View from a train: Zurich to Luzern

sketchbook from Chicago and Lucerne

(Christian Maiwald interviewing Olivier Schrauen)

Dirty Fingers

I have a piece in Cinder's Dirty Fingers show at F.L.A. Gallery in Gainesville, Florida, along with lots of other awesome people. Check them all here (Aiden Koch, Kelie Bowman and John Orth pictured below). My piece is a two-color screenprint I made at PFC in France in 2011, called The Labors of Hercules (bottom).

SXSW Tech Expo: 1,000,000 B.C.

This was in the NYT today. accompanying an article about beer and civilization. I'm very happy with it, and it was a pleasure to get to cast my favorite hominids in a new role, but I thought I would post one other sketch I pitched. Understandably the alternate version was simply too complicated design-wise – the text of the article and whatever else they were running would, in theory, have been set in the empty space. Admittedly, a lot to expect in print, near impossible on the web. But I liked how simple the idea was.

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At the end the score is tied

Below are a few last images from my stay in Paris. In addition to a few museums I visited the Cimetiere Pere Lachaise. It's famous because Jim Morrison was buried there, but it houses a few French people, too. There's a map to greet you when you come in with a bunch of famous people's names. I wrote down coordinates for Delecroix, Daumier and Oscar Wilde, but ended up just wandering around aimlessly instead of hunting them down. I mean, if you want to pay your respects to Delacroix, go to the Louvre, right?

 

Walking around a cemetery this grand inevitably becomes a meditation on the art of death. In a way it actually is like walking around the Louvre. It's a catalog of a certain kind of artmaking and of French history. One thing that struck me were the few tombs (examples above and below) that made use, intentionally or not, of live plants. As a commentary on the power of death, it seemed strongest when the plants outgrew their confines and obscured the graves themselves. Life is not so easily corralled.

Same goes for little plastic dogs.

This burst of color, below, attracted my eye, but the flowers are, of course, plastic. Which seemed unintentionally ironic and even more sad, symbolically speaking, than the gray stone and moss that surrounded them. They do look nice, though.

This little guy meowed at me but wouldn't stop for a better picture. Maybe he was on his way to pick up a baguette. Or looking for his buddy's lost sword.

Below: a variety of containers for discarded materials of all sorts.

The monument below stopped me in my tracks. I even stood and did a little drawing of it, until my fingers froze. The deceased, rendered up top, apparently felt important enough that he needed a woman, symbolic of the French Nation presumably, to gaze admiringly up at his name for all eternity. Not at his face, at his name. From my perspective in the 21st century it looked absurd, but also... weirdly effective. He looks good up there. I kind of wanted to take up arms in defense of the French Nation myself. It peaked my curiosity enough to look him up later. And actually he seems like a pretty cool guy. So, deceptively pompous 19th century French statesman: 1, obscure 21st century American cartoonist: 0.

Help. Some ruffians. They took my sword. They went thataway.

See? The score is tied, now.

Genevieve Castree on tour

If I was in Chicago I would go to this at Quimby's tomorrow night (or any of these other places and times, like tonight in L.A.).