Joseph Lupo's Take...Comic Relief?

Joe Lupo, who teaches printmaking at West Virginia University in Morgantown created this sadbuttrue 3 panel strip in the style of the late underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar. If you click on the image, it should enlarge enough to reveal the text. Hey now, we obsessive compulsive types have to be able to channel our energies in some harmless way! At least the majority of us (besides being gregarious) have an appreciation for the ludicrous & amusing.

Internship at Bergamot Station - ASAP

The Lora Schlesinger Gallery in Santa Monica is currently looking for an intern to help out & gallery sit for the next two weeks, with the possibility of another short stint sometime in November.

If you are interested, or know of anyone who may be keen to do this, please contact Stephanie Mercado at Gallery@loraschlesinger.com

The commitment doesn't involve too many hours, but it would help if said person is available at least on Fridays / Saturdays.

While the internship is unpaid, it is a great opportunity make some lasting connections & to see and to hear how things work on the business end of the art world.

The pencil drawing repro'ed here (titled: Bird with Ball Balancing on Cat) is by former CSULB MFA student in illustration, Adonna Khare. She is represented by this gallery, as is Bruce Houston. I was at The University of Iowa with the latter, back when the earth's magma was just beginning to cool (the early '70's). To this day, I wish Adonna had taken some classes with me - she could have made some outstanding etchings!

Energy Exhibition - More Shameless Self-Promotion

Should anyone be in the proximity of Santa Ana, CA this coming Saturday evening (8/6/2011) please do consider dropping into the OCCCA (The Orange County Center for Contemporary Arts) from 6 - 10 PM. There will be an opening reception for "Energy" an exhibition that I've the good fortune to be part of, along with fellow printmaker (& Canadian) Sean Caulfield. Otherwise, I'd say that the majority of work appears either photographically or digitally derived. If those combination of factors aren't enough to entice you away from viddying instant movies on Netflix, perhaps the looming presence of not 1, but 2 upscale food trucks will tempt. "Brats Berlin" (one can only wonder if they'll actually have the dreadful currywurst) will be competing for your Yankee dollars with "Crepes Bonaparte," & Santa Ana's renowned "ArtWalk" will be in full swing.

I'm not certain which works by powerhouse Sean will be in the exhibition, but I'd guess something visually tasty, such as the above, titled Fire Horn, a mezzotint form 2005, might just be in the offing. The image below is from my hand, a woodcut/litho combo titled Perihelion/Aphelion. The Shanghai Museum of Art has a gallery of Qing dynasty paper currency, many of which incorporate the techniques of woodcut or engraving. Enthralled, I did small sketches in the gallery, one of which eventually became this print. I was interested in playing with not only ornamental pattern and decoration, but also with symmetrical duplication of the solar image that appears on many of the banknotes. I wanted to translate the nervous line energy from the sketch into the larger print, and to see if I could compositionally sequence the image in time through composing multiple inversions of it.

The address of the above is 117 North Sycamore Street, Santa Ana , CA, & no, that's not my late model blue sporty vehicle.

The 75 pg. catalogue is available for purchase at www.LuLu.com, for $25.00. Howard Fox, Curator Emeritus of Contemporary Art at LACMA did a bang up job writing an insightful essay.