NEW B&W SKETCHES

It's been a while since I've drawn anything worth posting, and it's also been a while since I've posted. Life got ahead of me recently and my fantasies of controlling time have shown themselves to be empty.
These drawings are done by doing a line drawing on paper, then flipping the paper over and filling in the negative areas by hand. I could certainly do this with photoshop, but it does not make finished piece and lacks the hand-drawn feeling I strive for. The second one is NFSW, but if you are looking at my blog at work, your boss needs to give you more to do.


Images copyright 2009 Chad Vercus

Gerd Arntz

While image searching for George Grosz drawings the other day I stumbled across this master of dynamic black & white illustraion of whom I had never heard. Much like the way that almost every computer in every home or office has the font Gill Sans pre-loaded but no-one knows who Eric Gill is, Arntz also left his mark in iconic history by creating a style of drawing the human form that is so bleak and masterful it is used to tell each gender which room they need to go in to squat. You can see in some of these earlier images how he was attempting to refine his style to a point of purity & perfection where the blacks & white are always in perfect ratio and the forms, although being quite human are neither comical or expessive. They are so start in their design it is as if he was more interested in the designs and forms than the often political points he was making in his work. I think Arntz reached a perfection that some of us (myself included) strive fro every time we sit down. not to draw from the right side of the brain but to draw from the left. To make an iconic system in which anything can be rendered and look stylistically the same. I will certianly be ripping of his style for a couple weeks and then add Elvis Studio elements and then get frustrated and go back to drawing art deco plants. Well done, Gerd. You can tell me which door to walk through to piss any day.

Tadanori Yokoo

I promised myself that I would never put youtube videos on my weblog, but then I came across his a couple weeks ago and knew that I could either write his name on a post-it note and lose it on my desk for years, or I could just embed this fantastic animation short from 1965 inot my weblog and know right where to find it any time I wanted.

Three New Paintings

Recently, I was aksed by a local organization to do 3 new pieces for their charity show they do every year where about 100 local artists provide pieces that they frame in 10 x 10 black frames and display in a giant room for one night. All the charitable folks from around the town show up and buy the pieces off the wall and everybody wins. Last year I even made money from it, which was beyond me because I thought I was doing the work for charity. These are what I came up with. The scans are not that great becasue I use 70% gray on black and the scanenr has a really hard time picking up what I am putting down. The paintings do not mean much or say much, but they are pretty and most anyone can appreciate them.

Empirical01

I am now accepting submissions for EMPRICIAL01 - an anthology of comics & art to be produced in the fall of 2009. If you are interested in submitting work to this anthology, please email me for submission guidelines.
Submission deadline is: 07/01/2009
chadverrill@maine.rr.com

Skate or Die

Here is a skate deck I just finished for the Skate or Die IV show that opens at Young Blood Gallery in Atlanta, GA on May 2nd. Go buy it for $100.

Equinox

Image c. 2009 Chad Verrill

Initials

ere are some initials I have been rendering slowly off-and-on for the past three or four years. They are drawn on paper - about 2 inches square each. They are definitely inspired by other initials, but basically I just wanted to make my own set for a comic I was doing at the time and not just grab some uncopyrighted decorative alphabet from online or one of my books. Instead I just looked at ones I liked (and ones I didn't like), sat down with a grid and just started sketching in my own style without having any source material close by to tempt me. My style is pretty informed by decorative arts, so it's no small wonder that these look like I copied them even though they are original. What will I use them for? Wait and see...


Images c. 2009 Chad Verrill

New Scans

hese sketches have been sitting on my scanner for a month or two now. Here I am finally scanning and posting them so I can squirrel them away in a folder in my studio.




Images c. 2009 Chad Verrill

Silhouettes III: Karin Dickel-Jonasch

While wandering the web in search of images related to Walpurgisnacht, I came across this contemporary artist who does papercuts in a silhouette style. Her website doesn't tell much about her as an artist, but regarding her art, she sites Chinese papercuts as a source for inspiration. It is very evident, but her use of minute cuts to create white lines is also reminiscent of British white-line engravers and Greco-Roman pottery art. Her worlds are definitely of a fairy tale nature. Some seem like they may relate to stories that are familiar to us, or the stories are completely her own. I am especially enthused by the pieces that show foreground and background in the same frame and use land and filigrie to cut the image into sections. It is as if not all the parts of the scene are taking place at the same time - a style that could be used in sequential storytelling that I will definitely allow myself to be inspirred by without completely copying.
Find her book here.





All work copyright Karin Dickel-Jonasch

Silhouettes II: Wilhelm Staehle

Silhouettemasterpiecetheatre.com does not give much information about the artist Wilhelm Staehle, but his pieces speak for themselves. An absolutely fantastic series of witty, sarcastic and sometimes poignant images using victorian style silhouettes in the negative with minor text on backgrounds that I don't recognize but look like they are appropriated lanscape paintings from a while back. If I am wrong, strike a blow, my chuck. What I mean to say is, if he painted the backgrounds too, I am reduced to tears & ash.
Prints are attainable at The Bazaarium.com




All images copyright Wilhelm Staehle

Silhouettes I: Eric Gill

I have been fully immersing myself in silhouette art for a while now. I am attracted to it in ways I never would have guessed and for some reason it is resonating with me deeply and also influencing my work now more than it has in the past. Much of my love of the bold black aeas comes from british white line engravers - one of the more prominent of them being Eric Gill. Despite being a despicable human being, Eric Gill did fantastic engravings, many large sculptures and designed the font Gill Sans, which you probably have on your computer. He toyed with silhouettes but this was a natural off-shoot of being an engraver.
In choosing these images I somehow missed some of his more famous whiteline nudes. They are not iconic enough for my tastes so I probably would have ignored them anyway. Here are some great examples of his darker works:

Zero

Here I am again, approaching with bold intentions. A lot of people out there have blogs, a lot of them post daily, weekly etc. I will attempt to post things now and again, but I am fuller aware that all blogs begin with no eyes. Although my intention is to eventually make this a group blog where those being published in Empirical can post things, for now I will simply use it ass a scratchpad of my findings on the computer, so that no matter how many beers I have after work I will not forget the names of artists or forgot websites that for a few minutes or a few days I was so gaga about. oh yeah. This blog will be about art. My art. Your art. Dead people's art.