Just added my Octogons to the gallery image server on this box. Above, my favorite page I drew for the series.
Street Posters II
This is a flyer I created for a show in Bloomington which focused on the art of the street poster in Bloomingtin through the years 1982 – 1989, if I recall correctly.
An embroidered emblem
One of the hundreds and hundreds of designs I did for labor union locals while working for the Frank Doolittle Company in the early nineties.
Back Study
A pencil drawing of a man’s back, circa 1988.
old skool
This Monday I present a startup screen drawn on a Mac SE, for a Mac SE, back in ’95, showing our cat Chloe upon a television set.
Click the thumbnail to see it in aliased, black and white glory.
An old BKB flyer
This is the first flyer I did for my old band, the Bare Knuckle Boxers.
We had a monthly gig at the Art Bar, downtown (near one of the Amazon outposts), for about a year. Maybe a bit longer. The regulars in the place were more to the hip-hop end of the scale than people one might expect to attend gigs by a rock band playing punk-ish versions of Irish traditional music, but we definitely had some good nights. The show advertised on this flyer was one of them.
We had the good fortune to talk the incredilby talented Jason Webley into opening for us; honestly, it’s hard to actually go on after Jason, because he’s so good and so entertaining. Nonetheless, we ripped it up that night, and Jason was part of the reason.
Other highlights of the Art Bar tenure included a very drunk man, who spoke no English, from somewhere in Africa repeatedly attempting to hug everyone in the band, one at a time, while we were onstage and in the middle of songs, over and over again. He succeeded in getting us all to jump in the air while shouting “Africa”, in imitation of an expression of happiness he had repeatedly made.
the Internation'ale
This poster was created as a tee-shirt design for the now defunct Seattle Morris team at the behest of former co-worker Rob Falk.
Rob possesses the female baby scutter which appeared in a first-season episode of Red Dwarf. Entertainingly, there appears to be a Red Dwarf trading card featuring Rimmer’s treasured issues of Morris Dancer Monthly.
"Moctogon"
Sometime around 1993, I wrote and drew this Octogon as a series of four postcards, each sent on a consecutive day. It’s a ‘moctogon’ because, firstt, it was never intended for publication, and second, becase Bill Weaver, my collaborator on matters Octogon, had no part in it and probably has not seen it yet.
Sigh. I just remembered I beat some scripts outta Bill a year ago or so and I still haven’t picked up on ’em.
There are many more Octogons at comix.whybark.com, let me hasten to remind you.
Last King
This is the final image in my long-running series of the King. I painted it for my wife as a birthday present the first year we met.
Most of my images of the King were created specifically as birthday presents. I don’t think I ever really spent a lot of time worrying about why I was interested in working with his image, but I often create works in extended series. In fact, I’m engaged in such a project right now. A virtual Otter Pop to the first person who correctly identifies that series.
1987 Stenciled poster
Oops!
I was so involved with my Wired piece I forgot about the Monday art.
In a few days I’ll fudge the dates of publication so it’s neater.
This image is a photo of a no-longer surviving copy of a large, 18″ by 24″ or larger poster I made for a party/show in the basement of the house I lived in during college, the Litter Box. As I recall, the bands were Too Cooland also the Truckadelics. Too Cool was this too short-lived postpunk power rock band – sorta glam. As I recall they were great but I only saw them twice that I can remember.
The Truckadelics were a long-lived Frankie Camaro project. I have video of Andrew Wagner singing an original Frankie number, “Unlucky Highway”, in the basement of the Litter Box at a party, possibly this one. The parties in the basement with bands at this house remain epic in scope – I recall one in particular in which the keg was tapped and completely consumed in less than thirty minutes. Occasionally, I am introduced to someone here in Seattle who happened to be in Bloomington during this era and recalls the parties at the house.
I cut the stencil at full size into a piece of heavy drawing paper, and used a variety of spraypaint colors and on-the-fly paper masking to accomplish the variant color effects. This is one of the most ambitious stencil pieces I did. For many years I would attend punk rock shows with no money in my pocket and hang out by the front door of the show, selling a stencil to be sprayed on whatever people were wearing for a measly buck.
I would clean up, and usually had money for beer after the show. I still have almost all of the stencils I cut – there were thirty or so as I recall, some as elaborate as this image.
I actually got a “real” job from a promoter who worked for the University Student Board from this flyer – he came to the show and asked me to make a flyer for a Replacements show he was booking. I did the job for free plus four tickets to the show, but I don’t think he liked the flyer I made for him.