ice and clouds

Winter here in Chicago seems ever so reluctantly to be exiting. It's still cold and gray, but less and less. So, I'm putting these pictures I took in Wisconsin late last year up before it gets genuinely warm and they become nostalgic. There are also a couple of pictures Heather took of clouds from a plane window. I have some more of those that I'll post in the next week or two.

portraits of passengers, groups of three, a rock show, a list

Other People's Pictures II

Todd Baxter is another of the artists who's shown at Lula over the last year or so. I've been meaning to post the above image for months now. I pretty much love everything he does, but this image gives me goosebumps. We've been friends for something like fifteen years and, I think it's safe to say, have influenced one another tremendously in that time. His collaged paintings and beautifully constructed frames were a revelation to me when we were both students at the University of New Mexico in the mid 90's. Not to mention his sketchbooks and incredibly delicate drypoint drawings. Here's another image, one that was in the recent show:


Todd is presently working on a large multi-image narrative photo project called Owl Scouts (those are the two models for the project, above) that I've helped him with a bit, sketching out compositions and drawing patches for the scout uniforms, which he's then had made into actual embroidered patches. Below are the gouaches he started with, you can see a bunch more of the progress of the project generally at his blog site, including comparisons between some of the sketches I did and the final pictures, as well as some of the sets and snapshots from shoots.

bones and rocks, shapes in red and black

Other People's Pictures

For about the last six years or so my friend Marianne and I have curated the artwork at a restaurant here in Chicago called Lula. We both used to work there, me flipping eggs, she serving them once flipped, when the original curator fell by the wayside. Marianne and I, imagining that our experience with drawing birds and sewing pieces of toast made us art experts, took over. Shows of varying quality have come and gone. People seem to have liked them, mostly. Because we both have our own work and the art at Lula has been neither her nor my primary vocation we've done a rather dismal job of documenting our work there. I think I might have photos of three shows out of roughly 20 we've hung. As of today's entry, I'm turning over a new leaf.



The pieces above are from the current show. The two above are Residue and Two Neighborhoods 2 by Nick Butcher. The two below are Green Bar Suprematism and The Spines of Rothko by Nadine Nakanishi. You can find more info and pictures from both at sonnenzimmer.com. Both artists are printmakers and graphic design types. Nick makes music, too. They make beautiful, beautiful stuff. Really. The show should be up til mid May.

I'm intending to do posts about a few other recent shows at Lula over the next few weeks.

A rubber necklace, some directions, a cellar door, a drawing in red, a lament

A book, another book, an appliance out of doors

Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes, the follow up to Monologues for the Coming Plague is now out. This is the cover (sort of):


Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes is the second in what will eventually be a trilogy. The third one will be out...sometime before the next millenium. Here is an excerpt from the present work (click on the image to get a better look):







(Thanks Kyle) Here is the back cover, which carries a perfunctory, incomplete list of the volume's contents:


There is one other excerpt on the Publisher's Weekly site, though if you're a regular reader of this internet world wide web log of mine, you'll have already seen it.

Another book with my name on it also came out last month, but only in Denmark (from Abenmaler) . It's a collection of shorter pieces, some random drawings etc. Below is the cover, partly folded out.


If you were to continue unfolding it, in addition to the material above, you would be presented with a Danish translation of The Game, a three page painted strip I did for Kramer's Ergot #7.

By way of ending for today, here is a picture of a washing machine: