cloudy/co News

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!

Happy New Year, everyone! Have a new desktop image, on me!

I have a lot I am looking forward to this year. Come back to see all I am up to…

I can’t say that I blame them, because it is a TON of work to draw like that, but I’m a little sad that Art Nouveau isn’t the reigning style anymore. Just look at that stuff!

Okay, okay. I’ve been neglecting my duties, and you aren’t the only ones yelling at me. Both the cherub and the demon on my shoulders are telling me I gotta post something. I get it. Here I go:

The Circus Punks show was really incredible. There were something like 227 punks by 100+ artists, and they filled the little space that is Toy Tokyo Showroom in New York to the gills. I went to the VIP opening on Thursday, September 29, as well as the public opening on the 30th. The VIP opening, which I expected to be more exclusive and quiet, was an absolute zoo. People everywhere. The line curled around the corner as people waited their turn to get it. Local street (and otherwise) artist, ewok, slipped in faster by virtue of his name, cutting ahead of Andrew Bell, a few people ahead of me, and the rest of us who didn’t have the balls to speak up. “Hey, I’m an artist in the show, too!” My name doesn’t make that work yet… Soon, though?

When I got inside, I was very excited to find my two Punks front-and-center on the table just across from the door when you walked in. Not only were they prominently displayed, they sat two shelves below Tim Biskup‘s and Gary Baseman‘s Punks. Also in close proximity were Seen and Tara McPherson.

Unfortunately, there weren’t any nametags, so I am sure I missed meeting some very cool people for lack of knowing who was an artist and who was just checking things out. I chatted briefly with Andrew Bell again, who I met previously at his Take That Back show at Wootini. I introduced myself to Tara McPherson, who looks just like her paintings. And I met the owner of OX-OP in Minneapolis, who happens to know and like my friends Michael and Dan of Aesthetic Apparatus. I also talked with Tim Biskup for a little bit while he was drawing something for the Toy Tokyo folks, but he was pretty distracted.

Anyway, all told, the show was all right, but it was easier to see the work on the second night, since almost nobody was there. I talked with the Circus Punk guys for a while, and it was great to put faces with names. Jim Koch was super-nice and we chatted for a while. He also lamented the lack of nametags the first night.

The real bonus of the trip was my host, Mike Krol, who interned at Planet last summer. He is a senior at SVA, and was feeling burned out that weekend, so he just became my personal tour guide. We walked and subwayed all over town, going to museums, galleries, toy stores, and comic shops. I admit it, I was geeking out. I also finally found something for John Martz to use as payment for his toyware fonts. Such a good idea!

Unfortunately, my Punks haven’t sold yet, but they are still up on the Toy Tokyo site for a while longer.

Well, I think that covers the Circus Punks show. But that was a month and a half ago! More updates to come. Soon.

I know I haven’t written up my experiences from the show yet (life is moving quickly these days), but I’ll do it soon. In the meantime, my Punks are up on the Toy Tokyo site (along with the 227 others). Buy Karmagettin’ and/or Sextopus for your best friend and/or lover and/or relative!

If you are in New York, I hope to see you there. Now, I gotta go catch a bus to my plane…

What a fantastic way to bookend my time here in Madison! When I first moved here, I played on a fall league Ultimate Frisbee team named “The Great Pumpkin.” We had a great team with a lot of fun, good-spirited players.

The following summer, a lot of those players got back together to form “The Joker Coalition.” I spent that summer learning to play capoeira, so I missed a season with them, but the following fall I played with them in the annual Dick & Jane fundraiser tournament, and I was hooked on Frisbee again.

Then we started a series of team names off with “Armed and Hammered” in 2003, then “Charmed and Enamored” in 2004, and this year we played as HITS: “Harmed in the Slammer.” As Joker Coalition and Armed and Hammered, we lost in the semifinals to our then-nemesis, “When Cousins Marry.” Last year we were eliminated a little earlier by the eventual champs, “Team Discount.”

But this year was different. Our first round of the playoffs went as expected, with a relatively easy victory over a lower-ranked team. But after that, we were the underdogs, chinking away at our opponents one after the other. Our semifinals game, we were down 7-4 at the half, but worked our way up to a tie at 12s before coming away with a 14-12 victory over last year’s champs, Team Discount.

And our finals victory over the “No Talent Ass Clowns”? I’ll leave that to our teammate, Jon Lefers:

The Ass Clowns jumped us early just like Team Discount, and took half at 7-3, and proceeded to strike first in the second half, running it to 8-3. But HITS decided to break out the vaunted zone, and started to whittle away. Then we switched it up to a straight up marking, and brought it to 9-8. However the Ass Clowns were resilient and scored the next two (11-8). Then we tied it at 11-11. Ass Clowns then scored next on an epic point with lots of endzone turnovers. HITS could have cashed it in, but we didn’t. We scored the next two to make it 13-12. The Ass Clowns would again not be denied, and tied the score. At this time, it was decided to hard cap at 15. HITS struck first. Ass Clowns tied. And then, in fitting manner, Krissy [one of our best end-zone threats -ed.] caught the final point!

A big thank you to all the MUFA organizers, past and present, who made yesterday possible. All told, I played in three fall leagues, three spring leagues, and three summer leagues, plus two Dick & Jane tourneys. This year I tried to give a little bit back by designing the discs and shirts for spring, summer and fall leagues. It’s been a great 5 years! Thank you!

Congratulations, Harmed in the Slammer. And thank you for the fantastic sendoff!

GO BIKE!

Woo-hoo! The PLUSH YOU! show at Schmancy opens tomorrow, and somehow my name got in the press release. And apparently, the Seattle Weekly thinks the show will be a good one! Here’s a peek at the work I will be showing.

Here’s the full release– if you are in Seattle in the next month, go check out the show!

—–

Contact: Kristen Rask
Schmancy
1930 2nd Ave
Seattle, WA 98101
Schmancytoys.com
(206) 728-8008
kristen_DOT_rask_AT_gmail_DOT_com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 20, 2005

Schmancy Presents Plush You!, a Showcase of Plush Toys

Seattle – Schmancy, a Belltown toy store and gallery, is proud to present PLUSH YOU!, an art show featuring over fifty emerging plush artists from around the world. Kristen Rask, owner of Schmancy, has organized PLUSH YOU! as a public showcase of the DIY toy phenomenon featuring local, national, and international artists. The show runs August 12 – September 9. Schmancy is located at 1930 2nd Ave in Belltown.

In light of the proliferation of handmade, limited release plush toys, Rask will display pieces that reflect this niche art’s growing following and collectibility. Contributing artists include Stuart Bloomfield (sewdorky.com), Beck Wheeler (kissykissytoys.com), Heidi Kenney (mypapercrane.com), and David Huyck (bunchofmonkeys.com).

Rask remarks “Plush is exploding right now. These are basically one-of-a-kind toys that are inventive, surprising and often disarming. If it’s cute and fuzzy, can it be serious art? If a two-year old can’t play with it, is it really a toy? It’s an engaging medium.” 100 works will hang at Schmancy during the run of Plush You!.

The opening reception will be held on August 12th at 5 pm. Wine and appetizers will be provided and several artists will be in attendance.

To view some of the work that will displayed at Plush You!, please visit Schmancytoys.blogspot.com.

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I’ve posted several new monkeys pieces to the portfolio, and you may have noticed the new homepage, as well:

	My handmade Circus Punks are off to California for ComicCon before heading out to New York for the “100 (Circus) Punks Invade New York” show this September and October. I am pleased to introduce Sextopus and Karmagettin’.
	This spring, my buddy and co-worker, Dave Taylor, asked me to draw some robots for a series of ads he was working on for Gary Fisher bikes.
	MUFA asked me to design the discs for this year’s Spring League.
	And then they asked me back for discs and t-shirts for Summer League.
	And while I was photographing all these discs, I figured I put up my old GOP discs from my Carleton days.

Enjoy!

• Your plans will be rewarding.
I’ve been saving these for a long time now. I think I got them all in a two-month period about a year ago, when I first started plowing ahead with my plans to apply to graduate school. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I was actually interested in going to school, but I was sure that I wanted to give full-time art-making a shot at some point. I began an aggressive savings plan and I started making as much art as I could in the hopes of having more than enough work to put into a portfolio. This collection of well-wishing fortunes feel like the universe’s endorsement of that plan.

• You are soon going to change your present line of work.
Right now, more than any other time so far, feels like the balance is finally tipping more towards the right side of my brain than the left. I’ve been doing web programming for the past 7 years. I love the problem-solving, and the immediacy of results when I make a change to a page or an application. It is so satisfying to spend a relatively short amount of time pushing buttons and getting something that shines and glows and computes in return. It is tactile and rewarding in a way I never expected it to be.

But my body and my being was missing something. It is tempting to say that I missed being creative, but that is simply not true. Designing a complex relational database or putting together a smooth JavaScript photo gallery requires a creative eye, in addition to the logical, coding side of things. Rather it was the more specific pen on paper. The act of moving my whole arm rather than just my fingertips. I started doodling on my notes three years ago, and it has just snowballed from there.

• Your original ideas will get you well-deserved recognition.
Today we received the July issue of Communication Arts at work: the Illustration Annual. My Altar Boy poster is in the first few pages. It is amazing to me how much positive response I have gotten since I just started putting my work “out there.”

• Nothing gets in the way of your vision of yourself in the future.
In the past week, I finished working on a pair of Circus Punks for a show in New York at the end of September. It was so much fun to make those things I could hardly contain myself at each step along the way. Also this week at work, we kicked off a very exciting project. I am on the team for this particular project not because of my programming skills, but because of my storytelling experience and my love for children’s books. And I am now working on three critters for another art show that will go up in August in Seattle. I get to spend almost my entire day drawing, writing stories, and stitching wool felt together. Seventh heaven. And I might get to make a career out of this? Insane!

• A book is in your future.
And just today I had yet another hare-brained idea for a book. Again, I don’t know if it is a comic book or a children’s book that is lurking in my brain, but it’s there. Ideas I have many of; it is the follow-through I chicken out on– but not this time: I won’t allow it. (And a more specific response to this fortune: I’ve preordered my copy of Harry Potter book 6.)

• You have much skill in expressing yourself to be effective.
I have no idea what that means.

Here is a short post (reduce) where I highlight a post where the author appropriates other products’ slogans (reuse) with a link to someone else’s site (recycle).

P.S. I have a lot of catching up to do on here. Art projects, work projects, and life-changing technology. Oh my.

Well, it’s all out on the table. Cailin successfully defended her Ph.D. last week, and that was the keystone to all the thinking and planning that we’ve been doing for the past year or so. Now all the other decisions are clear: Cailin will start her post-doc in the UNC Geography department next fall, and I will begin working on an MFA in the Studio Art program at UNC in the fall as well! I’m taking my art full-time!

We are both really excited about the next step, but it is bittersweet. We both have a lot of friends at our workplaces, and we’ve really come to love Madison in our 5 years here. It will be hard to leave here for many reasons.

Of course, we won’t be moving for another 3 months, so it was a little weird to tell my workplace about it. But one of the principals at work wrote a recommendation for me, and there is another person from our Active Media group that will be leaving at the end of the summer as well, so it seemed only fair to let them know so they can start thinking ahead. (Which they did right away: I wrote an ad for my replacement yesterday, and it is on the site today.)

It is definitely liberating to not have to sit on a big secret like this anymore, but nothing was really definite until about 6 days ago. And I only got into school about 12 days ago. There wasn’t really anything I could say about it until the end of last week anyway. And now here it is only days later, and we’re having a garage sale this Saturday, our realtor is getting ready to list our house (open house on May 15th), we’re shopping around for apartments in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and we’re already stressing about how the heck we’re going to get all our stuff into a two-bedroom apartment.

On the other hand, we put in a garden two weeks ago, put in tomato plant starts last weekend, frisbee season is up-and-running, and we’ve got quite a full summer planned. We’re going to two weddings, getting a visit from my brother, Cailin will be teaching her first course as “Professor Orr” this summer at UW-Madison, I’ve got more than a summer’s worth of work coming my way at Planet, and I’ve got two gallery shows to get work ready for by the middle of the summer.

I’m ready to turn on the Zen switch because while stress is to be expected, I don’t want to make close friends with it. We will jump-start the Zen with a week in Florida, right after Cailin’s graduation ceremony.

So, I’ve been meaning to participate in Illustration Friday for a while now. There is a weekly theme that anyone can illustrate and post an image for, and you can use existing illustrations or you can do a new one. Simple, right?

Instead of doing a doodle and posting it for Illustration Friday, my first community art project post in a long time is for Month of Softies: there is a monthly theme for which you can make some sort of soft somthing-or-other to illustrate the theme. You have to sew things and glue things and cut things out and it takes a lot of time. Yeah, I do things the hard way.

When I was a kid, I LOVED Superman. So much so that I had a Superman lunchbox, a Superman towel, and, yes, Superman Underoos. There is even a photo of me and one of my oldest friends, Becca, wearing our Superman Underoos together in our high school yearbook. And since she came up, she is also the source of the Batman cape. I think it was originally made for her older brother, but we all wore it eventually. It was awesome.

My mom is a quilter. She has made quilts for as long as I can remember. At one point when I was a kid, she made a quilt that was like a portrait of me and my two brothers, though we were Amish doll style, with no faces. When I saw the Month of Softies theme for this month, “Self-portrait of the artist as a young child”, this quilt was the first thing that came to mind, and the outfit I am wearing in this doll I made is the same outfit I am wearing in the quilt my mom made.

It was a lot of fun to make this. I got to think about the Superman Underoos (I even rented the 1978 Superman movie) and the cool costume box at Becca’s house. And I got to use my mom’s old sewing machine to put the little guy together– probably the same machine that made the original quilt that inspired this guy. And best of all, this was all extremely valuable practice for a show that I am going to have some work in in August (hint: I have to make more soft toys).

If my experiences of the last few weeks (and year) are a representative sample, then I can offer this advice: if you ever get the chance to meet one of your idols, go for it. A little over a year ago I met the first in a growing string of people who have the coolest jobs ever. It started with Eric Rohmann, the 2003 Caldecott winner for his book, My Friend Rabbit, whom I met when he gave a talk on the UW campus. Then last week I met three cartoonists from the New Yorker: Roz Chast, Matt Diffee, and the cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff. They were here as part of the New Yorker College Tour, and I actually got to sit down with Matt Diffee to talk about my own drawings.

And most recently, this past Thursday, I got to spend some time with one of my all-time favorite artists, Tim Biskup. His work is a unique blend of pop and Art-with-a-capital-A. One of my friends and I decided that he is the natural continuation of Warhol’s legacy: Warhol took pop culture and made it Art; Tim Biskup takes Art and makes it pop culture.

I don’t remember when I first saw his work– it was either a link from K10K, or it was some of his work in Juxtapoz magazine– but I know that the first thing of his that I bought was the Space Totem. Since then, I have also bought a Stack Pack toy, his 100 Paintings book, and the complete set of Neo Kaiju, which includes two of his creations as well as two toys by his wife, Seonna Hong (and two each by Gary Baseman, Todd Schorr, and Kathy Staico-Schorr). And that is a testament to Biskup’s genius: he makes things that you want to buy. Well, I do anyway, and the fact that he has an entire (successful!) storefront filled with his work means that others want to buy his stuff, too.

Biskup was here to deliver a talk for a local organization of designers, Design Madison, and in that talk he discussed the ways that he has intentionally steered his offerings to be even more desirable. The vast majority of his work is created as limited-edition multiples: serigraph prints, posters, and toys, primarily. But to raise their “I must have that” quotient, he takes smaller sets of the multiples and bundles them in creative ways to make even more exclusive options (and therefore more expensive). For a collector, that kind of thing is just irresistable.

So aside from all the awe that I have for his work and his marketing savvy, I was most impressed by Tim the person. He deserves to have an ego the size of Godzilla, but if it is there, it doesn’t show. He was real, he was personable, he was generous and friendly, and he was just a really nice guy. One of the things he talked about during his talk was how he got started: I hung on every word, of course. He came into the art world by way of the animation industry, and while he was trying to break in, he was taking the advice of (someone I can’t remember), who said that we all have 100,000 bad drawings in us. Once you get past those, you’ll be in business.

So while I don’t want to be another Tim Biskup (though there are worse things!), I do want to be THE David Huyck, and if it is going to take 100,000 drawings to get there, I’m going to have to keep busy.

My oldest friend, Becca Deysach, knows more embarassing things about me than I care to acknowledge. If my memory were more potent, I might be able to drag up more dirt on her, but it’s really more fun letting the balance tip this way.

The memories that I do have of being small and in her house are mixes of cooking smells and the musty porch with the old, worn elk head on the wall, a colorful fabric ceiling in the livingroom, zipping across the backyard on the cable-and-pulley, Christmas parties with Michael Jackson’s Thriller LP on the record player. Later on, in the next chapter of memories, I am sitting on the couch with Becca and other childhood friends remembering Becca’s dad Larry after his funeral. They are snippets mostly, all of them wonderful, happy memories.

I don’t keep up very regularly with Becca, but our moms are good friends, and we hear about each others’ exploits through our communication with our own mothers. Through that grapevine, I just read this wonderful article that Becca wrote. In it, she introduces me to another side of her family that I have always known was there, but I had never seen it so well articulated. Beautiful.

A lot of weblogs I like to read are linking this other new weblog, and with good reason. DRAWN! collects posts from a number of illustrators and artists, and the people involved are posting way faster than I can keep up. All the posts are just fantastic, too.

Both Robot Johnny (John Martz) and Claire Robertson (Loobylu) are people I’ve been a fan of for a while, and they are contributing some great links. In fact, John just posted a link to something I sent him in an email a little while ago. Of course, I found it somewhere else, and I can’t remember where, so all credit goes to the interweb.

Well, my weblog-silence has been broken by one of the masters of comic art: Chris Ware. More specifically, a French interview with him. I am constantly amazed by his excruciating discomfort with the work he does and how he imagines it will be perceived by the world. To paraphrase a friend: the man is a genius, and he is the only one who doesn’t know it.

In real life, coming soon to the UW campus is the New Yorker College Tour. Included is a talk by Roz Chast, Matthew Diffee, and the cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff. A new friend I met through my mother-in-law may come down to take advantage of the opportunity to show her portfolio in-person. I’ll be spending at least part of the weekend preparing to show something as well, though Julia definitely has more experience at this.

Speaking of New York(er) I’ve just added a few images to my portfolio from some work I did for a band out of New York. The Honorary Title is currently on tour, and they are selling two shirts and four 1″ buttons I designed. This is actually the first paid work I’ve done for someone who found me via this website!

And to keep the roll going, I am going to be designing a disc for the Madison Ultimate Spring League, and maybe for summer league, too. I did one of these when I was in college, and it is fun to have an opportunity to work on a round “canvas” again. This also means that I get to play some Ultimate in the foreseeable future! It’s a good thing, too, ‘cuz I been squirrelly.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a little something about a poster I did last year. My Altar Boy poster is in the 2005 HOW International Design Annual. It’s in the poster section of course, and it received a Merit Award. My friend and coworker, Dave Taylor, received an Outstanding Award for his 2004 Wisconsin Film Festival posters, and the FISH catalog he worked on for Gary Fisher Mountain Bikes is in the latest Communication Arts. There is also a bit about the American Players Theater Book of Lore in CA. It’s a good month for Planeteers.