Noah Scalin - Camino Real Show Poster

Noah designed this poster a little while back for a theatre up in NY. I love the classic color scheme, reminiscent of the WPA. He let me screen this one. 12.5 x 19, five colors, including the gold heart. Thanks Noah! Keep em coming! See more of his poster work at Another Limited Rebellion.

FUNS WANT Interview

I have a feature interview in the Taiwanese magazine Funs Want Vo. 9. You should check out their very cool website. However unless you can read traditional Chinese you're going to need to use babel fish to translate for you.

1000 Garment Graphics

Over at popidiot we  received our copy of 1000 Garment Graphics which you can order from Amazon -

http://www.amazon.com/000-Garment-Graphics-

It was designed and edited by Jeffrey Everette of El Jefe Design for Rockport Publishing. Once again El Jefe did a bang up job. The book is about printing on garments, mostly t-shirts but includes many other things such as hats, bags, belts, etc. If you love personal, quirky, mostly hand printed wares done by artists for the love of it, most of which is being done without the constraints of clients, this book is a great place to start. There's a lot of amazing work in the book. Some by friends such as Spaghetti Kiss, Adhouse Books and Squidfire and a lot of stuff by folks we're unfamiliar with but love being exposed to.

Some might say that it's full of ephemeral trashy pop culture junk and on some levels they'd be right. But we at popidiot love that kind of thing, for better or worse it's our nature.

The Cost of Living

Lately I've been working on a sculpture for a show coming up at Gallery 5 in Richmond, Va (Opening on Friday, March 6th). The show is centered around the theme of "The Cost of Living," so I chose to create a bunch of little figures working in this unfinished building/giant king. Essentially it's saying the king's wealth is created by the combined labor of the many. I wanted to try something new with media, since I feel like I've been messing around with pen and ink almost exclusively for the last few years. It's been a lot of fun building this thing and I've learned a lot about working with an added dimension. In this image the piece still isn't complete, but I'll post an update once it's finished.



Best,

Barry
barrybruner.com

Italian Film & Food Fest 2008

This was another collaboration with Spencer. Unlike my previous experience which was my first time working with Spencer, I had no reservations. I knew I was in good hands and this time I asked him if he wouldn't mind doing the design as well as the color and of course he didn't hesitate and as you can see he did his usual bang up job. This is the second poster that I've had the pleasure of working on for the Italian Film and Food Festival. The festival is sponsored By Ed of MammaZu and 8 1/2 and Brad of Edo's Squid. We worked with Ed on it and he proved again to be the model client.

NYC RISK!

So I play a lot of RISK, the game of world domination, and I got tired of playing on the same map over and over again. With my spare time I redesigned the game based on the boroughs of New York City and east Jersey. (For those unfamiliar with the game the original board and cards are below as well). Also a different variable I added to the game is the bridge blowing card, which one could blow up bridges or tunnels to adjoining territories.

With naming and shaping the territories on the map I apologize in advance to all neighborhoods grossly misrepresented in shape or size or not included at all. But this is a game board not meant to be used as a accurate map of the NYC area, and it would be impossible to include all neighborhoods.

As for the cards, I used the movie, The Warriors, as inspiration. In order from left to right they represent (as from the original game) infantry, cavalry, and artillery. And below is the bridge blowing card and the wild card. Before I carried away and poorly describe all aspects of the game, go to the RISK wiki page for a full explanation the game and its rules.



Dorkly yours,

Barry

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

We love halloween! Its been a little preoccupying this past week. Here's an invite I put together for the party tonight. Yes it is screen printed and yes that is silver ink. Its actually, silver, pink, and black on black French paper. I hope everyone enjoys my favorite holiday!

Second

I'm not quite sure whether this one is about intimacy, uncertainty, or just about how much I love hair.

FEVER

Jan Van Eyck's Cat's

This past weekend I was a groomsman in the wedding of my very good friends, Neal Iwan and Kristen Lowery. It was a ton of fun, I went golfing for the first time, and drank too much Maker's Mark at the reception. But the greatest part of all was making the bride cry for 30 minutes. No, I didn't ream her out for trying to steal my friend from me, and no I did not object to their union by feigning a seizure in the middle of the aisle. What I did do was give them a really good wedding present.

Neal and Kristen have two cats, Charlie and Kitten, who they both adore, so I decided to redo Jan Van Eyck's famous "The Arnolfini Marriage" with their cat's heads switched with the people's in the painting and Neal's with the dog's. Unbeknown to me that painting happened to be Kristen's all time favorite, so when she opened it, my altered version moved her quite a bit.

Apparently, Kitten didn't like it as much they did. Neal reported when they got home, he sat the framed illo on their kitchen counter, and Kitten jumped on it thus knocking it onto the floor, breaking the frame. Oh well... So here's the piece:

BARF COMICS # 1

Jim has finally put his mega awesome art book up for sale online. Its a full color, 48 page collection of short comics, record covers, and all sorts of other crap, in a limited print run of 250 copies. It also features the very same cover we used for his Barf Comics six color 25 inch poster. Buy the comic HERE for like ten smackers.

Plan 9 Anniversary T-Shirt... That wasn't

I did this a year or so ago, whenever Plan 9's 25th anniversary was. It was something I did pro-bono for Jim Bland, owner of Plan 9 Music, because he's one of the nicest guy's I know and he has one of the state's coolest music stores. I don't remember if he approached me or if I approached him? I guess it doesn't really matter, but for some reason he's never really made clear, he decided not to use it. On occasion I'll ask him if he intends to use it and he'll say "yes" he does. We'll see. Maybe one day I'll get around to doing something with it myself.

The color's are reduced to just 3 because the original use was to be a t-shirt and I wanted to keep it simple and inexpensive. If I were to make a silk screen poster I now know that I could add another 3 or 4 colors, could be fun, we'll see.

Frans Boukas!

Frans we met at Small Press Expo a few years ago. We met back up with him at the comic con in New York this past spring. Turns out he had been drawing like a maniac the whole time. On his blog you can check out Pumpkin Man, the Goon, Bogged Down At Bush Street story, some posters and hats and tons more. Of, course we had to beg him to do a silk screened poster with us, which hopefully will be previewing here soon, and I've overheard him and Matt Deans plotting some insanely large mash up poster project. Here's a taste:

People Have been Busy.

It seems that a few of the Team Eight regulars have eeked out enough downtime to toss some of their fevered drawlings up on their respective flickr pages. They missed that deadline to post them and they also skipped lunch, so you better appreciate it.

Matt Deans:



Matt has been working hard at his full time day job while also trying to keep his ink brush wet and the stream of gooey illustrations flowing. Oh yeah, and he's in this band that plays shows and practices two to three times a week. No time for whining.


And Mr. Callahan:




Jim likes puppy dogs and pizza and long rides on his skateboard at dusk. SDWP - ISO - GSOH

New Review

I wrote a review for the new graphic novel sensation, 'The Alcoholic."  Check it out:

http://www.brickweekly.com/index.php/booksprint/article/comics_the_alcoholic/702

SKULLS

SKULLS, the book based on my Skull-A-Day project is officially in US stores today!



Look for it at your local independent book store. You can also find it online at all the usual places like: Amazon.com, Powells, and Barnes & Noble.

New Stuff

Here are some new illos that I've completed. The first one was for an article in Plenty Magazine about the politics of salmon. It dealt with how politicians block legislation to help save salmon populations and put in measures that might destroy their habitats. I had a great time with the content (of course) this illo, but drawing the the environment around the figures and handling of the color was a lot of fun to play with too.

The second drawing is just another portrait that was intended was promo mailing. It's of Vladamir Putin.

Paper Parade at SPX!!

Come check out Team 8 Press at Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD! They will be there this weekend and in full swing. I have been busy working with Spencer and some of the other members on my hot new paper pendants made from test print samples from several artists work. These one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces will be available this weekend at SPX at Team 8's table. Come and spend the day with many of the east coasts premier print artists. Thanks!

Maria Carra Rose
Face Metal Design

Mariya Pantyukhina - Richmond City Sketches

Mariyah recently posted these and many other sketches on her blog, mariawithstories.blogspot.com. They are gorgeous and I had to bring them to everyone's attention. She is a great example of why we should all be sketching as frequently as possible, which for many of us is probably more than we are now.

Teleological Art

I came across this book in a used bookstore last week.  I can't find any further information about the paintings that it mentions, but it's pretty amazing.  Does anyone out there know more about this?

Excerpted from “Teleological Art,” by Ferraro Strauss.  Published by Elenchus House, 1989.

Pg. 112

“While an executive order demanding that all religious idols be stricken from the home and replaced with images of the leader himself may seem outlandish to us today, in Stalinist Russia this was official policy.  Any who dared to disobey would be branded a traitor and an undesirable, and face exile or death. 

But some Russian Christians, perhaps more afraid of an eternity in hell then a life of false idols, took extraordinary steps to circumvent and undermine this law.

Recently, researchers have uncovered proof that a secret cabal existed, one devoted to producing otherwise state approved works of art that secretly included coded Christian messages and hidden Christian symbols.   These works often relied on elaborate puns or images so steeped in symbolism that an almost scholarly understanding of Christianity would be needed to pick them out. 

One of the artists who risked his life to produce these works was Guiseppe Nekenbruli, an Italian painter who emigrated to Stalinist Russia with the express purpose of producing Stalinist Christian works.  It is unclear how many works Nekenbruli produced.  His reliance on pseudonyms, as well as the imperative to hide these Christian images as well as possible, made cataloguing his work nearly impossible.  It is known that in 1979 he donated one piece, titled [untranslatable] to the Vatican Museum.  This work is notable for the fact that Nekenbruli hid images of Jesus Christ in Stalin’s very own mustache.  In fact, when viewed under a microscope, it is revealed that each hair in the mustache hides an image of Christ, over 200 hundred in all.  The fact that Nekenbruli was able to pull of such an audacious stunt in nothing less then amazing.”