‘Tomorrow I’ll be Naked in the Woods’

If television has taught me anything it is that this country loves crazy naked people. I don’t know why exactly, but it just does. So it is, I suppose, that the above painting is my gift back to this country.

Moving on and in the spirit of the new year, I’d like to give you guys a quick remembrance my activities closing out 2010:

First things first, Congratulations to my little sister Sara and her husband Kevin on their lovely October wedding. The two met as teenagers nearly a decade ago and have been growing closer ever since. I know Kevin makes my sister happy and on a separate note I can tell you that he makes me happy as I completely dominate him at foosball and air hockey. Oh the joys. Welcome to the family little brother!

As an Irony of timing, the very same night of my sister’s wedding saw the Lonesome No More Opening at the Wall Eye Gallery in Cleveland. Lonesome No More is a gaggle of artists organized by cultural mover and shaker Dave Desimone.

Pictured here are Jonah Jacobs, myself and Chad Chimes in order of left to right while setting up. While I was sadly not in attendance for the opening, I was told it went quite well.

Michael Christoff was one who told me it went well and he actually liked the work I presented so much that he invited me to speak at Pecha Kucha night Cleveland Vol. 10 in November.

Pecha Kucha is a world wide series of speaking events that have persons-of-interest give approximately six minute presentation with 20 slides that are each shown for 20 seconds. Micheal and his colleague Raseem Parker host the Cleveland series and I thank them as it was a joy, honor and privilege to present.

My opening slide was one of those pictures of Photoshop-ed bear heads I do which everyone immediately laughed at. This was a good thing as I had planned on my ice breaker being, “Man, I haven’t even started speaking and everyone is already laughing at me.” I did say that and everyone laughed again which was a relief as I depend a little light hearted absurdity to carry me every now and then. Very few artist are natural public speakers you know?

Another thing to note about the organizers is that they are architects. This is worth noting because architects plan their events in the most amazing buildings, court yards and public structures in town. Wow.

On other horizons: While leaving work before Thanksgiving one of my co-workers couldn’t help but notice that the shrubbery was meowing to her. That meowing turned out to be a little six-week old kitten separated from her mother. Two months prior I had actually lost a very sweet stray that I was trying to save, so the discovery of a kitten in need of a home wasn’t entirely unwelcome. Through some effort we caught her, she bit me and I named her Olive (AKA Fuzzy-Face).

She is doing very well, though she does have this modestly creepy way of sitting and staring at me adoringly while I am trying to paint.

A final note of gratitude to end this post goes to Room With a View in Akron who were nice enough to feature my work in their space this season.

I have a few fun things lined up for 2011 including some new custom work so I look forward to sharing that soon.

Thanks for reading all this. I know it ran long so as a bonus I’ll share this old college photo of John Waters hating some of my early work. Enjoy!

‘Awesome Possum — Custom’

Vivid Plastic Toys invited me to make a Custom Munny for ‘The Lovely Lowbrow Toy Show’ which opened earlier this month in Akron. This marks my first attempt at a custom Munny, (or a custom anything for that matter). Excitement, of course, ensues.

Cleveland is secretly rich with 3-D artist whose work I’ve less than secretly been envious of for awhile now. Some of the things these people manage to do with a non-assuming lump of clay is somewhat disturbing. I draw a lot of inspiration from the successes ambitious artist and they served as a good motivating factor when my chance at the third dimension came.

In college my attempts at making three dimensional pieces, while not entirely unsuccessful, all ended in misadventure and misfortune as they were shattered, smashed and exploded respectively. Quite the troubling legacy to bear, I assure you.

No less and never one to learn from my mistakes, I took on the task of sculpting once more. I modeled the Munny off an OLD painting I made during my second semester of painting in Spring of 2006. The original painting had the catchy title of “An Awesome Possum Hung From the Moon Trying to Steal the Stars from the Sky.”

I never did complete that original painting, but I managed to build the Munny, sculpt to delivery, in six days which neatly fit my self-inflicted tight deadline of six days.

As for the “AMAZING 3-D !!!” portion of this update, I decided to take a cue from Hollywood and exploit the novelty of stereoscopic imaging. For those of you unfamiliar, stereoscopic images use two pictures of the same object taken from slightly different angles. When the user focuses on the right image with the right eye and the left image with the left eye it will appear to be in a three diminutional space to the brain.

What the heck does that mean? Well, cozy up about ten inches from your computer screen and un-focus your stare while looking at the noses of the possums in the images below. Once they drift apart and overlap to form a third critter in the middle you will be completely amazed by the 3-D Awesome Possum before you. You will also likely think I am some kind of crazy genius. Don’t worry, this is all part of my master plan.

There is a lot more going on right now than just this possum, but as this post is running long I will wait a couple of weeks before catching everyone up. Until then.

‘The Forbidden Zone’

Next month Chad “Chod” Chimes will be curating a show at the (art)ificial Gallery titled “Cinematic Redux.” For the theme, Chad simply gathered a motley crew of artist and set us loose to design posters for movies we deem classic.

Being a sophisticated sort, I naturally chose “The Forbidden Zone.” For those unfamiliar, this 1980′s acme of live action film was realized by the characters behind The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Never for those easily offended, “The Forbidden Zone” combined excesses of the absurd with with a heart based in 1920′s american animation primarily inspired by the Fleischer Studios, (Betty Boop, Superman, ect).

Essentially that means it was really fun to draw.

The show opens August 7th from 6pm to 9pm. I will be in attendance for at least some of the evening, so if you come out feel free to say hello. The gallery will be producing posters/prints of all the art in the show. I’ll follow up once the show is live for those of you who may be interested in purchasing the original or a reproduction of my piece.

Here is one more painting I have recently completed:

‘Situations Normal: All Fowled Up’

Most of this weekend had me building frames for paintings which can be an amazingly messy affair.

Thankfully I live alone and answer to no one about the state of the dining room floor.

‘After the Flood’

Life has been churning away behind the scenes here. I am working on these new paintings for a little project Dave Desimone, (former owner of the Low Life Gallery) is putting together. He is still drawing up the details but I will be one of fifteen artists along for the ride. I’ll let you guys know more as time progresses but it should be a lot of fun for everyone included.

‘She Brought a Molotov To My Cocktail Party’

I’ll also be a part of a couple themed shows in the coming months. Down in Akron, Vivid Plastic Toys will be hosting a customized Munny show that I am looking forward to. I haven’t a clue what I will do with the little fellow, but I have been wanting to a custom for awhile now so I will hopefully get something worth my anticipation incarnated by August.

A couple weeks ago I was in Akron again for the opening of “Modern Mythologies” at Revival. The show included three of my old college friends: Matthew Miller, Mathew Pearlman and Josh Davis as well as myself. Our friend Vince took the above photo of, respectively, Miller, Pearlman and myself.

We like vegetables.

I believe the show will be running for a couple more weeks so all you Akronians should check it out if you missed it so far. There is some real nail-biting-good work in this one.

With another day coming to an end I felt that I was overdue to update this thing. I spent most of the past few weeks feeling quite lazy but that is probably more in my head than in actuality. I cut down sizable stack of birch panels that I am currently sanding and, as seen above, drawing on for my next series of paintings.

After spending so much time on the computer lately it feels great to be drawing again.

One of the best things about living in Cleveland, (in my less than humble opinion) is Phoenix Coffee. I frequent their East Ninth Street location a couple times a week for the sort of soothing touch that only a post-work espresso, small coffee and freakishly un-healthy pastry can provide.

The kindly staff there recently offered to display a back-catalogue of my work which sounded like a great idea to me. I’ve received a great response from it so I would like to thank everyone who stopped by and gave my work a gander. If anyone else is in the Cleveland area and would like to some of my work, it should be on display for a couple more weeks.

Here are some new business cards fresh from the printer. They share branding with this website and came out pretty great.

It should be noted that those pictures were of the second card castle. The first card castle I made met a fury fate.

Lastly I bought this new Jason Limon painting from his First Of series which is amazing to have. As seen here hanging next to some older pieces I have by Chris Ryniak and Chris Rutan.
I may have a tiny art collection, but that’s not to stop it from growing.

It feels like spring is officially breaking here. I’ve officially cracked two windows to let some of that forty-something air in as the sunlight combines with the radiator to make this place pleasently too warm. A warm week in March is way too soon to declare victory over winter in Cleveland, yet I am hopeful.

As if with one final malicious whip, however, this winter finally got a hold of my immune system and I ended up lamenting a cold all week. Such a state lazied me up enough to prevent my forward progress on this site, but that excuse has come to pass.

In a pleasant turn of events my old friend Theresa sent me a tiny crocheted bomb in the mail. A mail-bomb if you will. Let it never be said that we failed to live a life of danger.

Adios Kiddos.

'Never for Fear Of Exploding We'd Watch the World Turn'

With this new site being well underway I thought I’d post a little about it for those parties interested.

My old site, (which, for the time being, is still available at arshondrick.com/old had a few nice tricks in it but ultimately it was too dark and impractical. There came a time to realize that I lack the skill and time to create and maintain a truly wonderful Flash site so I decided to move on.

I decided to build this site around a WordPress core for several reasons. I wanted a blog-centric website to make updating easy and to give people a chance to subscribe to the RSS feature. Not being based solely in flash, my images and content will be search engine friendly and people will be able to bookmark any page that interests them. WordPress allows you to download their program to your own site and then to style it to any extreme that suits you needs. All in all this allows me a highly functional, professional and easy-to-operate website.

For those of you wondering, I actually am a simpleton with minimal wed design/programming knowledge. My ability to get this thing off the ground owes much graditude to css-tricks.com and more specifically this screen-cast series.

With this being said, my future posts here will move away from drab web design talk and focus on painting, (which I am significantly better at).

Until then.