This past couple of weeks have been full of activity (work, painting, work, painting,) but at least a few days were spent leisure-like in Charleston, S.C. The delights there are many, in particular for the arts minded; the act of strolling, in itself, is a kind of cultural escape, given Charleston’s mise-en-scene. I like to think that there is no place else on earth with quite the blend of early American and Eurpopean architechture and structure as the Palmetto City. I often feel like I’m in a fantasized version of old-town Europe there, that the cobblestone streets and “Single House” style is almost theatrical in its charm.

Lucky for us, a client of mine offered their spacious (read: huge) 18th century-right-on-the Battery- house for the stay. This place was amazing, and a piece of history itself. Converted servants quarters, antique fixtures, huge landings, and super-tall ceilings are just a few of the authentic features of our staying residence. Right in the middle of it all, too, which made it especially nice for folks who love to stroll.

And the things you can find by walking there are delicious. We had dinner the first night at Fleet Landing Restaurant, a restored Naval debarkation point, which served up the best She-Crab soup (at least top-three) I’ve had, creamy with a hint of sherry. Other taste emporiums included Cru Cafe and Hominy Grill. On the downside of Charleston cuisine, I do sense a trend to “re-southernized” dishes; if the trendy eateries of the big coastal cities are to be believed, then all southerners eat Fried Chicken, cooked Cordon Bleu style, ladled with fancy gravy. Every mid-to-high level restaurant there feels it necessary to have a Shrimp and Grits dish. But, this self-consciousness aside, the low-country food does delight.

But this is an art blog (maybe art of living?), so what of the art in Charleston? For my tastes, there are a some choice offerings that must be seen, gallery and store-wise. First, for fellow representational lovers, there is Ann Long Fine Art, where both the ongoing collection (featuring works by Ben Long and D. Jeffrey Mims, for two of the many greats there,) and “current shows” (as of this month, a great showcase of nudes,) are sometimes breathtaking. Robert Lange Studios, meanwhile, has a fresh, contemporary p.o.v. on representational and sometimes abstract/expressionist work by new, and younger, artists. Part boutique, part gallery, Plum Elements looks far-eastward in it’s tastes. Many unique gift and art print opportunities to be found here, especially for hand-crafted Asian-themed works that go far beyond hippy craft. We’re quite proud of the Mayumi Oda screen print we picked up there.

I had forgotten, to be frank, the poetry and wealth of treasures in Charleston. Strange to think of the gamut that coastal South Carolina runs, from the uber-trash of Myrtle Beach to the paradise of Brookgreen Gardens (see my earlier post on this,) to the historical fantasy of the Palmetto City.

As I’ve had opportunity to mention here before, I’ve got a second identity as a rock n’ rollist. I’m thankful for all the great friends that this path has brought my way, and last night’s performance here in Charlotte was, in a sense, a celebration of that crew of folks. Last night, Nitehawk became the Big Brother and the Holding Co. to a living legend at Charlotte’s Snug Harbor.

Nitehawk, known for taking the cover band concept to new levels, signed on a couple of months ago to back up our good friend Travis from Brooklyn, who periodically “channels” Janis Joplin under the moniker Pearl. (Janis fans will no doubt catch the reference). Travis not only looks and sounds like Janis, he becomes the late great blues rock icon, down to his interactions with the audience and the free flowing Southern Comfort. Check out the pics of Pearl and the ‘hawk through the above thumbs.

I find the story of Pearl, and how Travis came to the music of Janis, quite a moving one. When he was in his teens, Travis lost his half-brother to an accident. He found out some time later that his late brother’s favorite music was that of Janis Joplin, her whole oeuvre, from the Big Brother years through the Kosmic Blues era. Travis had not experienced the music of Janis before that time, and the loss of his brother introduced him to the soothing balm of heavy blues. Janis, quite literally, saved his soul, and soon thereafter he felt the bond so intensely that he started to perform as “Pearl”.

Which brings us to last night, and the full-tilt boogie that shook the audience and healed a lot of tired winter souls. Props to Nitehawk– we rocked the tunes, playing with aplomb, among others, “The Intruder”, “Combination of the Two”, “Down on Me”, “Piece of My Heart” and “Ball and Chain”. As “four gentleman and one great, great broad”, Pearl and Nitehawk brought some of the spirit of ‘67 to the Queen City.

Here’s a collection of drawings from the first part of ‘08. Most are of the 20 minute model-pose type, but I’ve thrown a few of the five minute poses in for fun. All are charcoal, conte, and white chalk on either newsprint or Strathmore 400.

Truth is, sometimes I prefer the fivers– there’s a spontaneity to them, a lack of fussiness.

Dante’s Inferno has been inspirational lately. Not to imply that I have been in a “living hell,” or that “the straight way was lost”, (though I’ve certainly been accused of the latter.) Rather, the visual aspect of Dante’s verse has been a peculiar kind of nourishment for my imagination. In what some may call an act of masochism, given the horror resplendent in Dante’s Hell, I find myself reading a Canto or two before sleep at night, and my subsequent dreams have been visually vivid and dramatic. Better than a plate of chorizo sausage and refried beans, the Inferno has awoken the slumbering dreamer, at least for the time being.

Not a bad era to be experiencing The Divine Commedy, either. There are tons and tons of exhaustive web resources on the Commedy, Dante’s other works, and Dante’s life and times. A quick browse of the incredible Project Gutenberg site yields this set of links to many complete versions of the Divine Commedy. Not to mention a full, downloadable version of the edition with Gustave Dore prints. Columbia University, meanwhile has the impressive “Digital Dante” site, which has even more imagery, resources, and research materials.

You might have to shell out many Lire to get the best translations, however. I’m no expert on the work, but I’ve heard that the Charles Singleton translation is the best, given that he forgoes silly rhyming schemes (a la the ever-popular Ciardi) in favor of capturing the essence and force of the language (more like Nabokov’s Eugene Oneigin translation.) If this search from Google products is any indication, I better take good care of my edition.

Of all the stuff I learned in College– the factoids, cocktail party tidbits, habits bad and good, and actual truths (yes, real, actual truths)– one of the more lasting practices I retain to this day is that of journal keeping. Not necessarily of the Robinson Crusoe “today I found coconuts… tomorrow, more coconuts” variety. Rather, more of a visual record of some of the things I see, dream, or simply concoct, day in and day out, put down in a wide range of mediums (pen and ink, charcoal, watercolor, oil crayon, pastel, pencil) on the blank pages of hard bound sketch books.

I love these black volumes, with their creaky spines and smell of clean paper. The practice of extemporaneous drawing in them has become a daily ritual. Anything that comes to mind, as I put pen to paper, is fair game in the journal. It makes for a great personal record, and it’s a great means to flesh out larger ideas. After a few years, I’m left with a stack of books full of images, that are a a snapshot of my creative brain from the past. Sometimes, a mind is a strange thing to taste…

So today begins the process of taking the occasional piece from the journals and posting them online. Check out this handy flip-page “journal”, brought to you by the kind folks at FlashPageFlip.com. Stay tuned– more journally stuff to come!

In my ever-aching need to be on top of the techie/media heap (sounds kinky, no?) I have started exploring the multitude of networking/blogging/posting resources out there.  I’m not afraid to blabber on-and-on in new and various forums.  Be it a blog, a lens, a digg, or a mxlplx, give me a soapbox, and on it I will likely stand. 

Today, then, I joined squidoo.  Why, you may ask, should I push much of the same content found here into a new venue?  Why not be happy with the quietude of one’s own blog?  Curiosity, for the most part.  I want to cultivate an audience, and would be lying if I claimed a “fit though few” policy.  I want people to see this work, in this forum, and I’m curious if branching the message out to more mediums will bring an audience.  I have read some pretty dastardly yet ingenious methods of promoting non-content for the sake of profit.  So if I can use a modicum of this snuff to bring actual interested artists/culture vultures to creativekungfu.com, where’s the harm?

Being a longtime fan of sequential art, (my copy of the ginormous Little Nemo collection takes a place of pride in my studio,) it is with great pleasure that I have watched, over the past decade, the growth of longtime friend and collaborator Ben Towle into a top-notch comic artist.  A bit of history: I first met Ben when we were bright-eyed independents (me a sophmore, he a freshman,) at Davidson College, quick friends due to our shared tastes in music and pop culture.  I will never forget the first impression of his vintage-patch-fastooned denim jacket and his overall rock and roll style, a breath of fresh air from the general sense of preppiness that seeped into life at Davidson in the late eighties.   Little surprise that we would find ourselves, but a few years later, touring and playing together as musicians in a true Rock n’ Roll combo called Come On Thunderchild (H.G. Wells fans, as well as fans of British late-70’s art rock, will likely get the reference.) 

Never before has there been a truer bunch of rock and roll idealists, and a good deal of that idealism was thanks to Ben.  As a musician, he has huge ears and a pure vision.  We made a great record together, and played a ton of great shows all up-and-down the east coast.  Nothing to be ashamed of, to say the least.  I only hope that someday I can lure him back to the stage, to show the world what they might have missed the first time around.

Said return to the rockstage must not, however, keep Ben from his drafting table and postpone the inevitable: Ben Towle creates great visual stories.  For the past couple of years, I have been following the serialized version of Midnight Sun, the historical fiction account of a 1928 Italian airship crash in the North Pole.  At the time of its periodic release, I thought the comic was good, nearly great.  I found the characters interesting, though occasionally flat,  while I found the pace of the narrative intriguing.  He told the story of survival and human comedy/drama slower than most contemporary comics storytellers might.  My disdain for the pace of modern life (and art) immediately found a quiet little haven in this tale of pre-modern reporting, adverturing, and true-grit struggle.  I felt like I was reading a sequential version of a Sergio Leone tale.  Big, sometimes slow, but usually intriguing. 

Now, with the release of the whole story digest-style by SLG Publishing, I withdraw any prior reservations– in its collected, compact digest form, Midnight Sun is brillant.  The pace of the story, which might have felt slightly deliberate in the periodic version, now takes on a poignancy as a collected whole.  The pace now feels deliberately palpable– you can feel the waiting involved in this lost expedition’s struggle to survive.  The story delivers an emotional undercurrent, meanwhile, the likes of which I feel rarely in comics– Chris Ware comes to mind on this front.  There is tension sustained throughout.  Furthermore, there is a striking nobility to the characters:  they sense that they are in an absurd struggle against circumstance, and they bear it with an amazing kind of quiet emotion.  Towle seems to particularly avoid melodrama, in favor of quiet comic irony: witness the half-assed rescue attempts of the flamboyant aviator, who manages to show up to a dramatic ice-flow rescue three sheets to the wind.  The muttered curses of the un-rescued make for poignant comedy, despite the bleakness of the occasion.

Hurry out to your local vendor and purchase Midnight Sun.  With masterful storytelling and quiet dignity, it serves up like a welcome brandy on these chilly winter evenings.�

Had a blast ringing in the new year as keyboard/guitar guy with The Alternative Champs. The show was at the Visulite Theater here in Charlotte, and we Champs opted to throw a Prom/New Year’s hybrid party. So we had the usual New Years-isms (a ball drop, though it really was “ballz” that dropped,) confetti, champagne, etc., but we also had chaperones, school principals, and tons and tons of eager decked-out prom goers, ready to rock. And, in the tradition of all great proms, we gave the event a theme– “The Final Countdown,” evoking both the strains of the Europe classic cheese metal song (which we played,) and the visual image of modernist space stuff.

We were thus tasked with the job of decorating the event. Among the decorations were forty some-odd silver covered mobile pieces, shaped like space shuttles, saturns, stars, and astronauts, which hung from the ceiling. Balloons galore filed the theater’s aisles and ceiling space, the latter for the inevitable midnight balloon drop. And my assignment was to create the photo-booth background, the prom photo being a classic staple of any pimply faced teenaged prommer.

And so I found myself, two days before the event, stretching, gessoing, and stapling canvas to a 6′ x 8′ frame– easily the largest piece I have ever worked on. Due to size and cost limitations, I was forced to work on rough-hewn drop cloth canvas, and in acrylic paint, not my favorite because of the way it dries. The result, though, was pretty sucessful, and thanks to Brent of the Alt Champs, now a slew of prom pics, featuring many different characters standing in front of my space art backdrop, can be seen here.  Great photography by Charlotte’s own Hamilton Chesson.

It’s fun to watch the people change in front of the backdrop, as it stays the same. And yes, that’s me and my wife Patty in the first few images.

In addition to playing with charcoal and chalks, I expend some of my life’s energies performing music. Nitehawk, one of the groups I perform with around the region, has had a fun year playing shows in Charlotte, and, in July, recording a Christmas special for the local PBS station. Here is that performance, in all its glory.

 

 

 

 Also of video-note, the trailer to “Great World of Sound.” This is a film made in the area a couple of summers back that recently has had some success in the indie cinema world. Read more about it on imdb here. I was joined by my bandmates from Snagglepuss in a brief appearance, performing as musicians auditioning for the erstwhile music moguls in the film. Check us out in our instant of glory in the trailer, at about 1 min 43 sec!

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Took some time today to add and subtract from the painting and drawing sections. Most of this work is from within the last 3 weeks. Something about the dark and cold makes me want to retreat into my studio, happy elf-style.
Also, I have started to promote my skills in portraiture. I’ve been lucky to get a few commissions this year, and look forward to more in ‘08. My recurring obsession with Frans Hals probably has something to do with it…