If you need me I'll be on Holodeck Four.

Earlier this week I contributed a guest Riker to the best website ever, which I would have posted about in a timelier manner if I wasn't swamped manning the Nicolas Cage Colorform apparatus. It's actually a ten year old acrylic painting I had completely forgotten I ever did.

Also in news I should have mentioned a good long while ago, I have some prints for sale in the Giant Robot print show in San Francisco this weekend.

If Adventure Has a Name

It must be Nicolas Cage. All I can say about this one is, I hope enough people buy it because I can't wait to start on the sequel.

The Norton Itch

I put up a new painting, Fortean Norton. And by "new" I mean I started it 2006, had it in a storage tub for two and half years, showed it in an unfinished too-green state at the Gallery 1988 show this summer, and now after a bit more tinkering it's maybe possibly completed (there's another painting from that show I have yet to put online; it's also being reworked). The inspiration is a tremendous drawing of Edward Norton my brother Darrin did many years ago:


I wanted to see if I could give that sketch dimensionality, and also get out of 'gluing celebrity heads onto funny bodies' mode and try out an outsider art/horrible-drippy-people style. Parts of it were really fun to paint but I'm not sure if those parts ever came together into a confident and resolved painting.


The fox mask is something my friend Alexa made in real life, and the little gremlin faces--representing trophies from Norton's globe-spanning travels--are knickknacks from her parents' house. The picture of Mothman, well, that's just a picture of Mothman.

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.

Dream Cast

Man oh man I can't wait for Star Trek 2: The Next Generation.

Die Walken

I'm not too surprised by this, because if you really think about, if you have college students pretend to be kids writing Christmas letters to Chris Walken, it's pretty much inevitable that someone is going to take the text of one of those letters and transform it into a smashing opera piece:

"An Acquaintance" by Ryan Walker, based on "An Acquaintance?" by Ming Doyle.

VDO as DV

I would like to share something I came across in my continuing "Law & Order" research:

Wow.

Fucillo! HUUUUGEST!

"Gawd, can't you do prints any bigger?" people bark as they spit on me in the street. Well, now you can order enormous prints (some three or nearly four feet long) at TopatoCo.com! Prints are unsigned and come on semi-glossy photo paper, or can be upgraded to textured fine art paper or super-premium canvas (they even varnish it!). They also have a couple new, exclusive T-shirt designs like the one above.

When you order through TopatoCo you're buying from a real company with fast shipping and an excellent record of customer service, and you can combine your order with any of the other hilarious products they offer from other web artists.

All my signed & limited stuff will of course continue to be available through brandonbird.com. But now you've got more options!

From the hell inside Germany

My second hate mail in six years:

"hello, brandonbird,
I´m from germany, i have so much so problems, problems from where you´d never think, it is possible.
and............................i want to tell you only something...............you are a bastard. your picture is
a lie and you know it. but why you made shit like this? ron l. hubbard, was a man, who had a heart and mind you never reach it. i love him, until he is dead, i know, but its the same as with jesus...............his ideas, his thougts, his understanding, about human being, still lives on and on and on and with your fucking bullshit picture, with your lie about r. l.hubbard, i hope your go to hell, as soon as possible. with love and hope i send you greetings, from fucking germany, hamburg, the hell inside germany, bye bye, i hope, i never met you. silvia klein"

A Party Ends in a Quadruple Homicide

Descriptions of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" episodes from the DirecTV guide:

Seduction of stepson.
Little girl is a victim.
A sadist tortures a senile old woman.
Girl's body is found on a bus.
Rape/murders launch a manhunt.
A woman falls to her death.
A killer has a foot fetish.
Young murder suspects.
A homeless man is a suspect.
Rapist attacks a patient.
Victim steps off a subway platform.
Subway commuter is mutilated.
A child is poisoned.
A woman commits suicide.
A pediatrician is murdered.
A cocktail waitress is murdered.
A Bronx DA lies strangled.
A psychiatrist is found murdered.
A man handles his own defense.
A killer spouts religious rhetoric.
Club-goers accused of murder.
Criminology leads to murder.
Sexual re-education poster boy is slain.
Expectant mother.
Boy is abducted.
Ball players are murdered.
Death of a bully.

I Love Art

http://badpaintingsofbarackobama.com/

The Human Adventure is Just Beginning

I have a wacky interview up at Tor.com.

This month has been crazy and weird and scary. I went to New York and saw some of my more favorite people whom I hadn't seen in a while:


(Doyle signs alongside legendary comics legend Rob Liefeld)


(Alexa, confused man, me)


(Here's a link to Nick's drawings)


I also upgraded from my dank Valley apartment and to a superenormous loft headquarters:





I'm still unpacking and getting things in order. Here's my pal Brad sticking some daylight-balanced fluorescents to the ceiling:



2008 caught me off gaurd, in that my best laid plans actually worked out and I ended up making a very respectable and grownup amount of money. I realized, "Wait, maybe this art thing is not a hobby, or a sideline, or something that's going to just dry up. Maybe I should actually invest in having the light and space to get things done."

Having said that, and done that, I am now of course terrified at having raised my rent and expenses so dramatically. I'm not really sure what the correct response is right now (for the world or myself), but I'm pretty sure doing nothing and slowly crenating is the wrong choice. Getting to work and making new stuff seems like the way to go.

New York City's War on Crime

To Dana in the comments who asked for some Noth, here's a sketch from long ago of Logan and his pixie-partner:


I totally forgot that I was going to the New York comic-con this Friday and Saturday. I won't be signing or anything, but if you hunt me down, I will give you a Valentine. Hint: I look like the guy in that box over there.

SVU and I are going steady

I realized there was one Valentine I hadn't released as a folding card (Capt. Cragen), so I drew up four new images, and now there's a new set of five SVU cards, available here. There's a slight discount if you buy all three sets, and all Valentine orders will be sent Priority mail in the US (2-3 day delivery).


Sometimes I think maybe I'm running this "Law & Order" thing into the ground, but you know what? Fuck that, I love "Law & Order" so darn much. And Bob Saget probably needed to find his way into my ouvre somehow.

I've also added prints of this old GI Joe/Guernica bit of silliness:


I don't really know how I feel about this one. It was a commission, and I don't really like directly referencing famous art (too easy of a joke). But other people seem to like it, so here it is.

The poster/shirt megasale is still going on, and I've knocked a few dollars off mini-prints, too. And here's a link to Valentine art prints, since I'd semi-vertantly let that disappear for a while.

Bigfoot Sightings

Several years ago I visited my sister when she and her husband still lived in the Ballard section of Seattle. She took me to a little breakfast-y diner place (Aunt Hattie's? Something like that).

Dana: Once Andy and I saw some famous actor here. I wish I could remember what his name was.

Later:

Dana: Hey Andy, what was the name of that actor we saw? Dinglebert Pimplypuss?

Andy: Ray Liotta.

*****

Here is a list of all the vaguely famous people I've seen in the wild this past year:

1) Veronica Mars (almost smashed into her at the post office)

2) John Landis (three separate sightings in three separate cities)

3) Darius McCrary (buying cases of water at Ralphs at 1:00 am)

4) Ray Park (with his family at the Burbank Toys R Us, immediately after I put down a Darth Maul figure thinking, "God, what a horrible likeness!")

5) Lewis Black (screaming into cell phone)

6) Warren Beatty and Annette Bening and their many children (sat behind us at a sushi place).

7) Seth Green (twice because some pals work on his show, once at an art show, once at a crazy Halloween party. Each time I get the stink eye).

8) John Francis Daley (again, this is a cheat because I was visiting my friend who works on "Bones")

9) Seth Rogen (leaving comic store)

10) Deidrich Bader (entering comic store)

11) Harry Hamlin (came into the AM/PM, browsed snacks, left with a look of extreme disappointment)

In conclusion, it is fun when you see people you recognize from the TV.

New Year's Steals

To clear some space and gear up for moving, I'm putting all my posters and t-shirts on sale through the 15th. I've got a restock on Devitomon and Crimefighters shirts coming in about a week, in case you don't see your size right now.

I'm also putting certain prints of all last year's new paintings (Sir Ian, Nat, Mr. Noodle, Pax, Spidey, Hoffman) on sale. 2008 was three or four times more productive for me than 2007, and my goal for '09 is to push it over the top, rip it up, take it to the x-treme, and so forth.