PRIVATE INVESTIGATION ART SHOW

(click to enlarge)

I just tricked you into looking at my latest colored pencil creation. It's for an art show called Private Investigation which starts on September 15th at the Mastodon Mesa gallery in Los Angeles. The concept required artists to "choose a found photograph of unknown provenance, and use it as a jumping off point to make a piece of art."

Here it is hanging in the gallery

My submission (called Soft Focus Phantom in Pigtails) is based on a mysterious snapshot from the 1970s. I picked it because it initially grabbed my attention with the costume, but when I noticed that the ferocious subject is a little girl it became even more appealing. Also, I tend to have Halloween on the brain this time of year and I happen to own a mask similar to the one in the photo (though the blur and the glare from the flash distort it nicely in the found snapshot.)

Including the original photo alongside the art was optional. I wrestled with the decision until I concluded that my take on it just can't measure up to awesomeness of the authentic article.

At first I had grand plans to do a more creative interpretation of the image, but I quickly fell in love with it and couldn't bring myself to deviate too much. Though somehow I subconsciously became a human PhotoShop, deepening the colors and trying to sharpen the focus some.

The project was especially enticing because it's a step away from my film family portraits, and it's my foray outside the walls of the beloved Gallery 1988. For this I can thank curator Graham Kolbeins, who also wrote a nice write-up on my portraits on the official site for Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are movie.

For more info on the show and the other artists check out Mastodon Mesa's site.

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KING KONG OVER BRANSON

As if you needed another reason to visit Branson, Missouri, this season marks the debut of a giant King Kong appearing atop the Hollywood Wax Museum. I, for one, welcome our new primate overlord. Thanks to the traffic-choked highway 76 passerbys have the opportunity to study the sculpture from all angles for at least ten minutes at at time.

But if you long for a taste of "Silver Age" Branson (1995-2005) you can venture to the neighborhood directly behind the museum to find the back porch that houses the former "have your photo taken in King Kong's hand" prop. But don't despair, the Kong photo-op has been updated to appeal to today's more sophisticated novelty photo connoisseurs.

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GORILLA MASK HUNT

UPDATED YET AGAIN: Boy, my knowledge of gorilla facewear has increased tremendously this week. Raymond Castile of the invaluable Gallery of Monster Toys, has helped me determine what the Johnson Smith "Savage Gorilla (With hair)" mask actually looks like. Ray has it in his collection...

It's everything I hoped it would be. Thanks Ray!

[And now, here's the post as it originally began...]
Ever since I was forbidden by my parents to send my allowance to the "shysters" who advertised amazing novelties in my comic books, I've grown more and more obsessed with tracking down the treasures I was denied. Many of these items turn out to be as fraudulent as my parents had warned, but that just adds to their appeal.

I recently took a low stakes gamble and nabbed this fine facial enhancement on ebay, with hopes that it might be the gorilla mask I'd seen advertised so many times...


So here's my question for all of you mask experts and/or people who were allowed to order from comic book ads: Was this mask ever sold through the Johnson Smith ad (shown at the top of the post)?

The mask shown above is from the late 80s or even early 90s and therefore it was not "the one."

The mask was made by Topstone, the preferred mask supplier for Johnson Smith, Honor House and other mail order folks. I realized my gorilla has no teeth, but certain ads ran for many years, and novelty companies had to use different models of the products, even though the original illustrations were still shown. So I thought it possible that mine could be one of many varieties that were offered.

Another theory was that the Johnson Smith gorilla mas was the same as the Captain Company (of Famous Monsters of Filmland) gorilla monster mask since they used the same illustration. Evil Wilhelm of Monster Mayhem shared this photo of a recast of that mask...

By the way, blanks of this design happen to be available at Monster Mayhem. Here's what they look like unpainted and painted...



I've learned that this one was offered much earlier than the Johnson Smith ad and probably wasn't sold through them.

Then there were my other theories that involved this design or the mask Ernie Kovacs used as props on his show. Alas I think the truth has been uncovered.

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MONSTERS DO HAVE THEIR PLACE!

This wonderful forty-eight seconds of film never ceases to give me a blast of spooky joy. I love how the monsters are rendered and presented 1960s style, I love the knock-off Famous Monsters typeface, and I love the music. (Anyone who can identify it for me shall become the champion of the universe.) I've admired this piece for years on a VHS collection of drive-in theater intermission ads but I just happened upon it on archive.org (Click the link to go directly to loads of glorious drive-in intermission reels.)

But I'm perplexed that even with a genius ad campaign like this one, we all ended up with monsters in our living rooms.

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THE SIGNING OF THE SHINING

Yes, those chimp-like hands are mine, fearfully signing fifty prints of my Torrance family portrait for the Crazy 4 Cult show- fearful of screwing one up. These will be available on July 16th when the third installment of the show opens. You can order yours by calling the gallery at 323.937.7088 or emailing gallery1988 [at] aol.com

I wanted to give the signing event extra significance so I used an old novelty skeleton pencil that I got as a stocking stuffer in 1987. I'm not sure how it relates to the project, but it's more special than a boring ol' #2.

Most of the art I buy comes from flea markets, which explains why I was so blown away by the quality of these prints. The paper is actually thicker than the stuff I used for the original colored pencil piece! They did such a fantastic job.

The original piece currently resides among the private collection of actor Michael Rappaport who has described his typical film roles as "the dumb white guy." How I would love to see the rest of his art. I like envisioning him plucking my piece from his wall and sending it back to the gallery for scanning as he did earlier this summer. I immediately follow this thought with memories of seeing him on the big screen in flicks like Cop Land and Metro. This sort of shorts out my brain.

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GOTTLIEB HAUNTED DESKTOP

As a kid, I constantly longed to be wherever video games were, be it the lobby of the grocery store, the local arcade, or ideally, gamer havens like Showbiz Pizza. Even after my supply of quarters was diminished I didn't want to leave the comfort of those warm, buzzing monolith-like machines. I often found myself among them with nothing to do but study their demo screens and cabinet art (and finger the little garage-like coin return slots for stray quarters.)

One of the most inviting, most intriguing images I ever encountered among those electronic wonders was the backglass for Gottieb's 1982 masterwork of pinball, Haunted House. Its stunning rendition of the classic Victorian haunted abode was illustrated by Terry Doerzaph (who also did cabinet graphics for Q*bert). The typeface is gorgeous, the color choices are unexpected, and the entire piece has a flawless quality. And how amazing is that cluster of floating skulls in the window? The answer is very.

I was recently overjoyed to find a beautiful, high-res scan of the art on this site. Of course my first move was to use it as desktop wallpaper. I started with the entire thing (as seen above) and later I cropped it for a closer view (see below). I invite you to click on either of the images (for larger versions) and grab it as well. It's such a welcoming sight every time I sit down for some good ol' computing.

More images of the machine are here and here. See also this screenprint by Sam Chivers inspired by the piece.

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7th ANNUAL RONDO AWARDS

Hey classic horrorologists, this is your chance to vote on the best of everything under the classic horror sun. And even if you don't feel like casting a ballot it's well worth a click to discover the greatest in classic horror that 2008 had to offer. Long live Rondo! (Voting ends on March 21)

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SPOOK HOUSE DAVE

I must admit that I braced myself for the worst when I was invited to have a look at Spook House Dave, an online puppet show about a boy living in a haunted castle. While the premise was appealing, for some reason my expectations defaulted to thoughts of a schlocky production filled with corny, pun-driven monster humor, or perhaps a South Park wannabe. (Sheesh, how did I reach this lowly state of puppet cynicism?)

But with a click of the play button I perked up at the minimal yet brilliant puppet designs. After a while I even found myself laughing out loud. Now, our society likes to casually throw around this term "lol" but I'm telling you I literally laughed aloud– more than once! And I liked the sensation very much. The humor is surprisingly subtle and character driven for a puppet show; I'd go as far as comparing it to Homestar Runner. And the fact that they tip their hat to Forrest J. Ackerman of Famous Monsters of Filmland fame tells me that the creative team at Dragonfruit Studios are more than just casual fans of the spooky genre.

So forget everything you've learned about online monster-related puppet shows, and take a look at the seven minute premiere webisode of Spook House Dave in which the gang pays homage to classic soap operas...

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HAUNTED MANSION SHAG ART

Just in case you missed this on Boing Boing, artist Shag has created 13 astonishing new pieces inspired by Disneyland's Haunted Mansion! See the full story here.

Another wonderful case of two things I love intersecting...









See the rest here.

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BILL TRACY PROJECT NOW ONLINE

If you didn't get enough spooky on Halloween then check out The Haunted House , a brand new web site dedicated to Bill Tracy, the mastermind behind my favorite dark ride, Phantasmagoria. The site focuses on Trimper's Haunted House of Ocean City, Maryland, but it also features lots of photos of Tracy-influenced rides as well as some amazing Tracy catalogs.

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AMAZING MONSTER MAZES

I may have failed at getting a daily Halloween countdown together this year, but to me this is as good as a whole spooky months worth of posts because of the personal triumph it represents. After more than two decades of want, this weekend I've reclaimed the book Amazing Monster Mazes (1977, Hallmark) as my own.

It started in October of '77 when mom and I made a routine visit to the downtown Bible Book Store. Beyond the expected Bibles and books, the store carried a wondrous assortment of novelty gifts, jigsaw puzzles, chick tracts, posters, and endless bins of plastic trinkets intended as Sunday School rewards. The floor boasted a thick, green shag carpet perfect for plopping down upon, so as to examine their wares at length. They were also the most extensive Hallmark dealership in our little town, so once a year the whole place turned orange and black with the brand new line of Hallmark Halloween offerings. (Mind you, this was before American church culture mysteriously and collectively turned on Halloween a decade or so later.) Having deliberated over all of my possible purchases— greeting cards, wall decorations, centerpieces and party favors, it was a booklet that ultimately won my fancy.

(all pictures super size when clicked)

The 24 page volume is indeed a maze book, but to me it functioned more like a text book considering the hours of daily study I invested in its pages. In my pre-Where's Waldo world, few of my kiddie books served up this kind of detail, and I devoured it. I questioned the motives of every beast and I was frightfully intrigued by the consequences that met any careless maze traveler. I grew genuinely chilled at the thought of accidentally wandering into an open grave, or unintentionally awaking a sleeping ghoul.



One of my few memories of preschool is submitting this book when it was my turn to pick out the story to be read aloud in class. All morning I'd been anticipating the moment my teacher would share the mysteries of the monster mazes to my classmates, undoubtedly earning me their pure gratitude. I sat grinning as my teacher held it up and read the title. But then she hesitated and flipped through the book before announcing that maze books were unreadable. This sent me into an uncharacteristic outburst of tears, and I fled the room.
Later, after I'd choked down the replacement story with a damp face and raw eyes, the instructor took pity on me and revisited Monster Mazes, doing her best to describe each maze as cross legged students squinted to see the pictures. Her gracious actions had a healing effect.




The book fell apart, yet remained a favorite of mine for a number of years. And then it vanished. There are family theories surrounding its fate, the most plausible being a box of books that were unintentionally sold in a garage sale. No matter, it was gone; and I actively missed the booklet throughout my remaining childhood.



When I discovered ebay in 1998, recovering this treasure was among my first intentions. But its rarity (it was purely ephemeral, meant to be a value add crammed behind a greeting card, and discarded at seasons end), and the fact that I didn't know the official title (I always just called it my monster maze book, and there are tons of monster maze books) delayed my crusade. Until now.




Recently, a series of book related memories triggered me to scour ebay once again. When I saw that forgotten cover pop up (the very last entry of the last page of results, of course) I made an involuntary guttural sound and my heart started to pound. Four Buy-it-now dollars (plus shipping), and a week later it showed up in my mailbox.




So now that I posses it once again, what have I learned?
-It's still fantastic. The illustrations have aged extremely well, and it has lost none of its appeal in my eyes.
-Though they are uncredited on the cover, the book is written by Edward Cunningham, designed by Rick Cusick, and masterfully Illustrated by Tim Kirk. I've learned that Mr. Kirk started as a Hugo award winning fan artist...


...and after a seven year stint at Hallmark he became a Disney Imagineer.

-I've also learned that the imagery from this book never stopped rattling around my subconscious, and has influenced me artistically. Case in point: an illustration that I did right after college...


My (inferior) piece not only echoes the detail and scope of Monster Mazes, but it shares similar elements such as the starry sky, the hilly skyline, and the haunted house with the following maze (which happens to be my favorite)...

Notice how the placement of my rollercoaster echos the maze's path.  I drew a road leading into a cop's mouth while the original features a road running into the jaws of a monster mountain.

The tell tale orange cyclops cinches my theory...

Also note the vehicles near both of them.

And later when I translated the drawing into a Flash animation I even shuffled the cyclops into the upper left corner where he belongs...


I did the initial drawing at least 15 years after my last contact with Monster Mazes and I hadn't recalled Mr. Kirk's one-eyed creature until I saw it again yesterday. It's as though my mind was desperately trying to recreate the missing book without my knowledge. Awesome.

Anyway, as reward to those of you who have braved my tedious recollections, I offer the entire booklet scanned at a printable resolution. Let's give the kiddies their monster mazes once again.

Download Amazing Monster Mazes via Megaupload (87.4 meg zip file)

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THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL

(Click any image to enlarge it)

Alas, here are my contributions to this year's Crazy 4 Cult art show. I'll be blabbing about them soon. at the bottom of this post.

UPDATE: Hey, these were chosen to be made into a set of prints! I'll announce it here when they're ready to order, or you can keep your eye on www.stuff88.com or crazy4cult.com for details.





UPDATE #2: Rather than tastefully allowing this art to speak for itself I've opted to prattle on about the creative process behind these, starting....now.

My wife was my muse for the concept. As I pondered aloud potential Crazy 4 Cult ideas she reminded me of an awesome old family portrait we'd recently seen for sale and I immediately connected the dots between cult films and the family portrait format. I'd already been thinking in terms of Fargo since I love the flick and it seemed underrepresented in last year's show, so I first envisioned William H. Macey's dopey grin in front of a Sears-style backdrop, and the thought delighted me. Moments later when the mental image of The Shining's Torrance family hit my brain, I grew extremely excited and knew I had to try to bring it to life.

The family portrait format felt perfect since this type of photography is basically a study in pure affectation. And what's great about them is that the veneer of smiles is always too transparent to disguise the strain, the physical discomfort, the uneasiness, and often the volatile emotions bubbling beneath. Amazing how we don our most painful clothes and stand under all-illuminating heat lamps in a vain attempt to appear natural, happy, and "at our best." Then we send this piece of fiction to everyone we know. I vividly recall the agony of being forced to rest my hand on my sister's shoulder for literally minutes at a time!

So when you drop these familiar movie families into the equation you've got a double layer of irony. Anyone who's seen these films gets flashes of the horrors each tribe is destined for. I also liked the idea of creating would-be movie props that could be at home in the families' respective fictional dwellings.

Visual reference was the first order of business. I grabbed The Shining off my DVD shelf and headed for my computer. This part was more tricky than I expected. I needed to grab images of each of the three stars that met the following criteria...
1. They need to be smiling (or something close)
2. They need to be smiling while facing the general direction of the camera
3. They need to be in decent light (finding images with matching light sources would have been impossible)
4. They need to be wearing something they might wear to a family photo shoot

I took dozens of different screen grabs from scenes throughout the film. I soon realized that I'd need to create head/body composites in some cases since the right head and the right body didn't usually share the screen.
In the case of the Freelings (Poltergeist) the process was extremely difficult. The family only appears normal during a small sliver of time at the beginning before the ghosts kidnap Carol Anne and the reign of terror ensues. I also noticed that in both Fargo and The Shining, the boys practically never smile (which stands to reason considering the heads of those households.)

So I took my best screen captures and digitally cut them up and pasted them into family portrait-ish compositions (following examples of vintage Olan Mills photos via flickr.) I printed these out and using an old grade school grid technique (you draw a grid on the source material and another on the blank paper and use it as a general placement guide) I transferred and scaled my printout onto the larger 10 x 14 page.

My first thought was to try to create these with acrylic paint, but at some point I remembered a colored pencil piece I did in college of Jeffrey Katzenberg, and I liked the effect.

I used a regular pencil to draw a base layer of details before coming in with the Prismacolor pencils. The process was a long one since I did a lot of layering so as not to let any of the paper show through. The biggest challenges were...
1. Trying to recreate recognizable faces based on low resolution screen grabs
2. Trying to somewhat match the lighting even though the subjects were lit by a wide variety of sources, from sunlight to office fluorescents
3. Surviving the sleep deprivation (I have a career and a family life too.)

I could have made it easier on myself by tracing, but I chose not to; I wanted to allow more of myself to show through, for better or for worse, and I actually like the semi-primitive look and cartoonishness that naturally emerged. The final outcome is a nice mixture of artistic choices and pure inexperience.

I tried to vary the styles somewhat from piece to piece based on each film and family. For instance, I figured the Torrances' photo would come from a K-Mart type store so it's slightly misframed and the lighting is severe in an attempt to match Kubrick's. In contrast, National Lampoon's Vacation was shot using very direct and saturated lighting, so when it translated into my colored pencils it made the piece feel flat and really cartoony from the very beginning. Since this look seemed to match the characters I decided not to fight it and I let the kitsch flow.

I also carefully considered the frames for each, trying to match the eras and families' income. For example, the Freelings from Poltergeist seemed like they might have a more glamorous silver frame in their large suburban Californian home of the '80s, while the Lundegaards seemed a good fit with the dark wood.

So why these families? Well, they all have the following in common...
1. The films they come from are all among my favorites.
2. They're all-American and "traditional" in that both parents are together (Well, at the time of the photo).
3. They all go though purely hellish experiences.

The Griswolds seemed out of place to me until I realized that I'd rather survive a vicious haunting with Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) than travel cross country to Wally World under Clark W. Griswold's supervision.

All in all, it's been great to take a break from the mouse pad to illustrate traditionally again. And being a part of Crazy 4 Cult was a purely wonderful experience. (I'll post my recap of the show soon.) Anyway, I hope you got a kick, a laugh, or a nightmare out of my art.

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KERMESSE FANASTIQUE

Here is the best Dutch stop-motion animated commercial from 1948 that you will see all week. Kermesse Fantastique, a ten minute promotion for Philips Electronics, is directed by Jozsef Misik and presented by Joop Geesink (who art directed some of George Pál's Puppetoons). There's so much to love here, from the Art Deco star-lit styling to the glorious dark ride trip. Thank you Brian O. for directing me to this wonderful bit of secret fun!

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