A Walk in Eden

I'll post more about this when the book is released next Fall, but I spent the last several months working on a coloring book titled A Walk in Eden, finally turning in the final files last week. It was originally commissioned by Ginkgo Press in Beijing and will be released in North America by Drawn & Quarterly. It loosely follows some of the other Garden of Eden drawings I've done in the last few years and shares a (secret sub)title with that of another large drawing I did in 2012... so yes, there is a very loose narrative to it. Most of the actual drawings comprise ten-to-fifteen page continuous panoramas. A gatefold in the middle showcases a few of these, but the rest of the book is, of course, necessarily made up of two-page spreads. A few of the original landscape drawings, in all their white-ink/cut-and-paste-y glory, are on view now as part of a special two-person show called Side Projects at Lula in Chicago through late Summer. I may try and make an accordion-book version of the best of these in the Fall if I can manage it. But for now, here are some snippets I captured for instagram (mostly) while I was working:

Project Astoria: test two: The Brazil Colony at Lula, January 19th

I'm going to be in Chicago next Tuesday for the opening of Todd Baxter and Aubrey Videtto's second installment of Project: Astoria at Lula, from 6-9 (free appetizers, cash bar). The images I've seen so far are as amazing as everything those two set their minds to. Come check it out and say hello. There's more info below about Astoria... but first check out this octopus:

Project Astoria is a narrative photo series exploring life on an imagined new planet and its moons, discovered hidden within our own Solar system by an amateur astronomer in Astoria, Illinois, in 1927. The moons, named for his daughters Elsie and Vivian, are found to be habitable and are colonized by a co-operative multinational expedition from Earth in the mid 1970's. The images follow the moons' immigrants as they explore, adapt and create a new life in their strange new worlds. The first installment, test one was shown at Lula in 2014 and followed colonists from North America. Continuing their progress around the new world test two brings us to the South American and Brazilian colony. Moving between the surreal feeling of a fairy tale and something more familiar and deceptively mundane, Project Astoria takes Baxter's unique visions to an ambitious new level.

The End: Outtakes and Curiosities

Apropos of the release of The End  this week, below are a few outtakes and curiosities from the book, beginning with the layout 'map' of post-its that I used in the last few weeks to keep the overall sequence of pieces straight in my mind while moving them around. It can be a bear keeping everything flowing just right – balancing the rhythm and content of the individual pieces with chronology while also keeping two-page spreads on even/odd pages... there is also one 16 page color section (signature) that had to begin on a page number that was divisible by 16 (the pages in red outline mark the beginning of each 16 page signature). Keeping all this straight can be a little crazy-making.

One of the main anchors of the book is the piece solve for x. An early draft of the piece was done originally for a show at Junc in L.A. in 2006, curated by Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson. They sent participants a small accordion book to draw in for the show. I used mine to adapt and rework some of the messy venting I was doing in my sketchbooks at the time.

The piece always worked in a way, but felt ever so slightly incomplete, even as I was laying it out for The End #1 later in 2006. It was late in the editing/proofing process for that book that the idea for a parallel algebraic monologue fell in my lap. This is a sheet of corrections to be scanned and inserted, which includes that parallel monologue for the first time. I've always liked how these corrections sheets can become like weird poems all on their own.

One of the main pieces that didn't make it into The End #1 is this piece, You Were Born and So You're Free. Originally I did this as a screenprint in an edition of 120 (I think) on a collection of topographical maps of Cheryl's, though it also existed as a slide reading, which is closer to how it appears in the new book.

There is one section from The End #1 that I ended up cutting from the new book. A few months after Cheryl's death I went to Europe – Dogs and Water had just come out in French and my publisher brought me to Angouleme to promote it. I extended the free trip to just get away from my life for a bit. My friend Ryan met me in Spain for a week to skate, and I went to Berlin after that to visit my friend Nina. The End #1 had a few pages of sketches and lists from that visit. I included them in The End #1 half as filler and half as a sort of juxtaposition of normality.
The last few images are included to give a sense of how this material existed in my sketchbooks, where it began, and a few of the half-finished fragments that didn't make it in the book for whatever reason (there are many many dozens more pages in that category). Even most of what did make it in was not originally intended for publication, so there are no 'originals' in the usual sense.
Below on the right is a drawing of me and Mike McGinley working brunch at Lula. Which has nothing to do with anything.

In 2007, about a year and a half after Cheryl's death my sister had a son. I wrote a piece for a family gathering in his honor. Later that year I added visuals and it was turned into a six color screen-print in collaboration with Sonnenzimmer, this image is an early version of the idea for that print. It was probably this piece more than any of the others that made me feel like there might be a good reason to publish the material as a whole – finishing the story started in The End #1 – that it might add up to something greater than a well-crafted, but bitter, self-pitying lament. This piece also appears in substantially altered form in the book.

TUESDAY!!!

THE BIG QUESTIONS HOME TOWN SPECTACULAR

THE BIG NIGHT.

Come down to Lula Cafe in Logan Square  7-10 and let's toast the big fat book. And I'll draw a picture in one for you. It's going to be awesome. Everyone's going to be there. Original art, slide shows, literature. Rock and Roll. Food. MC'd by the fantastic Mr. Kyle Obriot.

Awesome. Stupendous. Outrageous. Super Fun.

And a portion of the proceeds will go to support Sara Drake's Independent Media Project with Arts Network Asia--that is comics and women's literacy in Cambodia. So it's even for a good cause!

Oh, and here's a little window display I just installed at Quimby's yesterday.