MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Can the comics powers that be please declare a moratorium on comics artists complaining about how it takes so long to make comics and then people read them in a few minutes. I was listening to the Inkstuds interview with Ray Fenwick, and the topic came up. Chris Ware and Kevin Huizenga have both made [...]

The number of comics in the “to blog” pile in my office is a little overwhelming. Some are slated for longer appreciations, but many, I suspect would benefit just as well from a quicker look at the highlights or just whatever caught my interest in the work. Or maybe, as happened in this case, a [...]

Be regular and orderly in your life… so that you may be violent and original in your work. Flaubert, Gustave. Quoted in Keeping Found Things Found by William Jones (Elsevier, 2008). We thought that that was a better way to go with it, to have the music be the place where it’s wild and experimental [...]

I found this Louise Bourgeois drawing from 1944 in “Drawing from the Modern: 1880-1945″ (Museum of Modern Art, 2004): Click for larger. Something about it appeals to me. The repeated lines are likes waves, the ocean, sound, an ekg, abstract mountains, or a topographic map. The peaks travel across the page, down and to the [...]

Andrei Molotiu pointed me towards the works of Pierre Alechinsky, a painter I was not familiar with, though I have heard of the group he was associated with, COBRA (some of whom later went on to join with parts of the Lettrist group to form the Situationist International). A quick Google Image search will bring [...]

I posted previously about Cy Twombly’s work. As I was returning the monograph on him I had back to the library, I scanned two images to share. The first is a “polyptych in 9 parts” called “Nine Discourses on Commodus” (1963). I’d imagine my interest in it is obvious. Layed out as it is on [...]

Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp. Ed. Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk. Trans. Jill Taylor. Ghent, Belgium: Ludion Press, 2000. Marcel Duchamp is arguably one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. I won’t be arguing that point here. He was not a prolific artist and the myth goes that [...]

Mark Tansey is, hands down, one of my favorite painters. His works are thematically/conceptually rich, beautifully painted, and narrative. They often deal with matters of representation, art theory, and texts. Titles like “Derrida Queries de Man”, “The Triumph of the New York School”, “Close Reading”, and “The Bricoleur’s Daughter” should give you an idea about [...]