Well, it’s been a few weeks since it was due, so it’s about time to begin putting my Comps up here. For those not in the know: in the Studio Art department of Carleton, Comps is a final project, usually worked on in the fall or winter, that students complete for a faculty review at the end of the term. Then, students may continue to work on it (or something entirely different) for the spring’s Senior Show (scroll down for links to past shows). My finished work consists of three painted maps and six ink-and-watercolor comics pages. Here’s a view of the complete installation, which was in the main gallery in Boliou until yesterday:

And another view, with gallery space for reference:

Finally, here’s links to close-ups of the maps:

• Great Lakes Region
• Lower Lake Michigan
• Milwaukee (near General Mitchell International Airport)

A word on materials and such: the acrylic paintings were done on masonite panels from a previous project, the Figural Map of the Continental United States. I’m pretty sure I used the bottom three panels for these maps. The panels within the maps were drawn with sharpie on mylar, a semi-translucent paper, and were then nailed to the maps, floating about a quarter inch off the surface of the maps. Here’s a side view for reference:

That’s about it for the maps. I’ll post close-ups of the comics in the days to come.

The more and more you look at the title of this post, the less it looks like real words. That’s true for me, anyway. In any case, here’s a watercolor/pen drawing that I did recently:

Kudos to anyone who can identify the three faces shown here.

P.S. Kudos as in ‘congratulations,’ not the candy bar.

For my Life Drawing final project, I did three large watercolor portraits in a series with accompanying text. I asked some of my friends to send me photos of themselves portraying an emotion. I received about a dozen, and had a tough time narrowing it down.

In the end, I decided on one very excited face and two more subtle expressions. I included text that provides three very distinct ways in which people deal with being alone. The pictures, to me, reflect each of these personalities/emotional characters.

Canadian cities were a last-minute decision, but I liked the way they tied the three images together, in addition to the theme of loneliness (the glasses are coincidental). The actual people in the drawings, to satiate your curiosity, are all members of Lenny Dee: Jared, Emogene, and Tim, respectively.

Also! The table show went amazingly last night, and I’ll be putting up pictures from that on Monday.

It’s that time of the term, when a young boy’s thoughts turn to many different things, because his short-term memory is severely affected by the lack of sleep brought on by working ungodly hours toward final projects in two art classes. That’s me. I am that young boy. It’s not to say that I don’t love it — the opportunity to spend so much time creating art and even the accompanying stress. The table is coming together (again, that’s Friday at 7 PM in Boliou), and I have a good idea of what I’ll be doing for my Life Drawing project now. Here’s a sketch I did for it, a little self-portrait with some text:

It’s in much more of a graphic/cartoon style than the actual project will be, but the text boxes relating to facial features/expressions are there to stay. I’m thinking of doing text that implies a more specific narrative, unique to each picture. I was lucky enough to have several friends who granted me photographs of their lovely faces. I’ve already started on two and plan to start a third tonight, finishing them probably over tomorrow night. Look for pictures on Friday!

Growing up in Wauwatosa, a close Milwaukee suburb, one of the biggest local attractions was Mayfair Mall. For about 17 years, I lived in a small neighborhood sandwiched between the Mall and a golf course. As it took less than 10 minutes to walk from my front door to that of the mall, I spent a lot of time there as a kid. It started expanding in the mid-90s to include a Barnes & Noble and an 18-screen movie theater. So I also spent a lot of money at Mayfair.

Lately I’ve been trying to focus my art on what’s relevant to me, and specifically my childhood. The new banner, a pen drawing of the skyline of Milwaukee, is an example of this. The view of the Mayfair Mall North Tower (above) is another. I passed that tower nearly every day on my way to and from school, or when walking to the Mall.

A graphic novel is in the works, I think. I recently read Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (some wonderful images here and here). This summer, I want some of my own illustrative work to come together to tell a story. So I’ve been working from photographs and memory, trying to capture the feel of 1990s Milwaukee and near suburbs. It may be a while before I update about this again, since I’m beginning to wrap up Winter term at Carleton. In the spring I’ll be independently studying illustration, and hope to get some more serious groundwork done toward this. Then, hopefully, by the summer, I will have something substantial completed.

Until next time.

I gave my sketchbook to a few of my other group members to keep them entertained one night. What I got back was, to say the least, shocking, controversial, and perhaps one of the most important pieces of contemporary art of which I’ve ever been a part. If you’re curious about who exactly these “other group members” are, you can find most of them (and some other pictures, better than the ones you’ll find here) on Paul’s website:

• Paul’s website

And now, to get to the drawings that may change the world, read on, deeper into the belly of the beast.

I labeled on the drawings who did what, so be sure to consult Paul’s site for portraits of the artist in question.

It seems like this work has a lot to say about the personalities of each artist. Paul created on the left an ethereal, otherworldly atmosphere, reflecting his desire to experience more than this world can offer. I recommend hallucinogens. Hannah Robinson then encased his space with a number of outlines. What I believe this means is that she’s a protector, a motherly figure, perhaps, who looks after those close to her, and is always willing to sacrifice her self if it benefits others. She also drew a kinda cool tree. Jon drew in strong, brutal swaths of color that unapologetically draw attention to themselves, even covering up Hannah Goodwin’s work in the process. Jon is an “alpha male,” who comes out on top no matter the situation. Hannah Goodwin also drew a significant part of this next picture:

Hannah’s drawing is pretty cool. This one Jon did not dominate.

Here’s Naomi’s drawing:I believe the tree and leaves were Naomi originals. I definitely made the red thing at the bottom that sort of resembles a nipple. I think I was trying to show something about watercolor technique? Either that or I was drawing a nipple. Anything is possible.

I guess the point of this post is that everyone else in my Vienna group should probably drop their current majors and become Studio Art majors.

I arrived back home in Wauwatosa two nights ago, via Chicago and Frankfurt again (but not in that order, thankfully). While in Vienna, I was able to do a lot of drawing and watercolors in my little sketchbook, which graciously just fit in the pocket of my winter coat, like a large spoonful of mashed potatoes into an open mouth, buttery and warm. My drawings on this trip were for the most part divided into three categories: architectural, sketches of my fellow students, and studies from existing artwork in museums or public.

Architectural:

• The entrance rotunda to the Kunsthistorisches (Historical Art) Museum (Museum). One of my roommates, Paul, took 360 deg. pictures of the space, and will be uploading them to his website soon. I’ll provide a link when that happens. Here is my sketch of the rotunda:It’s in Micron .03mm pen and pretty clearly unfinished, but gives some sense of the scale of the interior. It’s so large that it was hard to fit that much into my sketchbook and keep a consistent perspective.

• Otto Wagner’s Stadtbahn (Subway) Entrance Pavilion. Wagner was a prominent Viennese architect in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This building is a pretty good example of Viennese Secession-style architecture, an artistic movement around the turn of the century that was one of the first (in Vienna, anyway) to break away from strong historicism. Here is my sketch:Also in pen, I think .03mm again. The people in the lower left were four of my group members, and should serve to give you a sense of the size of the building.

• Columnar sculpture at the Schloss Belvedere (Belvedere Palace). These are pretty Classical (Roman) figures that functionally act as supports for the building, something that’s reflected in the poses of the figures, struggling to hold up the weight of the structure (and, one would assume, the immense wealth of the Belvedere family). Here’s my sketch:As you can see, dude’s holding it up pretty well.

• In Café Central. As I recall, I had a melange (similar to a cappuccino) and a piece of cake. Wikipedia also tells me that Melange is the “name of the fictional drug central to the Dune series of science fiction novels.” This drawing serves as a pretty good segue into the section of people, since you can see Jon and Paul here.Here also begin a bunch of watercolors, which is what my sketchbook was designed for.

People:

• The first day everyone arrived, a few of us went to Coffee Shop Company (the Viennese Starbucks, basically) to email our safe arrivals to our loved ones overseas. I took the opportunity to do some drawing. Here are Jon, Naomi, and Hannah Goodwin (l-r) on laptops:

• This was a pretty quick sketch, but is helpful in that it shows everyone in our group (except for me). We were sitting, exhausted after a tour of the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts). Noelia is crossed out because she got up and left while I was in the middle of the drawing. I felt a little bad about it afterwards.

• Sketches at dinner one night: these include Kai (our instructor), Jon, Hannah Robinson, and Paul. If I were to grade myself on the representativity of each, it would be as follows: B, C, C+, A- (l-r).

• A quick sketch at the Kärntner/American Bar. Drinks here were ungodly expensive, so I found something else to occupy my time: drawing other people.In all, that’s about everyone in our group, some in more exquisitely rendered detail than others. I was also fortunate to collect some of their artwork in my sketchbook, so I’ll post that another time.

Studies:

• These seem to be what I focused most of my time and energy on. This first one was from the Kunsthistorisches Museum. I didn’t catch the name or sculptor, but it’s right at the head of the stairs after the entrance, displayed very prominently. In it, some dude with a club is choking and beating a half-horse half-man to death. Pretty badass.

• Portrait of Arthur Roessler by Egon Schiele (1910). Schiele was one of the later members of the Viennese Secession and Jugendstil, and in my opinion has the most distinctive and compelling painting style. The fact that he died when he was only 28, the same year he was replaced Gustav Klimt as Vienna’s leading artist, probably only served to further his popularity/scandalousness. In the sketch below, the quotation reads: “Egon Schiele was arrested and jailed for three days in St. Pölten for the distribution of immoral drawings.”

• Self Portrait with Raised Bare Shoulder (Schiele, 1912). This dude again. Even more so than others, Schiele loved painting himself. There are dozens, if not hundreds of self portraits he did, but this was my favorite from the Leopold Museum.

• Lissy im Café (Karl Hubboch, 1931). I hadn’t heard of Hubboch before, but Lissy caught my eyes in a way that no woman before had. By which I mean a very creepy, predatory sort of way. The funniest part of this one is that a couple of days later, in the American Bar, we saw a woman that strongly resembled Lissy, but with black hair. Fortunately she was sitting much closer to Jon than to myself.

Well, those are the drawings that I was happiest with. There are, of course, more, and a slew of photos that I may or may not get around to posting. I’d love to return to Vienna someday, sketchbook in hand.

In other news, on Saturday the 20th I’m leaving for New Zealand to go hiking with my girlfriend and her family. I’ll be there until early January, when I return directly to Minnesota. Hopefully, as with Vienna, I’ll have a lot of drawings to put up once I make my way to Northfield.

The second project (that is, before the final project) of my painting class was to create a reproduction of a painting from between the Renaissance and the mid-19th century. I chose Anthony van Dyck’s Amaryllis and Mirtillo (1631), a painting based on Giovanni Battista Guarini’s 1590 poem Il Pastor Fido (The Faithful Shepherd). The scene depicts lots of people kissing, and is pretty sexy (and luckily for me, the assignment was not to do a lot of research based on the work. I picked for my detail reproduction the two kissing figures just left of center in the painting. Here’s my painting:

This piece is in oil also, although I started out the term working mainly in watercolor. I’m not totally happy with how it turned out, but it was a good experience for exploring oil as a medium and trying to draw on Van Dyck and the Flemish Baroque style of realism and paint application. I’ll put up some of the work from the first project of the class soon.

As outlined in the last post, for the last few weeks I’ve been working on a large (5′6″ x 8′6″) map of the continental United States, fitting figures into each state’s outline. It’s finished! Complete with pictures! Those you can find below. The states are off-white acrylic (which I think worked much better against a masonite background than white gesso would have), and the figures are oil. I didn’t use any models for this project, as many of the poses are awkward, uncomfortable, and just a little too sexy.

For more map-related artwork, or for fun, check out:

• Strange Maps — Updated pretty regularly, this site collects maps, real and fictional, and provides tons of research and background information for each post. This post in particular is related to my project, and I think I was probably unconsciously inspired by the artist, Frank Chimero, who did a series of prints in which the shapes of states become objects (I think Illinois and California are particularly fun).
• Radical Cartography — Run by cartographer and illustrator Bill Rankin, this site is slightly more geared toward the academics (he’s done some cool geographic and historical infographics for Wikipedia), but there’s also a lot of creative work. I’m especially a fan of The Errant Isle of Manhattan, which places Manhattan in various places around the U.S.

And here’s my finished map, hopefully the first of many (check out below for details):

• Pacific Northwest
• Upper Midwest
• Great Plains
• New England
• Mid-Atlantic
• The South
• Gulf Coast
• West Coast

Although this is a pretty titillating post title, I haven’t started delving into pornography (yet). The title is actually a quote from my art professor David Lefkowitz, referring to my final painting project. I knew that I wanted to work with a map, and I was inspired by the lower 48 states as an (in?)divisible shape. I sketched and eventually painted figures contorted to fit within the state’s boundaries. Some were more challenging than others (i.e. Michigan, complete with Upper Peninsula). Here are some pictures as it was in progress, with me for scale (the painting itself is on 9 masonite panels, and is 5′6″ x 8′6″).