Music Monday!

I do have a handful of song recordings I've been meaning to share so I figured, "What better way to present them than by kicking off each week with a different song?"

After a rocking weekend spent reconnecting with old roommates and meandering the streets of San Francisco, I dedicate this post to Remy Chan, the song's composer.

Here's "Staying Out All Night":


Remy wrote the lyrics, melody, and guitar parts and plays guitar on the track, I'm on vocals, and our good buddy Erik Spickard laid down the saxophone unrehearsed on the first take. That's right: every note of sweet sax you hear is 100% improvised. For me the song really evokes the late-night streets full of weathered hedonistic individuals steeped in guilt from their weekend bender. . . in a good way. The track is almost three years old and still gives me little goosebumps when I put it on. The piece represents one of Remy's first solo-lyrical compositions and is a part of a project entitled "Once Upon a Greatest Story." The album was essentially a venue to lump any musical tidbits Remy and I had cobbled together while living in Davis.

Stay tuned to future Music Mondays for more tracks off that album, and newer musical ventures since the acquisition of my Concertina!

Micro-Pomp and Circumstance

Today's piece was inspired by Lisa Woods' "Insects at Home" diorama series, and commissioned by my UALR labmate Dr. Robin Verble as a gift for our advisor. Each ant represents a member of the Yanoviak insect ecology lab as we received our respective degrees from the University of Arkansas just over two months ago.

Ants were pinned straight out of ethanol to dry in their poses, though some legs had to be removed and reattached to achieve just the right stance. Mortarboards and diplomas are simply paper with embroidery thread. I actually wrote a short message on each diploma, but the whole thing's been sealed in a bell jar now. Species were chosen with regards to research focus or physical similarity.

The players (left to right) are as follows:
Petrus Moriera (MS) and Dr. Stephen Yanoviak (advisor) - Cephalotes atratus
Theodore Sumnicht (MS) - Eciton hamatum
Robin Verble (PhD) - Camponotus pennsylvanicus

The names link to auto-montage images of other specimens of each species from AntWeb so that you can better see the details of each one. As you may have realized, though I do pursue many artistic mediums, I am not much of a photographer. Luckily most 2D material is scanned, but pretty much everything else is taken with a phone-camera. I may remedy this someday, but for now the blurry basics will have to suffice.

Lego people are easier to draw than real people.

WASTELAND:

I drafted this comic a in Olympia, WA on Hourly Comic Day a couple of years ago. Granted this one wasn't part of the event (it took more than an hour, and didn't fit with the subject matter), but the whole day is a nice way to get people motivated and inspired about the medium and it sparks a lot of ideas. If you haven't participated in an Hourly Comic Day (Feb, 1st), I'd highly recommend it.

After having followed the same drafting formats for so long, this comic was really an attempt to play with layouts a little bit and to go beyond the borders of the panels. I know it's not that radical, but you have to realize that most of my comics before this where perfect 2x8 boxes without any deviation.

I hope you enjoy it!



I'm tagging this with the "Lego" label even though this isn't made out of Legos, aaannd these could very well be Mega Blocks for copyright infringement purposes.

Otch

Today's piece is the second in a series of busts created without any foresight. As with the piece presented 9/12/2010, the only direction going in was that it should be an organism of indeterminate sentience seen from the shoulders up. I've entitled this one "Otch."

As with most posts, please click the photos to see them better.




The bust is about the size of a softball. Otch wears a large winter coat, a scarf, and a monocle. His eyes are suspended between stalks so that they can swivel 360 degrees. He is currently investigating a small stone covered in runes and has a set of tinkering tools for . . . whatever it is he does. The gill-like flaps on his chin and the hexagonal pits on his face could be sensory organs or ornamental--who knows.

As with the previous bust, I haven't painted it yet in hope of casting it someday. I've come to realize, however, that there are too many gaps, loops, and fragile bits to make a functional mold so this one will remain one of a kind. In my future sculpting I need to start taking that into consideration.

I look forward to continuing the series. A story may even begin to emerge with enough characters to draw from!

Two years later. . .

. . . I'm finally posting again! Not that it really matters seeing as this is more a personal endeavor than something to please a fanbase. I went to Panama, attended two weddings (one of which I officiated), got a Master's degree, got a tattoo, and moved to Salt Lake City. I have a stash of new art that I'm going to post, and though it's tempting to dump it here all at once, I'm going to spread it out like before.

I'll start with the tattoo.

This is a line drawing I did last April of Paraponera clavata, colloquially known as the bullet ant. It's purported to have the most painful insect sting so, not wanting to miss out on an opportunity to better know my study organism, I had my advisor sting me with one. If you want to know more about that experience you can ask me in person.

I wanted to go for a style that was realistic but used solid lines in place of true shading. It's based off of several of Alex Wild's photographs (http://www.alexanderwild.com), and the specimen that I kept.
In order to commemorate the finishing of my degree and the experience of the sting itself, I brought my design to Golden Lotus Tattoos in North Little Rock and had it cover the location of the sting:

The design had to be enlarged and simplified due to the intricacy of the lines, and the shading (that I didn't ask for) doesn't follow the pattern of any particular light source, but all in all I was quite pleased with the outcome.

Self-explanatory

. . .

On the process of creation:

Brain Juice

Distilled thoughts which slop
down on paper like black mud
gritty and viscous
The wade through them
Delicious or sickening, I can't decide
Slats of silt so dark and sweet,
and wide across my vast insides.
Coalescent conceptions wait for their final sauté
A steamy ballet or melting sorbet of the
blind writings of my future protégé
A me which can wipe the left overs away

Brain juices unrefined
break free often from my mind
Tart, bitter, perverse.
Greasy confusion which in the foam rises
through the whirling mentalities of which they're comprised
Spit out on your face, on your hands
and your ego: the frosting of obscene indignation
Stripping my muses of fresh contraband
But everyone yells out false appreciation
for my cognitive custards
As I vomit a slurry of dream elementals
That no one's supposed to understand.