Utilizing a lovely soft pencil technique, Sam Branton's whimsical drawings feature startled and goofy blobby characters in scenes from classical painting. At left is only a detail of what madness transpires within these drawings.
It is obvious by now that I have an extreme weak spot for grotesque portraiture. I have always been one to mull over school yearbooks and obsess over the split moment in time when someone has their mask on, playing their role while also looking extremely vulnerable. Richard Moon's portraits, while not all successful in this regard, capture these moments. Stark portraiture like this almost becomes abstract as the length of a forehead and the form of a shirt become obsessive details that render someone a ridiculous creature as the tendons in their neck strain to hold an unnatural "candid" pose.
Set designer and robot artist Roland Olbeter has created a series of electro-pneumatic sound machines capable of performing entire string quartets. The first commissioned composition for the robotic instruments was Elena Kats-Chernin's Fast Blue Air, which takes advantage of the range of noises created by the pneumatics.
A Youtube version of the video can be found here...another composition can be found here.
Elena Kats-Chernin's work is fantastic in itself. Her ear for odd sound and animated composition are a perfect match for the film and theater pieces she scores for. Her Wergo CD Unceremonious Processions- 15 short studio pieces is a surreal and moody soundtrack for an imaginary film. Listen to Left-over...a wheezing little dance piece that conjures up images of broken industrial equipment attempting ballet. You can hear more of Kats-Chernin's work on her official MySpace page.
(NSFW) The Groovy Age of Horror is a blog devoted to bizarre horror paperbacks, comics and movies. For the past year the curators have been posting scans of Italian Fumetti (comics), starting with the wild and weird series Terror Blu. The stories are a sick and hilarious mix of gynecological and genital terror told within ludicrous sci-fi storylines The stuff is not for the faint of heart but I'm sure your ghoulish curiosity will get the better of you as you scratch your head wondering how anyone concocted such a carnival of carnage.
Comic book creator Marc Bell condenses his page-turners on large panels. The result is a dizzying torrent of blobby shapes stacked on geometric heads, big feet and wrinkled junk food.
Christian Rex van Minnen shapes a world bursting with oozing tumors piled upon each other as if in classical repose. His velvety oils add a luminescent beauty to the abject horror show.
Matt Borruso creates stunningly demented portraits of ugly children. The garish candy colors vibrate, making these unfortunate kids equally nauseating and mouth watering.
Mike Belleme's photo essay on his "Uncle Dirty" is a fascinating portrait of an old man that lives by his own rules and refuses to age. An ex-bodybuilder, Uncle Dirty is obsessed with pasting enormous cut-out penises on pictures of muscle men and wearing enormous stuffed thongs.
For Dave the Spazz- here are the monkey sculptures of Mitsy Groenendijk.
From blobby gelatinized creatures to an obsession with cuts and gaping wounds, Greek artist George Tourlas has developed a beguiling visual vocabulary.
Unfortunately, Tourlas only has a MySpace page for his work. I had befriended him a while back and his work has been burned into my mind through this very haunting yet understated video.
Static shot. Breathing. Mashed up Face. Trickles of blood.
Through collage and painting, Swedish artist Mia Makila creates hellish Bosch inspired worlds brimming with grotesque and hilarious characters.
This glamorous photo-spread by Matt Erwin is featured in the January 2008 edition of British style magazine Dazed & Confused. The avant-fashion blog Foto Decadent has posted large versions of these magnificent ladies here.
Chicago based artist Jared Joslin paints mysterious figures of the carnival age. His skies angrily whip around as his figures calmly recline in repose or display the tools of their trade. The clothing of his characters are decorative, meticulous and form fitting, wrapping around his sinewey figures.
His wife Jessica Joslin is also an amazing artist who constructs playful animals out of old brass fixtures and bones.
(nsfw) Harma Heikens' sculptures are vulgarized kitsch, bringing a unique demented dark humor to a concept that has been beat to death. Just look at Sleeping Beauty to the left, oblivious to her terrible acne and in some sort of drug-induced haze...but still trying very hard to be pretty.
In addition to mutated pigs, reassembled animals and cartoon masks with sausage coming out of the eyes, Heikens' recent work is an homage to the big eyed paintings of Margaret Keane. Heikens hilariously transfers Keane's cutesy, dirty and somewhat sexualized children into a more contemporary setting, prancing down city streets littered with piles of garbage.
Joseph Seigenthaler began his art career by building wax sculptures for
the Country Music Wax Museums in Nashville and Tamworth, Australia. With this experience he went on to breathe life into the oddest cast of gangly imbeciles that walked straight out of a Brueghel painting. All of them seem to be in a constant state of ecstasy and pain as the withered skin of their ruddy faces fold into grotesque expressions. His work is meticulous and lovingly crafted, bringing a frail humanity to his absurd characters.
Seigenthaler's most recent works are hilarious computer animation loops of his creatures that focus solely on ridiculous gestures and facial contortions. Every limb, every joint, every muscle takes on such subtle but big movements that I can stay in constant hysteric amazement when watching a thirty second-loop for an hour. Fortunately, Seigenthaler has posted a selection of his video work on YouTube, which includes animations of Wesley Willis and George Bush.
Mark Schubert's sculptures are teetering monuments of garbage. Shards of plastic lawn furniture are melted down into jagged forms that bulge and balloon out at the tips recalling bulbous cartoon characters crossed with the most violent Willem de Kooning painting. His assemblages are crusted over with hardened pastel glop that resembles botched cake frosting, adding a playful element to the implied violence and failure of his ramshackle piles. But I find Schubert's work essentially sexual- bloated ridiculous figures with sac-like organs full of pus waiting to be popped.
Mark Schubert current show Bungleblown runs through February 9th at Mark Moore gallery in Los Angeles. There are more pictures of the exhibit at The Flog. More work can be seen at Monya Rowe gallery.
French artist/musician Ludovic Debeurme is a fantastic illustrator of debased fairy tales populated with sad and dejected characters. His work veers from cute to the sexually surreal with an awkward but animated figurative style similar to Dan Clowes and Max Beckmann.
His website has some great examples of his work although he has been posting his newer work to his MySpace blog. His excellent Django Reinhardt guitar stylings can be heard on his MySpace page as well.
German illustrator Herr Schulze's chaotic works are a comical maelstrom of stabbing, sex and spam rendered in a layered and tight style. Believe it or not, he also creates pretty darn cute characters that would fit nicely on a Hallmark greeting card.
It's being more than redundant when a person points out the blundering faults of the half-assed hacked together monolithic garbage that is MySpace. But even with the unimaginably shitty code, bad design, a sometimes functioning music player and lots of spam, I still find myself trawling MySpace's shaky corridors for new music. However terrible the design of the site, I know where to find the information I need on an artist in an instant instead of having to figure out someone's clever flash site (unless they have cluttered up their MySpace page with ten megs of graphics, forty YouTube videos and annoying transparent text). With that being said, even though I hate introducing new and good music as "music found on MySpace", here is an initial small collection of bands I found through MySpace or who only have a MySpace page for their music.
Brilliant Pebbles is fronted by Monika Bukowska, a "hyperactive immigrant from Poland" clad in day-glo and encrusted in cheap party jewelry. She roars and chirps through a hyper-emotional and theatrical mix of New Wave, Prog and Disco. It's a mixture made even more unique by the video game sounding keyboards of Samuel Ng, "a classically trained alien from Hong Kong".
Cougar's Secret Door
Beez
Battlemattertime
These songs are from a studio session at Chicago station WLUW. Although rough around the edges, they exhibit the group's penchant for seemingly cute melodies which reveal an angry and dark undercurrent.
Low Red Center - There are a couple weirdo scenes brewing in Austin and Low Red Center come from the self-made Zolo style. Arising from the ashes of Oblong Boys and Zom Zoms, Low Red Center takes the quirky Renaldo & the Loaf inspired blip-blop to a more atmospheric, darker minimal synth level.
Fantagaga
Panic Role
Momentary Switch
Whereas older material such as Fantagaga take a cue from Xex, Low Red Center's most recent material (Panic Role) is an alien howl of throaty vocals and clusterfucked synths...although the YouTube link below really shows what sort of ominous squall fuckery they are working towards.
Gay Beast - "Formed under the premise of making queer-political music more ambitious in arrangement than their previous bands", Minneapolis based Gay Beast is a guitar/synth/drums trio that creates a fractured form of dance music melding the ugliness of Arab on Radar with the disparate sound jumble of Palais Schaumberg.
These songs are from their recent LP Disrobics...an album which is aptly titled as I envision spastic skinny guys flailing around in front of a television hurting themselves with Thigh Masters as Suzanne Somer's legs methodically open and close.
Stone Oakvalley's Authentic SID Collection is a project to convert every Commodore 64 song of the High Voltage Sid Collection into MP3 format (145449 of them!) using the actual machine rather than PC emulators. The sound difference between the analog chip and digital emulation is startling- the analog being much warmer, deep and possessing various natural inconsistencies. Each song was recorded from the three different versions of the Sid chip that was used in the Commodore 64. This sometimes results in diverse playings of the same composition as the three chips process information differently.
I have been sifting through the HVSC for a couple years, converting choice bits to MP3, so it is nice to have this massive library online where I can grab the authentic sounding version. Here are a few of the best ones I found recently:
Trygve Gundersen - Eat Maniac
ZZap 69 - Green Tomato
Kjell Nordbo - Differ
Tim Follin - Bionic Commando
Another one of my favorite painters, Julie Heffernan creates whirling Mannerist compositions of flora, fire, dead animals and women. The aggregations are always monumental, slithering about, forming an architecture that is always in flux. Her latest works are lush self-portraits clothed in ballooning skirts of slaughtered animals embellished with clumps of flowers.
Julie Heffernan at P·P·O·W, Lisa Sette, LittleJohn Contemporary.
I don't have much to say about Laurie Hogin aside from the fact that I melt whenever I see her allegorical paintings of cranky birds and suspicious animals.
Her site is comprehensive and clean but unfortunately the images are a bit too small. There are plenty of gallery sites in which to view her work in a larger size- the best being at Little John Contemporary.
Texan wierdos, Attic Ted churn out an "Insane Asylum Country Gothic Carnival" organ driven clip-clop. They perform in cardboard masks, influenced by synthetic cubism, whipping themselves up into a manic frenzy for their live shows. Frontman/organ grinder Grady Roper rants with glee as the waltzes stumble down into a drunken wobble and sour oscillations swirl throughout.
For the past four years Attic Ted has been performing their Christmas "Opera" Mary's Little Secret- a tale of the Virgin Mary sleeping around with a traveling performer and giving birth to the little baby Jesus. It took a while, but it seems the Texan Bible thumpers have finally caught on and have called a protest to this year's show, in order to stop the blasphamy (sic). Grady Roper says:
So I go to the laundrymat last night to do some wash, and realize that Attic Ted has been getting talked about...not by the young artists and rockers but by some stuffy old fart sniffing Christians...trying to ruin our holiday fun! It makes me feel like all that hard work is finally paying off. Too bad our show doesn't start until midnight. I think them protesters will be out of Christmas carols by then.
It might all be a hoax, but...I dunno, it's Texas...Texas scares the shit out of me. Hopefully the flyer is genuine and the protest adds to the demented proceedings. Grady informs me that Mary was to have a miscarriage this year but fate stepped in and the little baby Jesus will be alive and kicking when he slips out.
If you're in the San Marcos area, Attic Ted will present Mary's Little Secret on Saturday, December 22nd at the Triple Cown. Here is a video of them performing a song from the show. Also! Listen to their song Climbing Up from the Attic Ted Land Suite.
Brian K. Jones' paintings of fat men culled from the Craigslist classifieds are strangely alluring. I usually find that source material of this nature trumps any “artistic” copy because of the incredible difficulty in conveying the dense but subtle narratives of the originals. Jones seemingly started this project for shits and giggles (some of the paintings come off as one-note fat man jokes) but somewhere along the line he hit a painterly stride where he began to enjoy rendering the mounds and folds of flesh in a manner not unlike Jenny Saville albeit in a much (appropriately) cruder manner.
