It Might Be Art

This Blog

2009-09-27T00:53:00.004-06:00

I don't use it anymore. It's very dead. I do other stuff now, like work for this company, post new work here, and run this little T-shirt company.

Appareldise

2009-06-16T18:10:00.002-06:00

This is just so everyone knows, the name Appareldise. I call it. You can't have it. It's what I'm calling the next version of my website. Appareldise. Yeah. Welcome to Appareldise.

Web 2000.0

2009-05-06T00:04:00.001-06:00

Video on Reproduction and Authenticity

2009-05-02T21:19:00.003-06:00

Excellent video on mass reproduction and the idea of authenticity:

"Iconoclastic destruction is simultaneously productive. The modes of destruction resemble modification strategies in remix culture."

versions

Masks Series

2009-04-07T13:51:00.003-06:00

I used to believe that one of life's ultimate goals involved capturing 150 electronic monsters.

Clay Pot Animation

2009-04-06T12:53:00.001-06:00

Clay Pot Animation
Originally uploaded by samanpwbb

Video my girlfriend and I made with pots. There are 12 pots total, and in different positions in the walk cycle. The animation didn't turn out perfectly (neither of us had ever done any animation before), but it was a fun little project.

I got blogged

2009-03-30T14:28:00.002-06:00

My latest shirt at DBH has gotten some coverage on T-shirt sites. Kinda cool:

teehunter.com and theawesomer.com are a couple.

In other news, I went to NYC over the last week, saw lots of art.

This was at the Whitney:

I done won a t-shirt competition

2009-03-20T11:44:00.003-06:00

Woa, they printed it hilariously huge. Buy it here.

Progress report

2009-03-06T15:13:00.002-06:00

I finished the basic designs for the three major deities. I decided to draw inspiration from old video game screenshots for colors. It's important that the visual language I develop with the project neither latches on too strongly to mythology or too strongly to the subject matter, but instead is a sensible synthesis between the two.

The works should represent what might plausibly arrive as a visual language to a new religion based on pop culture icons, rather than just being parodies of either video games or religious iconography.

Ben Jones

2009-02-26T13:04:00.000-06:00

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2374

"The exhibition consists of five components of equal importance to the artist: Ladders, Minimalism, Cartoon Drawings, Dogs, and Bricks. Buy a pizza and throw it into a dog park. Build a doghouse out of bricks. Draw cartoons to sell to street wear corporations and gorge yourself on soft pretzels. Then come to the exhibition."

Towards a perfect icon

2009-02-26T03:42:00.003-06:00

Right now I'm trying to refine this image. I want the care and time and thought that went into each one to impact the viewer immediately. They should be as close to perfect as possible.

A few goals here:

-The figure should be aggressive, strong, and still.

-contained yet chaotic.

-Balance between articulating depth and form, and rhythm and pattern.

Megaman

2009-02-21T22:08:00.003-06:00

Yeay. Mega man. That's 3/3. I just set up my studio space in the Senior Studies studio, and surrounded my desk with images of religious icons and pictures of super heroes and other cool stuff. Time to really get to work.

Exploded action heroes

2009-02-17T00:28:00.009-06:00

Finally getting somewhere. They should look like dieties and also like "exploded" diagrams, revealing what's inside. There will also be a Mega Man.

Plans are changing

2009-01-25T15:08:00.004-06:00

I've decided that I'm going to paint. No more fake religion. 6 ft x 4 ft, vertical paintings. The digital art approach just isn't going to have the impact in the end that I want. There can be something a bit cheap about prints. I'm going to still stay on the same general subject matter, and still do stickers, but mainly I'm going to make oil paintings. I think. Still up in the air. Don't really have to decide for a few weeks. Just wanted to get some words down right now.

The main reason for my change of approach comes from a late night drawing session last night. I came up with this:

I can see that on a big canvas, with a white border and really vibrant colors. I'll do 4-6 of these paintings of symbols, and then maybe do some smaller drawings too. I still want some narrative elements to them, and if I do these straightforward paintings, that'll be difficult to fit in. That's why I'd do the drawings.

What I like about the drawing above is that its simple and has a lot of impact, yet it retains the decorative and rhythmic elements that I like about folk art and religious art. Its also still very iconographic.

2009-02-06T21:28:00.005-06:00

So right now, I tentatively plan to do four paintings. Each one will be a "portrait" of a character from the mythology of pop culture. One of the handful of fictional pop-culture heroes/villians the project will focus on is Darth Vader. Here's a version of the Vader mask I did based on a Thai temple painting.

Been sketching a lot in my sketchbook. Lots of stuff sourced from the Mayans and Olmecs, and also from mythologies from all over the place. I want a really good mix of stuff, to the point where the boundaries between cultures start to fade away and the works enter an imaginary place where pop-culture and mythology start to blend.

Dinosaurs instead of Horses

2009-01-18T21:04:00.003-06:00

Horses have always been important symbols of power and wealth and stuff. If I'm going to make some art about the stuff I want to make art about, I need to use the horse symbol. Horses are boring though, so I just now decided that instead of depicting people riding horses, all my people will ride dinosaurs and maybe tigers(like some dudes do in Tibetan Buddhist art).

Ninja Turtle Guardian Angel

2009-01-13T01:36:00.001-06:00

Quick sketch, but this is vaguely in the direction I want to take things.

2009-01-10T21:10:00.004-06:00

Images from a 1950's children's Bible:

Via Golden Gems . There's a huge pile of these. The style is very reminiscent of medieval European folk art. I like the flatness and the decorative character of these.

Symbols

2009-01-07T13:45:00.005-06:00

All religious art has its set of symbols right? The neo-classical artists had a wide range of symbols based on ancient roman and greek mythology: cherubs, arrows, fruit, even many characters would exist solely as symbols. All types of Christian iconographic art used angels, crosses, halos, books, and other objects to express particular ideas. The Mayan, Egyptian, and many cultures had glyph-based communication systems. These glyphs existed somewhere between art and language and used consistent set of symbols.

I tend to use a lot of symbols in my work. Most of these symbols don't have well defined meanings, but they show up over and over and start to develop a life of their own with specific associations.

Some drawings are actually made up entirely of symbols, so they share a bit in common with ancient glyph based artwork. For example:

We've got basic stuff like triangle and squares, but also trees, TV's, clouds, bolts, eyes, thought and speech bubbles, "guardian" characters(the shrouded figues with circles for faces), and pipes. I need to work on giving these symbols definite characteristics. Part of how I'll do that is by looking at what associations these symbols already have. That's the first step towards creating my own iconography to go with the fake religion.

Most religions probably begin with the theology and the art follows. With this project I'll undertake the opposite: manufacturing a religion out of symbols that already exist.

Art History Professor Quote

2009-01-06T21:29:00.002-06:00

"I argue western art has a PREJUDICE towards order". Hence all the squares.

It's interesting that so much art in the grand scheme of things, especially when looking back through time, is about forcing order onto the world, when it could have as easily been about turning orderly things on their heads.

Maybe these days it does quite a bit of both though, ever since Rauschenberg or something.

Hey There, Here's What I'm Going to Do Here

2009-01-06T14:22:00.002-06:00

My last chance at art in college is coming up fast. Next semester, the rest of the senior art majors and I will have our senior shows in May. The show is part of a required class at St. Olaf simply called Senior Studies. Since I'm not sure what I want to do, but know that I want it to be very involved and well researched, I'm going to start now. This blog will become a place where I brainstorm. I'll still try to periodically post other stuff here as well, but I hope next semester I'll be able to focus all my creative energy on this one project.

Very rough list of some things I want to do for Senior Studies:
-Turn the stuff I think about and draw about in my sketchbook into a fake religion. This is the core of the project.
-Focus on developing my vocabulary of characters, objects, and symbols rather than do something completely new
-Spend time looking at the aesthetics of religious art from all over the world. I hope to in some cases directly reference religious and iconographic art in my project.
-Learn about the current and past relationship between these three things: religion, marketing, and art. Anyone have book suggestions?
-Make the final project a spectacle, not just a set of drawings or prints.
-Stickers
-T-shirts
-Digital Prints
-Drawings
-The work will be personal, about my own experiences with religion
-The work will be about video games
-The work will be about religion
-The work will be about politics
-The work will be about mass media

That's all for now. I gotta hit up the art supply store right now and grab a fresh sketchbook.

Superstructure

2008-10-30T13:16:00.004-06:00

So I made this in two nights between 1am and 4am. Its about the eternal struggle between math and art and science and religion and stuff.

I can never stay still stylistically. My work is all over the place. Maybe that's okay though.

Art of the future

2008-11-06T22:52:00.004-06:00

Science Machine from Chad Pugh on Vimeo.

I feel a connection to this video that some might describe as spiritual. It must show about 80 hours of work. Watch it and know the science of art.

You can also buy prints of the image from the guy's website- just follow the vimeo link.

Ernst Haeckel

2008-10-21T00:05:00.002-06:00

This is a little tribute to a guy known as Ernst Haeckel. It's a pen drawing with a Haeckel print underlayed (they're public domain). So yeah, maybe he was into eugenics, but he made some psychedelic nature art. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur

Art Couch!

2008-10-12T01:19:00.002-06:00

A bunch of friends and I got together and painted/collaged what you see above. Starting at the beginning of this semester, I've organized a weekly drawing get together thing and we've had a great time so far. Who wouldn't want this thing in their living room? Imagine if we did this to every piece of furniture in a room? We're working on a dresser right now.