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ART BY A PAGAN IN ARIZONA
Desiree Valenzuela sends you greetings from beautiful Cornville, Arizona! The year just past was a somewhat chaotic, ooops I mean interesting, erm...challenging? Yep, challenging year. Painting has helped me maintain my grasp on sanity. I hope you enjoy seeing some of the things I've done during 2021. These are all the leg bones of goats and an elk. I'm still keeping my eyes peeled for another skull to paint.
PAINTINGS BY MFLINN
Welcome 2022 and here we are again at Expo! Like a lot of you I’ve been fairly isolated these last couple of years and haven’t really been too motivated to schlep paintings here and yon in hopes of a show at galleries in my part of the world. Besides I’m kind of done with “auditions” in my old age. That isolation inspired me to try something I never thought I would - portrait painting. I started out painting myself so that if I failed miserably I wouldn’t offend someone I care about. I’m fully aware of my limitations in this area and I’m pretty hard to offend, even by my own self. A surprising thing happened though - people reacted positively to the self-portrait so I jumped in with both big feet to try my best to paint my wife, Cheryl. Again, the painting was well received by the few who saw it but, most importantly, Cheryl liked it. I thought of the set of paintings as a kind of “we were here” project and named them “The Kilroy Set” after the World War 2 graffiti that declared “Kilroy Was Here!”. A hat tip to Cmae for the inspiration in portrait color modeling.
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I’m enjoying the freedom that comes with not painting towards a show and since I find myself less concerned with “what might sell” I’m finally painting a lot of stuff from my Someday File - that morgue of drawings and photos and just plain weird ideas I’ve written down over the years. Some of the new stuff is pretty derivative and there are a lot of recognizable ripoffs in some of the new/old stuff but I’m really enjoying painting without worrying about the commercial viability of the results. It’s fun. “The Sun Mechanic” is brand new as of last week, just finished it before the Expo was announced. The title is taken from David Bowie’s song, “Memory of a Free Festival” in which we are told, “The Sun Machine is coming down and we’re gonna have a party, uhhuhuh…”. The Expo is kind of like that.
COMIC BOOK PAGES BY MATT Z
Hi, Matt Zimmer here, creator of the comic “Gilda And Meek & The Un-Iverse”. The past few Kos Expos have had me deal with either a specific story theme or character. And I don’t feel like I’ve necessarily shown my best, well, ART yet. Frankly, I am a crappy artist. You read my story for the words, not the illustrations. It can best be described as a screenplay with pictures, (the Narrator even gives stages directions!) and that’s how it usually works out.
But frankly, I do have an actual artistic gift. In fact, if I couldn’t draw at all and a genie granted me talent in one specific aspect of art, I would have chosen the only thing I’m actually already good at: Facial expressions. I’m going to share some interesting facial expressions here. Are they my best facial expressions? No. Because like any artistic talent, I improve on them over time, and really the only ones I can really share with any degree of comfort come from the 34 issues I have already posted on my site.
gildaandmeekandtheuniverse.blogspot.com/…
All of my higher tier stuff comes from issues I haven’t posted yet and would be major spoilers that I wouldn’t want to leak. But I think these this pages are pretty memorable examples from the first 34 issues.
My first expression that I’m proud is something, I AM a little reluctant to share. It comes from the early issue of Gilda And Meek “Skeletons”. To be completely blunt, years later in hindsight I greatly regret this gory, horror-themed issue, and believe the violence and women in jeopardy tropes are in extremely poor taste. On a very real level “Skeletons” is the issue I am most ashamed of. There’s a point to the dark mayhem and violence, but it’s upsetting, and possibly triggering to people who would ordinarily be friends to the rest of the franchise and put them off of it entirely early on.
But, damn, it’s the second panel of this page, that slays me. Whatever else you want to say about how exploitative “Skeletons” is (and you’d probably be right) check out the expression of compassion on Charlie the Warlock’s face as well as the Mother’s pensive gratitude. It kills me dead. And when I reread the issue, instead of throwing up my hands in disgust, the twist ending gives me chills instead because of it. “Skeletons” is arguably one of the worst issues in the franchise. But when I wrote and drew it, it was the best of the seven I had done up to that point and informed everything past it. You want to say “Matt Zimmer is a gross creep” after reading it, I’ll understand. But it’s the expressions on Charlie and the Mother which makes me disagree with that notion. Check it out
This next picture is also a bit disturbing and in bad taste, in a scary rather than touching way. However, the expression on the demonic Psycow’s face as his prisoner Mistress Augatha is tripping balls on mushroom soup is pretty wild.
Finally this page is sort of a comedy of errors between Gilda and Gabrielle as Gilda awkwardly tries to comfort her frenemy after a devastating loss. Good expressions aren’t simply essential for broad dramatic moments or exaggerated cartoon comedy. They also can add a subtle human element and make sad things seem absurd and vice versa. Gilda believes herself to be the most insightful person on Earth, so the fact that she STILL can’t get a beat on Gabrielle’s possibly sinister intentions towards her really frustrates her.
That’s it for this year. I hope you liked them.
PAINTINGS BY RALPHDOG
PAINTINGS BY MICHELEWLN
These three paintings are done in acrylics. I am an expressionist artist which means that the paintbrush becomes an extension of the images in my mind. I always have an image in my mind when I paint. I have been an artist for all my life. I have a second grade report card where Mrs. Bluestein wrote "Take a look at her art!"
PAINTINGS BY STARHAWK
Kifri Cover art is a portrait of my dog from years ago. Nala is a basenji and the same breed of the dog as in my novel. This is a sample of my pet portrait work. Acrylic on board.
Old Abe – A portrait of the bald eagle mascot of the Civil War Union regiment the 8th Wisconsin. Another pet portrait, though a bit unusual. Acrylic on canvas 36 X 48.
The Last Siberian – Another wildlife piece. Acrylic on canvas 24 X 36.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANGMAR
3 PAINTINGS BY Cmae
Some of my newest paintings, I hope you guys enjoy these. The portraits are based on my memories of old friends. The vase was just to see if I could manage at all to paint a colored glass vase, it was interesting to try and do. I think I will try some more down the road.
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Impedementia
By Clio2
A selection in covid-time. Inspired by writers and commenters here, each of these items originally appeared in DK under one of the series “WriteOn!”, “Language of the Night,” or “Morning Open Thread.”
As our last two trips around Sol turned more and more surreal, chats in the virtual coffeehouse of DK mentally melded with literature, history, personal history, and nighttime dreams. Moods meandered from gloom through humor.
Consumer warning: Not academically certified. For entertainment purposes only. Loan-phrases crop out often: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Thanks for the space.
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Early lockdown: May 29, 2020
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Deconstructulation
Here lying on its side we see
Ozymandias’ effigy.
Things fall part, and wotthehell,
I sit composing doggerel
While worlds devolve from bad to worse
And Love rides shotgun in the hearse.
If one thing could be saved alone,
I want Will’s sonnets, carved in stone.
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Maria Dahvana Headley just took a first-place Hugo Award for her new, highly colloquial, irreverent, and feminist translation of Beowulf. (Nice review in The New Yorker.) A discussion led by DrLori at “Language of the Night,” inspired some frivolity:
After Spending Some Hours With Headley’s Beowulf
Dude! Grendel came down like a wolf on the fold,
While the swan-path lay shimmering siver and gold,
Yet what murdering monster’s a match for the wrath
Of dad-bros and frat-bois and Sylvia Plath?
Dude’s mother was tougher, but Beowulf got her;
That cage-hash’s tag Twittered over the water;
Horatio stood last by this warrior worth Ilion,
As Artus made earth-ichor gush gold-vermilon.
Bro, that Serpent still snores, on swords rotted with rust,
Till all of our mss. mingle in dust.
NOTES (with apologies to those who do not need any):
Title: borrowed from John Keats’s “On First Looking Into Chapman’s (translation of) Homer”
”Dude!” Yes, that is how Headley’s translation opens.
”Like a wolf on the fold”: from Byron’s “The Destrution of Sennacherib”
”Swan-path”: Old English style “kenning,” meaning the ocean, actually used in Beowulf
Sylvia Plath: feminist poet (as most know, but in case)
“Horatio”: Wiglaf, the loyal man with Beowulf at his death, as Horatio was to be with Hamlet
”IIion”: Troy, referencing another epic tradition
”Artus”: Old name of King Arthur, meaning “bear.” Beowulf (“bee-wolf”) also means “bear” as bears destroy hives for the honey
”Earth-ichor”: the blood of Beowulf’s third foe, the earth-dwelling dragon. Ichor was divine blood in Greek tradition.
”Gush gold-vermilion”: adapted from “gash gold-vermilion” in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover”
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Way back in May of 2020, when covid had just begun to bite, Nick Asbury described in The Guardian how he wrote 1,000 poems in 1,000 days—on his phone. I gave it a try and lasted only 30. :-) This was one quickie.
Identification
Can I see
Some ID
He said
She pulled out
Her pocket
Mirror
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“When the whole world is on fire and the people you love are at risk, what should you write about?” —Charlie Jane Anders (quoted by not a lamb here on DK), September 2021
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Noche
The night after the day after
the end of the world
their rafts canoed the broken asphalt
and most pulled off into
L.G.’s filling station,
beat-up Prius after brand-new Escape,
and many got stuck there
out of gas. No gas.
Back in the kitchen Carlos
grilled the final
frozen burritos. Marta folded
them neatly in red-and-white check
single-serve coffins, handing
these out at random.
Paper napkins flapped and flew
Like pigeons released.
Clusters coalesced. To rotate
maps, probe for a cell phone
pulse. A few souls forged out,
resolute, breasting the arid mesquite.
Two former lovers met and
Were sharing stories.
Over at the gift shop where
her huband last night
Suddenly died, Elena sits
throned in silk flowers,
candles, resin statuettes, souvenir
snow globes from China. How
did I come to be holding this
pitiful offering, all I possess here?
Branch of translucent soft petals,
already fading?
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Paintings by Gwennedd:
I’ve had fun this last few months exploring more art that intrigues me. I began with a pour paint background brushed on and placed the zentangle of the Orca over it. The next thing that caught my imagination was an abstract design I saw. The Blocks Interrupted was the result of working with simple shapes interconnected in ways that both pleased and shocked the visual senses. All the paints used are metallics, so depending on the viewing angle the whole will shine and change slightly. The hummingbirds are a Christmas gift for a good friend. She requested them, and come the summer, the painting will hang on the fence above her garden and fill in for those days when the real birds may not be visiting.
Painting and Ink Drawings by Desert Scientist
Here are a few of my latest works- the owl just finished today. This is a mixed media- watercolor, watercolor pencil, pencil, and ink on Arches 300 lb. cold press. Owl from Pine Ridge Park in Edmonds, Washington.The other two are black and colored ink drawings for a local Inktober.
Link: Some Ink Drawings From Inktober
DRAWINGS BY NIEMANN
I thought this time I’d put up some things related to a specific interest of mine: how different areas of creativity overlap. I’ve always been an “inbetween person” who likes the grey areas and chafes under rigid boundaries.
That’s why I’ve always been fascinated by people who do a variety of creative things, like E.T.A. Hoffmann (who, aside from his famous weird stories, was also a composer, painter/artist/caricaturist, theater manager/designer, and judge), and Noel Coward (playwright, actor, songwriter). As another example, I’ve just been looking at a book of paintings by Paul McCartney. It’s interesting to see how the same creative mind expresses itself in (supposedly) different fields.
In that vein, here’s a doodle I recently did of Hoffmann, as I was listening to a lot of his music and reading a lot of his stories:
Although I don’t have full-blown synthesia like some people, I’m fascinated by the ways different creative fields interrelate, and in my mind I do associate certain textures and colors with sounds, say, like, “I want this song to sound like wood grain,” or “That picture feels like a cello.” In the last year I’ve fallen into a really fascinating collaboration with a real classical music composer, writing words and stories for him to set for a series of chamber operas based on the old horror comics of the 1950s — that is, genuine classical music, but with the fun of those lurid old things. (I’ve told people they’re the classical music equivalent of handing around peeled grapes in the dark and telling people they’re eyeballs.) I haven’t known much about opera, but getting into it am really looking forward to eventually combining the elements music, storytelling, acting, theater, and design/illustration … Here’s the poster idea I’ve come up with:
Finally … I just really like looking at people’s steam-of-consciousness doodles. Last time I put up some pretty polished drawings that started that way in boring staff meetings, but here’s one that’s more typical. After the fact I just look at these and think, “Where did THAT come from?!”
They relate to another big theme for me: imagination, the power of stories, and wrestling with the idea of what counts as “real”. (I have a big problem with the idea that much of what we’re told is the “Real World” — i.e. all that crappy stuff everyone hates — is really just as made-up and human-invented as anything else. There’s no “IRS” or “Wal-Mart” in nature.) So, I thought I’d end with something different, a bit of poetry from a book of short stories I’ve written, relating my made-up adventures in my dream-like version of my hometown. After realizing that’s a big theme that runs all the way through them, I felt I should write something to spell it all out as an introduction:
Sometimes a lie contains more truth than truth,
And sometimes truth is captured best in outright lies,
Not hampered by such niceties as “proof”.
Tales are lies with all the untruth taken out,
A made-up world more real than that without;
Fictitious, yes, so more than literalities,
Expressing greater truth. That’s what a story is.
POLITICAL ART BY NONNIE9999
From Matt Lewis at Daily Beast:
“[Donald] Trump, not McCarthy, is the leader of the Republican Party. Trump can be the 2024 presidential nominee if he wants. Or he can be the Speaker of the House (assuming Republicans take back the House). Or he could probably get Kevin McCarthy to dress up like Little Bo Peep if he wants. He is the master, and when the master summons you, you go.”
From DAILY BEAST:
“Joel Greenberg—the Rep. Matt Gaetz wingman who pleaded guilty and is now helping authorities investigate the congressman’s involvement in an underage sex ring—has so much evidence that he needs more than 44 days to share it.
In a court document filed Tuesday, Greenberg, the disgraced local tax collector, asked a federal judge to push back his sentencing.”
In the latest lunacy, lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Crossfit) had this to say about wearing masks to combat COVID-19:
You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany, and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.
In response to the QAnon Jewish Laser-dodging imbecile, Kevin “Shecky” McCarthy had this to say:
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EDITOR’S NOTE: You can see all of these wonderful pieces and so much more on nonnie9999’s website here, here and here!
Sculpture by boran2
Done in elm and acrylic paint, this piece measures more than a foot in length. I attempted to evoke the great flowing cars of the 1930s.
ART BY NIEMANN
Before there was Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus, there was Winter.
In the Scandinavian countries Winter, like those who would follow, went from house to house … but there was a difference: In a sort of ancient Scandinavian protection racket, you had to give him presents, so he would be good to you!
RESIN ART BY RKNROBIN
My Reflections in Silence... Coasters and Plaques.
Photos by gizmo59
Hubby and I moved from northwestern Pennsylvania to southern California six months ago, so I have a few photos from our new environment, and one from during the trip.
ART by LaurelinCA
An illustration for a friend’s book – an old lady who is wearing her cat on her head, secured with a pink ribbon and a lot of lace! Pen-and-ink and watercolor.
Below are two illustrations of Life in the Great Pandemic, Sheltering in Place with Samoyeds: Reading with Dog, Cooking with Dogs.
An experiment with drypoint: Canal in Bruges, Belgium, on a misty day.
Paintings by Nolana
I haven’t done much painting this fall — my writing muse has been dragging me away from my artwork — but I do have a few small WIPs and a watercolor sketch I’d like to share.
I’m not accustomed to working in such a small format, but wanted to see if I could adapt to it, so chose three photos from my leaf-peeking travels around the state as test images. Despite the tiny size they are challenging to paint, and what with work and distractions and writing and the holiday season I just haven’t gotten around to finishing them yet.
Okay, so the one on the left is kind of funky, but I am rather pleased with the one on the right. These are done with a Koh-i-Noor watercolor travel set and a plastic-bristled water-brush, with fine details in Rapidograph pen and black ink.
Linocut by Marko the Werelynx
Here I am still digging away at last minute projects.
I’ve been making New Year’s greeting cards for decades now. In 1999 I tried making a card using my mother’s old linocut tools. I liked the results, but it took me nearly 20 years to try it again. The last couple of years I’ve been making linocut cards. Here are two pictures of this year’s card in progress:
Still a few hours of work left on it— luckily the year will be new for a few weeks still.
Ceramic Arts by MELinPGH
Hello Art Friends,
Here are a few photos of my latest works.
One current project is producing 50 plates all with different designs as a surprise for a currently undisclosed group of people. Here are a few of them.
Another project involves a private commission for two custom table tops. Those are currently in progress so there are no finished photos yet. I promise to include them in a future expo.
Here are photos of two recent tables that I have made. Unfortunately, none of the items posted here are for sale. I am, however, happy to discuss any custom requests you may have. Just send me a KosMail message.
Happy New Year to all!
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(Thanks Artists and Poets for compiling this great exhibit of your work!
And thanks again to Tortmaster)
Happy New Year-
2022
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