The Seven Deadly Sinners

Crafters!

A current FFWD cover illo. showing a typically sordid scene common to Cowtown: crafters! And here they are, drinking nameless hi-balls, listening to "Emasculation Blues" by Big Ugly Flo McNeil (file under "Party Sax"), laughing, chatting, being sociable yet eschewing the typical girls' night out... *crafting*.

By day, you'd probably never know them from the innocent biddy across from you on the bus ride home. By night however, the (homemade) oven mitts come off, corks are popped, the sewing boxes and knitting baskets are revealed...

Who knows? Maybe you've got them in your town... or yours... OR YOURS!!!

The new honing, the new crafting

I've been really inspired lately by various doodles on the covers of old phonebooks, particularly those of my Uncle Hugh. Luckily he keeps all of his old phonebooks, both white and yellow pages, the oldest one going back to 1958 which was also the year Uncle Hugh fell off of an oil derrick onto a pile of rusty anvils. They didn't wear helmets in those days but rather those paper crowns you get in Christmas crackers. Although he was never quite the same, it seems that his daring, mildly crazy vision lives on in the new honing, the new crafting.

Just look around. And Catch the fever.

Boris Artzybasheff, 1931

Here's a scan from a book called "Poor Shaydulla", told and illustrated by Boris Artzybasheff/Macmillan 1931.

It's a children's story about a hapless lackwit who travels and has many adventures on his way to ask Allah (who is regulation Old Bearded White Guy God in the illustration) to make him rich. Shaydulla comes to a bad end because he is too stupid to see the riches before him; this is the final illustration in the book.

The art is classic Artzybasheff, gorgeous black and white design and pristine inkwork. I picked it up years ago at the Goodwill BookNook in Baltimore, and forgot I had it until BoingBoing started posting a lot of BA art recently. I love the book, and the art is marvelously disturbing, but some of that disturbance has nothing to do with the technical brilliance of the art. Sometimes, I guess, a story has its time to be told, and the times change in 76 years.

More Artzybasheff art: Artzybasheff on the Moon

One morning in the Middle Cambrian age

Here's a scan from one of my sketchbooks; we took a trip out to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, and sure, the big boned gals were fine, but the best thing in the place is the Burgess Shale room. From the RTM website:

"The Burgess Shale is a layer of rock found high in the Canadian Rockies in Yoho National Park, near Field, British Columbia. What was once a watery home to over 140 species of soft-bodied organisms is now a mountain ridge 2300 metres above sea level.
This full-colour, three dimensional walk-in diorama features 46 of the Burgess Shale creatures at 12 times their actual size. Imagine facing a creature with seven pairs of legs, seven sets of waving tentacles and a head that looks like a light bulb. Enter their strange world and marvel at the wonders that lived together 545-490 million years ago."

In other words, it's wicked cool. If you were a multi-bazillionaire, you'd have your bedroom done like this. Plexiglass floors float over demented, colorful creatures, monsters appear and disappear in the gloom, wackier than the craziest Max Fleischer cartoon. The only thing wrong with it is the size of the room. It's like a nightclub/bordello/theater of the bizarre/laugh in the dark ride/art gallery all rolled into one, and it should be 10 times bigger. The craziest thing is that all these creatures really existed.

And the King of them all is Opabinia. A 5 eyed vacuum cleaner, no artist can resist the subtle charms of Opabinia. You laugh, but if you google Opabinia you will be hooked, and soon little 5 eyes will appear in the corners of your work, mocking.
"Evolutionary dead end, am I?", smirks Opa-B. "I will live on in the imagination of artists and little kids forever!"

Envy

Every year La Luz de Jesus Gallery has their famous group show called “Everything but the Kitschen Sync “, where tons of artists and illustrators submit their work for possible inclusion for this event. I’ve been lucky enough to have been accepted; this being the third year. Here is my piece.

The End of the Affair - Yawr.

FOUR SINS OF SEVEN

And this I clothe my naked villainy
With old odds ends, stol'n forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil,
Four deadly sins of seven, methinks a perfect fit!

And now for something completely different

An adorable li'l one eared hyena puppy. Oh the cuteness! I want to kiss him on his stinky head!

Sure, Cute Overload (see link under Great Blogs of Fire) has cornered the blog market with sweet faced, fluffy, big eyed animals photographed in situations calculated to make them appear even more sweet faced, fluffy, and big eyed, but over here at the Seven Deadly Sinners we promise one thing that Cute Overload does not. And that promise is: NO UGLY BABY PICTURES!

There you are, getting your cute fix, playing with the CuteTracker (tm), cooing and squealing over a wee bunny, a barely ambulatory kitten, a puff-cheeked rodent or adorable Italian Greyhound...and then, like a large, very uncute, buzzing hairy fly drowning in the bubbling soup of cute cuteness, there is a ghastly, splotchy  human primate looking out at you from your screen. GAH!

And that, my friends, is when I go and look at the baby hyena. And all is well with my world.

More pix of this little guy, and some lion cubs too.

Until We Beat Again

This is my last contribution. Can we move on to Easter Bunnies and Squids now? The squiggles are intentional and also integral.

Happy Valentines Day, from a Stud of Magnificent Proportion