cloudy/co News

I fell in love with Chuck Close’s paintings when I first saw one of his early self-portraits at the MIA in Minneapolis. I grew up going to the Art Institute in Chicago, but I had never seen any of Close’s paintings, or a lot of modern and contemporary work, until I went to Minnesota for college. I was stunned by the way he could not only wield paint, but by the scale and imposition of the work. You almost can’t get far enough away from a Close painting, though in reproduction you lose most of its impact.

Anyway, when I found this link to an interview on Charlie Rose with Chuck Close (via Kimowan), I eagerly clicked through and watched the entire thing twice. Two things stood out to me: (1) Close cites Ad Reinhardt for suggesting that an artist can choose what not to paint, and by doing so, further focus his work and his vision; and (2) Close says that if stranded on a desert island, he wouldn’t be pricking his finger and drawing with blood on the back of a leaf– art needs an audience. He says that 50% of a work of art is the making of it. The other half comes from the experience of the audience. Of course it makes sense, and it’s a rather obvious statement, but it struck me as one of the reasons I work so well under a deadline: once someone is expecting to see something, I get crackin’.

Anyway, I couldn’t help but draw the man whose face I’ve seen at 9 feet high a number of times. I missed a retrospective that Cailin got to see when she was in San Francisco for a conference a few years ago, but the next time I hear of one coming within a couple hours of me or a friend or family member, I’m heading over.

P.S.

Kimowan is an art professor at UNC Chapel Hill where I have just completed my MFA. This summer he is dealing with some paralysis problems resulting form a recurring medical condition. Thus the Chuck Close references, and perhaps some inspiration as well. Kimo, I hope the Met buys your first work after your recovery as well.

My book just arrived. I’ll be back in a few.

Ed. — Up till 3:33am, and totally worth it.

This is brilliant.

These are cute and horrifying at the same time. They are inside-out teddy bears photographed by Kent Rogowski. (via BoingBoing)

Which reminds me, I don’t think I’ve linked up the plush books I contributed to. Plush-o-Rama: Curious Creatures for Immature Adults came out last November, and Plush You!: Lovable Misfit Toys to Sew and Stuff will be out this coming November. I’ve contributed not just work, but also instructions for making your own plush critters in each book. Enjoy!

Hello to all of you visiting from Drawn! It’s a thrill to see my name up in lights, since Drawn! is the one site I religiously visit everyday. Enjoy your stay!

P.S. Here is an illo I was working on last night:

I’ve decided it would be silly to take all these pictures and not share them. I’ve started uploading a bunch of new pictures to my Flickr account. Enjoy!

Also, if you are interested in arty updates from me from time-to-time, I’ve added a new mailing list to the site. Please sign up for the Bunch of Monkeys Dispatch!

Happy Summer, world! Today is the solstice which also marks the official beginning of summer– a great day to relaunch a website, if you ask me.

I graduated with my MFA in May, and now I am off into the wild world, ready for anything. I have finally posted most of the new work I made while I was in grad school. There are a few odds and ends coming soon, but you should have plenty to catch up on for now.

I am starting my summer in Mendocino County, CA, and I should end it in September in the Twin Cities. The drive from North Carolina to here was pretty awesome. The first beautiful stretch is the winding section near Richmond, West Virginia. And if you haven’t driven the stretch of I-80 up over the continental divide, across the desert and into the salt flats of northwestern Utah, you need to get in your car now. Continuing all the way to the California coast, it is like one alien landscape after another. You can tell why people make movies in these weird places. Speaking of movies, Mendocino is covered in redwoods, which makes me think of the home of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. I’ve been here almost three weeks now, and I am still surprised by how beautiful it all is.

Now that the site update is finished, I’m heading back to my sketchbooks. There is a ton to look at and draw. First up are the caddisfly larvae. These amazing little critters make cocoons out of detritus in the river– rocks, sticks, shells, whatever– for their protection. They’re everywhere here!

The opening of my first solo show, Playground Rules, was a resounding success! According to the owner of the gallery, there were 350-375 people there, more than he’s ever had. Indeed the keg was empty at the end of the night! Several pieces sold that night, and from what I hear, some more have been purchased this week, too. There should be t-shirts still available, though. (incindentally, please contact the gallery if you are interested in anything)

Paper airplane series (four military jets just flew over as I write this!):

Fist Face’s Den!

More paintings and drawings:

Izel “Edward Camerahands” Vargas:

3-D versions of Fist Face’s tormetors:

And Brad (left) and Cat (on the right) after Cat made her purchase of Badmouth:

The crowds enjoying the show:

And a couple of older pieces that were relevent to the show:

Taj Forer looking like a goofball:

Many many thanks to Wootini owner, Mike Maher.

P.S. Dave Graedon did the work in the front window. Those are some f-ed up sock monkeys! We likey.

Thanks for the links from Drawn!, Juxtapoz, and others regarding my first solo show: Playground Rules at Wootini.

I’m exhausted and nervous and a bunch of other things, but mostly I am just excited to put up this show! Graduate school has its own stresses and perks and all, but putting my work in front of the public is a fabulous way to motivate and work out my ideas in so many ways. This last month has been especially intense in my studio, so I’m looking forward to seeing it up in public and watching people engage and interact with the work.

Okay, stop distracting me– I have some final touches to take care of before we hang this show tonight. I hope to see you tomorrow!

(P.S. I am trying to hatch a surprize for the opening tomorrow night, so cross your fingers and think efficient thoughts.)

This is one of the busiest fallls I’ve ever had. I guess grad school will do that to you, but then I went and made it even more complicated by scheduling a solo show! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This Friday, October 13th, half of the MFA graduate students here at UNC are having an Open Studios night at the Hanes Art Center. It should be a fun night, and for many of you it will be the first time you get to see the new students’ work.

Also on Friday, Wootini is opening its Potluck show. The scheduled artist for October cancelled on the gallery, so they invited local artists they may not have worked with to bring in anything they had. I got a sneak peek the other day, and there is some cool stuff showing up. One woman sent in this wire sculpture that was stretched over with pig intestines. It’s actually quite beautiful!

Next month, my first solo show, Playground Rules, will also open at Wootini. I’m getting closer, one piece at a time, to feeling really excited about this show. I’ve got some family arriving for the opening, and more family showing up for Thanksgiving, so they can see the show in-person. I’m feeling the love.

And finally, at the end of November, a book I contributed to will be released. Ask for Plush-o-Rama in your local bookstore starting November 28th!

(and if you are in the Seattle area, don’t forget to go check out Plush You! at Schmancy Toys, up through the beginning of November)

I don’t know how many of you read Juxtapoz Magazine, but there used to be a section in there where readers would send in photos of the tattoos they had gotten of Juxtapoz artists’ artworks. Some were better than others, but I have to say, it’s never as cool as when it happens to you!

A few years ago when my friend Dave Taylor first started working at Planet Propaganda with me, he designed a logo for one of our clients. The day after the final logo was signed off on, one of the company’s owners came in with a tattoo of their brand new logo! Dave was beside himself!

My story continues about four or five months ago, when I got an email from an internet stranger asking if she could use one of my drawings for a tattoo! I said, “Sure, as long as you send me photos.” Well, yesterday I got my photos!

I’m totally famous! (many thanks to tattooee, Heather in Florida!)

It is on! A bunch of fabulous and crafty artists will unleash their creations on the Seattle public tonight at the second annual Plush You! show (a.k.a. Plush You II!) at Schmancy Toys.

I’m working on updates to the site over the next few days and weeks, so keep an eye out for new (old) work on the pictures side of things. It’s been a while since updated, so it will have to trickle in slowly…

Phew! The summer is too rapidly coming to a close. I have about 100 things to do yet this summer, but school starts again in less than a week! If you are waiting for stuff from me, I probably know about it, but give me a poke if its getting more urgent. In some ways school has already started, so I am doing everything I can to get back ahead of things before I feel completely inundated. It may be too late, but I’m fighting that feeling.

In the meantime, I still haven’t seen the movie, but I can’t wait until it gets to town (tomorrow!) Threadless is doing a Little Miss Sunshine contest, and I did a drawing for it:

If you like the shirt, vote for it! If not, well, there are other fish in the sea.

Colin Christian

Lions, Tigers, Bears, Etc. opened Friday night, and it was a huge hit! It was so great to see the gallery full of people, and we got to put little red dots next to a lot of the work. Unfortunately, I didn’t get too many photos of the crowds since I was most often a member of the crowd, but here are a couple shots.

There were people waiting at the doors when we opened them, and there were never fewer than 20 people in the gallery, with the peak coming to over 70 people around 9:30. It’s not that big of a space, so it was great to see people crowd in for it. They were in a good mood, too, and I think that helped a number of the pieces sell.

It was great to talk to all the guests, especially before they knew I was the curator of the show. I got some good candid feedback. Everyone kept asking which piece in the show was mine, but I intentionally kept myself out of the show– it was enough work getting it ready without trying to finish a piece of my own, too. I was able to point out my custom Circus Punks, which are now available for sale through Wootini (along with some of my other work). I also drummed up some interest for my own solo show at the gallery in November.

Thank you to everyone who came out to the opening, and a huge thank you to all of the artists who made this show so amazing! For everyone looking for documentation of the entire show, it’s coming…

Brendan Danielsson

I was just going down to get a few cookies and take a break from drawing, I swear. But then, there I was, watching an incredible story about Hergé, the Belgian cartoonist and creator of Tintin. The documentary centers on a fantastic (both meanings of the word) interview from 1971 by a young reporter who wasn’t hoping for much, yet he got an amazingly intimate picture of Hergé’s childhood, his sometimes stifling Catholicism, his experiences under Nazi rule, his divorce, and his waning need to express himself through his comics. If you are at all interested in comics or history or politics or adventurous stories or Tintin himself, I strongly advise you to check your PBS listings to see when this will be on again.

Just as I stumbled onto Tintin this evening, my introduction to him was similarly accidental. One of the people who happened to live in my dorm my first year in college was from rural Indiana, and he often wandered toward a bit of a fantasy world that was inspired by the things he read and the movies he watched. He had even given himself a new name when he got to college, perhaps inspired by Hergé who was born Georges Remi. He was the first person I had met who was really into comics and manga and Miyazaki, and his passion for those things was fundamentally influential to me and the career path I am now pursuing.

Anyway, much like I am stunned when a bookstore employee hasn’t heard of the Caldecott Medal, this guy couldn’t believe that I– an art major interested in children’s books– didn’t know about Tintin. Of course, the reason I was an art major and interested in children’s books had a lot to do with his passion for both subjects, but instead of recognizing his influence, I dismissed him as a bit of a zealot.

It wasn’t until several years after we had graduated that I first read any Tintin books, and then it was because I was waiting in a bookstore to meet up with someone. At the time I was still heavliy into children’s books, but not yet looking at comics very seriously. As I was waiting, I was done looking at the new children’s books, so I wandered the store and ended up by the graphic novel section. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but the encounter with my college friend had implanted the name “Tintin” in my head, and there on the shelf was a whole row of these stories. When I pulled one down and flipped through it, I was immediately astounded by the detailed artwork.

Hergé is known for his skilled combining of detailed, hyper-realistic backgrounds with these wonderfully caricatured characters. But my criteria when looking at children’s books (and now comics) is that is okay to be seduced by the art, but I won’t buy it if the story isn’t compelling. To shorten this lengthening story, I walked out of that store with three volumes of Tintin stories.

It’s funny to me when I think about the sequences of events that lead me from one point in my life to another. Even more interesting to me are the triggers that get me to think about those paths. As much as I have grumbled this past year (not here, I guess) about my graduate school experience, I am getting a lot of mileage out of the introspection it has imposed. Don’t be surprised to see more coming out of both the experiences I am recalling, and also the meta-experiences of how I came to recall these events. It’s all fodder for the paintbrushes.

In less than two weeks, my curatorial debut opens at Wootini Gallery in Carrboro, NC. Lions, Tigers, Bears, Etc. is a group show with over 30 artists responding to issues of fear, manipulation, power, and powerlessness. It is an amazing collection of work!

The opening is Friday, July 14th from 7pm to midnight. Several of the artists will be present to discuss their work. See the full list of participants and get all the details at this website.

Well, the show will come down this week, but it was a big personal success. I am ready to form my MFA thesis committee, and I got some wonderful feedback on the work. Here is a page full of images from the show, and here is another with photos from the opening.

The Re:forest installation is a representation of my memory, especially as it relates to stories and storytelling. The flat trees in the space are knowledge: unquestioned memories that collectively form the context through which I experience the world. Much like the stage scenery they reference, these trees are in the background, not often paid any attention.

The painting, “Burr Oak (Quercus macrocarpa)”, represents rote memory. It is factual and structured.

The jars on the wall contain imagery-based memories, not fully-formed into cohesive stories. Each jar has a short phrase that triggers a more expansive memory to me. For example, on one I wrote “10-32-26″, which my brother knew right away as the combination to the lock on the garage from the house we grew up in. From that number I see not only the Master lock itself, but the white garage door, the grey shingles on the walls of the garage, my mother’s flower garden and the white fence, then stepping back I see the lilac bush, the tall, sticky, white pines. And beyond imagery, I think of mowing the lawn, shoveling the car out of the snow, the oppresively hot hay loft with sections of the Pinewood Derby track from our Cub Scout troop, and the door that opened out to nothing.

And the most specific memory in the room is the bear on the opposite wall, who visited my brothers and me on a hiking trip in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. His ominous presense looks on in my memory, but the temporal and physical distance softens his edges, and he, too, becomes part of the scenery.

On top of this heavy symbolism, I was thinking of all the amazing experiences I have had among trees. The title, Re:forest references email subject lines, indicating the push and pull of technology versus nature. It also suggests the artificiality of my forest, with trees constructed from processed trees, and grass growing in found-jar terrariums.

This work is a step outside of the more character-driven art I have been making up until now. The major-yet-subtle difference with this body of work is that is it motivated by narrative, rather than driven by it. I see it as a context from which I can build my characters’ stories into the future.

For immediate release:
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Re:forest

David Huyck is pleased to announce his one-person show, Re:forest, at UNC Chapel Hill’s John and June Allcott Gallery, from June 21st through July 1st. Wander into a forest of memories gathered from collective experiences portrayed in stories and fairy tales, as well as from David’s own experiences.

Please come to the gallery at the east end of Hanes Art Center on Friday, June 23rd, from 6pm to 8pm, for an opening reception including light refreshments.

David Huyck has just completed his first year of the Master of Fine Arts graduate program at UNC Chapel Hill. See some of his past work at http://www.bunchofmonkeys.com/. For those of you unable to attend the exhibition, David will post photos of the new work on his website before the show comes down on July 1st.

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Show dates: June 21st – July 1st, 2006
Opening reception: Friday, June 23rd 6-8pm

John and June Allcott Gallery
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Hanes Art Center, Department of Art
115 South Columbia Street
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Please contact David for more information.

Well, it’s been way too long. Like this comic I drew for the Daily Tar Heel, I haven’t had much room on my mental table to write much here lately, but I am going to try to change that soon.

School is winding down, and I am on to thinking about summer plans. So far I have a show at the end of June to plan for and work towards, I am working on pulling together the Lions, Tigers, Bears, Etc. show at Wootini for July, and I will be attending a week-long workshop regarding the life of a university professor in May. Otherwise, I am looking for freelance work in web programming or illustration and design, so let me know what you got.

Needless to say, grad school has been all-consuming, so this summer I should feel a little more available to the world. I’m really excited about the artwork I am planning on pursuing, so that should help me keep things rolling through my solo show this fall and beyond.

Speaking of inspiring art work, I just got back from Minneapolis where I saw two amazing shows. At the Juxtapoz anniversary show, up at OX-OP and Soo Vac, I got to see a lot of my favorite artists’ work in-person for the first time, including people who I have invited to the Lions, Tigers, Bears, Etc. show. This is going to be good! I also went to see the Kiki Smith show at the Walker Art Center. Just amazing! It was great to see another artist working across so many mediums and still stitching a central idea thread through all the works. Something to aspire to, for sure.

Anyway, there is much to catch up on, in life and here on this site. Expect to see new work up in the coming weeks, and possibly even a new look for the Bunch of Monkeys Workshop…

I almost forgot to tell you! Tomorrow evening from 5:30-7pm is the opening of Oculomotor, the UNC Chapel Hill first-year MFA show. Nine of my closest art friends and I will be showing work from our first semester here at UNC. We are using the John and June Allcott Gallery and the Undergraduate Gallery on the first floor of Hanes Art Center.

I will be showing the animation I created at Duke last semester, an animation I created at home (digitally) over the winter break, and it will all be wrapped up in an installation of plush crows. (Pictures to come soon)

If you are local, please come by! The show will be up until Groundhog Day (February 2).

Directions to campus can be found here.

P.S. I also designed the postcards for the show!