Placate

Today I finished a new piece, Placate.



The text says,"Does it placate Mister Death to talk about him on and on? Is it polite to talk behind his back? Ought one not to invest heavily in puppies?"

Larger images are on my website here.

I borrowed a skull from my neighbor across the street so I could draw it in this piece. She's a lovely person, and she'd happened to mention that she had one while we were chatting on the street one time, so when I needed to draw a bony head I went tripping cheerily across the street to ask if I could borrow a cup of skull. I felt very jolly about the whole escapade while I was planning it. I loved the idea that my neighborhood, which has recently become extremely gentrified, still had enough artists in it to support such a wacky neighborly exchange.

But then she put the skull in my hand.



And it felt like a head. I wasn't ready for that. I thought it would feel like a plastic skeleton's head- like the kind of skull you see in anatomy classrooms. No. This skull was lumpy and individual, and it felt like it does when you touch the back of someone's head.

I pretended I was brave. I didn't want my neighbor to know that it was all I could do not to play hot potato with the skull until she took it out of my hands. I played it cool. Or tried to. When I got the skull I remembered that my neighbor had mentioned that she'd bought the skull on ebay. Which seemed very much worse when it was in my hands.

I thanked her profusely and then ran inside and got a towel so I didn't have to touch it. I hauled it up to my studio and spent the next several waking hours drawing it as fast as I could. Just so I could return it. With cavalier jokes. About the creepy rattling noise it made when it moved.

Next time I'm borrowing the puppy.

Suspension of Disbelief

I finished a new piece this week, and I finally put images of it on the website. It's called, you guessed it, Suspension of Disbelief, and it's a bit of a gloomy piece. But it features a skeleton reading a book called "Being and Nuth", a moon wearing glasses, babies and lots of bugs. So what's not to like?



The main text says," I believe that one cannot afford not to believe in suspension of disbelief. " You can take a look at it and read some of the small text here. There are links to a larger image and details on that page if you want to check them out.

Sure they kill you, but they also educate and entertain!

From the amazing NYPL: Cigarrette cards. I love these things. I thought about curating an exhibit of cigarrette cards, but it's probably better to look at them enlarged on the web than it would be to see them behind glass in a frame. These are from the "Colour in Nature" series. The back of each card has a little paragraph of info about each image. I've included a few card backs that I thought were funny, and I've picked the cards I liked the best. But they're all great. You can see the whole series online here.




































I love that a Springbok pronks.






















And I didn't even put in the three-pronged stickleback!

Libri Amicorum

I've discovered a wormhole in the internet. It is the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery. You must go there. But be careful!

When was reading through the descriptions of their collections yesterday I felt like I was going to come down with a case of the vapours if I didn't stop reading and take a little rest. Cigarette cards! Classic Zoologies! Medieval Manuscripts! Posters! Patterns! William Blake! Everything they have is fascinating, beautifully scanned and well documented, and there's hardly any of it I don't want to blog about. And they have 600,000 images. Really.

So. This week's little drop in the bucket? Memorials of Friendship, a book by Anne Wagner, who hung around with Percy Byssche Shelley.













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You can see the whole thing here- and there's lots more to see. More fantastic images and lots of great and funny little poems and dedications. The guide to the collection is here.