Josh Howard's take on Eve, plus thoughts on audience

image source

Well, it's old news now, but here's Josh Howard's spin on Eve:

"Journey back to a time when magic still thrived, dragons and fallen gods roamed the earth, and man was just a myth. The Garden of Eden was a place of perfect peace and tranquility. That is, until its keeper, Adam, went missing. Now, his newly created wife, Eve, must venture outside the safety of the Garden for the first time to go in search of her husband, all the while battling monsters,beast men, wizards, demons, and even the gods themselves. It's the fun and adventure of Samurai Jack mixed with the epic scope of Lord of the Rings." (more, plus preview here)

Just ordered my copy, interested to see his take on it.

Now I just need to get back to work on my own version; it's been on the back burner while I negotiate kids during summer vacation, working more hours, and taking on fun little side projects.

Meanwhile, something on my mind is how to successfully reconcile (or successfully split) my various artistic persona's. Those persona's being connected to divergent and fairly incompatible audiences, I'm starting to feel the push/pull more and more, the distressing tension that lies between the work that gets exposure & recognition among the intellectual/feminist/LDS community, vs the work that gets exposure & recognition among the speculative fiction/horror/graphic novel community. There is some overlap, but not much.

Option B: find contentment dwelling in that tiny niche where they DO overlap, but that seems to be a marketing dead-end and I AM trying to think of that part it too. (BTW, existing in a small isolated niche = story of my life. x_X )

Anyhooo, to end, one of my own Eve studies:

pages 3 and 4 (Being Born)

I really do like how these two pages, in particular, turned out. (If you click on the image, you can see it larger.) (Here's more about the story.)

a painting a week (take 2)

Heheheh, I just realized it was almost a year ago that I decided to try making a painting a week. It didn't go so well (life gets busy) but I did do a few paintings . Anyhow, going to try it again. Starting now. This will sort of go hand in hand (hopefully) with the Drawing a Day I am doing. These will mostly be smallish paintings (11x14 inches or smaller), mixed media, revisiting ideas and images I am already working on.

We'll see how it goes this time around.

Feeling a bit ambitious this week, I have already done TWO paintings! and here they are:
and:

rigoramortis

zombie erotica anyone?
heheh, eeeEEEEwwwww!!!!!

I'm Doing some illustrations along that line, but here's my conflict: to lean more explicit R-rated gore/sex? Or lean more towards pg-13 dark humor.

Probably a nice middle ground between the two will suffice. I'll have to a bit of drawing around that question.

And now, a few of my undead love roughs:
(and yes, I suck at text. I know)



(Just for kicks, here's a sampling of various ways Zombie Jesus has been done. I'll start there for inspiration.)

Keith Haring, Cecily Brown, and Wombat pOrn

Here's two of my favorite artists: Keith Haring and Cecily Brown. You don't get much different than them, Keith having a strong graphic, pop-art comic style, and Cecily displaying amazing painterly expressionism.

I guess this pretty much sums up my own pull between the two styles (sometimes swinging towards the graphic, sometimes swinging towards the painterly). It probably also sums up my own proclivity towards explicit subject matter: Here's Keith's Bathroom, and Here's Cecily's Hard Fast and Beautiful. (WARNING, Explicit!)

I was thinking of both these artists when I drew up this quick sketch on a dare: Wombat p0rn (WARNING, Explicit!)

It isn't a very good tribute to either of them, but at least it put them back to the front of my mind again.

Two things:
1) work to reconcile my 'style'
2)work to uncover the reasons behind my proclivity towards the explicit, so that it's not just a shock-and-awe gimmick.

One more thing: tonight I spent an hour or so painting, and it was wonderful.

angels.

So the character that didn't make it into my last comic was The Angel (not enough room, story-line went a different direction, etc). Now feeling the need to revisit and explore Eve's encounter with him. Previously, I have had her tie him up and cut off his head, beat him to a bloody pulp, or just do a little wrestling (taking a page from Alexander Louis Leloir).

Why all the violence?

Well,the angel is guarding the tree and it's fruit so, he's in her way . But also he's got this special sword (a flaming sword!) that she needs. Why? Well... I think she is going to kill God and needs that sword to do it. (Just a guess you understand, I'm still figuring that part out.)

So Angels will be on my mind and in my sketchbook/paintings for the next little bit as I work it all out.

For your entertainment (and for my inspiration) some fallen angels :Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as murderous angels in Dogma, and the most amazing Tilda Swinton as Gabriel in Constantine.

RIP louise Bourgeouis (who died yesterday at age 98)

“I have a religious temperament, I have not been educated to use it. I’m afraid of power. It makes me nervous. In real life, I identify with the victim. That’s why I went into art.”
~Louise Borgeois (a professed atheist)

to quote directly from the NYTimes eulogy: "it was her images of the body itself, sensual but grotesque, fragmented, often sexually ambiguous, that proved especially memorable.... Fragility and fierceness were, in fact, the twin poles of Ms. Bourgeois’s art."

some glimpses of her art:
-a ginormous spider
-a whole room full of her drawings and sulptures (LOVE her fabric creations)
-a bed full of..? (more about that show here)
-the ever graphic fillette (and the mapplethorpe portrait of her carrying it under her arm)
-matching parts for parts w/ fillette, Janus Fleuri, also hanging by a wire.

And here's a video: Louise Bourgeouis, The Spider, the Mistress, and The Tangerine.