Just finished this image, which will be my new promo postcard. This image is somewhat inspired by my gadget-filled life, and I often marvel at how people use and interact with their array of gadgets. I try as hard as I can to keep things simple and accessible on the gadget front, yet some people I see on the street do come close to this kind of bandolier of technology. I look forward to the day when I can have some little media brick sitting in my bag wirelessly transmitting my music to my ears, no wires please.
I’m getting 3,000 cards printed up at Modern Postcard, using 2,185 contacts from my Adbase mailing list (focusing on magazines / newspapers, book publishers and graphic design houses all over the country). Works out to about $.31 cents per card, which is a very good deal, though not always easy to lay out the cash for. But you gotta spend money to make money…
Tropical Sea Flowers, 2005. collage (screenprint, fabric, acrylic on paper), 17×22″
The sassy ladies over at rose-coloredglasses.com have posted the first of their “Artists interviewing Artists” series of articles. Julie Kirkpatrick (full disclosure: my invisiblewoman) interviews fellow Brooklyn artist Melissa Barrett Lundquist about her work (shown above), which will be shown at the AAF Contemporary Art Fair in New York City this weekend (October 27-30).
LINK: Interview with Melissa Barrett Lundquist
This is a detail of a new drawing I’m working up for a promo postcard. I’ve been saving screenshots of it in-progress for a good step-by-step after I’m finished. I have really enjoyed working on this one bit, after Julie, my wise invisiblewoman correctly concluded that the head I had previously drawn on there wasn’t up to snuff. Much could change between now and the finish…More later!
Alas, the stars have aligned and a confluence of fantastical events have led to this glorious post. Halloween is nearly upon us, Apple has spawned millions of video iPods, and nobody has anything to watch on them. Today we are releasing our baby, “Bighead”- neatly encoded for your video iPod (or just to watch on your computer).
A good chunk of the invisibleman team spent a hilarious weekend in Kempton, PA filming and acting in this opus. Hard-earned money was wasted on high quality sausages, tyvek worksuits and chocolate syrup. Another year or so of feverish bi-coastal editing ensued, and it has been languishing in our HQ’s armored media vault for a while now. If you love something, set it free…We’re releasing this 20 minute film under a Creative Commons license ( Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 to be precise), so feel free to share this with your friends- although as the license states, please keep our credits intact, and resist the urge to sell copies of this masterpiece on Canal street out of duct-taped luggage.
The latest version of QuickTime is needed to watch this. It’s a big download, but trust us, it’s worth it.
DOWNLOAD – bighead_final.mov (88.9 mb)
Last Sunday (October 16th) 83% of the Invisibleman team got together for our first “art lodge” (Sorry Barb…maybe when you’re up in NYC next!).
We brewed about a full pound of dark, oily Gorilla coffee, scarfed many hearty Bergen Bagels and busted out 25 pieces of artwork which we all had our hands in.
Kurt was the task master, setting the majority of the sessions to 5 minutes per artist, then the artwork was passed to the artist sitting next to you, and you picked up where they left off…or completely obliterated thier planned masterpiece. We did a few speed rounds of a minute per artist at the end. After a full rotation, we grab some new paper, forage for some new supplies and start again.
It was a fascinating, liberating exercise, with many guffaws and strange marks being laid on paper. Unusual materials were passed among artists, and bizzarre images emerged as we listened to WFMU’s terrifying Horror Compilation as a soundtrack.
I just got back from my two week trip to Europe. We visited Germany (Düsseldorf and Cologne), the Netherlands (Amsterdam) and Denmark (Aarhus, Copenahgen and Møns Klint). We saw over a dozen museums and galleries, the best of which was probably the Louisiana Museum north of Copenhagen which had a really inspiring Matisse show (more on his tree drawing later).
On our last day we took a journey down to the southeast corner of Denmark to the island of Møn. There we found the most spectacular landscapes of our trip in the 400 foot white chalk cliffs of Møns Klint. A breathtaking end to our great trip.
In addition to taking scads of pictures, I tried to draw as much as possible, and I’ve created a collection of a few of the sketches to share. Click on the above image to see them, or click here.
I also have to recommend the sweeping epic of a novel, “Cloud Atlas”
by David Mitchell (recommended to me by fellow invisibleman PA). This was my travel book, and it delivered exactly what I was looking for on a good trip. It’s an epic that sweeps through time as well as distance. Be sure to check it out.
I’m writing this entry in the lovely Flingern neighborhood of Dusseldorf, Germany. I was determined to add to our “travels” category with a euro-dispatch, so here I am. My invisiblewoman and I have just returned from a little side trip to Amsterdam, and are spending the weekend in our home base in Dusseldorf, which happens to be our gracious hosts Marcus & Vanessa’s cool apartment. They have been taking us around to see the sights, all the art openings in Dusseldorf’s art scene, the best doner kebab shops…And we had a nice trip to Koln today. The Museum Ludwig was spectacular…
Amsterdam was really lovely, and our time there helped erase some unsavory memories of my first visit years ago. In particular, we were quite taken by the Jordaan neighborhood, which is full of great shops and bars, and some incredibly quaint canal houses.
Of course we took in some inspiring art, including the suprisingly good collection of van Gogh’s drawings at his eponymous museum. Nice to his his little sepia sketches in his folded letters to his brother Theo. They had several of his sketchbooks on display, which was a treat! Off to Arhus, Denamrk on Monday, then a brief visit around Copenhagen.
Couldn’t scan in any of my sketches while on the road unfortunately, so the above photo will have to do until my return. A few more photos are available for perusal here.”
I was trolling around the web and stumbled upon Nate Williams‘ fabulous IllustrationMundo (Where illustration gets all the love!). Great site, and it got me inspired to freshed up my own site. I’ve been spending a lot of time at invisibleman, and I’ve been neglecting my poor old jonkeegan.com.
So I have posted a new spread of pages from my latest mini-moleskine sketchbook, added some new work onto the site and placed my most recent work in my featured illo section.
The days are numbered for my stogy old site, and I’m looking forward to ripping it’s guts out and blogifying it’s innards. Big fall project, ready to be tackled upon my return from our imminent vacation in Old Europe.
I’ll keep the step-by-step ball rolling with a few frames of an illo that I just finished. This is part of a series I’m doing for a magazine. I will post the finals and the details shortly.
I have been trying to keep my process as much like traditional paint-on-paper as possible. Keeping the “underpainting” is an important step I did not want to abandon. I’m still tweaking the formula a bit, as I do more of these with the pencil drawing on top of color in photoshop. The thing I’m happiest about, is that my drawing gets preserved, and doesn’t get buried under a layer of opaque gouache.
Early November: North Greenland – Rockwell Kent 1933
Just got back from a breathtakingly beautiful vacation up in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. One of the suprise highlights was a quick stop in at the beautiful Portland Museum of Art, where I was delighted to find a huge Rockwell Kent exhibit. I don’t know if it was all the salt in the water that I swam in or too many lobster rolls, but this show just floored me.
The first images that come to my mind when I hear Kent’s name are the amazing black and white ink drawings of Moby Dick. I had always kept him firmly in the camp of the great American pen and ink illustrators of the early 20th century. This show completely enlarged my view of his work, and of his amazing life. This fellow was a grade-A swashbuckler, travelling to the world’s most spectacularly desolate and awe-inspiring places, and surviving any shipwrecks that nature threw his way (at least one that I am aware of).
His glowing landscpaes of Monhegan Maine, Tierra del Fuego, Greenland and Alaska are meant to remove the viewer’s self-consciousness, and just revel in the marvel of the scene. He was quite a modernist as well, producing playfully cartoonish shapes, yet preserving their deep cobalt blue glow and blindingly bright snowfields.
I’m looking forward to reading his wild tales of adventure as he sails to Tierra del Fuego in his book Voyaging. If you happen to be up in the area near Portland, ME be sure to check this show out. It runs until October 16th.
Amazon: Rockwell Kent: The Mythic and the Modern
Amazon: Voyaging
Link: Portland Museum of Art
