Recently in comic art Category

(Click on image to view larger)

MS Brandl installation

Editor John Lent opened the pages of his remarkable academic journal, The International Journal of Comic Art to several essays on gallery comics grouped as a symposium. The latest issue (Fall 2007, vol. 9 no. 2) combines perspectives on gallery comics from artists, art historians, collectors and curators including essays discussing the art of Mark Staff Brandl, Andrei Molotiu, and C Hill.

Sharkforum OpEd Cartoons and Comics by Steve Hamann and Mark Staff Brandl

Steve Hamann and I will be doing an irregular series of cartoons and short comics on art for Sharkforum. They will primarily be collaborations between us, yet also individual pieces as well. All will be presented here in the future under the rubric Feeding Frenzy Funnies.

There are traditionally Nine Muses and Nine Arts, frequently linked to one another. My Latin professor Dr Clemens Müller and I have concocted a fresh, contemporary version of this system for no darn reason other than pure, arcane fun.

I recently gave the "opening speech" for a show and book signing by artist, "low-brow" queen, illustrator, comic artist, poster artist, indy rocker and all-around Wunderfrau, Tara Mc Pherson. I'm posting it here because I think her artwork is great, crosses and ignores "important" borders, and because she and her colleagues have successfully and marvelously managed to create their own supportive artworld.

Tara McPherson, who comes from Los Angeles, California, lives in New York City in the US, is a painter, poster artist, comic artist, freelance Illustrator, toy designer, book author and more. The artist also plays bass in a band and loves tattoos. In short, she is a multi-tasking, immensely creative artist straddling the line between popular art and fine art. Or better said, totally ignoring that line, which is admirable.

Our Sharkforum merchandising novelties?!!

A little summer fun.

Here's a portfolio of photos from the exhibition by Maya Bringolf and Mark Staff Brandl at Project Space exex in St. Gallen Switzerland.

Artist and theorist C Hill has recently created a new term to give a clear identity to a new artistic phenomenon. The appellation is gallery comic. The second expression, iconosequentiality, is my own creation for a compositional form concomitant with gallery comics.

Recently I began reading an old book that traces the history of art criticism as a discipline, which the author starts much earlier than I would have ever imagined -– in Greek times (‘Chap. 2: Art criticism in Greece in the third century before Christ and its conditions,’ etc.). I had come across this book as I have the labor of love of sorting through (with the help of a very able assistant) the library of Joseph Randall Shapiro, which he donated to the Museum of Contemporary Art upon his death in 1996 at age 90+ (being of a heritage and era where exact birthdates were often obscure). I loved Joe Shapiro, his passion for life and art, and the obvious sustenance he drew from art. I even loved his undisguised delight in and appreciation of “the fairer sex” (which disturbed many) and felt it was a privileged view on a courtly time that was fast disappearing rather than some sort of rude affront to my gender. Joe did not disguise that he loved to lunch with “his harem,” mostly curators and other museum people — female of course — at those dreary sorts of middlebrow restaurants that sprang up in the 1950s and 1960s, i.e. The Homestead in Oak Park. Very few of these places exist today and thus can exist in some sort of rosy glow of nostalgia. In reality they were pretty awful. When invited, however, I always attended, and when I had business with Joe, as I often did, I would bring along other female MCA staffers who had not heard his repertoire of humorous stories which would slowly wind into the realm of bawdy jokes if his listener(s) seemed comfortable. Of course it wasn’t so much that he enjoyed the food at these restaurants. It was the company and conversation that he craved, and it was as much sustenance to him as the daily special. He was an esthete who could converse on the highest levels about art, yet what really tickled him was to author an advice column for the MCA staff newsletter titled “Joe Sez” (which was compiled, incidentally, into a bound volume and presented to Joe, who is often called the “father” of the Museum of Contemporary Art in appreciation for all he did).