TRUST IN FALSE LIGHTS...

 

WHERE THERE BE ASHES....

 Started preparing a bunch of drawings to add to the Etsy Store over the weekend. Have a LOT of unlisted mounted 4x5 drawings and several large framed 8x10 ones that are still in the process of being photographed and what-not.

Hoping to start adding them online soon.

NEW THINGS EATING OLD THINGS...

NEW WEBSITE….FINALLY! I know it’s been forever since I threatened an updated website….even longer since I have added any words to this here Blog (which has moved from it’s dark corner of Google’s Blogger to this here dark corner of this sparkly new website), and although that’s primarily the reason behind breaking a several year blogging fast, I also wanted to take this opportunity to share things that are in the works as of late:

 - while I could list a series of drawings or sculptures that I’ve been working on, it’s better to leave those to come into focus within the the bigger news of the YouTube Channel that I’m in the middle of creating. 

 ….some of the new equipment and set-up 

To be fair, the YouTube Channel is actually already created….it’s the content that I have been working on adding. The past few months has seen myself collecting various piece of needed equipment, teaching myself film and audio editing as well as filming different projects and test scenes.

My plans for the videos themselves are mostly to share artwork, art construction and processes, but will also include a variety of non-sequitur tangents as most of my online presence does. Now that the website is live, I’m hoping to have YouTube content to share relatively shortly….but if I have learned anything, it’s that my plans for “soon” should at least be doubled if not just taken out back and shot, buried in a shallow grave and forgotten…..I’m hoping for just doubled.

Coming back to the new website, I’m still in the process of creating a store that will reside within it, seeing as right now (and for a long while now), items that I have available are strewn throughout the web in various e-commerce iterations. 

zygoat will become the face of my store…

I’m working on having a more coherent store (containing original artwork and prints as well as other products such as apparel, mugs, stickers and voodoo spells) under one roof.

There is also a Patreon page as well as a Kickstarter in the works….but there’ll be more on both of those in the near future (or at least ‘double’ that near future).

In completely unrelated news, there seems to be absolutely no hip hop songs about cabbage. …..it’s good to be back!

YOU SHOULD WRITE A BLOG AGAIN, SAID NO ONE...

 Do people read blogs anymore? Or anything that is longer than a single-sentence-status-update or a selfie?

Tales from a Citrus Swamp…

Or: the History of the Bog Orange

First, an admission: I have a habit of drawing faces on things. Some might call it an annoying habit, as it sometimes takes the form of drawing faces on unattended items belonging to others, which usually entails their food. Take the following picture as a small example:

One of the main places that this could happen was at work. Coworkers tended to leave things unattended near me all the time, and if these items had any kind of a surface that would lend itself to having a face, it usually got one. This would include Coffee to-go cups, paper bags from fast food or convenient stores, tampons (true story….I got one of my many “talkings to” for that) and fruits.
Oranges tended to be one of my favorite items, I suppose due to their having a rounded, lumpy head-like shapes that in many ways mimicked the drawings that I already do.
A few years ago I drew one of these (what has since become known as “Mort” faces) on the unattended orange of my co-worker Sam, who worked with me in the basement of the art store. He dug it so much that he put it on his shelf of items on his desk, refusing to peel it and eat it. I’m guessing that the original idea was to throw it away eventually, when it would start to rot….but that never happened. Instead, the orange slowly shrunk down and mummified in the dry Colorado air in this basement. The peel became a rock solid skin, and you could feel that the insides had basically dehydrated to nothingness, leaving the orange hollow and petrified.
Sam brought a bag of oranges in to work one day, specifically for me to draw on. using sharpies and paint markers, I created near a dozen more….and we put them away on a shelf, and watched over the next several months as they too shrunk and mummified.A few other coworkers and several friends, it turned out, loved these little guys and I ended up giving most of them away as gifts.
Not long after that, I found myself looking through the oranges in a produce store, trying to pick several of the best candidates for the next batch. This group I took home to my studio and put aside, deciding to draw the faces AFTER the mummifying. While I’m sure there is a much quicker way to desiccate an orange or, for that matter, a group of oranges, I don’t know it. Plus, there is something satisfying in watching them slowly shrink and tan over the weeks and months.
While this was happening I had started to take up sculpting little creatures out of clay and resin (more on that in a later post), and eventually (you can see where this is headed) I wondered if it possible to sculpt on the dried orange husks themselves….
 
…..and as you can see from the previous photo, it turns out that it is!
So, along with the other projects that I was sculpting, I included these new, what became known as “Bog Oranges”, as each orange became ready. Pictured below is the entire first set.

At the time of this blog post, I’ll be adding each of these little creatures individually on my Etsy Store.