In One Week

I'll be at table 258 at San Francisco's Alternative Press Expo next weekend. APE is just like a comic book convention, but with lots of new art & comics to sample and no cosplayers or movie studios. So I guess it's nothing like a comic book convention. It runs Saturday October 17th from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm, and Sunday the 18th from 11:00 to 6:00. Admission is ten bucks or something, or completely free if you have your pass from this year's San Diego comic-con.

I'll have a bunch of T-shirts, posters, prints, and cards for sale at reduced prices (I've got to make room for new Christmas products), and I'll be around to sign stuff the whole time. Just a few tables down will be a bunch of bros from Topatoco as well (see map above).

It sure is fun to meet people!

Cited!

p. 88 of this:



p. 91 of this:



It feels good and tingly to look in the index of something and see your name and then a number.

I have the previous book by (one of) the authors of the SVU Guide, and it is super-informative and kinda dishy with its interviews. So I expect the same from this one.

The TV Guide Special contains a lot of endearing Jerry Orbach stories, and some swell photographs a certain artist will be stealing for future projects. I got mine at a Target.

I would say both are essential reading for critical minds.

Happy 20

Tonight, at 8:00 pm EST on NBC, "Law & Order" enters its twentieth year. I'll be celebrating in my own little way, by making fantastical new L&O art all year long.

Like this Jack McCoy shirt, which I think I'm going to order up and then it'll be available on brandonbird.com in about 2 or 3 weeks.

What a scoop!

I don't have any artwork ready this week, but here's something I've been sitting on all summer, waiting to confirm with my Hollywood sources. Finally, I can announce the full cast of Star Trek 2: The Next Generation:










I've also heard rumblings of Tom Hanks as the film's Romulan villain.

Twisted, Mutated Freaks

Against the Brotherhood of Mutants! This was the first concept I had for the Stan Lee show, before deciding to go with a duck-laden Magneto. Maybe not my most brilliantest concept, but after having it rattle around for a year it was sort of like, "Yeah... this still amuses me for some reason. I guess I'll have to paint it."

I also wanted to do a trial run for this style, in preparation for another, larger thing I'm working on. It's basically one of the horrible pop-art paintings I made in high school but done using oil instead of acrylics: instead of having the colors be flat and static, there can be subtle wet-into-wet effects, and instead of having all the lines be solid black they can vary in weight and translucency. The downside is having to wait a million hours for each layer to dry.

Everything Lost and Wonderful and Sad

It's 3:00 a.m. and I've spent the last few hours flipping through a collection of pictures of Risley, the arts dorm at Cornell where my artist-in-residence adventure took place. I don't even recognize half the people in the photos, and Lord was that place covered in nerd (the SCA practiced on our lawn!), but right now, sitting in my hermetic LA loft with the windows clamped shut to keep out toxic flame ash, I somehow smell autumn and rainstorms, and I feel in my belly a bit of that manic excitement you have when everything in your world is still new and unfolding.

Here would be a great place to write something about the effect of other people's nostalgia and make a clever segue to this:



Years ago I had the idea of making dozens of plein air Sears paintings. Searses of all shapes and sizes, showing the differences in landscape and architecture. I tried a few experiments that didn't quite feel right, before realizing, No: It shouldn't be about capturing the realness of Sears, it should be about creating that one perfect Sears, the Sears you see in your mind, the Sears that's more Sears than Sears ever was. So here is A Perfect Moment Braced in Time, Like Falling in Love. Click through to see all seven feet of awesome beigeness.

It's one of my paintings from the "Monsters of Pop" show, which is still up at Gallery 1988 through this weekend. I'll roll out the others over the next week or so as I finish scanning and cleaning them up, and I've got some other drawings and such waiting in the wings as well. It's time to breathe some life back into the ol' brandonbird.com.

Art on the Way

I don't even know what happened to June and July; I've just been barreling towards this show, hoping to get some amount of paintings done in time:

"Monsters of Pop"
Brandon Bird, Kiersten Essenpreis, Dave MacDowell, Netherland
Opening Reception Tuesday August 11, runs till September 5th
Gallery 1988
7020 Melrose, Los Angeles CA

If you can make it out, please do.

And then... I think that's going to be my last gallery show for a while. It's cool they've helped raise my profile & selling price, but they're also anathema to how I like to exist. I feel I was at something of a peak from 2003 to 2006 or so (curiously, when I wasn't so much self-employed as unemployed). I'd think of something--a Law & Order coloring book or what have you--and then just... make it. Now it's more like, "Shit, I just got the best idea ever, but I have to paint Magneto tonight and the next night and the night after that." So I don't mean I'm not going to exhibit, just that I'm not going to commit to any long-term, outside deadlines, and be more open to possibilities as they crop up. Does that even make sense?

Speaking of wich, here's some stuff that's cropped up or in the process of cropping up: I'll have a table at APE in San Francisco in October. I also met the Topatoco dudes for the three hours I was at Comic-con; they're getting a hugemongous booth next year and I'll be there to join in the hoe-down. I might sneak in to some of the East Coast cons, too.