Art & Story Blog

I participated in my first Sketchcrawl yesterday: “Sketchcrawl in Your Home!” I had lots of fun with my sumi water-brush pen and I think maybe this was a good warmup for lucky Sketchcrawl 13. Below are the results. I’ve also posted these to the Sketchcrawl Forum and Flickr Sketchcrawl Pool.

Also, I want to add a note that this is my 101st post to the Art & Story Blog, so a mini centennial celebration of sorts is in order. Mind you, almost a quarter of those 101 posts have been made in this month alone. I’m on that kind of productivity kick.

As I said in my last post, I’m a long-time fan of Harvey Pekar, and obviously that’s what brought me out to the event last night, but I was glad to learn a bit more about artist Robbie Conal ( ), as well. I’d seen his posters pasted onto traffic-signal control boxes on street-corners of San Francisco, Seattle (I think) and Los Angeles (in that order). You’ve probably seen them, too. Those giant portraits of politicians, drawn in a fleshy, decaying, pock-marked, grotesque, and needless to say, unflattering light.

Here’s a snapshot I took just before things got going and Louise Steinman (center) asked everyone to stop taking pictures.

I was 13. It was 1989. A friend had lent me his anthologies of R. Crumb and American Splendor comix. Until then, I’d only known comic books to be Spider-Man, Batman, and the like. Now, almost 17 years later, I still clearly remember staying up late pouring over these books, as a light seemed to emanate from them and my mind was opened to the limitlessness of the comix medium. It was a major turning point, for sure. I don’t know if I can pinpoint in just a few words, exactly how this sort of seminal experience has influenced me as an artist today, but it’s definitely a bright spot along the sentimental journey of days past. Hey, you never forget your first time, you know. I had been a total virgin to underground comix, aside from a vague knowledge of Zippy the Pinhead, and this was my deflowering. Things would never be the same after that. Stripped from my naive idolation (yes, I invented a new word) of spandex-clad he-men and thrust into the dark, perverse, underworld of the self-loathing antihero. And these things were autobiographical! Well, at least partially. Anyway, these guys really existed!

Or so I’ve been told. I’m going to get my empirical evidence tonight at the L.A. Central Library, when I see Harvey Pekar in a discussion with Robbie Conal. It’s part of the ALOUD series.

More info here and here:

Thursday, June 8, 2006 at 7pm
“Life as Art, Art as Life.”
A conversation between HARVEY PEKAR and ROBBIE CONAL
ALOUD at Central Library, Mark Taper Auditorium
Fifth and Flower Street, Downtown Los Angeles

Reservations:
www.aloudla.org or (213) 228-7025
Admission is FREE

This past weekend was spent at Cinequest 16, where I attended a screening of The Second Death. This was my first experience attending a festival screening as one of the film’s makers (storyboard artist and actor). The film was a part of Shorts Program 8: Mindbenders which began at about midnight and ran approximately two hours, Friday and Saturday. There were a number of interesting films included in the lineup. One that has apparently been making the rounds at festivals for a little while now was Lucky, in which a man locked in the trunk of a car, seeks to free himself and gain control of the unmanned, yet speeding car he finds himself a passenger on. Another was Slice of Heaven, showing the strangely mundane actions of a woman (SPOILER ALERT) harvesting feces from a bacon-grease fed infant to serve as fertilizer (END SPOILER) for her bucolic suburban garden. And another worth mention, was Rats, a black and white short based on the comic-story of the same name by Frank Miller. Sparing us the comic-book effects and devices, but still preserving Miller’s story, composition, chiaroscuro, and sense of timing. With these films alone, we certainly were in good company.

Somewhat regretfully, I skipped out on participating in the Q&A section of the screening. Although by about a quarter after two in the morning, I don’t think it was the most provocative of Q&A’s anyway. A few hours of mindbending social ineptitude followed back at the Montgomery Hotel and made for a Sunday that was a bit rough around the edges, but I did manage to see another entertaining short and an outstanding, albeit immensely depressing, feature in the evening before trucking back to L.A. I do wish I had the luxury of spending a bit more time at the festival to see films and meet filmmakers, but it’s at least kindled more of an interest to do more of that sort of thing in the future.