Radio Relay Towers

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2012-01-05T11:09:00.000-08:00

Publication Fair this weekend

2011-12-12T09:41:00.000-08:00

Come on down to The Publication Fair this weekend. Cumbersome Multiples will have some great letterpress cards, Jotters, Naked Boy comics, prints and Series 1 of The Naked Boy Character Postcards. Plus if you are a collector or just want to find a great gift for a budding comics reader I'll have Comic Library Starters. These are specially packaged lots from my collection. You can't see what's inside so you have to take it on faith. Some are old some are new, but each lot is assembled with a theme.

Where:
The Cleaners
SW 10th and Stark
When:
Sunday December 18
11AM- 7PM

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2011-12-05T13:59:00.001-08:00

Cumbersome Multiples Studio Sale

2011-11-25T09:44:00.001-08:00

Come join us next week for our annual studio sale. Forget Black
Friday! Do all your holiday shopping in one place. Who needs a wide
screen TV when you can have original art and limited edition
letterpress? We will have prints, letterpress, books and pickles!

When: Saturday December 3, 10AM -4PM
Where: 3144 NE Seventh Avenue, Portland
Just two blocks south of Fremont next to Irving Park tennis court.

I will have new prints and the first series of letterpress Naked Boy Cards.

Check out more at
www.cumbersomemultiples.com

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2011-11-07T13:01:00.000-08:00

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2011-11-02T10:28:00.000-07:00

Review in the Idaho Statesman

2011-10-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a nice review of my work in the Idaho-Statesman. If you happen to be in Boise next Thursday Nov. 3, I'll be at the museum giving a talk about my work.

Milkmaid's Mourning new version

2011-10-13T16:11:00.000-07:00

I reconfigured the Milkmaid's Mourning for the PNCA Faculty show. I'm much happier with the result. The show opens October 16 at PNCA.

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2011-10-03T16:26:00.000-07:00

October Reading List

2011-09-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted a reading list in awhile. I'm going to include books I was looking at and reading from late summer as well.

1493: Uncovering the World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann
The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson
Since '45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art by Katy Siegel
The Last Werewolf by Glenn Duncan

Big Questions by Anders Nilsen
The New 52 by DC Comics (more on this later)
Captain America by Ed Brubaker
Habibi by Craig Thompson
Sweet Tooth by Jeff Lemire
The Breadbaker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Rienhart
Supergods by Grant Morrison
The Emancipated Spectator by Jacques Ranciere
The HIstory of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat

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2011-09-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

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2011-09-19T16:44:00.001-07:00

Wellspring and Golems Waiting book release

2011-09-13T10:09:00.000-07:00

Here is the newly printed two color print for Golems Waiting Redux. Like Wellspring, Golems Waiting will have an original print bound into the book.
Golems Waiting is published with Gobshite Quarterly and Publication Studio.
When: Friday September 23, 7PM
Where:
Publication Studio
717 SW Ankeny Street
Portland, OR 97205

Wellspring is available!

2011-08-25T16:45:00.000-07:00

I am very excited to announce the release of Wellspring: Poems 1993-2003. Wellspring collects ten years of poems. These poems are my first major body of work and reflect the main concerns in my current work. Each book is bound with four hand-pulled letterpress and lino-cut prints. The book is available at Publication Studio.
Wellspring is published by Publication Studio and Cumbersome Multiples.
I will be giving a reading at Publication Studio in Portland on Sept. 23. I'll be celebrating the release of Wellspring and Golems Waiting Redux also printed by Publication Studio.
More on the event in coming weeks.

Boise installation shots

2011-08-22T16:52:00.000-07:00

Comics at the Crossroads

2011-08-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

I'll be doing a large installation at the Boise Art Museum. I'm very excited to participate in the next incarnation of this museum survey of comics art. Comics at the Crossroads opens Aug 20.
I'll post progress shots of the installation.

New poster

2011-08-03T14:30:00.000-07:00

I just finished printing the next round of Naked Boy posters. Here they are in the drying rack ready to go out into the world!

New pots from the kiln

2011-07-21T10:25:00.000-07:00

Here are a few of the pots from yesterday's glaze firing. These pots are the beginning of a series of pots with text and images from American history. Some of the pots will contain poetry and/or comics.

Section dividers for Wellspring

2011-07-20T14:57:00.000-07:00

I just printed these pages yesterday on the Cumbersome Multiples' C&P clamshell letterpress . It felt good to do a big print run. These original prints will be bound into each copy of my upcoming book of poetry Wellspring: Poems 1993-2003. It will available in the next couple of weeks from Publication Studio. Tracy did the design and it looks terrific!

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2011-07-06T15:11:00.000-07:00

July Reading List

2011-07-01T09:52:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the books on my bookshelf this month.
Mothers of Invention: women of the slaveholding South in the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso
The Fasti by Ovid
Even the Giants by Jesse Jacobs
Ceramics in America 2006 by Robert Hunter
Masters of American Comics
Congress of the Animals by Jim Woodring
Asterix the Gaul by R. Goscinny and A. Underzo

Walt Whitman print

2011-06-30T16:54:00.000-07:00

Here's the first stage of a Walt Whitman print. In the next few weeks I'm going to begin a series of Naked Boy related posters featuring the historic figures in the story. Walt Whitman plays Lyle Walters, the werewolf/guiding spirit.

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2011-06-20T16:21:00.000-07:00

Summer Comics Roundup

2011-06-16T10:24:00.000-07:00

A COMICS ROUND UP

Here’s some short reviews of notable comics I’ve read recently. All three of the series I in this review are self-published. They all have very distinct voices. These are stories that work best as comics and a large part of comics history is in serialization. Check them out and support some talented up and coming artists and writers.

Poison the Cure Parts 1-3 by Jad Ziade and Alex Cahill

The New Radio

Poison the Cure is a dense, underappreciated labor of love. It doesn’t look or sound like anything else I’ve read. (Alex Cahill is a friend so I’ll get that out of the way right now) Ziade and Cahill have been working on Poison the Cure since 2006. Poison the Cure begins with aliens in a far distant future. They are assigned to discover the history of a long ago scorched earth. The story is told via the psychic residue of the characters. Set in a dystopic near future, a group of friends fight against a military-industrial dictatorship. Cahill’s drawings crackle with energy. He uses the hard black and white negative spaces of woodcuts, but manages to retain the liquid fluidity of ink. Ziade’s storytelling is at times elliptical, but never pandering. Poison the Cure is one of the most thrilling books I've read in a while. What is exciting to me is to see how Cahill’s drawings have matured over the 5 years of the making of the books.

The Feast by Evan Palmer and Anna Bongiovanni

The Godins Parts 1 & 2 by Evan Palmer

I picked these small zine style comics on my way out of the door at Stumptown. I’m glad I did. The Feast is a strange fairy tale about girls fighting a carnivorous monster. The drawing is crisp and clear. The storytelling has a good pace. The Godins is an ongoing story that takes place in a fantasy world. Palmer has a very clean storytelling style. Like Jeff Smith’s Bone, The Godins uses a combination of Disneyesque characterizations and fantasy tropes to tell the story. I look forward to the next installments.

Expansion Parts 1 & 2

Matt Sheean and Malachi Ward

I’ve liked Malachi Ward’s work since I discovered Utu. Like the above-mentioned books, Expansion is a three part serialized story. Expansion exists in the world of high-concept science fiction. The story elling is elegant. Sheean and Ward also know how to pace a serialized story. Each installment works as a piece that builds a larger whole. The combined drawing of the two (Sheean on pencils and Ward on inks) has a slippery, sticky quality. One particular page in which the character Turner watches a multitude of people turn into a gooey mass of slime is terrific. Sheean and Ward use silence to great affect in creating the sensation of being lost far out in the void of space.

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2011-06-15T13:39:00.000-07:00

June Reading List

2011-05-26T16:28:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the books on my bookshelf this month.
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
The End of Art by Donald Kuspit
Captain America Omnibus by Jack Kirby
I Will Bite You by Joseph Lambert
Leon Golub by Donald Kuspit
Stigmata by Lorenzo Mattotti and Claudio Piersanti
King of the Flies by Mezzo and Pirus
Paterson by William Carlos Williams

Wellspring Chapter images

2011-05-25T13:35:00.000-07:00

Here are the four chapter images for Wellspring: Poems 1993-2003. The book's sections will be divided by original prints bound into the book. Check in for more information on the release of the book by Publication Studio.

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2011-05-19T14:30:00.000-07:00

RRT returns! The Worried Superhero moves to Maryhill Museum

2011-05-16T09:38:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since the last post. We went to Mexico for a week and then the end of the semester hit. Now that summer is here, look for many more posts as we get to the end of The Naked Boy.
This weekend, anyone interested in heading to Maryhill Museum should come and hear me talk. The Worried Superhero from the Sleeping Giant show has been re-fired and re-surfaced. I built a new base for the sculpture. The sculpture will spend the next few months in the outdoor sculpture garden. Maryhill Museum is a terrific and unique museum in the Columbia River Gorge. If you can't make it Saturday then you could go all summer long. the piece will spend the next few months there.

When: Saturday May 21, 3 PM
Where: Maryhill Museum

Poem: Some Great Men

2011-04-08T16:21:00.000-07:00

I will publish a book of poems later this Spring with Publication Studio entitled Wellspring: Poems 1993-2003. This is from that collection.

SOME GREAT MEN

Some great men rage.

They bawl and yell,

open the doors of their chests

and out spills the universe.

Give me wine, I'll yell and rage too,

I'll cry despair on dirty streets

that have been washed clean

of enigmatic holy luster,

I'll finger my dreams in my pocket

and show you when the coast is clear.

Some great men walk quietly,

they shine like burnished lappis,

they speak with the voices

from the depths of the wellspring.

The world melts through their pores.

I sit for ten thousand years

dressed as a raven tied to a mesa,

and these men whisp away

like the mist on a morning river.

Some great men work in dusty places,

their stories told in epic poems over mashed potatoes,

while the rest of the family

takes their own trips

on oceans of T.V. noise

and cucumbers from the garden.

My hands are their hands,

and I go to wash off the blood and grease

in the still ocean of the world.

April Reading List

2011-04-03T14:20:00.000-07:00

Just Kids by Patti Smith
Birchfield Close by Jon McNaught
A Graphic Cosmogony
OMAC by Jack Kirby
FF # 1
War of the Green Lanterns
Skyscrapers of the Midwest by Joshua Cotter
The Jealous Potter by Claude Levi Strauss
Lynd Ward's Library of America Collection
Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
Frederick Douglass : Autobiographies : Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave / My Bondage and My Freedom / Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Library of America)

Essay and book review

2011-04-02T17:29:00.000-07:00

The Indian Problem

General George Armstrong Custer

On June 25, 1876 the U.S. Seventh Cavalry led by General George Armstrong Custer mounted an attack on the largest gathering of Sioux in history. The Sioux were camped on the Little Bighorn River with all their families, ponies and possessions. The Northern bands of the Sioux gathered to resist the pressure from the United States government to give up their traditional ways and move into the agencies. They wanted to remain free. Custer couldn’t see the immensity of the gathering. The might and resolve of the northern bands was invisible to the General. On that day in June, when Custer’s men descended on the Sioux, he was carrying out one part of a three-pronged strike to choke out the northern bands. He failed miserably. By June 26 all the U.S. soldiers were dead including Custer himself. Custer was instantly mythologized for dying tragically in his “last stand”. The newspapers of the time referred to it as a massacre. Much was made of the scalping and mutilation of the soldier’s corpses. The Indians were described as being “lucky” or “outnumbering” the hapless soldiers. Neither military prowess nor a tenacious homeland defense was cited as part of the Sioux victory. After the battle, the United States government doubled down its pursuit of the remaining bands of free Sioux. This Indian victory led to their quick and total demise. In that battle, two Sioux leaders emerged as icons of Indian resistance- Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. The following year after Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse would be coerced into a reservation and then murdered. Sitting Bull lived another twenty years after being extradited from Canada and similarly assassinated. The humiliation at Little Bighorn burned in the hearts of many military men. Even as late as 1891, at the massacre at Wounded Knee, revenge fueled the soldiers’ ethnic rage. The Wounded Knee Massacre destroyed any semblance of Sioux independence. The Sioux exit the historic stage. They then occasionally make cameos as foils for John Wayne or to weep over highway trash.

Horse skeletons on Little Bighorn Battlefield
The battle and its aftermath occupy different perspectives of what’s called “the Indian problem”. First the problem was how to get them off resource rich land, and then having done so how to turn them into white people. The Sioux, and all indigenous peoples of the Americas, have the unfortunate position of being confined in history and simultaneously excluded from it. They are not allowed contemporaneity. Take a moment and try to think of a modern Sioux (and no, turn off the flute music and eagle cry in your head). When an Indian appears in contemporary culture he or she gets one of three roles– drunken fool, wise shaman or greedy casino owner. Several recent books and shows give new context to the history and the aftermath of that fateful day in 1876. Thomas Powers’ book The Killing of Crazy Horse gives us a multifaceted view into the events surrounding the death of the Sioux leader. It has the pace of a mystery novel with the sensitivity of a journalist building a case. Powers gives the reader a portrait of Crazy Horse by inference and creates the political and cultural context leading up to the murder. By the time the titular act happens, the reader feels the emotional weight of an entire people. History is made alive and immediate. Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera’s comic book series Scalped from Vertigo tells the story of the contemporary Sioux reservation. At heart, Scalped is a sordid story of low-life crime centered on a corrupt casino owner named Chief Red Crow. On the surface it traffics in the above-mentioned stereotypes. By setting a crime story on the rez, Aaron gives us neither saints nor fools, but real characters inside noir genre. Finally, HBO’s Deadwood (2004-2006) is a kind of anti-western. Deadwood was the illegal town of gold miners in the Black Hills that spurred the US government to renegotiate its treaty with the Sioux. Custer kick started the gold rush by declaring that “there was gold from the grassroots down” in the Black Hills. Deadwood set itself up inside Sioux territory as an independent camp while it awaited annexation to the U.S. The town was a willing tool of empire.

Ledger drawing of Crazy Horse by Amos Bad Heart Bull
The Killing of Crazy Horse makes the history around the Sioux wars matter to us in the twenty-first century. Frontier history is often framed as a tragic, but inevitable flow of events. Told this way history is stuck behind glass. It can’t breathe. A reader is left with a feeling of helplessness. There’s nothing that can be done now and anyway, we have bigger fish to fry these days. Why read a book about the murder of a historic Sioux chief? Read this history and you see echoes of the now– echoes of genocidal policies, echoes of deeds swept under the collective rug, echoes of national amnesia. The United States was building a glorious new democracy and the Indians were the noble but extraneous blockage to that goal. Powers builds a case history by focusing on different characters around Crazy Horse. One such profile is of General George Crook. Crook was a deeply frustrated, vain and prickly man. He always felt overlooked in the public eye. He was to be one prong of the three-prong attack. He was routed by Crazy Horse and then sat waiting for orders while his men fished and hunted. Had he moved to the aid of Custer, some 30 miles away, Little Bighorn would be a different matter. He was never blamed explicitly, but innuendo dogged Crook. As a result, he was particularly keen on bringing down Crazy Horse. Powers paints a picture of tragic misunderstandings, missed opportunities and duplicitous power plays. Crazy Horse’s murder happens at the end of a long line of such mishaps. His own people did him in, but the means were placed there by an imperial system. Powers gives a brief history of the Sioux after consolidation on reservations. After his death Crazy Horse diminished in public memory. Sitting Bull emerged as the iconic Indian resistance fighter. However, Crazy Horse’s memory was kept alive by relatives. Like an ancestral relay race, Crazy Horse still touches the hands of contemporary Sioux via family histories. By the twenties and thirties Crazy Horse was restored to a position of influence in the historic register. These days, his name is synonymous with warrior culture.

The Deadwood thoroughfare
Indians don’t have much presence in HBO’s Deadwood. All the action happens in the stinking mud streets of the boomtown or various saloons and hotels. The Sioux are major forces outside the town, but they live offstage in dialogue only. In the first season, saloon owner Al Swearengen (played by Ian Mcshane) says, “I'll tell you this, son, you can mark my words, Crazy Horse went into Little Bighorn, bought his people one good, long-term ass-fucking. You do not want to be a dirt-worshipping heathen from this fucking point forward.” This quote puts not too fine a point on the consequences of such a sweeping Indian victory. The victory focused all the forces of the young nation on the Plains tribes. The only live Sioux that shows up in the three seasons fights Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant) to the death. The fight is accidental and brutal. Bullock takes the time to respectfully inter his victim in the traditional Lakota way on a scaffold. In the third season Swearengen takes to carrying around a severed Sioux head in a box. The head becomes the object of Swearengen’s increasingly melancholic monologues. Like Yorick, the Indian head is an occasion for the crime lord/saloon owner to recognize his own mortality. Swearengen, a pioneer hoping to capitalize on his claims and power in the mining camp recognizes that the coming of larger, more bureaucratic forces spell the end to his small time crime. Deadwood aired during the height of the Bush economic bubble. It took the classic western (of which the Bush administration tacitly identified with) and stripped it of romantic vistas and individualistic heroes. Deadwood showed what really made the west and America tick in boom times- thuggish greed and corruption. Deadwood ran on gold speculation. There were no innocents or noble heroes.

R.M. Guera sketches of Chief Red Crow
As vulgar and raunchy as Deadwood, Scalped spares no politically correct feelings in its story of corruption and crime on the fictional Prairie Rose Reservation. Aaron gives the reader a portrait of desperate poverty, clannish rivalries and an ever-present rage bubbling beneath the surface of a people. Scalped is the story of Dash Bad Horse, an undercover FBI agent who returns to the reservation he hates to bring down Chief Red Crow. Scalped is like Donnie Brasco meets Incident at Oglala. Bad Horse’s mother was an activist in the mold of A.I.M. (the American Indian Movement). Gina Bad Horse and Red Crow were lovers who along with their group of radicals are involved in the killing of two FBI agents. Aaron fictionalizes the events surrounding the killing of two agents on Pine Ridge reservation in 1975. Leonard Peltier was convicted for those murders but many questions surround his case. Peltier even mirrored Sitting Bull’s move to Canada before being extradited for trial. Scalped has a Peltier stand-in later in the series.
Little Bighorn scene from Scalped

Like the best of serial television (The Sopranos, Deadwood etc.), Scalped slowly builds a multi-character story of a place. All the characters occupy a morally ambiguous territory, but we end up rooting for them anyway. R.M. Guera’s drawings have the grit and dirt suited to the storylines. His characters live and breathe. When occasionally another artist takes up the story, it’s a little disappointing. It’s like having James Gandolfini’s understudy play Tony Soprano for an episode. Scalped allows the history of the Sioux to bubble up into the present of the characters. In one issue, a three-page progression moves from the Little Bighorn battlefield and the death of Custer to Wounded Knee to 20^th century consolidation to the present. Guera’s drawings and Aaron’s script condense the history in a way only comics do well and the condensation and distillation manifests the urgency of those wrongs in the character’s lives. A subterranean anger burns slow and smolders. Mass culture might ask us to forget and move on– “keep buying, keep shopping”– but history aches. There’s a real cinematic quality to Scalped that might seem it wants to be on the big (or small) screen. The storytelling is pure comics however, it exists in the space between the drawn characters and the written word. Like Deadwood, Scalped is a lesson in what the American character really is. It’s capitalism, brutal and blunt not sunny democracy that drives our stories.

The Indian problem then becomes one of story. The original name for reservations is agencies. How can the indigenous people have narrative agency- the agency to tell their story and live now? How do we have the agency to tell a multi-branched and contradictory national narrative that allows for coexistence? Redress and guilt are not particularly useful responses to such a horrific history. Guilt can be narcissistic. The world is global. Culture, even at its most local, is affected by international winds. The national story mentions the original tribes and then with a bit of creative erasure, lightens the dark spaces. They were here but now they’re gone. A recent article in the New York Times about the Denver Art Museum’s American Indian art galleries discusses the museum’s new policy of attribution. For the first time in the history of the collection, objects will be given a maker’s name. This trend is beginning to take hold. In the past, artifacts would be grouped according to geography or tribe. We deny Native Americans a place in the story of modern art even though their imagery is hugely influential. We deny individual Native American artists and writers a place in mainstream histories, arguing some cultural exceptionalism as a reason for a defined niche. In another recent Times review of the show Tipi: Heritage of the Plains at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Ken Johnson senses the old confusion. In looking at the mix of contemporary artists and craftsmen next to historic artifacts he says,
“The display suggests that there is no important difference between the old and the new. But how can that be so? The Plains Indian culture that gave rise to these kinds of objects was practically destroyed by the United States government’s campaign to clear land for settlement by white people over a century ago.”

In the 80’s and 90’s the rise of multiculturalism and politically correct nomenclature went a long way toward redressing public blind spots. Unfortunately, those same trends were easily co-opted by corporate linguists for amnesiac purposes. Political correctness while well meaning, (it’s tendency for finger wagging seems an extension of our Puritan past), scrubbed our language clean of honest idiosyncrasy. 9/11 gave us something else to focus on and fear. Who’s got time for a bunch of whiny Indians on the public tit when you’ve got sleeper cells in the neighborhood? But listen to the words of generals in the war on terror and read historic accounts of the Indian wars. You’ve got almost verbatim the same language, the same tactics and the same buried agendas. Listen to the racism of Tea Party rhetoric (by the way the Tea Party taking it’s name from whites who dressed as Indians to commit acts of vandalism, not unlike road agents in Deadwood who disguised their own murderous marauding as acts of Sioux aggression) and you will see that the story of the Sioux is the story of our nation. Until we can restore the full human agency of the original peoples and bring them into our larger narrative as equals, we have no agency. The whole thing needs to be told, and not as little side compartments off of the larger triumphal story. History is easy to think of as something behind us, a gone train missed. But that attitude renders the true contours of the present invisible. Why did Custer die on that day in 1876? He died from hubris. He died of blindness.

New storage jar series

2011-03-28T20:22:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the first of a new series of pots. The tin-glazed pots have imagery from American myth and history. Some of the forms I'm exploring are storage jars, cake plates and platters.

This jar has an image of tenant farmers. The jar has four "spouts".

Here is a detail of one of the knobs. It's a "green man" head.

Part 3 Page 11

2011-03-28T16:56:00.000-07:00

Part 3 Page 10

2011-03-28T16:55:00.000-07:00

Book Review: Stumptown Volume 1

2011-03-27T14:30:00.000-07:00

The Portlandia Files

All comics is local. That’s not totally true of course, but it seems that comic stories lend themselves to specific places. Even in the Big 2 universes, each character is given a city to patrol. Superman has Metropolis, Batman has Gotham and in the Marvel Universe most of the superheroes hang out in New York City. Indie comics, which tend toward confessional autobiographies, really claim the mid-sized city as the backdrop for their protagonists’ downbeat stories. Newspaper strips were an integral part of a city’s daily life. In Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth’s Stumptown, the city of Portland, Oregon becomes a main character. Stumptown Volume 1 has just been released as a hard cover from Oni Press. The hardcover collects the first story arc from the single comic issues. Portland is home to some of the most important cartoonists and comic book writers. It boasts at least three major comic publishers (including Oni), numerous smaller publishers and several top-notch comic shops. In Stumptown, Portland gets its own comic book close up.

Stumptown is a terrific P.I story. Rucka has referred to this as an homage to The Rockford Files and other pulpy 70’s television shows. I too grew up on a steady diet of 70’s cop shows. I can’t remember a single episode of The Rockford Files though it seemed to be on constantly. I do recognize however, the kinds of walk-on characters usually reserved for washed up actors as well as the breezy and resourceful main character. Stumptown tells the story of Dex (short for Dexedrine) Parios. She’s a P.I with a flimsy grasp on her finances and her love life. She lives with her mentally retarded brother. She’s deep in debt from gambling. Dex is given a seemingly simple case that will clear her debts but inevitably becomes murky. Rucka knows how to tell comic stories. Without exposition he gives us glimpses of Dex’s history and character. He deftly balances cheeky dialogue and dangerous intrigue. Stumptown is fun and suspenseful and like those old detective shows, you know that Dex will be back for more cases. It doesn’t take itself too seriously but it doesn’t pander. This is smart entertainment without pretension.

Of course since comics are a form of visual storytelling, half of the narrative chores fall to the artist. Matthew Southworth (from Seattle, we won’t hold that against him, Rucka is from Portland) really captures the feel of the city. Southworth’s panels have a blunt elegance to them. His drawings combine a loose brushiness with tight architectural space. His characters feel fully realized. There are a couple of top-notch sequences. The full page spread when Dex is getting shot under the St. John’s Bridge overlaid with a cascading series of panels depicting a goose or duck flying off is just exquisite. His sequence of Dex trying to run out of a hotel room just after getting bonked on the head is a nice bit of POV. Southworth truly captures Portland. It should also be said that the hardcover greatly improves upon the monthly comic. The issues were printed on glossy paper whereas the new collection is on matte paper. This really shows off Southworth’s artwork and the color by Southworth, Lee Loughridge and Rico Renzi.

On the surface, Portland is a very clean and upright city. One might actually say the City of Roses is a bit of a schoolmarm. That self-righteous, left of center attitude is beautifully spoofed in IFC’s Portlandia. However, this west coast schoolmarm has a naughty nightlife. Portland is home to a lot of heroine, sex clubs and strange crime. Not to mention it has atmosphere. It rains here, a lot. The structure of the city lends itself to a certain kind of storytelling. We have a muddy river that connects the docks and granaries with the Pacific Ocean, a small downtown surrounded by wooded hills with opulent homes. That gives the writers of Portland a quirky but also archetypal canvas on which to work. Many other writers have begun to exploit this. Look at the success of Chelsea Cain’s detective series. In a very different and smaller way my own Green Man of Portland exploits the strangeness and local myths of the city. I hope to see more of Stumptown soon. This isn’t just because it takes place in my hometown, but because Rucka and Southworth are exemplary comic storytellers. I’m a big fan of Rucka’s past work such as Gotham Central and Queen and Country, but Stumptown has something else going for it. It is a story of normal people in seedy situations played out in a strange but very recognizable place. This is a place I would happily spend a lot of time.

Stumptown Vol. 1

by Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth

available from Oni Press

$29.99

Released March 2011

A Ceramic book to check out

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Here is a link to Paul Mathieu's excellent new book of ceramic essays called The Art of the Future. The whole thing is available online. This is a good addition to my earlier list of books about ceramics. Finally with books like Mathieu's there is a new frame for thinking about clay. Mathieu's earlier book Sexpots is another great rethinking of ceramic history.

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Essay: The Ceramic Boom

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The Coming Ceramic Boom

“The God image, not pottery, was the first manual act. It is the materialistic corruption of present-day anthropology that has tried to make men believe that original man fashioned pottery before he made sculpture. Pottery is the product of civilization. The artistic act is man’s personal birthright.” So saith Barnett Newman in his essay “The First Man was an Artist”. The cantankerous abstract expressionist spelled out in the most explicit terms I’ve ever seen why ceramics are considered the snotty little orphan of Fine Art– it’s domestic, effeminate and banal.

If Newman took a quick gander at some current trends in contemporary art he would be aghast. Apparently ceramics, and not just fired clay, but of all things lowly pots, are of interest to young artists, critics and collectors. How did this happen? As a practitioner of ceramic art for nearly twenty years, I accepted that ceramic history was a sleepy cul-de-sac of not much consequence. Sure, I dig it, but I am embarrassed by the corny provincialism of that world. The ceramic world is like the relatives I’m slightly ashamed of. I left the ceramic dialogue many times in search of greener pastures, but it always calls me back. My home is in that burnt earth.

This month in Portland there are a couple of notable shows that reflect this trend. At Pulliam is a terrific show by Seattle artist Jeffry Mitchell. The show is called simply “pot & snowflake”. In a show of over 60 modest sized pots and cut up prints in snowflake patterns, Mitchell completely overturns the expectations of how fine art is supposed to be presented. There is no real artist statement; there are no overlays of French theory and no titles. The show’s title is as blunt as the work. That doesn’t mean that it’s dumb or anti-intellectual. In fact it is smartly sensual, playful and satisfying as hell. If this show were filtered through the status quo of ceramics history and craft protocols, it would come off as fusty or defensive. The pots all resemble colonial bean jars and honey pots. The mottled glaze recalls medieval lead glazed earthenware. Sgraffito drawings of elephants and flowers adorn the surface of the pots. The pots have lugs and cut-out holes that make the pots de facto bodies– ears, mouths and sphincters. They’re occasionally hilarious and always bewitching. All the pots are arranged on pedestals that are slightly too tall. The viewing experience never becomes too comfortable. In fact, there is a reticence in the work that suggests the hand of a trickster. Knowing Mitchell’s earlier work this seems apt. Mitchell strips the vessels of utility and leaves the viewer with an acute awareness of the physicality of clay.

Jeffry Mitchell at Pulliam

Around the corner at Elizabeth Leach is the group show “Here/Now” which includes the work of Jessica Jackson Hutchins. Hutchins’ lumpen brown vessels combined with altered furniture brought her to national attention. She was featured in the last Whitney Biennial. The success of Hutchins’ work is that she does not shy away from the history of hand made pots. On the other hand, she is not collared by the orthodoxy of ceramic history. Of course if you were to walk a few blocks down the road to The Museum of Contemporary Craft, you would find that history on display. Those earlier makers would probably think, “What’s the big deal? We’ve been doing this stuff for decades”. “Era Messages” a show curated by Garth Johnson from the permanent collection chooses pieces that reflect their times. Some of the work certainly does look almost embarrassing in its reflection of a particular era. Much of the work looks fresh again. Some of it looks down right prophetic. Craft has had an alternate history without much crossover into the mainstream. We seem to be in an era of dovetailing.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins at Elizabeth Leach

Why now? Why is handicraft on an ascendance? Six years ago, colleagues, curators and collectors were huffing the fumes of new media and a bubble economy. Any regard for a handmade functional object was met with derision, anxiety and dismissal. Design, not craft was king. At the Pacific Northwest College of Art where I teach, students were mainly interested in relational aesthetics, video and ephemeral practices. An underground rumble was beginning however. With young people becoming more and more interested in Americana, folk music, DIY craft and artisanal food, it makes sense that traditional craft would be rediscovered. While design usurped craft’s utilitarian role, Social Practice and Relational Aesthetics usurped craft’s social structure. Young artists are primed through exposure to socially based work and a desire to subvert existing power structures to reengage craft. Social practice tends to make non-participants feel they’ve missed a party and will never get it, and many participants don’t get it either. It can be a slight experience. “High” design tends to be smug and self-satisfied. Craft works best in the human realm. But the craft movement as it existed since William Morris’ time and flowered in the eighties needed to die.

Wayne Higby at The Museum of Contemporary Craft

There are a few texts that seemed to herald this new age. In 2008 Garth Clark presented his excellent essay “How Envy Killed the Craft Movement” available through the Museum of Contemporary Craft. He presents what he calls an “autopsy” of a movement whose failure rested in its desire to emulate fine art instead of being itself. He ends with “Craft is dead, long live craft”. In 2007 Glenn Adamson’s book Thinking Through Craft created a critical framework for a new generation of crafters. Last year Adamson edited The Craft Reader, which will become an important source for renewal in crafts. Richard Sennett’s book The Craftsman uses the craftsman as a model for economics and education. Sennett shows among other things that there is an explicit connection between the hand and the head. Making is a kind of thinking. Finally in 2009 the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia launched the influential exhibit Dirt on Delight. The show featured both historic ceramic luminaries such as Robert Arneson and Viola Frey as well as younger artists such as Hutchins and Mitchell. The catalog includes an essay by Adamson and should be a seen as a kind of manifesto for young ceramic artists. There are many other shows cropping up as well even the New Museum’s 2008 Unmonumental: The Object in the 21^st Century pointed toward a more material, handed moment in contemporary art.

Dirt on Delight installation view

Of course, some other seismic shifts helped usher in this renewal. The economy collapsed in 2007. It collapsed because we got conned into believing that we could borrow based on nothing but blind belief. Since the Dot Com boom we’ve had a cult of the “Visionary CEO”. These are businessmen who speak like conceptual artists and cook books to hide the fact that there is no earth supporting their hare-brained schemes. They got rich and we got poor. Even the bailouts rewarded the gamblers and punished the poor. Meanwhile based on this imaginary capital the art market swelled to historic highs. The trend toward international superstars creating blue chip baubles and MFA programs promoting a masturbatory professionalism in young artists revealed an art world reflecting and fed by the financial world. As Andrea Fraser in her excellent essay “From a Critique of Institution to an Institution of Critique” states, no one benefited from the Bush tax cuts as much as artists. It’s no wonder that young artists desire the immediate and the physical. It turns out that we can’t completely deny the physical world.

In the ceramic studios at PNCA more and more students are throwing pots and making things with clay. This is an exciting sign. Clay more than any other material is primal. It is literally the ground beneath our feet. Fired in a kiln it is the first promethean act of industry and alchemy. Newman is correct that pots go hand in hand with agriculture and civilization, but he is incorrect to assume that the god image is not contained in these humble vessels. A fired clay vessel is one of the most human of objects and therefore if not divine, then profoundly philosophical and cpomplex. The vessel as metaphor and artifact sums up the physical life of a human being. Yes, the history of ceramics is filled with kitsch, bad jokes and just plain dumb objects. But isn’t painting as well? What about sculpture? Not all performance art is created equal let me tell you. Why deny this whole facet of material, visual culture an intellectual assessment? Why not grant it the same contemplative capacities granted other art works? This reevaluation of clay signals a coming reevaluation of art in general. Perhaps the mud and the fire, the broad humanness inherent in the material and its history will help usher in a more poetic and human era in art.

Bibliography and further reading

Adamson, Glenn. The Craft Reader. Berg Publishers, 2010. Print.

Adamson, Glenn. Thinking through craft. English ed. Oxford; New York:

Berg, 2007.

Flood, Richard, and New Museum (New York, N.Y.). Unmonumental : the object in the 21st century.

London; New York: Phaidon in association with New Museum, 2007.

Schaffner, Ingrid, Jenelle Porter, and Glenn Adamson. Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay. Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2009. Print.

Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008

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Book Review

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The Whale by Aidan Koch

Leviathan by Jens Harder

Utu by Malachi Ward

Comics and poetry share many similarities. Both depend on the boiled down image- the distillation surrounded by silence. Both have the possibility of resonances echoing in the space between word or image. Three books that have been on my “think about shelf” exhibit those qualities. Each of these three books is either self-published or from a small publisher. A premium is put on the quality of the book itself.

I discovered Malachi Ward’s Utu at last year’s Stumptown Comics Fest. It is a short haunting story about a man in some unnamed future trying to affect the outcome of a very distant past. Ward uses near silence in the story telling. Utu harks back to 1970’s psychological science fiction. His line work is simple and uncluttered but retains a hand drawn vivacity. The story ends with the past symmetrically reflected in his present. Ward is able to retain the poetics of the medium without sacrificing the clarity of the medium’s past. This is top grade comics.

Aidan Koch’s The Whale is pure poetry. The Whale is about loss and remembrance. A women sifts through the artifacts of a lost lover and tries to fill the void left behind. Koch has a wonderful lightness of touch in her graphite drawings. Her use of white space and scumbled erasure is one of the great pleasures of looking at the book. However, her real trump card is in her economical use of text. The words bounce off the drawings giving the book its emotional weight. The whale in question is one that has been beached far from home. There is a beautiful sequence of the lost whale sounding for its companions.

Jens Harder’s Leviathan takes the whale head on. Combining quotes from Melville’s Moby Dick with long silent sequences Harder reveals a powerful metaphoric whale. The whale in these gorgeous blue and gray drawings emerges as an ancient spirit deep seated in the human psyche. It is a mysterious and beguiling book. The dynamic drawings recall etchings, medieval block prints and heavily cross-hatched adventure comics. Some of the sequences evince formal rigor while others explode maniacally across the page.

All three of these books point to the poetic qualities of comics. These books are great examples of what comics do singularly and best.

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Part 3 The Story So Far

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The Naked Boy is spit out of the mouth of a white whale on the east coast of an unnamed continent. The little unformed baby is adopted by a group of crows. The crows tell him that The Great Bear (Ursa Major) — the constellation that turns the seasons — will ravage and kill his sister Ursula if he doesn’t get there first. They give him wings and a directive to follow the railroad west to Ursa Major’s home.

Meanwhile, the Great Bear and Ursula discover that they are expecting twins. The Great Bear worries that The Naked Boy will fulfill a prophecy to kill him.

After The Naked Boy blinds Pirate, a giant snapping turtle, the turtle bites off The Naked Boy’s legs. While blinding Pirate, he inadvertently killed the seven sisters who now form a constellation named The Pleiades. His friend Lyle (formerly a werewolf), now a wandering spirit, keeps watch on The Naked Boy as he crosses the continent.

The Naked Boy has recently left Freedom City-The City of Big Men in flames. A family of escaping slaves- Mama Lou, Cash and Rose have led the "volunteer" work force out of servitude in Freedom City. The Governor of Freedom City has just hatched his plan to run for president of the continent. Part of that plan involved experimentation on the Naked Boy to create a lab grown work force that would dispense with human workers. The Naked Boy's capture gave The Governor another political edge- his image as a protector. The Naked Boy thwarted his plans with the help of Lyle by escaping just in time to help the slaves break out. Now, The Naked Boy continues his westward journey in search of his sister in the beginning of the final part of The Naked Boy.

My March reading list

2011-03-04T09:30:00.000-08:00

Here are a few books I've been reading and thinking about. Full reviews will appear next week.
The Killing of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers
Trickster Makes this World by Lewis Hyde
The Old, Weird America by Toby Kamps
Dirt on Delight: Impulses that Form Clay
Leviathan by Jens Harder
Utu by Malachi Ward
The Whale by Aidan Koch
In the American Grain by William Carlos Williams

Wanted poster

2011-02-28T10:07:00.000-08:00

Here's a new print I did for the signing. These prints will be available soon for $20. on the site.

Willamette Week review

2011-02-23T10:35:00.000-08:00

Nice mention in this week's Willamette Week.

Free Slave-Frederick Douglass series

2011-02-21T16:38:00.000-08:00

Here are two prints from a new series of prints.
The black and white print was created for the PNCA Print Portfolio.

Part 3 Coming soon! Green Man #2 delayed

2011-02-15T10:16:00.000-08:00

Start looking for the first pages of Part 3 in the next week or so. I've been promoting Part 2 and rewriting some of Part 3.
Part 3 will be as big as Parts 1 and 2 combined. Everything comes together in the final installment of The Naked Boy.
Because of the intensity of the work to finish the Naked Boy, I'm postponing Green Man # 2. Green Man of Portland #2 is already written and continues the stories from 1 and adds new depth and new characters to the story.

Naked Boy Part 2 Book Release and Signing

2011-01-31T15:29:00.001-08:00

The Naked Boy Part 2 Release Party and Signing

When:

Friday February 25 6-8PM

Where:

Bridge City Comics

3725 N. Mississippi Ave.
Portland, OR 97227

Phone/Fax: 503-282-5484

E-mail: info@bridgecitycomics.com

http://www.bridgecitycomics.com/

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Look for it in print in the next few weeks!

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The Naked Boy Part 2 Cover art

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This is the cover art for The Naked Boy Part 2. Cover is watercolor and graphite.

New Print for Cumbersome Multiples Studio Sale

2010-11-29T21:12:00.000-08:00

Here's a new print for the forthcoming Naked Boy Part 2- John Henry Holding the Dying Frederick Douglass. The print will be available at Cumbersome Multiples Studio Sale this Sunday Dec. 5. Come by for a great selection of letterpress, prints, handmade gifts, pastries and pickles!

Check out our website www.cumbersomemultiples.com for information on all our guest artists.

WHERE:

3144 NE 7th Avenue

Portland, Oregon 97212

WHEN:

Sunday December 5

10-5

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The Naked Boy Returns!

2010-09-27T20:58:00.000-07:00

I'm finally back on track for the Naked Boy! Here's the next page of the story. I will post more this week.

Off to Bellevue

2010-08-18T21:40:00.000-07:00

Here are some images of the final piece before I pack it up and bring it to Bellevue for the Bellevue Art Museum's 2010 Biennial.

The Night Pharaoh exhibition

2010-08-03T23:08:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder to join us tomorrow night at Publication Studio for The Night Pharaoh release and Rafael's reading. We'll be pulling prints and giving them for free. The books look terrific! Tracy's design is beautiful. Then join us Thursday for the opening of the Night Pharaoh exhibition at PNCA. Here are some shots from today's installation.

The Feast of Fallen in Progress

2010-07-29T15:04:00.001-07:00

Here's an in-progress view of the Feast of the Fallen. Delivery to BAM is on Aug. 20th! Head and plate are fired but still need glazing and surfacing. The pedestal will be painted next week after The Night Pharaoh installation.

Powells Books Events: PDX Bridge Festival: Daniel Duford

2010-07-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

Powells Books Events: PDX Bridge Festival: Daniel Duford

More Night Pharaoh prints

2010-07-19T13:12:00.000-07:00