Comic strip alteration: Bad Sentence / I was a grammar cop

 

RTomens, 2021

Ah, the grammar police! A tribute to Jess, creator of the Trick Cad alterations. Not that I claim to be in his league. Still, it's fun to play around with the speech bubbles in a comic strip. I used to proof read as part of my job. We were the grammar police, taking great pleasure in correcting such things as American spelling in a British document. You be surprised how frequently a 'z' would be used instead of an 's' - go home Yank(y) spelling! Hyphens were problematic for many too. I thought it would be a long term job. But it wasn't for the long-term. Spot the mistake? If so, well done. The grammar police won't be coming for you.

Disclaimer: despite my career as a proof reader, I do not always bother to check these posts!

Comic Strip Collage: Capitalist Dogs!

RTomens, 2017

GR Swenson: Is Pop death?

Robert Indiana: Yes, death to smuggery and the Preconceived-Notion-of-What-Art-Is diehards.

Vispoets At Work

How Vispoets work...here we see the transformation of the material into the virtual/image...wherein fictitious cartoon characters represent the 'real' and the image the 'unreal', thus merging reality and unreality as if to inhabit the unreal yet create something 'real' from it...

Digital Collage: Don't Tell Your Friends

Don't Tell Your Friends, RTomens, 2017

digital art, comic strip collage

Are You Afraid Of Art?

Fear of Art is understandable...it can break relationships, ruin good people, encourage delusions of grandeur and generally lead to disappointment on behalf of the 'failed' artist who, lacking ambition and the right connections, is doomed to remain unrecognised by all but a few appreciative friends... 

Victim of Art, RTomens, 2016

collage

digital art

digital collage

digital art collage

Help! Art! Help!

digital collage: Baffling Mysteries x2

Why are the masses not concerned with art? Why does art remain the privilege of

certain educated sectors of the bourgeois class?

- Situationist International, 1964

.............why indeed...............or has Tate Modern (London) changed all that? "Look, a Damien Hirst exhibition!" 

                 if Mr & Mrs people now embrace art more than ever before is it only in terms of Tate Modern attendance figures & do they matter, really (half being tourists)? 

                                                                is it only in terms of what a sector of London's middle classes wish to be so as they educate their children in a form of indoctrination?

                                                                                                           is it all a bit Blair's Britain Pop YBA Oasis-at-Downing Street again?

                                                or are the proles actually using this portal (internet) to enlighten themselves regarding visual treats on offer by both contemporary artists & historical.............a revolution of the eyeballs? & even more revolutionary: are they themselves actually making art?!!!! more of them making art?

.................................................what the hell..................................................................................

I am no 'fine artist'

but I am working class

neither of which matters to you....................so here are some pictures...............two versions...........spinning on the horror comic theme, as I like to do..............perhaps the red star is cold war juju..............a hex on the capitalist state of mind....the horror!

Prints

A few of the prints that will be available soon...

Digital art collage prints

Love In The Wilderness

Love is the greatest refreshment in life.

- Pablo Picasso

I'm Wild About You

Fancy a quickie? Have this one. Some fun (for all the family) today as I get back in the swing of things after a week away in Nice. A potentially romantic city, yes. Here the lovers' flesh becomes a sea in which they drown...blissfully...or not...

They've Got Everything

I was invited to a wedding recently but couldn't get time off Work. The couple looked nothing like this, of course. Neither was the image inspired by the invite. I wanted to make all the guests anonymous, yes, literally faceless because, after all, it's an occasion on which only two people really matter, which doesn't stop women buying new hats (in the old days anyway) and the men wearing suits which they only dust off for weddings and funerals. It's best to have a dark one, suitable for both ceremonies, isn't it? So I got the idea of mutating the couple's faces...as a joke around the idea that they would strive to look their very best...even to the point of the man wearing lipstick. That would be an odd decision, wouldn't it? 

One Moment's Madness

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication...so said Leonardo da Vinci, who knew a thing or two about...things...but although I take his point, people (viewers) often fail to appreciate simplicity...and accuse me artists of not having done much...I imagine, sometimes. Or perhaps they don't. 

The thing being, we don't know what people think of our work unless they speak up. Silence, however, is golden when it takes the place of abuse...or cruel criticism. And, as we know, people react differently to a piece of art. 

Simplicity is a brave move. As much as the artist knows what is behind the work (the idea, thought processes, struggles, ideology or whatever) the reader may not 'read' anything. Complex work, though, wears it's effort on its sleeve. A viewer may not think much of the result, but they can see that a lot of work has gone into it. Unfortunately, complexity to no good effect in the eye of the beholder backfires, or rather, doubles the critical weight of their negative response: 'They put in all that effort and for what? That?!'

For fun (what else?) I performed some simple tinkering with the comic strip panel below. The funny thing being that it took me as long as some more complex pieces. This due to my lack of technical expertise, I must add, rather than much thinking...

Weak

What's Your Ideal?

Hey ho and here we go...what's this, a feminist comment? Scrappy style as if pasted on notebook paper 'cause that's how I felt, trying to capture the casual air of the simple collage, if you get my drift. Romantic adventures are all well and good but what if the man doesn't live up to the woman's ideal? Ha-ha! Do we ever? Perhaps he was so bad that he was best laid to rest by a bullet...tut-tut...

I May Never See You Again

Digital Collage/Cut/Paste/Print: Tee Hee! Ha-Ha!

What's so funny? I dunno. The laughter rings hollow after a while. The poor woman's bitten...and smitten...but the man doesn't feel too good either..."Something queer about this!" And what's Punch got to do with it? Is he spiking her drink? Moonage daydream comic strip thing...Eduardo who? 

You Are Doomed, Earthling! Good-Bye!

Science fiction has influenced my art and writing for as long as I've been putting pen (and ink) to paper, first scrawling and scribbling stories as a ten-year-old whilst the family watched TV and on through collage and cut up texts. So, no surprise then that the anti-gravitational pull of amazing stories and images still exert themselves, frequently spinning me off into realms beyond our atmosphere. In this image I was drawn towards repetition, as you can see, with a conclusion to the central strip, or rather, read left to right, staggered needle-stuck refrain. You are doomed, earthling! Good-bye!

Music is naturally a part of all this. I usually listen to synthesised/space sounds whilst working, ranging from Stockhausen to Sun Ra and modern Electronic music. To accompany the above work, though, I've chosen an old Renegade Soundwave track...

Comic Strip Collage: We Belong Together

Remaining with the comic strip theme, here's a character drowning in words once more, this time the cut up exclamation defines his situation, as you can probably tell. I sometimes like to cut words to complete abstraction, rendering them 'meaningless' other than as patterns. 'We belong'...but where? You can read this as a 'statement' of both the artist who unsure if he 'belongs' in any particular tradition; unconscious of one, at least. And an adaptation of sensationalist horror storytelling rewritten as...existential despair. 

Comic Strip Collage: Horror

'Where there is no imagination there is no horror', said Arthur Conan Doyle. Well I recently imagined this fellow drowning in, or being consumed by, the very word 'Horror'. Rather than suffering a terrible fate at the hands of an horrific beast/phantom/entity etc., I saw him as a soul tormented by cut up letters, a fate not dissimilar to those first encountering the words of William Burroughs' cut up sentences...ha-ha...