My fiancé, who teaches 1st grade, received the following letter from one of her students:
Dear: Ms. Marshall
You have to do a lot to teach us. I love you!! Do you teach hard? You are the best person ever! Do you and Mr. Baggs kiss I think so? Thank you for saying my hand writeing is good. Can you bring pictures of your dog.
I just completed a new web site for showcasing my work: JesseBaggs.com! Screen shot of the home page below:
Unlike my old web site, HardPressedInk.com, it’s standards-compliant, uses CSS and features my name right in the URL. It doesn’t feature many samples yet, and I plan to make further tweaks as time goes by, but for now we are live!
HardPressedInk.com will also remain live, but it will soon cease to be an online portfolio for me and become instead the web site for my new publishing collective, HardPressed Ink. Watch this space for news as they develop.
I created a portrait / caricature of myself way back in 2003 that I’ve used over the years for various purposes:
It’s become a little out of date: besides being 7 years old, I no longer wear glasses, nor do I have long, black hair. Now I wear contacts and have short salt-and-pepper hair! So I created a new self-portrait for a new decade:
Here’s the pencil version of the portrait:
And here are the inks, which I’m really please with. I never felt so in command of a brush before!
2010. This came from a really great photo of Kid Rock by, I believe, Jeremy Deputat in the August 2009 issue of Rolling Stone. I didn’t quite capture it in the drawing, but Kid Rock’s skinny, hairless physique coupled with his outstretched arms and crossed legs really made him look like Jesus on the cross.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I work as a sub at Studio 700, an art center for adults with disabilities, where I’m lucky to instruct or work with truly talented artists. One such artist, named Laura, works with construction paper and recently asked me what she should work on for the day. I suggested she create a self-portrait using non-traditional colors, i.e., to not use pink for her skin and brown for her hair, etc. She told me she prefers to work with animals and then created this amazing lion:
It reminds me of Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings, such as “Surprise!”
Another student in the same class, Josh Johnsen, created this drawing while waiting for a computer. It was very offhand for him—I think he intended to throw it away—but I found in it a sense of power and mystery one often finds in more “primitive” drawings:
It actually reminds me of a recurring dream I have that seems to be a mix Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “John Carter of Mars” series and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, where a sweaty, heavily-muscled red-skinned warrior battles his way through frightening alien landscapes. So, I decided to color Josh’s piece, and here is the result:
“Did you exchange / a walk-on part in the war / for a lead role in a cage?”
Pink Floyd, “Wish You Were Here” from Wish You Were Here.
Amanuensis –noun. A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.
Fortunately (unfortunately?), I wasn’t close enough to capture his leg acne. I’m a bastard.
Speaking of other people’s art, I was lucky enough to visit Roseville’s Blue Line Gallery the other day and saw a great collection of art by Gerald Heffernon entitled, “Inside-Out Evolution.” His work features surreal combinations of humans and animals, such as this painting, “The Cocktail Party”:
My favorite work by Heffernon is the statue “Farm Poet.” Here’s a picture of the sculpture from the artist’s web site, and a picture I took at the gallery using my camera phone:
I didn’t realize it until I visited his web site, but I’ve seen Heffernon’s work before. His a picture of my fiancé Audrey standing in front of Heffernon’s statue, “Rabbinoid, male”:
The gallery also featured two other statues by T.S. Linzey from their “Emerging Artists” show that would be of interest to fans of comics: “Load” and “. . . transition . . .”
Sacramento-based artist Skinner has been hired by Relapse Records to create imagery for comedian Brian Posehn’s upcoming double-album. Skinner was nice enough to send me a photo of the t-shirt design he also created for Posehn, which looks fucking awesome!
Given that both Skinner and Posehn are from the Sacramento area and love metal, I’d say this is a match made in hell!
Speaking of comedy in Sacramento, the Punch Line has been bringing in some great comedians lately, and Dave Attell will be here on March 16th and 17th!
Update: Check out the awesome He-Man show Skinner was in!
I Googled my name yesterday and found dollar drawings from APE created by Scott and myself. To give you an idea of how people try to stump us, someone requested “glass-penetrating ass-butterflies.” Oh, they try to stump us. And they fail. Here’s Scott’s drawing:
Someone from the same group asked me to draw “zombie moth teeth.” The image they posted online is pretty small, so I’ve enlarged it for your pleasure:
I found my drawing and a link to Scott’s drawing on the blog, “Not Funny Comics.” The links no longer work so the blog may be abandoned.
