Oekaki screenshot from a mixed-sketching session with friend Skinny Rydell.

Batman obsesses me.

And not even the franchise, because I simply don’t care. I’ve never stirred to purchase, collect, or read any official Batman comics. I picked up Arkham Asylum from someone’s coffee table and thought it was wonderful, but didn’t buy my own. I’ve always avoided “superhero comics” and been aggressively bored by ones I’ve opened in comic shops.

My own personal Batman is something of an archetype. A symbolic Man, an object of ridicule and affection, a torture subject, a grotesque, and a sex object. He is built for me to tear down.

Keaton is the only Batman. His smallness, his over-unctuous disapproval, his eyebrows. His petulance. His sleaze. And his performance was locked into the forty pound rubber suit, the one that fit like a spinal injury brace, preventing him even from looking over his shoulder. He was rigid, and helpless. Madness churning under a matte black shell.

Batman’s mask is lingerie. It conceals, and reveals, a face made for objectification. The leather fetishism of it, the animalism, even the aerodynamics: they turn his whole torso into a Cadillac. It is everything but human, but for the mouth, which is presented. That brilliant scene in Spider-Man where the ugly girl rolls up Spider-Man’s mask in the rain, using his mouth as he hangs there, bound up in his own sticky threads, that’s Batman all the time. He’s faceless, but orificed. His five o’clock shadow, that noir symbol of virility, is brazenly on display. While the rest of his face is armored, he is unable to defend his mouth. He is as anonymous, and accessible, as a masquerade orgiast.
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Things to Come [flickr]

Photographer Helminen has produced a lush series of black fabric studies, including this royal portrait. It’s a complicated sort of minimalism that I find inspiring. I want to paint my entire apartment black.

Juha Arvid Helminen [deviantart]

Bumblecopter [jasinski:deviantart]

The Frost Kraken [Venison Arts | Etsy]

Oh my.

The Folio Society has released a gorgeous edition of William Golding’s classic novel with paintings by Sam Weber. Unfortunately, it is only available to members and the entry fee ain’t cheap.

Lord of the Flies [Folio Society] : DRAWN!

23/10/09 by Station

Last week I ran a $45 painting commission special on SWEATSHOP. My first request was from a chef and restaurant owner, who sent me the following story and asked me to illustrate it.

Meanwhile, Station00023 was idling in the SWEATSHOP chatroom, as he usually does. At the end of the night, he sent me the music at the head of this post, having composed it while he watched the painting going up.

Between the three of us, we nearly had an opera. Please enjoy.

I purchase my fish from various fish mongers, (local fisher gentlemen) they come to my back door with their fresh catch looking to sell. Depending on a number of things, I usually buy. Usually they all have the same types of fish and/or crustaceans.

About 4 years ago on a Friday afternoon I opened my door to a 20 gallon cooler of squirming alive medium sized Octopus. It was glorious! As I was bargaining with the fisherman, he labored to keep them in the cooler, dozens of tentacles slithering over the edge trying to go free, dark sack-like bodies with little eyes peering over the edge, as he unstuck something, others popped up.
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Even the gleam in the eyes of this young tattooee speaks volumes on the subject of mythological rape. One cannot imagine him taking his pleasure without feathers billowing from the bedsheets, and thunder rattling the windowpanes.

Fine Print | Ink, Inc. [NYTimes : knickersoakers : thanks Nadya!]

Several times a week, I host a live video broadcast of my daily drawing and sketching. It’s called the Sweatshop, and it’s slowly growing in popularity.

Sweatshops are my own personal nighttime open mic drawing lessons, storytellings, and heckling opportunities. I announce the session is starting via my Twitter, and the call to arms is bounced around by viewers as the night goes on. Sometimes I point my cam at a page, sometimes at a Photoshop window, and very occasionally at a canvas. Guests wander into and out of the chatroom, offering wisecracks, critique, and shaggy dog stories. It’s a blast.

Over the past few nights, my nibs have strayed to the Dark Knight. These are the fruits of my (and our) labor.

I spend too much of my precious time looking at art on the Internet. I stopped recently–abandoned my feeds; stopped clicking links from friends, eschewing anything that told me I HAD TO SEE THIS!!!1. I became an artistic germophobe: fearful of contamination by all these outside influences. I think my output was better for it, and it’s a policy I keep up these days.

But I check the ectotips, of course. And I trust your collective judgment, of course. So it was with hope glazing my beady little eyes that I clicked the series of links Ectomite Tobin sent us recently. I was not disappointed.

Uno Morales’ work is by turns grotesque and gorgeous. It is the first genuinely frightening art I’ve seen in ages, and this is so, so refreshing.

supernature! [Uno Morales|Livejournal] (NWS)

Uno Moralez [Artist's site - thanks Tobin!]

Damien Hirst is a “conceptual artist” with an affinity for dead animals in preservative fluid, over-long, pretentious titles for artwork, and charging obscene amounts of money for combinations of the two. The piece that launched him into fortune, A Thousand Years, consisted of a cow’s maggot-infested head encased in glass. The pieces for which he is presumably best known, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living and For the Love of God, consist, respectively, of a vitrine encasing a 14-foot tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde, and a platinum skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds totaling 1,106 carats.

Around the time of Hirst’s budding success, he was quoted as saying, “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it.”

In a bit of disingenuously friendly supposition, I’ve imagined a world in which video clips of adorable animals doing their adorable animal thing are all shot, and subsequently entitled, by Damien Hirst.

I call this one Man’s Endless Struggle Against The Inevitability Of Death, Suffering, And Oblivion.

“In my mind I am masculine. I feel I don’t have to prove it to anyone who might think otherwise (I don’t care what others think).”

Photographer Chad States’ project, Men at their Most Masculine, seeks to capture the modern man in his element, portraying the subjects’ self-assessed masculinity in their own unique ways. The point that Mr. States attempts to put across with his work is fairly straight-forward; in this modern era, what is considered masculine? Each subject in the series is allowed an opportunity to explain his masculinity, or why he feels he is masculine, which is then displayed alongside his portrait.

Good idea, no? The problem, as with many endeavors, seems to have been in the source. Mr. States used a Craigslist ad to collect his 21st century portraits of masculinity. And as the duct-taped Adonis above illustrates, Craigslist is perhaps a stone better left unturned.

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Peter Pachoumis is a 16 year comic and advertising veteran, working for everyone from DC and Marvel to Disney and Popular Science. I’ve known him for 10 of those years and I’ve always been impressed with his work, showing as it does a keen understanding of human anatomy and strong use of color. He currently has a number of prints up for sale, including the one pictured above, entitled Autumn; part of a planned series of illustrations depicting the seasons.

Prints in store… No, really, they’re in the store! [Artist's Site]