Dumb Party

New version of an image I've posted before, now added to and coloured in with biro and various marker pens.

a link to flickr where you can get a closer look at it here

Raymond Roussel

A sketch after a photo of the eccentric writer Raymond Roussel, taken in Jerusalem, which makes him to appear as if he rises from his grave. Which in turn reminds of his novel Locus Solus, arguably one of the first zombie stories ever written. Or at least, it has some kind of zombies in it, among many other eyebrow-rising weird scenes.

Floorshow

EBD Group show/let's get it on.

Old school building smack dab in the centre of Den Haag, the Netherlands,

hardly any walls (one, basically, which may or may not be available), mostly windows, but lots of floor space plus the stair/seat/display thing(imagine it cleared of the remnants of the exhibition pictured).

No date fixed as of yet but think early 2016.

There is no funding, just a space, courtesy of http://locatiez.net/

If interested, leave a comment below.

Less  than 80 percent of the sum total of current EBD contributors show up in the comments section, & i retract the offer.

Ibrahim

Cat Attack

Hello!
Did you know that at the end of this year, even the kitten from the calendars are going crazy?
Warmly
arnus

NEW YULETIDE STUFF I KNOCKED OUT.

I just finished these new Yuletide decorations to cut-out. I did three sets of Halloween decorations this year & this is the first Christmas one. We put out a mess of wrapping paper as well. It's really fun to design all this stuff. 

The goal of my art has always been to become part of the fabric of reality & to eventually define  Western Culture. You can get these things at the GOBLINKO MEGAMALL. 

recent stuff

Elephant Boy

taking the piss

It would not be unfair, i think, to describe most draughtswomen and-men contributing to this blog as respectful of, if not pertaining to or even firmly rooted in, popular visual culture, although perhaps the part below the waist (waste?) of the mainstream.
I would be curious to know how many of us take inspiration from the aesthetics & tactics of 'contemporary art,' & in what way, negative or positive, if at all. 

Any thoughts?

KNOW YOUR SHIT

I'M PRETTY STOKED ON THIS NEW "KNOW YOUR SHIT" POSTER I DID. I DREW THE ORIGINAL IN 2008 OR SOMETHING, BUT IT WAS HALF-SIZE FOR A ZINE, I CAME ACROSS THE ORIGINAL WHILE WE WERE PREPARING FOR OUR HALLOWEEN ISLAND GOBLINKO ART SHOW & KNEW THAT I HAD TO REDRAW IT.  

KNOW YOUR SHIT!!! IT'S THE BRISTOL STOOL CHART AS LOVINGLY RENDERED BY WEIRDO WARLORD SEAN AABERG. SEVEN TYPES OF STOOL - ONE THRONE - WHO WILL RULE THE EXCREMENT EMPIRE? TAKE NOTE OF YOUR MOVEMENTS IN A CAPTAIN'S LOG. SKETCH YOUR SCAT. KNOW YOUR SHIT. - GET THE POSTER FOR YOUR BATHROOM, RUMPUS ROOM, LOCKER, WACK SHACK, PRACTICE SPACE OR OUTHOUSE. 11X17 FOLDED POSTER. YOURS FROM THE GOBLINKO MEGAMALL.

Franek Kluski & Pithecantropus

An oldie, drawn with only markers. Franek Kluski summoning the spirit of a caveman.

PORK #21 IS OUT NOW

I'M REALLY STOKED ON THE NEW ISSUE OF PORK MAGAZINE!!! 24 GIANT PAGES OF PORK - DECLARING A WORLD OF TROUBLE!!! I INTERVIEW FERAL HOUSE PUBLISHER, WRITER & SATANIC TROUBLE-MAKER ADAM PARFREY!!! WE LOOK BACK AT MALCOLM MCLAREN & VIVIENNE WESTWOOD'S PUNK ROCK SEDITIONARIES & THEIR REVOLUTIONARY ART INTO LIFE METHODOLOGY! I TALK TO BOB GORMAN OF GWAR & THE SLAVE PIT WEIRDO ART WAR MACHINE!!! WE PROFILE LOS ANGELES' ROCK&ROLLERS DR. BOOGIE & THEIR NEW RECORD GOTTA GET BACK... TO NEW YORK CITY!!! PLUS! THE USUAL: LOTS OF REVIEWS, KATIE AABERG'S PHOTO FUNNIES FEATURING ALL LIL'PIGS, COMIC ISLAND COMIX BY KAZ, THE SLOW POISONER, THE FORSLEY BROTHERS, MAX CLOTT, FERNANDEZ, GUNSHO, MIKEY BOSSSDOG, ALEX CHIU, CHICO FELIX, KELLY CAMPANILE, ALEX HAGEN, CHASE TAIL & SEAN AABERG! BAD IDEAS COLUMNS WITH DAN SHOUP LOOKS AT ARCHAEO OPTIMISM FOR THE NEW YEAR, THE SLOW POISONER ANSWERS ALL, JJ MK EXPLORES THE UNBELIEVABLE, MYKEL BOARD GRIPES, JAKE KELLY TALKS THE FABULOUS FREEBIRDS, BOBBY MADNESS SAYS THINGS TO MAKE YOU SQUIRM, THE ILLAGE VIDIOT BRINGS YOU THE BEST VIDEOISMS, CHASE TAIL BRINGS US HIS TALES FROM THE CRYPT & SEAN AABERG SAYS WHAT NEEDS TO BE SAID. IT'S GOTTA BE SEEN TO BELIEVED. THE ONLY MAGAZINE THAT MATTERS. CRAMMED TO THE GILLS WITH REAL STREET ROCKER JUNK SCRAPED FROM THE MEAN STREETS OF PORKLAND. PORK MAGAZINE. AT THE GOBLINKO MEGAMALL.

Careful with that snake

A random sketch of let's say, two generations of fortune tellers. Ink, markers, water colour on crappy paper.

Back to france !

hey people!!!
after long time on the road without posting anything,
i m back with lot of new tattoos, have a look on my blog
www.hundewetter.blogspot.com
I'm now back to france looking for a tattoo shop to work, if you hear something, let me know!
cheers!
anef

Xuxu

I did this comic for C'est bon kultur, don't know if it's in or not
I spent weeks starting comic in black and white, doing same first pages again and again (yeah unregular timing give bad result!) so i decided to make it that way and was able to complete it in short time... so maybe i'll make more, lete's see this as a first chapter

well i won't post everything here, last 3 pages are there : http://alkbazz.free.fr/spip.php?article179

Five coloured clusters

Hello, Fellow Ducks!

A Tengu. I penciled this in my sketchbook Wednesday night and then inked it on Thursday night (and into the first light of Friday morning). I need to do a lot more completed pen and ink drawings of various folklore monsters- not for any project in particular, but just to do them. Right now, I don't have any freelance work going, so I have time.

Pacing various things and doing them properly

 As usual I've got a ridiculously huge list of things I want to see on the internet and because of the changing nature of the internet it feels a few tads more urgent than getting through my books. It does often feel like an endless burden going through all these curiosities and I'm sure there will be things I can do without but there's definitely an abundance of things truly worth seeing.

 I was going through John Coulthart's blog archives HERE, and it taken a month or two to see everything I wanted and even then I'm sure I missed a lot of good stuff. A lot of the preview images he chooses don't represent what I think is the best work in a lot of the linked galleries (but there's nothing that can be done about that), so I very nearly decided not to look at some of the best galleries. Nick Hyde and Leonidas Kryvosej are my two favourite discoveries from these links, their best work is really stunning, the type of stuff I aspire towards. Both are surrealists and I think both are best when they are doing less typically surrealist style images and go heavier on the atmosphere. Neither seem to have books dedicated to them and their websites have far too small images. A real shame.

 Here's Leonidas Kryvosej. I could have chosen so many, I like the mid period stuff best but it's still going to be a few weeks before I finish looking at everything. His gallery is HERE, and there are many phases.

 Nick Hyde has lots of copyright and permission warnings so I'll just link to two of my favourites HERE and HERE.

 Even regardless of my OCD, these images are demanding of my time. Just like with some of my art books, I hoped I could power through these galleries in a short time but that becomes surprisingly exhausting and you're not likely to feel the full effect of the images that way. Being someone who spends a huge amount of time creating images I do feel funny just glancing over a brilliant artist's decades of complex and extravagant work in just several minutes.
 There is a temptation to save them in a folder for later but it's quite possible I'd never go back to them if I did that (so many art discs I haven't looked at in years).

 Too often with internet hunting/viewing, I try to finish one thing at a time but it's much better to juggle as much as you can and take it all in small doses.

Ah book is here

from Sherpa publishers, Haarlem 

https://www.facebook.com/sherpastrips

Patagonian Giants

From my current sketchbook. 

Probosci Poster

Dear Ducks,
For my first post here, let me offer you a very cute goat.
As you noticed, it's a poster for Probosci and L'Oeillère.
Wormly.

arnus

HALLOWEEN ISLAND - HALLOWEEN DECORATIONS BY SEAN AABERG

I went crazy doing Halloween Decorations!!! We have three sets. No I'm working on Thanksgiving/Fall & Christmas ones. So much fun! Get them at the GOBLINKO MEGAMALL.

Music!

Hello Ducks

I did some work for music release recently

One is Assatur second demo, oldschool death metal, here's one track from it (this is the bonus track)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5cqpwY-axQ

bands page http://www.twistedface.org/assatur/

The other is for industrial/gabber electronic from norway, END

https://epicureanescapism.bandcamp.com/album/subhuman-tracks

that's all folks!

cheers

Wine and dine in Veneto

Normally, drawing comics and the like does not put much food into my mouth, but late September it certainly did. As a long-time partner to the Treviso Comic Book Festival,  Gruppo Ristoratori della Marca Trevigiana invited me to to join the Dripping Taste tour in the Veneto area, together with my old pals Ole Comoll Christensen (DK) and Jakob Klemencic (SLO). We were joined by Cynthia Neves (BRA) a day later. So, next to touring around Treviso and visiting local industries, there were also mega-lunches to enjoy. That does make one feel somewhat like a barbarian, coming from one of those mashed-potato countries up north.

This is us sketching, joined by Stefano Piccoli from Dripping Taste in the Canova Museum - dedicated to neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova.

A giant sandal outside the Canova Museum.

A cruel sketch from a Canova painting. The neoclassical beauty standards of the time were frigging weird.

My first sketch on tour, after a visit to the Bosa ceramics factory. It features a few designs of theirs (the leegant shapes were often reminiscent of Lorenzo Matotti's comics) and Typex, my roommate at the hotel in Treviso. He likes to draw caricatures of his comics collegues and had to borrow a crummy mountain bike to get around in Treviso.

And sometimes, it is lunchtime. This was done at Villa Razzolini Loredan, where i learnt that 'to have lunch with the pope' is a local expression for having very good food. (Yes, I know i am lagging behind a few popes in this drawing. A pope is a pope, right?)

A sketch of the fully automatic milking contraption at the Vaka Mora dairy farm. The cows do all the work themselves.

Malanotte. Weird name for a Raboso wine. I'm not making it up.

Lunch again, at Ristorante Le Beccherie. Starter called 'butterfly'. Physiognomy kicked in just then.

Although many, if not all, parts of the tour were great, my personal highlight was a visit to sculptor Romano Abate, who does wildly grotesque works, inspired by classic mythology. My sketch here was done after a hommage to Dante Alighieri, made from the trunk of a 2,000 year old olive tree. It felt like home to be there.

Besonders Wertlos

I recently designed this wrap-around cover and some interior vignettes for the book: "Besonders Wertlos", a collection of film reviews and other articles by Jörg Buttgereit.
The vignettes accompany the respective articles' titles and represent their subjects, and the idea was to have all the vignettes appear somewhere on the cover.
I made about 50 vignettes in total. Some are fairly hidden on the cover or only represented indirectly, but it should be easy to spot the nine below.

Diamond Life

 Though little known, if not wholly obscured by more flattering fashions and styles in contemporary art, the paintings, comics, sculptures, poems, jewelry, films, musics, and performances of J.A. Bernard Meijer (a.k.a. Bernd, Bnine, Bmen, Ben) of Den Haag together constitute a body of work which, in its complexities, the craft exemplified by it, and through the raw energy it projects, compacts 21st century life like few of his contemporaries' oeuvres can.

If encountered through the singular aspect of one medium only (the way time and circumstance unfortunately force me to let you experience it, with this brief introduction), his poetry might seem like the ramblings of a dyslexic, his paintings those of a typical outsider artist, his street-art a mere party-trick; only when held up to the light for examination of its sum totality does it reflect mercilessly the unified thrust of its maker's intentions. Versatile and erratic, Meijer traces a private mythology across myriads of media, combining the stately grace of Byzantine ikons with the gutter dynamics of pop culture, and a dash of Dada.

Many of his comics start with, or otherwise incorporate the phrase (in his own ideosyncratic orthography): IT WAS T'AGE OF MACHINERY. Inspired perhaps by Meijer's time in India, this is a reference to the Kali Yuga, or Age of Discord,the last stage of human history as predicted in orthodox Hinduism.

Across scrawled graffitti and junkyard altarpieces and photocopied zines, Meijer draws us a map of the Apocalyptic desert of this terrifying age; a nightmare landscape where pop culture detritus fights itself in an endless loop. Across this desert, an eternal West (the Western Lands, Egyptian land of the dead, land where the sun of civilization goes down?) , riddled with vampire robot cowboys and cybernetic crustaceans, ride the Kings of the West. Are they the good guys, the bad? Prophets or Anti-Christs? None of it resolves.The magician's-apprentice figure of Stick Boy, a youthful ninja-moses forever confronts the G.O.D. (Genmatic Ord'ring Device), is forever trained by the wizened old wizard in the cave. This is the Apocalypse as Coda. It is an eternally sinking ship with the band playing on, and on, and on.

All this reflects perhaps a lifelong struggle with the Black Dog of depression which ended when Ben decided to end his life in 2013. He had always proclaimed that if it hadn't been for the hopeful message of X-men comics he read as a kid ( i'm a weird kid/i'm a mutant-that's okay!), he would have long since given up, but in the end, that energy and hope could not be sustained into an adulthood which had begun far too early (by his own admission- accounts of playground knife-fights abound).

Where are the heroes when you need them?

Ben's end shows up the Myth of the Campbellian Myth, umasks the Hero with a Thousand Faces and its positivist anthropocentric view that we must learn to recognize these mythical threads in everyday interactions, organise our inner life in accordance with narrative structures, and work through these stories to emerge healed and whole, a fuller human being. That, too, is just a story, and stories won't save us. No matter how many we tell or consume.

Even if i was too late in comprehending this truth to save my friend and mentor and colleague from his essential loneliness, i hope his life and work persist in being reminders of this mineral truth upon which others may yet sharpen their swords.

Loneliness is fundamental, but that fact is the rock we should build our humanity upon, and not upon stories.

Note on the illustrations: this is only a fragment of a vast body of work, the actual physical manifestations of which are scattered widely, not only across media, but amongst diverse archives and owners. His graphic output is in need of proper scanning, the paintings, once located, are deserving of more than quick Iphone photographs.

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Exit Thru The Gift Shop:

It is in honour & remembrance of our brother that fellow cartoonist Mattijs van Katwijk & i have put together a zine featuring some collaborative drawings & comics. Comes with a facsimile of one of Ben's pamphlets. Interested parties may email to: ibr.ineke (at) gmail(dot) com