Sunday, July 9, 2017

7 Days: My Art Life

Image may contain: indoor


New book from the inimitable Holly Crawford at AC Institute. Includes a riveting selection of my emails from a particularly multiple personality week-long period from last year! Essential. Available from https://www.rizzolibookstore.com/7-days-my-art-life and RAM It's not on Amazon, yet. http://acinstitute.org/7-days-my-art-life/

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

"Horizontally Stretched" Panter's New Thing

Panter with his new book, photo by Jody Culkin.


Gary Panter wears many hats—visionary punk cartoonist, Emmy-award winning designer for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, psychedelic lightshow revivalist, cutting-edge graphic designer, experimental musician, candlestick maker. Having dazzled the comic art world with his elaborate and sumptuous freeform adaptations of Dante (2004’s Jimbo in Purgatory and 2006’s Jimbo’s Inferno), Panter has just released a final, tangential volume—Songy of Paradise, based on John Milton’s 1671 Paradise Regained.

DOUG HARVEY: Can you give a bit of a rundown on your upbringing and relationship to Christianity?

GARY PANTER: I was born in 1950 in Durant, Oklahoma. My father was [a member of the] Church of Christ which considers itself the only true church with a literal reading of the King James version of the Bible. We were lower class people who went to church three times a week and had Sunday school, Wednesday night bible class and singing. The church forbade imagery in worship, musical instruments in worship and orbit dancing and frolicking in general. I was a Christian missionary to Belfast in the summer of 1969—bringing Christ to the Irish religious war. Many things about it bothered me and it took a while to get over, if I did.


Do you consider yourself a Christian now?

I am not part of the cult of Jesus. And I am not a fan of organized religion. I am superstitious to an extent. I was raised to try to obey and conform with the end in mind of getting to a better place with the right ritual and magic words, which generally makes no sense. And also the idea that this place is a horrible torturous test seems ungrateful to the gift of some kind of existence—and not digging this one, why would you trust the god to give you an untricky one next? I just have to dig this one as much as possible and not seek THE ANSWER. Interesting questions are enough.


Sunday, July 2, 2017

Desert Lighthouse Launch Event!



Image may contain: sky, tree, outdoor and nature

I think that may have been the best art opening I have ever attended! Thanks and congrats Daniel Hawkins!  http://desertlighthouse.org/

Image may contain: sky, night and outdoor

Don Suggs' photo of myself and Portfolio silhouetted in the lighthouse doorway towards the end of the evening.