brush pen
i’ve been at the family compound the last several days without my usual art supplies, so i’ve been drawing with a pentel brush pen. usually i hate brush pens, but i’ve actually been having fun with the darned thing!
more birches. i will probably try coloring this one sur l’ordinateur.
gentlemen, along with bears and screenprinted bicycles, are in the air. here are their accoutrements. while looking for pictures of macassar oil bottles (for keeping the gentleman’s hair well-groomed), i found out that there is a thing called privy excavation. basically, there are these dudes that find old outhouse holes and dig them out. i didn’t know people put anything down there but your standard numbers one and two, but apparently they were used for trash chutes as well. so these guys that excavate them have been finding dolls that girls’ evil brothers threw in the toilet and hyatt’s infallible life balsam and hair oil bottles.
this is kind of a strange one, and will probably make more sense if i color it in. i was picturing it as something like “The Lady of the House Returns to Her Cats After a Long Antipodean Journey.” i stole her fox fur from this photo of a 20s sydney inmate. there is also a tin ceiling, a fainting couch, and a picture rail.
i think mama took this picture in kyoto. some of the flavors in katakana read: ba ni ra (vanilla), ra ben da (lavender), ro su to pea na tsu (roast peanut), me ron (melon), mee ru ku (milk), and ba na na.i thought it might make a nice print. could be satisfying to use a bajillion different colors.
my flickr page has all these biggerer.
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the great depression is so visually interesting. feed sack dresses! flour sack undies! cardboard insulation! flattened tin can roofs! dugouts! canned veg! people were so resourceful.
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lauren & alexa woodward at the velo rouge
we have had traveling musicians, their Danes, and their vanagon around the last couple days. our old pal lauren a.k.a. linky (a gentle giant) has come through town on tour with alexa woodward. lauren plays the washboard, and alexa plays the banjo and they sing together. it is beautiful!
Filed under digital, illustration, sketchbook | Tags: alexa woodward, banjo, lauren, velo rouge, washboard | Comments Off on lauren & alexa woodward at the velo rougewhy does the virgin have 8 arms?
MAHARIA
esther was telling us about how in 19th century california, men from india were marrying mexican women. there were laws against brown people marrying white people*, but indian-mexican marriage was ok. they had similar material cultures (chilis, rotis, household altars, etc.) so one would think it would work out beautifully. but sometimes it didn’t, and we were picturing a terrible argument starting with “honey, why does the virgin have eight arms?”
*‘These marriages were more than a matter of individual choice, however, for the fact was that miscegenation laws prohibited marriages across racial lines in California until 1948 [<---OMG!! --ed.]. Most California county clerks saw the Punjabi men as colored, or “brown,” the word they used most often on the marriage license to describe the men’s race. Thus the women the Punjabis married also had to be perceived as “brown,” and that generally meant women of Mexican ancestry.’
Filed under digital, illustration, sketchbook | Tags: 8 arms, indian, mexican, virgin | Comments Off on why does the virgin have 8 arms?julia pastrana: singer, dancer, & bearded lady
for my beards series… let’s not forget the ladies, eh?
Julia Pastrana
Charles Darwin described her thusly: “a remarkably fine woman – she had a thick and masculine beard.” a charming person and graceful dancer with a beautiful voice, julia toured the world as a bearded lady in the mid-1800s.
mutants!
i ate a strawberry that had a nose the other day, and it made me have a think on a new print.
looking at hordes of these on flickr gives one a strange squicky feeling.
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