Rage of Poseidon 'Originals'

I'm doing a reading from the book – and giving a talk about making books – next Friday at the MCBA in Minneapolis, 7pm. And then again in Chicago at CityLit (with Jessica Hopper) December 15th.

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Live: The Goddess of Wisdom stumbles around her apartment hung-over as $%&#.

By which I mean my talk tonight will be streamed live (and then archived) here. It starts at 7pm Central time.

More Coming Attractions

Thursday is Give to the Max day, an annual fundraising occasion for all sorts of non-profits with Minnesota connections. Autoptic is getting in on the action. Help out here.

Coming Attractions

I've got a few talks and things coming up*. This Tuesday I'll be at St. Olaf College in Northfield Minnesota reading from Rage of Poseidon and discussing a new book I've recently begun.

December 6th I'm doing a reading at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts here in Minneapolis and, apropos of the venue, I'll talk a bit about various short run book and mini-comic projects I've done over the years in weird handmade formats, as well as the aforementioned new project.

Stuff in Chicago, L.A. and at Stanford coming up as well. Details to follow.

Meanwhile, here's a drawing I did recently of Kris Kristofferson for Cinefamily in L.A. (it makes a nice pair with the Dennis Hopper drawing I did for them a few years ago.)

*Anders Nilsen is a fiscal year 2013 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A Frailty Overhead

This Summer I did a collaboration with my friend the novelist and skateboarder  Kyle Beachy (here he is doing a nose manual). He gave me a few short prose pieces, I chose one and did some illustrations for it. It ended up as a four pager, which has just been published in Make Magazine, in Chicago. The format is similar to Rage of Poseidon – one image on a page with text underneath, though the images are more comic-y and complicated, as above. You can get a copy here.

Open House Tomorrow Night

This Summer I was asked to do a button installation in the new offices of the National Resources Defense Council. Tuesday night is the open house for the new offices, designed by Studio Gang to be platinum LEED certified and zero emissions, zero waste. It's kind of amazing.

The piece was designed in consultation with NRDC. The Midwest chapter focuses on Great Lakes issues, so almost all the imagery comes from pictures of the Lakes. The overall design is inspired by diagrams of their relative volume and depth (in order of size: Erie, Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Superior). On the buttons themselves there are images of people fishing and swimming, images of fish, plants and cities on the shore, sunken wrecks, sailboats, ducks, and driftwood as well as plenty of images of the Lakes' surfaces in all sorts of light and weather.

From the last, Lake Superior, the buttons trail around a corner onto the taller right hand wall (the St Lawrence Seaway, basically) connecting the Lakes to the Atlantic ocean, the wider world and the larger hydrologic and weather cycles that connect them. To the right there is a similar trailing off, upwards into the 'sky' (okay... the ceiling) again to indicate the idea of the circularity of the cycle and that the lakes are in fact fed from the rain, which in turn comes from the wider world. Along with images of the Great Lakes are a few of some other large lakes and bodies of water around the planet, again to just point to the general interconnectedness of all this stuff – the Caspian Sea, Baikal, Victoria, Tanganyika, Titicaca, etc.