Nathan Jurevicius

"Album"

"Shift"

"9 Lives\Fuji Film"

Australian artist Nathan Jurevicius is cool beyond words. Despite the fact that his website is teensy, he is nevertheless a profound and blinding talent. Juxtapoz magazine has a nice little feature on him in their latest issue, and I heartily recommend picking up a copy. Jurevicius is also a noted toy designer, and though his junk is notoriously hard to find nowadays, arguably he works better in three dimensions than two (and that is saying something.)

Kris Lewis

Kris Lewis, "Promise Broken"

I admit it: I am a truly terrible blogger. In my defense, I offer the meagre excuse that although I believed school started two weeks ago, it in fact started THREE weeks ago, so my time has been spent madly catching up on all my courses - and unfortunately, in the process, neglecting the Cabinet.

To make up for it, today I give you the artwork of Kris Lewis. His work tends to feature elongated, willowy women with massive Margaret-Keane-ish eyes who are simultaneously beautiful and alien - although, if pressed to explain exactly what makes them seem so unnatural, I would mumble something incoherent about proportions and the law of thirds and finally admit that they aren't so much unreal as they are imbued with a quality only rarely seen in the natural world. In the words of the artist himself, "Artwork is love made visible", and it's obvious that he has a deep affection for the women he paints (not to mention, ironically enough, the truly odd-looking musical personalities he has captured.)

In regards to regular updates, I'd like to re-affirm that I'll update it 2-3 times a week - but you know what they say about wishes and fishes, and I'm simply under such enormous time constraints for the next month or so that posts will have to trickle through when I can find a few minutes to spare here and there. However! I'd like to extend the invitation to any literate-minded readers with an interest in pop art who might like to come on-board and fill in the gaps. Send me an email at quixote23 (at) gmail (dot) com if you're interested!

Miscellany

Kentucky Art*O*Mat Machine
designed by Laurie Russell

First up, a shout out to For Crumb's Sake, my esteemed roommate's blog. Tim blogs about indie music, hipster culture, local politics, and self-drawn comics starring anthropomorphic turtles. Tim claims that For Crumb's Sake is "1 & 1/8 more fun than a shovel museum," but I've been in shovel museums, and I think he's underestimating their ability to entertain and, might I add, to educate. I'd put the ratio at closer to 1.09:1, myself.

I don't know much about David Normal, but "The Bicycle Ride", his short animation paying tribute to the very first acid trip, is hilarious, disturbing, and about as close to an authentic bad trip as you're going to get short of renting "Faces of Death 8" and dropping a postage-stamp-sized tab of blotter.

Art*O*Mat is a clever public-installation\kitsch-art\commentary on our culture of instant gratification, comprised of a group of artists who obtain dozens of old cigarette machines, modify them to distribute small works of art rather than cancer sticks, and then re-distribute them in art galleries, public libraries, coffeeshops, and museums. You can check this list to see if there's an Art*O*Mat near you - sadly, the closest one to me is in Tacoma, and I NEVER go to Tacoma. But maybe I'll have to start, now.

Jim Woodring

I apologise for the lack of updates over the last week or two, and I have no excuse other than the fact that I've been very busy and very disorganised. With luck (and maybe some concentrated application on my part) I'll be able to stick to my 2-3 posts-per-week schedule, because God knows, there's enough going on to justify it.

Pictured above are forthcoming figures from Press Pop, based of course on Jim Woodring's Frank, Pushpaw and Pupshaw from his long-running and wonderfully weird "Frank" comic. I first encountered Frank about ten years ago, when a girlfriend who was taking a course in Comics As Literature lent me her "textbooks". I remember spending hours sitting in a park on a warm May morning, endlessly fascinated by Woodring's wordless, Dali-meets-Felix-The-Cat illustrations. Even now, I can't help but be amused by Frank's constant hand-to-the-mouth shock as he encounters a parade of bizarre entities, whose occasionally bad-acid-trip appearances run perpendicular to their oftentimes friendly temperaments.

The figures above will be available in June, and while colour versions are currently available via the Press Pop website, I think I'll hold out for the monochromatic ones. After all, the comic is published in black and white, so why should the figures be anything other than that?

Cheap Paper Art

"Link"

"Not All Your Ideas Are Good"

"It's Okay, He's Canadian"

"Time To Do Something Stupid"

"Dying Is Awesome"

Over at Wonderland, Alice has posted a nice little review of the work of one Kelli Nelson, and, given the connection between her work and my last post on 8-bit art, I thought I'd pony up with my two cents. Kelli has a unique artistic style and a quirky sense of humour, which in my books is an unbeatable combination. She is also responsible for a number of self-published comics which are available for purchase via her website, and not a few mini-comics and weekly comics, all of which can be viewed and appreciated online for the low, low price of free.