Holly Munoz is making a record

My very good friend Holly Munoz is making a record. It's pretty serious. John Vanderslice is producing it, a guy from Iron and Wine is playing cello, etc. Holly is crowdfunding the production and rollout, and if she makes the goal, I get to do her cover art. Some of the rewards for contributors include the original painting I'm doing for the cover as well as the drawings and sketches that happen beforehand (and a bunch of other great stuff). The imagery is in the early turning-it-over-in-my-mind stages, but here's a little painting she commissioned from me last year for a friend. The record cover will be similarly landscape-ish, painted in gouache, but more grand in scale (and not including Hello Kitty).

Holly is the best. She's a great friend who reached out to me when I first moved back to Minneapolis and helped make the move way more friendly. There's a song on the record that was partly inspired by a piece in my book The End, written before we ever met. So doing her cover completes a nice little circle. The record promises to be great. Kick in a few bucks here.

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All About the Travels of Louella, Chapter 1

I uncovered this little hand made book in my mother's archives this morning. It's a little book of etchings I made for my little sister in probably 1994 or so, when she was 2 or 3. It's post Two Headed Boy, but pre-Big Questions. Its also a precurser to a more complete and refined book I made for her a few years later.

Just last Saturday I was talking with Jenny Schmid at Santopticlaus about why I'm not a good printmaker. I have little-to-no patience for involved processes and I always change my mind in the middle of printing. This is a good example. I was etching used plates, trying to do aquatint (gave up after the first two images), and just generally making a mess. Also I hadn't quite figured out how to write backwards on the plates, and the typewriter I was using was missing its 'w'. Still, this thing makes me smile. Needless to say "to be continued" didn't turn out to be quite true.

HOLIDAY SALE

So yesterday I was putting together a slide reading and talk about book making and some of the various kinds of book and minicomic formats I've messed with over the years. And I realized I have extra copies of some stuff that I can probably do without. Like, why do I need more than one copy of this stuff, right? Today I'm selling stuff at Santopticlaus at Co Exhibition in Minneapolis. And I decided to make the stuff available to the interweb holiday shopper as well. Hi interwebbers. So go here and see what's available. And then buy some stuff. Available NOWHERE ELSE (except a couple issues of BQ are on Amazon, but why would you want to shop there?)

Oh, and did I mention these awesome BATS from Marijpol? I had them in a show at Open Eye Figure Theatre in August for Autoptic and am putting them up at Lula in the Spring. But today they're at Co Exhibition for Santopticlaus. How awesome are they, right? Right!

Project: Astoria

I'm going to be in Chicago in a couple of weeks to help high five Todd Baxter and open his new show at Lula. This is one of the pictures:

Todd has been a friend for twenty years – since we were painting students together at the University of New Mexico. Back then he was doing exquisitely painted scenes with little collage elements cut from books and magazines inserted so seamlessly that you sometimes couldn't tell what was real and what was invented. Sometime after that he got hold of something called Photoshop and now he does the same thing with his own photographs, culled from shoots in Guam, Morocco, the Pacific Northwest, rural Kentucky and the space museum in Washington D.C., among other places, as well as in studio shoots with hired models. I've posted about his work now and then on this blog, occasionally I've been lucky enough to collaborate with him, and we've shown his work several times at Lula. He's one mega-talented s.o.b. (with a similarly talented collaborator in Aubrey Videtto) and we're beyond delighted to show this new body of weird loveliness as it develops over the next few years – this is the first of what are projected to be several semi-annual showcases at Lula. So come get in on the ground floor. More about the Astoria backstory here. And a facebook event page for the opening is here.