hungry wolf, hunched woman, bony hunched woman (I feel like they might have been describing me here) , i'm right 98% of the time, hybrid wolf and shark, lion/human 'hybrids, manmade things in rhode island (this is so hilariously broad), medium sized women, mini cooper line drawing, mortal pencil face (I don't know why but I read this as "mortal pencilface" and it cracks me up), most attractive paintings of the world (why thank you), mouse growing human hair (beaaautiful. and I think they were looking for that mouse that grew the human EAR), nordic women in furs, ouroboros conan (hilarious mental image), photos of actual lechuzas, brains scream at night, dont look in the eyes of women, rabid tooth dog, ripping lion paws, satanists what i think i'm doing, saw corpse (oh did you?), sexual reproduction (someone clinically looking for porn) , skeleton siting down with a tiger with black hair, what's the oldest human mummy ever found, weird shaped head, vagina, facecrotch@gmail.com (GREAT email address), a picture of a skeleton sitting at a table playing cards on a wallet, glow resin toilet (mad libs?), grave in the middle of the forest (I might paint this too), genie the rabid baby, child seek bones (best classified ad ever), q mart quakertown pa swords (I specifically know which booth at qmart they're looking for)creeping genie, past kids tv programme about a goblin genie, tiger bites heart"

It's possible that simply by writing this entry so packed with weird unrelated keywords I'm going to usher in a whole new batch of lost google searchers who come here just to be disappointed when I don't have answers for their asinine but delightful questions. Like a snake swallowing its tail. Or an "ouroboros conan".

I really need to get a good photograph of the other painting I was working on which has long been finished, but I made the mistake of spraying it will a matte protective coat (since it's painted on a box that might be handled) and it's making it really hard.  Hopefully soon. Also, HEY it's my favorite month! Check it out, I finally got to pull the carrots out of my garden: