Friday, March 9, 2007

Comings and Goings

On my first blog post, I thought I should mention that I'm in a group show this month at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in LA. Here's the piece that as far as I know is still up and available for purchase by any greedy collectors out there.

I went down to LA for the opening, and happily met up with Christine and Rama, two awesome artists. I met these two when Mati and I were down in LA for the Girly Show.

Rama gave me a wallet made out of one his fantastic illustrations. It's a sci-fi image of a squid, which everyone knows are the logical form of intelligent life on other planets. When Rama and I last met, we realized that we had both independently come to this speculation, that an intelligent species on another planet would have to be a tool-maker, and would have to have hands... Why not 10 hands? Squids and octopi also have the advantage of lacking skeletons, which in theory would allow for very large brains. Absurd? Absolutely, but Rama and I think this is much more likely than the common sci-fi image of child-sized humanoids.



At the moment, I'm working on a poster for my friend Brook Turner, celebrating the decision to turn the building at 557 Ashbury at Haight into a historic landmark. There's no way around it, the poster has to be a 60s-style psychedelic thing, but I really struggled with the color scheme. The whole clashing color thing just doesn't work for me, so I borrowed a color scheme from an old art nouveau poster. But somehow the sketch seems better than the final, which is so often the case.



On a side note, Brook tells me he is now working for Barak Obama's campaign. I have been curious how Obama is planning to deal with his middle name, which in case you haven't heard, is Hussein. Brook says they're just planning to do a slow unveiling of that fact, so that it doesn't blow up into some huge non-scandal at some point. But it's hard to see how the name isn't a deal-breaker. We'll just have to wait and see.

2 comments:

j. vorwaller said...

hi mister mati! just wanted to say, ahem, as the first commenter: i love the name of your new blog! :)

rama hughes said...

hooray blog!

that poster looks dynamite, hugh.