Question

 

It would seem more and more that being an artist in this world means having to dance to the tune of social media addiction. It’s exhausting and I’d love to say I’m off that junk and clean, I ain’t. And frankly I’m kinda scared too. You see, since I no longer have a brick and mortar and since I don’t have any kind of regular gallery or publishing representation, I tell myself that soc med is necessary to survive as an artist, to remain seen and active if not relevant.

Without soc med how do I gain traction? No one swings by blogs anymore if they ever did….so here I am. 

Have Art Kit, Will Travel !

 

Hello Everyone!

I’m so pleased to announce that I’ve been designing various Creative Collaborative Art Experiences to share with individuals or with groups! 

I need to take my creative drive and my Art Kit and connect with folks who want to make art but may need a helping hand!

These aren’t lessons as much as they are play dates! I’ll come to you and your friends (or we can meet in a park or café too) and we’ll make art together!

Can’t wait to see you.

Billy

A List of Potent Words

When I was thirteen or so, maybe fourteen, I combed through my copy of Roget's Thesaurus highlighting the words that inspired me, words like 'wretch' and 'talisman'.
At one point it seems I wrote some out.

I refound this card in a small box I've labelled "handwritten notes'. I sell them each for a buck in my shop. I tossed the note in there when I was clearing out my teen poetry a couple of years ago. (don't you worry, I saved some of it, the dazzling examples of purple jottings I'll wow you with one day).
I plucked this one out again because as I get older I realize that the important things for my well being are things I was inspired by before sex drugs and rock-n-roll came and ruined everything.

If I am to move towards wholeness and healing I am going to have to make a clearer space in my being for magic and spirituality. And that includes the darker aspects of things as well as the rainbow light.

When I was fifteen I acquired my magic name. I associated it with some weird abstract art I had begun to make. It then got associated with some ufo saint iconography I developed. As well as asemic languages.

Lately, I feel I have to explore my personal faith a bit deeper. It entails trying to reach out to this imagery, much of it scary as hell. It means accepting that I am able to access shadow realms. It means proudly delving into these realms and erecting a structure of odd shapes, weird creatures, unknown tongues. It means invocation of seemingly demonic forces. Oh well. Such is life.

I know these things/ languages/gestures aren't really demonic. They are shadowy, though, and kinda heavy. But I like them, they are familiar. They are kinda metal and kinda D&D and kinda me. It's ok to serve Chaos. It's ok to delve into shadow. It's ok to snark at oneself and smirk at the whole world. It's ok to scream and laugh and cry. It's ok to not know. It's ok to have allies that would scare the shit out of you if they walked into the room.

Blessings to all

Studio View w Bunnies

Where the bunnies multiply - My studio inside Monastiraki

I've Kept Busy

I have. My studio space, a corner of the shop behind the counter, is working. I am painting, I am exploring. My papers are getting in order without a vast army of help. Some key angels stepped forth, heeded my bidding and helped in ways that would have kept me behind for years without them.

A piece of large furniture was cut down to size making room, a closet was regained and stored with my boxes of scraps. I went through some of my art archives and maybe have a handle on it now.

I don't want to run screaming from retail any longer. I like my shop. I think it's in a good place.

This is not something I have easily said in the last many years.

I'm taking up more space in this place. My name is on the walls and so are many of my pictures. I don't scramble to show what I do, I put it up online and in house all over the walls. If you've ridden along with me for the ride this has been you'll know that this just may be quite the feat. I've never had a  problem with attention, I've sought it out honestly. But this time I may have put aside the shame of it and told myself and thus the world, it's ok, this is your corner, show yourself.

How many years did it take for me to realize what it is that I had the whole time ? Way too may but here I am.

The Sandwich Board Wording That Struck a Chord With Me

Recent Bunny Paintings 2017

Here are a bunch of recent bunny paintings. 

They all date from this year. I had a rather large acrylic painting on panel outburst come unbidden in deep Montreal January. It was a good way to get through the mid winter and magically I was able to sell some online which countered the rather poor performance of my retail space which is routine come the freeze.

I have been making my peace with these little bastards. I have left far behind me some of my high art pretensions and embraced the fact that I enjoy these things and it's ok to make them. I used to have no problems at all in this area but sometime several years ago I started thinking way too much about things like the art world. Even while I knew perfectly well the non hierarchical glory of things like mini comics, zines and mail-art.

In any case, the bunnies are here and they are multiplying. I tried rebranding them as demons a few years ago but they've bounced back as bunnies. Sure they could be mice or bears or owls or bats too. they are made of joy and nightmare. Some are gleefully happy, others brood. They aren't psychotic or malicious though.

I make sure that the facial expression is one I can honestly sanction before declaring it done.

Some below may not be finished, most are. 

I'm sure there are other things I wanted to write concerning these things but i think that may be it for now.

Thanks for reading this far and thanks for taking a look at the critters below.

You are welcome to contact me via my brick and mortar shop, Monastiraki (drop in or email) to inquire about availability, sizes and prices.

The Time Flies

Always thought that would be a great name for a garage band, The Time Flies. Kinda SF, kinda horror, kinda mind bending. In any case, it does and this year it did. My to-do list hung over from February lies faded and incomplete taped to my desktop. It's November now and I don't know what happened. I had some serious plans. Our late winter illnesses spread out and engulfed the spring and then summer said a brief hello while zipping by on it's bike and well, here we are.

So I'm simply checking in to say I did, to send another 'there, ok?' into The Universe, a symbol of my waddling intentions.

I remain confounded about my role as shop keeper / gallerist. I need a serious leave of absence away from the public, I take things way too personally and, to boot, I require full time assistance here. I need a crack team of devoted interns to hoist up my flagging morale and to help me get my papers in order. papers like scraps and drawings and photos. My official papers, taxes and the like, are not the problem this time.

I think the problem lies in the fact that the heart of my collection is the art that I myself have made coupled with the papers and objects I consider sacred. These collections are in disarray. They are stacked here and there and I've lost control of them. Before i had a shop my special collections remained tight and tidy, i knew where everything was and I'd go through the boxes and organize.

Those boxes are now equivalent to several cubic meters of material and I feel at sea. With that, a tiny muffled cry into the wilderness, heard slightly over my stubborn reminders to myself to be grateful, I send my hopes and my desires.

Rocknroll.

Asemic Scrawl

A close up of a pencil poem

Hold your pencil higher up so it feels like you have less control over where it would go if you pushed down and away while letting go. Add branches to the lines you've made. Twist the pencil with each slight release. See how and where it goes. Repeat.

Making Faces

I can scribble at a frenetic pace. I launch into asemics and soon enough see faces. That place between calligraphy and cartooning becomes evident.

There is a certain collection of gestures I trace when drawing with a pencil or a ball point. Those tools allow a certain grind not feasible with felt tip markers or brush. The line coils out tightly into vertical drops and spins back up, jags along the page, spirals out, repeats. It happens over and over again. The above drawing is more an illustration of me trying to break up the gestures into discrete parts, otherwise I get a long 'run-on sentence' wobbling all over the paper.

Profiles and three quarter views of faces emerge, ugly rockers peeping out behind hairy helmets. These faces come easy, a scribbly dowsing, some lines suggest that nose, others that squint. There is a direct lineage between these faces and what used to be the alien bean motif I was obsessing over years ago, a voluptuous mango replete with fleshy folds. These are the raw cousins of those beasts, the brutish toss offs vs the anal line work of clean hard psych.

These guys are immediate and brooding. They satisfy me and prod me towards pure cartooning. They become finished if I have the patience. They become people, at least the masks that people carry.

Spiel on art

All my life I have been making art, mostly drawing. Nowadays, pushing 50, I consider myself an artist, true, but not necessarily a drawer. My drawing skills are limited. I can't draw you or your house. I mean I could give it a fair shot, even surprise myself, but that's not what I want to do, even remotely.

As someone who makes comics I've met and befriended artists that can draw you, your house, you as a centaur, your house on telescoping robot legs spanning the whole of a major city, tropical jungle, whatever. From any angle to boot. My own dear brother John Mavreas can do these very things. I cannot. Sometimes I wish I could but then again I also wish I could design playgrounds, do backflips, think of something to make for dinner, drive a car.

These artists impress me. They want to draw like their heroes draw. They cite golden age, silver age, adventure, fantasy artists. They cite renowned draftsmen and obsessive pop culture visionaries. I will never be counted among them. I realize more and more that the art I love to make is all project oriented. Sometimes it'll be drawing cute critters for a colouring book project (see a couple posts below), sometimes, collaging abstract bits of paper using a copier or old fashioned glue and scissors (see immediate post below). I also have conflated my collecting with my artistic practise, honouring certain found scraps as I honour my own creations. This has confused things a bit since I also run a curiosity shop.

My heroes are unnamed. I love lots of disparate work, lots of thinkers, writers, artists, lots of plain everyday working folk who do other things, like design parks or make dinners. Sure I love Frazetta and Kirby but not enough to become them if I could. I also love Schwitters, Debuffet and Klee. Maybe I could be 10 percent of those guys.

My art consists of some drawing, some collage, some writing. I do all these things freehand and I also do all these things on the computer. All these things also fit neatly into the pages of smaller or larger books. So, yeah, I like making books. But I don't only make books. I also make paintings.

I also make installations but I'm certainly not versed in the history or theory of installation art. I've read some art history, mostly dada, surrealism, pop and comics. I studied literature but my lit theory is abysmal. I make concrete and visual poetry but talk about that as if I was a parking lot rocker with mostly yelps and awed grunts as tools of communication.

Almost, because I also lead collaborative creative workshops that touch on all of the above. I've also yelped and grunted to rock music for years with my pals in a shitty practise room.

I needed to write a bit this afternoon, so here it is.

Colour Me All Of Us ! My new colouring book

I recently completed a colouring book. It's 20 pages long with an introductory poem about how fun and easy it is to colour things. Now I'm well aware of the craze but must say that this is not an adult colouring book. I mean adults can colour it of course but I made it with the thought of entertaining kids. Sure, there are odd jokes in it that maybe only big people would notice but it's meant for kids. the lines are thick and chunky an the drawings are mostly of bunny creatures being the silly cartoon characters that they are.

I drew the whole thing on photoshop, using a large brush or eraser and switching back and forth between black and white, zooming in to clean up lines, changing brush size to taper lines. The process is a little like whittling. I'd draw a thick black line and then use an equally thick white line to carve the first line down a bit making it wonky and uneven. It's a fun process, easy to do, with minor head aches.

After each drawing was done I'd plunk in my little name logo I designed for the project and then print out the page, I brought a stack of paper to the copy shop and had the whole thing printed on smooth white cardstock and then had it spiral bound, the intro page printed in hot pink. A first edition of 200.

I've been selling these things for 20 bucks, offering a decent set of 12 markers as part of the package.

The whole thing has been pleasant, well received by my friends and family and has provided for me a necessary respite away from the pressure I have recently given myself to produce my next graphic novel, which is so far nowhere to be seen. Getting back to simple and fun cartooning has been a breath of fresh air. sometimes i get so serious minded about my art practise that nothing gets done.

This got done. If you want one message and paypal me at yesmonastiraki @ gmail.com and ask for shipping details. Thanks.

Maybe my favourite one. I like to think of this one as vintage European kids art.

Ice Cream Angel Tramp

Modern Puzzle face finger pointing that-a-way

Bold and brash critter hollering !!!!

And i'm backish ...

As any casual visitor to this blog could figure out in a couple of seconds, I haven't been around for a while. I aim to return with more regularity, which shouldn't be hard, except it probably will be.

As one could see from my list of occasional and defunct blogs on the right, I have been busy spreading myself incredibly thin in various ways all around the internet.
I have not bothered to include another that many blogs that were/are one-offs, jokes, conceptual things, collaborations, etc.
I may get around to blogging about those projects here, though.

This is my aim, to consolidate all personal artish type web blogs right here. Not only that, but I also aim to comment on what I post, and not simply put up un-aided images or stark text solo.
Will I let my tumblrs and other blogs dwindle and die ? Maybe. Who cares.

Now, the most regularly updated blog I run (co-run, actually) is my shop, Monastiraki's blog.
The shop also has a tumblr (occasional), an instagram (fun!) and all that facebook nonsense, of course.

The above image, chosen because it's kinda fresh, is a photo of some asemic scraps I wrote recently and tore up. I have hundreds of such things. I very much enjoy the practice of gestural handwriting-like drawing.

Ok. Let's see where this goes. Thanks for reading.

Punched Pennies

A while ago I learned how to use the Addressograph I scored from a folded local paper.
It's a machine that presses characters (addresses) into dog tag like bits of metal that are then put into another machine that prints out the labels for magazine/newspaper subscriptions.
I make 'lucky' pennies, pressing four letter words into pennies for a small fee.
Scanning the pennies, though, is tricky...the words are sunken not raised AND they look way better than this in real life.
Place your orders today!

one of my more widely abused mascots - the yesbunny

This l'il guy started life as a rather small linocut. I then enlarged the image into a 2 x3 foot blueprint (ed. of 25, 2001) then had Serigraphie Alphonse Raymonde silkscreen an 18 x 24 version (ed. of 50, 2004).
It has supposedly appeared in some tv show called Naked Josh, been used in ads and flyers for my shop Monastiraki and been thrown around to various zines and whatnots.
It ain't over.