Idiot Box Show is up

The Idiot Box show has opened at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles, featuring my Small Wonder painting, shown at right, as well as dozens of other works of art inspired by television nostalgia.  You can see all the work in the show by clicking this sentence.  Not this sentence, the last sentence.  No, its...it's probably a different color–look for that.  Here, let me do it, you're screwing it up.

Unused Sketch #3

When I posted Unused Sketch #1 a while back I mentioned that it was from a tricky picture book project that ended up generating a lot of material we didn't use. Believe it or not, this sketch is also in that category:

I've been calling it "Alexander Hamilton Makes a Federal Deposit."

Show at Redcap's Corner

Do you like pictures that look like this? Would you like to see them up close, in person? Do you live in the Philadelphia area?
This Saturday, the 4th, at 6pm, I have a show of fantasy art opening at Redcap's Corner in West Philly. At least a dozen of my paintings will be on the walls, for sale to the economically stimulated or simply available for closer scrutiny to the curious. For that matter I will also be there and available for closer scrutiny. I'll have to remember to shave.

Recap's Corner–4040 Locust Street, Philadelphia. See you there!

Thirty Poets/Thirty Days, and more.

April Fool's Day kicks off the completely-real-and-not-a-joke National Poetry Month, and fans of poetry for kids have two daily ways to celebrate.

First, on the blog GottaBook, we have Thirty Poets/Thirty Days.  Each day of April a renowned children's poet will present a completely new, never-before-seen poem.  the event is kicked off today by none other than Jack Prelutsky.  Other poets include Jon Scieszka, Nikki Grimes, Jane Yolen, Douglas Florian, and Linda Sue Park.  And me at some point, though I won't know when my poem is scheduled to appear until shortly before it does.

And over at The Miss Rumphius Effect we have Poetry Makers, a month's worth of conversations with kid's poets about what they do.  It starts today with an interview with Kenn Nesbitt.  There'll be an interview with me some time next week–I'll link to it when it happens.

Unused Sketch #2

Here's another batch of sketches that have thus far gone unused. That may change at some point.

A while back I was going to work up a bunch of spot illustrations of Abraham SuperLincoln and see if a particular magazine wanted to run them as space-filler. I sketched up quite a few more than I'm showing here, but these were the ones that made the cut. Then about a half-dozen more pressing matters got in the way and I dropped them.

I think they're mostly self-explanatory. I'll only note that yes, that is a bad drawing of Lincoln punching out Hitler in the top left. And in the bottom left he's preparing to hurl a Nazi at, ostensibly, more Nazis.

I just noticed I didn't draw him wearing his mask in any of these. That's weird.

Unused Sketch #1

I recently completed a picture book that ended up requiring a lot of sketches and ideas that were never used. This picture of a bus stop is one of them. The rabbit has an iPod.

Ada Lovelace Day

Haven't posted anything in a while. And my regular morning webcrawl tells me that today is Ada Lovelace Day–as Cory Doctorow put it, "the day that bloggers all over the world post about women in science as part of a global day of awareness and appreciation for the (often underreported) role that women play in the sciences." I love women in science (or at least one particular woman in science), and I'm a huge fan of awareness, so I'm blogging about my wife, Marie.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, she's an astrophysicist.  That's her, second from the left, in a photo by Gaelen Marsden, who I realize may not appreciate me stealing his content like this.  Let me know, Gaelen.  Anyway, Marie is here depicted in Antarctica in 2006, where she and her team built a telescope and launched it on a balloon to the edge of space to search the infrared spectrum for signs of star formation in the early universe.  She was there for two months.  Why yes, as a matter of fact she is cooler than your wife.  That's nice of you to mention it. 

V. I. C. I. 5

I think it's actually finished now. I have only to package it up somehow and get it off to LA for the Idiot Box show in April.

Home to Tucson

I'm going home to Tucson this weekend for the first annual Tucson Festival of Books, to be held on the campus of my alma mater, the University of Arizona. I'll be giving presentations on Saturday and Sunday, the 14th and 15th. Check out the link above for details, but here's my schedule:

Saturday, March 14th:

MINTY-FRESH FIRE-BREATHING CHARACTERS (a panel with David Christiana and Chris Newberg)
10 am, Education Building, room 353

Signing
11am-12pm in the authors signing area

Reading
1pm in the Teen Authors Lounge, wherever that is.

Sunday, March 15th:

FROM FRANKENSTEIN TO TRUE MEANINGS
10am, Target Stage on the East Mall

Signing
11am-12pm

Hope to see you there!

Git Gob

Regular readers will know that I don't make a habit of reposting other people's videos and work and other random things I find on the web. I just assume that's not why you come here, and anyway that's what Boing Boing is for, right?

But this really is possibly the best one-minute short I've ever seen.

Git Gob, by Phillip Eddolls.

Babushka

Max surveyed the lab with flagging interest. The police had been through with their brushes and combs, and any clue to the whereabouts of the missing chemist was no doubt bagged and tagged and sitting on the shelf of some dark evidence room. But amidst the dull microscopes and flasks and hot plates his eyes were drawn to a garish Russian nesting doll, smiling coquettishly from inside a Pyrex beaker.

Max lifted it out, twisted the little babushka at her equator to reveal the smaller but otherwise identical doll inside. Max’s mother always had a thing for nesting dolls. Max liked them himself–who didn’t? They posed an unanswerable question, a tickle in the brain. A complete doll demanded that you excavate all her little daughters and granddaughters. These little women, once disassembled, demanded to be put back together again, and so on. You were never finished. And the smallest doll– the size of a lean peanut, its painted face like punctuation–was always to Max a frustrating delight. Small enough, certainly, yet he always wished it could hatch still smaller generations. A woman like a grain of rice. Then another like a hangnail. Then a single peasant molecule, its atoms waiting to be split into the purely theoretical.

And so he noted with pleasure when the seventh largest of the chemist’s nesting dolls could itself be cracked to reveal an eighth the size of a newborn’s toe. And even the eighth–impossible!–had a little seam at the waist. And so did the next little grain of a doll inside. He tried to twist this one open, lost his hold, and spent the next three minutes hunting for it on the linoleum floor.

Finally he had it again, pinched tightly at both ends between his cramping fingers. He prized it apart, and the white speck inside dropped to the workbench and began immediately to flex and uncurl. It was a strip of paper, barely wider than an eyelash, yet unmistakably scribbled with tiny script. Max squinted at it for while before recalling that he was seated next to a microscope.

It took a while to coax the strip into place, still longer to figure out the microscope’s workings, but then he was reading it, a message that at a magnification of fifty appeared pockmarked and rough, but still legible:

look behind you.

Frowning, Max turned to see the chemist, and her gun, and the little babushka it fired.

V. I. C. I. 4

Another progress shot of the painting I'm working on.  Almost done.

Sophomore Undercover

Ben Esch's debut novel is out, and it's called Sophomore Undercover. As I've mentioned before, it's like getting kicked in the nuts by Mark Twain.  If that sounds like the sort of thing you'd like, get thee to Amazon, via the link above.  Or get thee to the official website to learn more.

New Slang

I had a dream last night in which I invented a new colloquialism, and I'd like to nominate it for wider use:

bert  | brt |

adjective

unexpectedly good : check it out–those culottes are bert | I didn't think I was going to like the movie, but it was totally bert.

On the internet one may write brt or, simply, <{:-|

Also, can we consider making "doin' the pigeon" a euphemism for something?  Thanks.

V. I. C. I. 3

Another progress shot of the painting I'm working on. As always, click for larger view.

From the Vaults 2

So my brother saw this post and was kind enough to send a jpeg of the album art reproduction I painted for him as a high school graduation present, which would have made me just barely 15. I guess painting album enlargements on canvas board was a bit of a meme for me in the late eighties–I remember painting at least one more (Magical Mystery Tour, I think) for another friend.

For the record (so to speak) I'm pretty sure we had a full-size LP I could reference for this one. The weird trivia here is that I'm also pretty sure I didn't just paint all the photographic elements of this Police cover in black and white, then brush them with transparent primary colors. I think I painted it all opaquely.

V. I. C. I. 2

More progress shots from the painting I'm working on. See previous post.

Voice Input Child Identicant

I'm due to contribute a piece of art to a group show called Idiot Box at Gallery 1988: LA. At my wife's urging I've elected to pay homage to what is arguably the worst television sitcom ever made: Small Wonder.
I lost about a week recently to a flu, so I started with a lot less in the way of thumbnails and preliminary sketches than I normally would. I gathered as much photo reference as I could of the original show, took some photos of myself, and ended up resolving a lot of the composition not in my sketchbook but on the painting surface itself: an old tabletop I found years ago in the trash and have been waiting to paint on ever since.
Here's the rough drawing. No time now, on to paint! I'll post more progress soon.

From the Vaults

I recently became reacquainted with my childhood best friend, Brandon, and he sent a jpeg of a painting I gave him. He says I did it when I was 13. I'm inclined to think I was maybe a little older than that, but I don't know. Anyway, here it is and, yes, it's an acrylic enlargement of the album cover of The Beatles' Abbey Road.

I love seeing childhood work like this, as I was famous for throwing away anything of mine that was more than a year old. If memory serves the painting is only a little larger than an LP–maybe 125-150% larger. But now that I think about it...I probably painted this from the artwork on a cassette. I didn't own any Beatles LPs when I was a kid, and it's not like I could do a Google image search back in 1986. Is that possible?

Happy President's Day!

Thought I'd share a larger look at that Abraham SuperLincoln I painted recently for a local Philly show.
Also, some pictures from a recent appearance at the great Head House Books on 2nd street. In honor of Valentine's Day, and at the kids' suggestion, I am drawing a monster bunny kissing Frankenstein.

Honest Abe Art Show

Shortly after my last post I received this flyer for the art show I mentioned. If you live in the Philly area, I hope to see you at the opening. I'll be the guy who looks like me.

Where I'll Be...

...if you're a lazy private detective hired to follow me or that process server I've been dodging.

Friday, February 6th from roughly 6 to 9pm– at Brave New Worlds Comic Shop in Old City, Philadelphia (45 N. 2nd St.) for the opening of the "Honest Abe" art show. Come see my and a lot of other artists' interpretations of Abraham Lincoln in honor of his 200th birthday. A preview of my painting is at right, which I've intentionally made VERY SMALL so that it'll look huge at the show.

Saturday, February 7th from 2-4pm– I'll be reading and drawing and signing books at Head House Books at 619 S. 2nd St., Philadelphia. Bring the kids!

Sunday, February 8th, afternoon– I'll be wandering around the Children's Book Fair at the Main Line Art Center (746 Panmure Rd., Haverford, PA). I don't have anything to do with this event personally, but friends of mine will be signing and presenting. Not "presenting" in the mating sense, you understand. I mean they'll be talking about their books.

Sophomore Undercover

Some time ago a was sent an advance reader's copy of a forthcoming book called Sophomore Undercover, the debut novel by Ben Esch. Hyperion books asked me for a blurb if I liked it. I liked it very much, and said it was "Like getting kicked in the nuts by Mark Twain." Hyperion asked me for a new blurb. I don't remember what they decided to go with, but something nice I said about this book will appear on the back cover.

I'll probably post about this book again a little closer to the publication date next month, but I mention it now because Ben Esch has created a video game for his book, and we want you to play it.

Dixie Nguyen's Nerd Quest

I Have a Cuffie...

...which doesn't mean what it sounds like. For the second year in a row I have tied for the Publisher's Weekly Cuffie Award for Funniest Book, this time for Frankenstein Takes the Cake. It was Smekday last year.

Edgar Allan Poem 3

Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe!
Read the third Poe-em here.