Mae Fae in progress.

A rough from yesterday

and a colour work-up in progress today...

xoxo,

K~

Tales from the storage unit - Pt. I

Comic collectors blues and the archivists tale of woe...

Sorry my blogging has been so sporadic this last week or so.This past month we had to reduce budget costs by paring down to having just the one storage unit. The last week I have been helping Matt clear out his unit of anything of mine in there, and as such had to prep my own to fit some furniture and whatever else we needed to condense back into my unit. This meant clearing a pretty generous path within my storage space. So this past Saturday was our last day, and we had to split up to tackle our units separately in an effort to save time. And since we had only so long before the gates were about to close I had to strap on my arm brace and transform myself into Le petite She Hulk.

Let me tell you, I have waay too much shit. And as a I was perusing through my most prized comics box a big box of art supplies toppled off of it's perch and missed me by a mere couple of feet. So that's when it hit me. (in the mental sense that is.) It's a real blessing/curse to have such a vast array of archival goodies.

Besides all the paintings, there are the books, LPs, posters, prints, frames,canvas, back-up art supplies, ancient portfolios, reference materials, archives, old poetry and song journals from my DFP days, photos, magazines, pin-ups, various old vintage ads and ephemera, letters from friends, letters I've never sent - (but kept anyway) toys, action figures..and then... ha ha ha... THEN there are thee comics. Boxes and boxes of 'em. I decided to take the very best of the mix and bring them to the studio room. Tonight I'd just noticed that over the years I'd lost the authenticity cert I had for a signed Amazing Spiderman comic, which sucks big time.

Good news is I recovered some older art and a few sketchbooks. Some include pages that I will edit and clean up for the web to place into my gallery folders on myspace and share. Some of the larger paintings will require the use of a large commercial scanner. (which praytel, that I am not a Rockafeller's heir is quite apparent and thus I cannot afford to own or house one of those monstrous bitches myself.) That will take a little time, and a wad o' money so the paintings folder on myspace is down temporarily and under construction.

I will say it has been a bit of a pleasure finding things I'd long since forgotten I'd had.At the moment I am enjoying the Dark Horse Comics Bettie Page lunch box as it sits next to my monitor. Le sigh. Just knowing it is filled with all 5 sets of the Bettie Page collector cards (issued by the bizarre little publishing company Mother Productions in the 90's) makes my heart go pitter-pat. I'm pretty beat and a little sore. I'm damn tired, but very glad the task is done. This week will be sorting and organizing, also sadly probably a bit of downsizing. Anyways, I'm headed off to bed to read my old childhood copy of PLOP DC and marvel over the wondrously creepy Basil Wolverton cover in all it's finely detailed illustrated glory...uh, gorey?

Friday's offering..

Work in progress....started off last November intended as a Birthday card for a friend and it evolved into something I ma use later.


Currently: Listening to the Mars Volta while making imaginary gun sounds..

"pweering..pweering!"

Hey it could be worse, I might feel like drinking whiskey and playing cards.

xoxo,
K~

Completion of a labor of love.

Much magic went on during the last few weeks for me on a personal level and I poured the hand detail into this one while the events were unfolding. It was wonderful to have this as a sort of release or record of that experience. This is the BIOFORCE character illustration. (She's Hanna the Team healer and shape shifter from Joe Graham's Omni Universe) Joe is a writer and came up with a great contest for Artists to illustrate his characters. He always encourages Writers and Artists to network and connect.  Check it all out and ADD  him  here to view the entries and vote later on MAY 1st.

I could have done a bit better on the hands and the hawk but my own hands were running out of strength between breaks and I wanted to be fair and meet the deadline. That said, unless I wanted to spend my nights sleeping in my brace all week I took breaks instead of overdoing it and working straight through . My time was running short for the deadline and the animals bore the brunt of that visually. The night I was to submit, the scanner decided to act up on me, which sucked, as meeting the submission day was imperative to the process for me. That was the only bummer or stress really. It was actually so much fun to create her image visually and there is always great group networking on his page. (nudge -nudge- wink-wink- add him.)

If you like what you see, the specs for the teenage character are in Joe's blog under bioforce contest and on his Wikipedia entry for OMNI.

xoxo 

K~

Oldie but goodie department.

Just came across some photos from the Famous Monsters show back in Fall 99. What a fabulous night that was. It was at a tiny club in Philly, The Pontiac Grill, at 3rd and South St. which used to be the old J.C. Dobbs. The bar was always grungy and dirty. The result of layers of lingering history and the filth of a hundred years without a good cleaning. And from experience, you just knew which side to stand on, or choose a booth to sit at, because of the leaky bathroom upstairs. Water drips and plaster flakes that fell on your head every time someone flushed the toliet were commonplace. (Yep, it literally came through the ceiling onto the crowd.)

That night I remember it was freezing cold and had just snowed the day prior. The bad weather had killed the turnout a bit.I got there early and pretty much sat in the booth with the merch gal. Just until showtime when we headed up front to the stage and danced our asses off. She shot this pic for me just before the first song in the set. The entire time we chatted and danced I kept thinking, "damn, she looks familiar." It wasn't until after the set that I found out she was the hot red-headed cowboy go-go dancer from the Thunderkiss 65' video back in the day. She was still a friend of Sean's and just helping her out for the tour by running the merch sale.What a great set and fun night. Miss that little band and the club. Everyone's spirits were high and they were meeting Forest J. Ackerman the next day or so. Tiny crowd, tiny club, tiny little brown van on tour. Which my ex and some fans even helped Devildoll, Shezilla, and Vampire Girl load up at the gig's end.

While the Pontiac never quite lived up to the hype of the old J.C. Dobbs I had heard the Grille got a fancy-pants face lift in 2007 and the old facade had been blown out,booths removed, etc. A gastro-pub atmosphere that served pumpkin-tinis was said to be the new shtick there. Then I think the JC Dobbs title came back and a revival took place last Summer.Someone tried to return it to it's former grungy glory and then within a year it's closed down until further notice.As was announced this January on their myspace. This was once one of my favourite haunts and the best of the tinier seedy clubs to see national acts in Philly. (ex: Pearl Jam played "Jeremy" live there for the first time to a crowd in '91 or so.)

Funny looking back, of all the times I'd gone there, I'm amazed that this is the only handful of photos I have. Must have been having too much fun to take shots for posterity.

Ah sweet nostalgia!
K~

ZINESHOW ! (Pt. II)

Kim Riot at work..

..and a few more pics from the show on campus. Although I was battling the recovery throes of the flu, (uh see the picture) I decided to fuel up on the vitamin C, don a babushka to cover my head and made it out to the show. And boy am I glad I did.(No I am not drunk..it's just the Niquil buzz finally prevailing by evening's end.)



Here is a collaboration I did with Kim ...although I did like 7 pages in the workshop (and one was even selected for the back cover art) I liked this collaboration best of them all:





..and lastly here's one of Matt enjoying BLACK MARKET - a selection from the "Sex Positive" section of the vintage displays. Uh, ok..sure..why not??!




K~

ZINESHOW !

Upcoming Art show
Current mood=Spectacular.

First art outing of 2009 and boy, this is going to be a great one! While I might participate in one of the workshops, I'm not doing any submissions. The focus isn't really a one-man show or even based on one artist works, but more so the art of the fanzine and the entire creative collective. My dear friend Helaine is a Student involved in this show and is an active performance artist in San Diego.Some of you might have seen her recent and stellar performance at the Prop 8 rally. Anyway it should be a blast and full of nostalgia and punk ephemera!

SHOW INFO:

ZINES! (re)make history

February 3-26th - from 6-8 PM..(Gallery closed February 16th)
Mira Costa College (Matt's old alma matter - haha)

Co-organized by the delightfully sassy Kim "Riot" Schwenk

Having participated via art submissions to various zines in the 80's and 90's I've been looking to find some of my prior work both in my archives and online but to no avail. Their distribution was all too small-scale, and perhaps too underground to have entered the digital age via archives. How's that for staying oldskool? I know a small handful were in South America. I was friends with a few underground bands, acquainted with a couple managers and journalists during this phenomena back in the 80's and 90's. So I'm trying to locate a few of them online. But despite the technology of the internet era, we've somehow all lost touch. ( Internet killed the fanzine star - just like video killed the radio star perhaps?) In the process of my search I did find a few old friends and acquaintences and that's an amazing and wonderful random gift.

So funny how my life has been all about re-connecting with my past lately.

I've not really thought much about my artwork from those days since. But basically, for this show I wanted to run off some of the old vintage copies and contribute them to the collective by leaving them with Helaine to pass along to Kim and distribute free- and freely- as examples of the medium. Because since the show is about the celebration of the zine, I thought that the act of passing those out would would truly be in vein of the old skool style flyer and zine hand-outs. But sadly, I can't find any of worth to submit to her so far. RATS.

I spoke to Helaine about the show just this past Friday and I mentioned that I may be bringing some things if I can get them in time.She felt it could definitely go over well. Perhaps I can submit these to the collection, or otherwise I'll just bring some old paste-up clippings for the workshop. We shall see. Pics to follow.

F*ckin shit up old skool style..*

K~

P.s.- * Actually I'm full of it , after sifting thru the archives I plan on watching some sci-fi and taking a nap this afternoon.