Illustration Friday: Elephant Oil

"Elephant Oil" Acrylic and Spray Paint on Found Sign

"FUEL" is the theme for today at Illustration Friday.  I've got a brand new painting for you to preview as my entry this week.  "Elephant Oil" is a painting on a repurposed metal sign.  These pricing numbers for old gas stations were salvaged as scrap and I painted a slew of them with Charles Bennett for our show, BUY the NUMBERS which is currently on display at The DAC in Clarksville, TN through the end of next week.  Drop in and check them out live if you're in Clarksville!  The gallery is housing over 60 new works from the two of us!

Click HERE for The DAC's website and find them on Franklin Street to see the art in person!

Click HERE for pics from the installation of the BUY the NUMBERS show!

Click HERE for a stream of ALL of my Illustration Friday entries!

800 Milligrams

inks on found index card divider / 2008

"Remedy" is the theme for this week on Illustration Friday.  There really were a lot of works to pick from today to suit this posting.  I grew up and live in a society with a deep-rooted drug culture.  Being a midnight toker, I am often inspired by this facet of our carnival of life through cognitively altering my consciousness via the few relatively safe substances I'm willing to use.  These experiences and the drugs themselves do surface in my work from time to time.

There is a remedy for every malady in the circus we call America- and you can have them all.  For 40 years, our country has waged a world-wide War on Drugs, hemorrhaging over $1,000,000,000,000 (yes- that's trillion) in a grossly failed attempt to stop drug trafficking.  All of this money, time, resources, and human life were squandered on battling the importation of natural substances such as cocaine and marijuana.  How much of that money was spent of drug education and drug treatment?  A very small fraction- we got Just Say No and D.A.R.E.

The truly frightening statistics with drug-related deaths and illnesses aren't found in the shady world of street trafficking, but right in front of our faces.  We are exposed on a daily basis to a LEGAL drug industry which makes far more money than the ILLEGAL one with Big Business and their pharmaceuticals. While 10,000 people die from Illegal Drug Use per year in our country, a whopping 100,000 die from legal prescription drugs which were pushed by Doctors, Television Ads, Clinics and anyone else getting their pocket lined by Drug companies.  These manufacturers hire lobbyists to corrupt Washington AND the FDA into not holding them accountable for these preventative deaths.  Pharmaceuticals are the #1 cause of death in the United States annually and are statistically 10x more lethal than all street drugs combined.

An American is arrested every 30 seconds for violating Marijuana laws.  $500 is spent by our government EVERY second to fight such illegal drugs.  Marijuana has NEVER killed a single person throughout thousands of years of medicinal, holistic, and cognitive use.  The Top 20 Big Pharma drug manufacturers average nearly $25 Billion in revenue EACH...and caused 1 MILLION deaths in the past decade.

Illustration Friday: Floundering

It's Illustration Friday again this week and we have the theme of "Soaked."  This stone age painting is from waaaaay back in 2005.  At the time, I was doing some very low brow painting aside from my illustration.  The panel was exhibited at The Alter Gallery here in Clarksville.  It was always fun painting on found wood, and just laying down some colors to see what happened.  The process took an entire 30 minutes I believe...  After making the first broad brown strokes on my white background, I decided I had an angel underwater.

"Floundering" acrylic and metallic marker on found wood panel

[Click here for a stream of ALL of this year's Illustration Friday entries!]

Happy Easter with Incarnations of Jesus

"Trinitarian Christ" inks on Bible page / 2007

Welcome to a time of year loaded with moral and religious high ground.  THE week started with Passover on Sunday on which I did exercises to limber my mind up after Rivers and Spires before I slid into Wednesday (4/20)- a night for reflection in which I cranked out some wonderful sketches for my Random Acts of Vibrance series as well as some other projects.  My week went totally Topsy-Turvy throughout Good Friday / Earth Day bringing me to the day we celebrate the myth and legend of the original Zombie himself...

Both of these works are from my Sacred Texts series, which were on display at the Tennessee Art League this past January - March...

"After the Crucifixion"  inks on page from a found copy The Holy Bible / 2007

"I have immunity from the Risen Jesus... and nobody beats The Riz."

-Mason Verger, from Hannibal

"Chocolate Jesus" inks on bristol / 2008 (for an online exhibit featuring works inspired by the music of Tom Waits)

Let's Play Jesus Dress-Up!!!

You Too Can Witness the Incredible Winking Jesus, one of the very first things I ever witnessed on the world wide web.

Illustration Friday: Bacon 'n' Eggs

Bacon 'n' Eggs (inks on found card / 2008)

This week's theme for Illustration Friday is "Chicken."  You can't have a chicken without the egg (or is it the other way around.)

My entry this week is from the same series I posted from last week (click here for last weeks where I explain the series.)  

Human beings absolutely love them some chicken.  You can't narrow it down to any racial stereotypes either, since worldwide, we slaughter 70 billion chickens annually, of which we consume their meat and eggs.  Only tens of millions of these are breeders and all male chicks are killed at hatching.  So we are sexually biased in our choice of the chicken we eat apparently but these baby chick corpses don't go to waste.  Alas, we turn them into fertilizer and pet food.  That's right- we even feed our animals and plants chicken as well!

It is estimated that the domestication of the chicken began about 10,000 years ago in Southeast Asia.  Today, there are more of them in the world than any other species of bird.  In the wild, a chicken has a pretty decent life expectancy of 5-10 years.  The marvels of modern meat processing have that down to just six weeks now.  Amazing what we can do with technology and world-wide demand for poultry... kinda scary though huh?    A chicken only lives .3%... that's three-TENTHS of a percent of it's expected lifespan.  To put it into perspective with that same figure and same scientific method, theoretically we could harvest fully-grown humans in just a few months, right?  Good thing we aren't cannibals.  

(Click here to see all my Illustration Friday weekly entries) 

Illustration Friday: Same Old 25th

This week's theme for Illustration Friday is "deja vu." The term is French in origin and translates to "already seen." Emile Boirac coined the phrase in his book The Future of Psychic Sciences around the turn of the 20th century. It is a reference to the compelling sense of familiarity which many people seem to experience occasionally throughout their lifetime. Deja vu is a very uncanny feeling when something about a situation triggers an ambiance in your mind that makes you believe you've dreamed about what is happening. Some say it's a simple glitch in the brain's wiring; some say it's a small glimpse into to the dormant portion of our mind which holds psychic abilities. Some people are more tapped into this than others . It's even believed by some that the feeling is us syncing into different alternate universes with different versions of our selves in the same exact situation. The only thing we know for certain is that it is a common unexplainable phenomenon which most of us experience several times throughout our lifetime.

"Same Old 25th" (inks on found card / 2008)

My entry for this week is from a series of illustrations I composed a few years back on index card dividers I found in my office. I've exhibited several of these in different shows themed around re-purposed materials and found object art. This work's character is in an exasperated state, probably after a uninhibited and uninspiring party and we get the feeling it's probably happened to him before.  The feeling of repeated disappointment led to the works's title listed below...

(Click here to see all my Illustration Friday weekly entries) 

Gimme Shelter (and Keeping the Internet Free)

I was pleased to stumble across the website for the Gimme Shelter project tonight.  I participated in this art show back in 2006.  Five years later, they still have their site and all the tremendous art which was created in archival form for you to see at your convenience.  Artists from all over the world painted and drew on cardboard to raise money for homeless charities.  The work went on a touring exhibit across the U.S. and Europe, where the pieces were auctioned off.  The ones not sold at the shows were sold on Ebay.  This was an artistic prompt which I could not ignore...

One of my donated works from 2006... mixed media on cardboard

At least once a week I'm brought to a realization of the magnificent power of the internet.   Artistic projects can be documented though online galleries, time lapse videos, blogs, etc.  The internet not only gives us the power to share but to also archive our experiences for generations to come.

While we wield this power of global communication and sharing, it is in extreme danger today.  Net neutrality is being stripped from our basic rights as we speak.  We already know that the internet is severely censored in other countries such as China.  This is mainly due to their need to shelter the public from critical views of their government and social structure for fear of organization and rebellion against it.  The United Nations have placed freedom of speech and religion at the forefront of what is defined as basic human rights.  Our own country was founded on these ideals as well.

Wikileaks has brought the issue of net neutrality into debate world-wide now.  I urge you to look through the smoke and around the mirrors and focus on the important issue at hand while all this transpires.  We are the audience and will live with the outcome.  Our government as well as others in the world are pressuring companies to do everything in their power to shut down this single website.  The content of this site (however you may feel about it) aside, it is perfectly legal to provide a forum for this information to be shared.  This week, under urging from governments affected by this information, companies such as Amazon stopped providing hosting for this website without justification.  Mastercard, Visa and PayPal have cut off use of their services to make donations to Wikileaks, severing the site's financial influx which keeps it hosted and alive.  These are actions by companies which should be completely neutral in such affairs, but are making biased decisions and dissolving the concept of net neutrality as we know it. 

What happens next year when your website or social networking profile can be hijacked, investigated, and removed for speaking out against capitalism or American ideology?  What happens when you can be charged as a terrorist for donating money to a cause you believe in (but goes against what the government prefers?)  We have to voice our opinions while we have the freedom of speech and thought still in tact (in person and in digital form.)  No matter your political stance or opinion of Wikileaks, acknowledge today that governments and businesses have NO place in deciding the content you access on the internet, just as they cannot ban a book or stop you from speaking on the street, or stop you from organizing.  You don't need to be sheltered from the freedom to inform yourself and in-turn speak your mind.