Category: Books, Comics, Music
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Reading Is Resistance
After a crazy year of traveling and shows, then a couple of months spent hiding from the New Model Army after the election, I’m back to a normal studio and class routine. By “normal”, I mean about 6-8 days each month as studio monitor at the Art Students League of Denver. You can sign up…
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Pop Go the Besties
It’s been a year. Filled with event, not all of them positive. We forge on, after a crazy summer of family matters, and my usual art show scramble. Not to mention the Red States’ massive brain fart in November. I survived the summer family drama, and then got through the art show rush, then I…
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Summer Muse
MoPrint took a bit out of me, blog wise. Its frantic pace stretched into April and I also took May off, mostly. By June, I was back into a regular studio routine, but never picked up the thread here. My latest studio icon is boxes. I sometimes like to take a simple image and explore…
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Besties Be On My Way
I had a lot more time than usual to read this year, and I took it, sometimes ignoring my TV for days into weeks. I read quite a bit of prose this year ( finally finishing The Sot-Weed Factor), but there are reams and megapixels devoted to that, and so I return to my niche,…
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Twigs and Berries: Life’s Been Berry Good
I have the luxury of time lately, which is very good for art. A regular studio routine is great for following up on ideas, and midweek days to work on framing, etc, without feeling rushed or stressed by deadlines, makes one feel more professional. The weather has been vivid. I’m taking more walks, looking at…
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A Library of Ideas
Library of Babel is a Jorge Luis Borges short fiction that clearly inspired the library in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. It’s a delightful story, and the themes of infinity and mathematical abstraction appealed to me at a time when I was beginning a cycle of work so I put it to the…
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Chillin’
As the news of the world continues to get worse, the urge to escape, into making art, reading, domestic tasks, grows. I create space for these essential tasks by blocking out politics during election off-years, but now the election is here and it’s hard to engage as the fascist politicians grub for money and votes…
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Matters of Style: Small ‘p’ Pop
I don’t often write about art books, which often for me, take the form of technical research, and is thus not as much of an ‘escape’ from the day-to-day grind of what is, after all, a business. The ways in which technique translates to expression are naturally of a major concern, make no mistake, but…
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Fast NonFiction
It’s in the nature of comics to feel like light reading. I’m not sure that’s true- I have a Yoshiharu Tsuge book of seminal manga stories that is still waiting for me to settle into a slower routine after MoPrint, as I just don’t feel I can give it the focus it needs. Manga is…
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Close Your Eyes and Think of Besties
Over their long rich, history, the Besties have established a tradition of… um, being 3 years old and changing in format every time. Of ignoring SEO-building topics such as best-selling novels and important prose non-fiction to concentrate on the best comics. Of not always focussing on the past year’s comics and being mostly about what…
