My friends, their underwear, and me.
I used to paint and draw robots, but that’s a tale for another time.
Lately I’ve been making pieces that involve superheroes and villains. This is an attempt to explain what that’s all about. Hopefully it doesn’t make my art worse in the eye of the beholder. That tends to be the result of most so-called artist statements. Ooh, that’s an idea for another blog post: Why I Hate Artist Statements. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Heroes. Villains. I make them. Here’s why. Sort of.
Here’s how it started, anyway. I’ve got a dog. He’s kind of a pain in the ass, but that’s yet another blog post. Almost daily I walk my mutt past a local halfway house. And every single day for about a year I saw this guy sitting outside smoking and holding a diet Pepsi. Slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, he barely appeared to be alive and never moved so much as a muscle. The cigarette would dangle limply from his hand. I never saw him actually take a sip of his diet Pepsi. Every day it was the same.I couldn’t get him out of my head. I wondered what his story was.I wondered if life had defeated him or if that was just how I interpreted things. I just didn’t have enough info to go on. So I made up my own story. Actually it wasn’t really a story. Just a notion. A kernel. A seed. A nugget.
This nugget churned around my head for quite a while. It floated in the nebula that is my mind. And it mixed with some junk that had been taking up space for quite a while. See, I grew up watching a deluge of Saturday morning cartoons, reading obscene amounts of comic books, and reading every single science fiction and fantasy novel I could get my hands on. Escapism at its finest, most mediocre, and downright horrible. I didn’t care. I devoured it all. Then I stopped. Sold all of my comic books. Started reading ‘real’ books and watching ‘important’ films. Grew up. Ish. But the damage had been done. All of these characters, images, figures set up house in my skull and to date I haven’t managed to evict them. I’ve given up trying. Well, the nugget melded with this mess of comic book sci fi fantasy that is my imagination and out churned the Spaceman. He’s a sad sort of individual. Lonely. Isolated. And usually dressed in tighty whities.
I first sketched the Spaceman one day while at a coffee shop with my friend Lisa. She was being actually productive. I was bored and attempting to entertain myself. So I sketched a fat guy wearing a space mask. In his underwear. And I liked it. More than anything I’d drawn in a while.
Around the same time I was offered a solo show at Cha Cha, a fantastic local hair salon. I had about 6 weeks to prepare for the show. I painted 10 paintings of robots. I hated all of them. So, with about 2 weeks to go, I started over. I started doing more sketches of the underwear-wearing spaceman. And, surprisingly quickly, a show came together. The pieces, at least to me, had a newness to them. A freshness that I hadn’t managed to capture in my art for a while. I think there’s a sort of duality to the character. A combination of melancholy and the obsurd. Optimism and despair. The future and the end of it all. One of these works, Spaceman Could Walk, I based loosely on a photograph of my friend Matt. I hadn’t based any art on any sort of reference material in a long, long while. It sort of led to the next bit of development.
I felt Spaceman needed a supporting ‘cast of characters’. So I drew a superhero team. A sad, sorry superhero team. All male. All chubby. Most in their underwear. A mish-mashed, twisted combination of He-man figures, Hannah Barbara, and Superfriends.
It was a start, but I still thought that something was missing. Eventually I realized what was missing. Super villains. Female super villains. Because, you know, girls are evil. That, and I like the play on duality that goes with having male heroes and female villains. The only problem is, I’m horrible at drawing females from memory. I can’t do it. Every time I try the figures end up looking like David Bowie in drag. I needed reference material. I needed models. I started recruiting my friends to pose for me. As super villains. In ridiculous poses. In their underwear.
It’s an awkward thing asking someone to pose in any way, shape, or form. Turns out it’s even more awkward when they’re friends of yours and they’re posing in their skivvies. But a funny thing happened. Turns out I had friends that were willing to do it. Some even volunteered without being asked. And the art stopped being entirely about me. Now it’s yet another mishmash. A combination of the strange goings-on in my head and the physical characteristics and personality traits of the model. Which seems somehow fitting. It adds another level of duality to it all. Me versus the model. Or me and the model. Or me and my various friends.
To date all of the models have been female, but I think the next step is recruiting some male friends to be heroes. We’ll see how that goes. Something tells me it will take awkward to a whole new level. My hope is, though, that something interesting will come of it.
As far as what the art itself ‘means’, well, yeah. Here’s the thing. I don’t know. At least I don’t go in with a specific plan or an idea of “I’m going to make a piece about so and so”. I wing it. I try and make art that looks good. Or bad. Or interesting at least. The rest, to some extent, just sort of happens. I’ve got a few themes I do keep touching on: regret, acceptance, loneliness, love, optimism, pessimism. But I like to mix those with a healthy dose of I’m-drawing-this-to-amuse-myself-and-hopefully-others. Maybe one day I’ll figure out exactly why I’m making the stuff I make. Until then I’ll just keep doing it and hopefully figuring it out as I go along.
So, yeah. I draw my friends. In their underwear. Let me know if you want to be a villain. Or hero. If not, I understand. Hopefully you’ll at least keep reading my unfocused ramblings and looking at the stuff I make.
EDIT - Oh yeah, anyone that poses gets a piece of art in exchange. Just an FYI.
An evil cat and a boxing dragon
So it turns out ‘process’ blog posts are usually incredibly dull. I’ll do my best to keep with that time honored tradition.
Anyway, the two to three of you that are reading this probably already know that I’ve started giving away drawings via Twitter.( By the way, if by some random chance you came across this blog and you don’t know me, feel free to follow me for your own chance to win. @mchuman or http://twitter.com/#/mchuman) The winners of these drawings get to pick the subject matter. The first two winners chose: 1) an evil robot cat, and 2) a robot dragon fighting an alien. Yes, I have strange friends. Yes, all cats are evil. Yes, a robot dragon is a semi-strange request.
Like all good artists I start by thoroughly researching the matter at hand. In this case I googled “evil cat” and printed out the first two images that caught my eye. Oh, and did look up “boxing gloves” for the robot vs alien drawing, but I didn’t bother to take a pic of said nonsense.
Then I make many, many detailed sketches. Or one. And it’s not usually very detailed. I like to work out any problems or whatnot on the actual piece itself. It tends to give the art a more human feel in my oh-so-humble opinion.
After sketching for a good 30 seconds I start on the actual pieces. In these two particular cases I began with a light pencil underdrawing followed by a black Sharpie outline. Oh, and for the cat piece I decided that I didn’t want the image centered. I wanted to push it further up into a corner to make it more dramaticamal. With the dragon/alien piece I wanted to sort of fill the whole space with the creatures, a la a kid’s drawing. And the dragon is boxing the alien. Just because.
After finishing the outlines I begin to color in the inner shapes, this time using mainly acrylic paint. So, yeah, each of these pieces are technically painted as well as drawn but calling them drawpaintings or paintdrawings just sounds idiotic. They’re drawings. Deal with it.
My way of making art tends to be a game of give and take. I cover some initial elements with paint. I spill on the paper and have to make it work somehow (see the pinkish-red cloudlike background on the cat piece). I grab fluorescent glitter and sprinkle it about haphazardly. I sneak in some glow-in-the-dark paint. I shellac. I erase. I draw with sketchy pencil lines at the end of it all to make it look more scribbly. None of these things translate overly well into a how-I-made-this blog post. Sorry. I’m skipping to the end. Without further adieu here is “Fluffy Goes Postal” and “Mechadragasaur Vs. Globulous”.
It turns out my process isn’t all that interesting, really. It’s an intuitive thing. I can’t really tell y’all how I know when a piece is finished. Or how exactly said piece gets to the finish line. What I can say is that I tend to mess up. A lot. It used to drive me bonkers. Now I consider it an essential part of the process. I’ve learned more from mistakes than I ever have from “perfect pieces”. I’ve also never made a perfect piece. And I don’t think I’ve ever made something that I’m 100% happy with. I think that’s sort of healthy. Ish.
I think anyone that’s truly satisfied with a piece of art they’ve made is either A) a liar, B) an arrogant prick, or C) bad.
I’m probably all three of those.
On the matter of talent and crossword puzzles
Bear with me. I’m extremely late to the whole blogging thing. And I don’t even know what a ‘micro-blog’ is. But on this page I’m going to ramble about various topics that interest me. Mainly art, graphic design, and bacon. Oh, and I promise the design of this site will get better. Well, hopefully.
Anyway, my mom always said I had talent. Not for art, mind you. Or for writing. She always thought I had a penchant for crossword puzzles (which I hate) and a knack for remembering useless facts (which I do not) . I think her lifelong dream is for me to appear either on Jeopardy or Who Wants to be a Millionaire. I think this because every time she sees me she tells me I should try out for each of those shows. My mother clearly doesn’t realize how many brain cells I’ve killed over the years. Pretty much the only thing mom has said about my art is, “You sure do have an interesting way of looking at things.” Okay, that’s not entirely true. I distinctly remember her liking a crayon drawing of a tiger I drew in first or second grade.*
Oh, and I pretty much failed every art class I took in high school. It might have had something to do with me insulting a certain painting of a panda on the first day of class. Sorry, Ms. Schabo. It was a lovely painting. And you were a lovely teacher. I’m sure you weren’t employed by the school mainly to coach volleyball.
So, of course, I majored in art in college. More specifically, I majored in printmaking. I took every available course on the subject. I sucked at it. I was truly horrible. I think that over the run of six classes and four and a half years of study I might have made one semi-passable woodcut. Maybe. So, now, of course, I’m taking up screen printing. I am not entirely sure I will do any better this time around. I’ll keep all of you posted. And by “all of you” I mean the one or two people that might stumble upon this blog while looking for porn, bacon, robots, or any combination thereof.
I also paint and draw. I’ll be writing about my extremely involved process of creating a drawing in the next post.
*My mother actually is pretty supportive of what I do, even if she doesn’t understand it. The painting at the beginning of this post is one of her favorites. She will probably get it for Christmas So, yes, some of what I will be blogging about might be hyperbole.
