What a crazy stretch this has been: embarking on a freelance career; MoCCA; Andrea finishing her first year at SVA; birthdays; and in a few days, my 10th-year high school reunion. I’m also thrilled to announce that I’ll have a piece in the upcoming issue of Moonshot Magazine, and that I’ll soon be giving this site some needed updates.

In the meantime, here are some sketches from the Met’s fantastic exhibition of the Stein family’s collection. I was blown away—I’ve love Matisse forever, but found several images for which I’d never even seen photos. Also discovered Francis Picabia, whose line has a lot to teach a cartoonist.

And here are a few more from recent adventures. We saw some crazy birds in Central Park and I found a relief sculpture of Andrea in a detail on a lamppost in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. (I call the weirdest bird a kingfisher, but we’re now pretty sure it was a heron with a truly crazy neck.)

The post title, by the way, is from Stein’s Tender Buttons.

Here’s the actual print of the Herriman piece. Gonna do some more on nice paper.

Here’s what my next screen print should look like—except less neon orange and more rust. I’ll try to update with a better version if I get a chance—or maybe I’ll just scan a finished print!

From e. e. cummings’s 1946 tribute to Krazy Kat:

…let’s make no mistake about Krazy. Her helplessness, as we have just seen, is merely sensical—nonsensically she’s a triumphant, not to say invincible, phenomenon. As for this invincible phenomenon’s supposed idiocy, it doesn’t even begin to fool nonsensical you and me. Life, to a lot of people, means either the triumph of mind over matter or the triumph of matter over mind; but you and I aren’t a lot of people. We understand that, just as there is something—love—infinitely more significant than brute force, there is something—wisdom—infinitely more significant than mental prowess.

You can read the whole essay, and much more, in Craig Yoe’s excellent Krazy Kat & the Art of George Herriman: A Celebration.

]]> http://versequential.com/blog/geo-herriman/feed/ 0 http://versequential.com/blog/first-screen-print/ http://versequential.com/blog/first-screen-print/#comments Sun, 19 Feb 2012 02:56:00 +0000 Alexander Rothman http://versequential.com/blog/?p=1614

…since high school, at least. It’s for Sara Varon‘s awesome screen-printing class at SVA. The piece could be better, but I’m pretty happy with it for a start.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! Please go cause some mayhem in the name of love.

As you can see, it has been a while, and things have fallen into disrepair. I’m overhauling the site as quickly as I can. This area will soon be an actual blog, with a separate, Webcomic-plugin-powered section of the site to display comics-poems.

It won’t be too much longer. Many thanks for your interest and patience in the meantime.

First of the new collection. Poems primarily about running and probably plants.

Here’s the third and last piece I’ll post from Circulating Drafts. There’s one more in the print edition, so if you feel like playing the patron, head on over to the Versequential Etsy page and consider picking one up.

Here are some studies for upcoming projects: stealing shamelessly from Andrea Tsurumi, I’m planning a series of 13 blackbirds. And the next bunch of comics-poems will be about running. Probably a whole chapbook of pieces about this.

My continuing ed. class is over—thanks again to Sal Amendola for his wisdom. Now it’s time to save money, but still time to keep learning.