I’m sure you cable TV watchers have seen this already. But anyway…
Melanie and I are moving to Kansas City on Monday. So I haven’t had time to get ready the next major post I’ve been wanting to do. Just for fun then, here’s some random stuff I’ve been liking online lately.
I was pretty psyched up when I heard that Blindness was being made into a movie. I really like the Jose Saramago book (which my students tell me they read in high school lit classes. wow). I really liked City of God, also directed by Fernando Meirelles. The Constant Gardner, too. I like Julianne Moore. The trailer makes me think…I don’t know. Mark Ruffalo? Sandro Oh? Plus something just seems off about the pacing and the framing. Anyone more hopeful?
The bobopoly blog has been posting up images scanned from classic Viewmaster reels. One of those things you see and think, someone should be riffing on this in paintings. (This and the Chris Ware animation are things I found over at Drawn!)
Ever since I read Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road, with those beautiful Gary Gianni illustrations, I’ve been on an action/adventure illustration kick. There’s something so…”boy” about the best of this stuff that I wish I could get into my own paintings. My favorites are paperback illustrator/painter Robert McGinnis who took his website down due to some kind of alarming copyright violations and Ashley Wood, whose cover for, get this, The Complete Zombies vs. Robots is above.
I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to go to the Sunday figure drawing sessions over on campus lately. The thing I miss most is the running monologue that MU Professor Emeritus Frank Stack keeps up during the 3 hour session. Frank, aka underground comics legend Foolbert Sturgeon, is something of a local legend and it’s been kind of an honor to meet him. The page above is from Stack/Sturgeon’s The New Adventures of Jesus. Here is a link to Frank’s portrait of R. Crumb and some other paintings.
The Takeaway Shows posts grainy, contrasty videos of indie bands playing live, many times on the streets of Paris or New York. This one, “In Our Talons” by the Bowerbirds is a recent favorite, but a lot of these are really recommendable.
That’s it. Sorry I didn’t link off to some article that would answer all of your questions about life, or how to go forward in your painting or anything. Maybe next time. Really I’ve been reading slightly too much slightly-too-partisan stuff about John McCain’s shady past. I’ll try to do some thinking while I’m loading the U Haul and get a solid, discussable post about cool Midwest paintings ready very, very soon. Take care.
Oh yeah, here’s our new house.
i love the chris ware animation… one of my most prized possessions is an original chris ware drawing i have from when he came to oxbow while i was there.
PS: your new house could, and should, appear in a chris ware book somewhere. nicely rectilinear with an appropriate lived-in feeling projected through the little jpeg here, while at the same time a nice homely curvature in those two arcs on the front… one could easily imagine a ware-like cutaway with the secret lives of mice and previous occupants deftly scribed along the sides. hope it’s awesome for the three of you.