Got Wood?

It may or may not be a well known fact that I like wood.  A quick stroll through the house will reveal wood-grain patterned towels, faux bois (“fake wood”) sheets, and several rolls of wood patterned contact paper with which I hope to someday cover my ugly metal filing cabinets (one of those “someday” projects that never seems to happen).  So when we decided to do a series of print editions for my recent show at Varnish Fine Art, did we print them on mere paper?  NO WE DID NOT!

“Behold My Heart”. print on wood, 15 x 11 inches

We found a fabulous company that figured out how to print them directly onto wood, allowing a hint of the beautiful wood grain to peep through.  (Which is perfect in more ways than one since I do all my paintings on wood panels.)  There are different sizes and prices, from stocking stuffers

“Lucky 7″ & “Bitten”, prints on wood, 5 x 7 inches (each)

to “Oh honey you shouldn’t have (but I’m so glad you did!)”.

“Song of Birth (The Three Magi)”, print on wood, 18 x 24 inches

These are all signed and numbered, a very limited edition of 50 each.

“Besame Mucho”, print on wood, 8 x 10 inches

And if you order right now, you can still probably get them in your hot little hands in time for Christmas.  (Otherwise I think they’d make a smashing Chinese New Year present.)

“Golden Silence”, print on wood, 17 x 11 inches

The fab guys that make these prints run a solar powered shop, use FSC sustainably harvested birch, and for every purchase they donate a dollar to the Plant a Billion Trees charity.

“The Birth of Ginger”, print on wood, 16 x 20 inches

What are you waiting for?  Click right here to see ‘em all and snatch something up for yourself.

“Gone Native”, prints on wood, 10 x 8 inches (each)

This pair is sold separately or as a set, and you get to write their story in your mind — are they arriving at the tiny island in the background or escaping? Are they coming together or pulling apart? Is the storm brewing or passing?

“The Honey Dripper”, print on wood, 14 x 11 inches

What if the moment when Baby Bear and Goldilocks first saw each other, that instant when he cast his big brown bear eyes on her as she slept in his bed, was a “love at first sight” moment?  Maybe she would have stayed in the woods…

“Sew Much Love”, print on wood, 14 x 11 inches

And if things had gone a little differently for the Bride of Frankenstein and her Monster, perhaps they’d have decided to expand their family the best way they knew how.

Other goodies are also available at the Varnish Emporium, including Jennybird Alcantara’s new catalog “Creatures of Saintly Disguise”, prints by Jennybird, Mike Davis, and Attaboy, the Hi-Fructose Collector’s Edition boxed set, and gorgeous art books by and about all your fave artists.  One stop holiday shopping for everyone who’s been naughty or nice!

Happy Holidaze everyone, we made it another year around the sun!

Double Trouble for Friday the 13th!

If you’re in the LA area, make sure you come and see Lisa Petrucci and I for our Double Trouble book signing at La Luz de Jesus, Friday the 13th at 6pm. She’ll be signing sizzlin’ copies of “Kick Ass Cuties” and I’ll be scribbling in “On Tender Hooks” .  As a special treat for anyone who can make it down, we’ve created a special-to-this-event very Limited Edition Button Set!  Six 1″ pins on a custom card that will be signed and numbered by both of us.  Talk about kick ass!

I Heart My Button Maker

The sets will have three designs each by Lisa and myself and were lovingly hand assembled by moi over the last couple of nights.

Button-y Goodness!

After about a hundred buttons I get what I call “Dented Thumb” from putting in the pin backs…

Fortunately it's not permanent

You know you want to snatch up one of these sets!  Wait till you see ‘em all pinned on their fancy signed and numbered custom color printed cards!

Lisa Petrucci & Isabel Samaras’ Double Book Signing

Friday, Nov. 13th, 6:00 – 9:00pm

La Luz de Jesus Gallery, 4633 Hollywood Blvd., LA, CA

Double Trouble

If you’ve heard the rumors, it’s all true — Lisa Petrucci and I will be descending on La Luz de Jesus on Friday, Nov. 13th at 6pm for a double signing event!  She’ll have copies of her new book “Kick Ass Cuties” and I’ll have “On Tender Hooks.”

We’re also working on a signed, numbered, limited edition button set just for the event.  Stay tuned…

“Dementions”

Dementions at Eclectix Gallery opens this Friday!

“Jam packed with scary, fun, demented, surreal, strangely beautiful and emotive art! The ultimate in Halloween viewing, hung salon style. With works by more than 45 artists in all mediums: dark gothic portraits, monsters, sexy vampires, skeletons, devils, surreal landscapes, Day of the Dead imagery and cute pumpkins. From our own Bay Area Newbrow art stars: gleaming, anthropomorphic robotic sculptures by Nemo Gould, a dark surprise from Annie Owens, fantastic monster cake sculptures by Scott Hove and a Franken-animal by Isabel Samaras.”

Opening Reception: Friday, October 16th, 7 to 10 pm.
With live music by “Eclair De Lune”
The “SweetRoll” truck will be rolling by…
Catered by Fume Bistro

Isabel Bites the Big Apple

I’m heading off to NYC this week for a couple fun events — please do come if you can, both are free and I’d love to see your smiling faces!

Thursday, Sept. 17th
“From Adaptation to Mutation: Contemporary Narrative Artists Remix Popular Culture”
Panel & slide show w/ Nora Krug, Isabel Samaras, and R. Sikoryak
Moderated and Introduced by Bill Kartalopouluos
Sept 17 at 7 – 9pm
The New School
66 W 12th Street, Room 404
New York, NY 10011
Free and open to the public

*and*

Saturday, Sept. 19th
Book Signing w/ Isabel Samaras
3 – 5pm
Jonathan LeVine Gallery
529 West 20th Street, 9th floor
New York, NY 10011
212-243-3822
(If I can get all my packing done, I might try to make some spiffy button sets to sell to first-comers.)

I’ll also be in Tompkins Sq. Park at some point playing ukulele with the incomparable Reggie Wingnutz, but as I haven’t played in months and he’s going to totally smoke me, that date and time is secret.  You could just loiter around the park and listen for something that sounds like a uke getting run over by an ice cream cart.  That would be me.

And lastly, if there are any must-see museum shows, galleries, events, the best shoe store on earth, or the most fantastic dessert you ever tasted that you think I need to check out, please do let me know.

Con-tastic!

Oh boy oh boy oh boy — gearing up this week for Comic-Con in San Diego.  Can’t. Hardly. Wait!  Come and share the excitement, bump elbows with some Jawas, pick up all those toys you’ve been coveting, roll around in comics up to your eyeballs, see some sneak preview movie clips and just generally revel in geek fandom heaven.

When not running around frothing at the mouth, I’ll be stationary for two events:

1)  Book signing at the Chronicle Books booth, #1506 along one of the main thoroughfares, near the stairs that go up to the seminar rooms.  I’ll be there at 3pm on Friday.  Stop on by, say hello, and pick up a spanky fresh copy of “On Tender Hooks”!

2)  My panel with R. Sikoryak and Ron English, moderated by Colin Berry, is at 6pm on Friday, room 32AB.  We called it “Pop Perversity: Parody in Comics & Art.”

(Clearly I didn’t get the memo that we were all going to use images with horns.)  They Con folks briefly stripped the title down a bit (just “Parody in Comics & Art”) but they wisely returned it to the original version.  How are we supposed to lure you in and compete with Klingon Lifestyles Presentations or your chance to get Elvira’s autograph if we can’t throw around words like “perversity”?  And what’s so bad about that anyway?  You know what the dictionary defination of perversity is?  “Contrariness: deliberate and stubborn unruliness and resistance to guidance or discipline.”  Sure there’s other definitions (I think “depravity” turns up eventually) but come on, work with me here people!

Anyway, our description of the panel is “Parodists from the world of art and comics show how their sharp, sly images blur the boundaries between the popular and the profound, the propagandistic and the profane.  Parody is a familiar part of our culture, but when done right it can still shock and awe, revealing truths while it makes us cackle.”

So come join us and get your cackle on!

What A Way To Start The Day

Is there anybody who wouldn’t like to see the word “genius” in the same sentence with their name?  (Except maybe for “Who’s the genius that screwed this up?”)  If you didn’t see the link in the comments, I just had to wave this around a bit because it’s such a lovely, lovely review.  Angela Cardone, arts and culture producer for KPBS Radio, pours some sweet sugar on me with “The Pop Culture Genius of Isabel Samaras.“

Chatty

Chronicle Books (not the entire building and staff, just a couple of really lovely CBers, Patti and Bridget) came to the studio and made this swell little video of their visit.  I’m giving a petite tour/sneak preview of some of the paintings for the show and of course showing the book some love.  (Clearly in this still I’m talking about large, juicy melons…)

It’s Here!

I’ve touched it.  The book.  It’s here!  Chronicle sent an advance copy and boy howdy is it purty.  (The note they tucked into it says “TA DA!”)

I can't quite believe it's real

One of my favorite features is the “dissected painting” — based on old medical books where you’d lift the paper “skin” flap to see the muscles, then lift that to see the organs, etc.  This one shows the sketch of the painting, the underpainting and the final finished piece.  (If you’re paying attention you’ll see the wolf prince was originally going to be sitting in/leaning on some kind of chair/throne which I’d originally thought would have a carved wolfy-gargoyle on it, but it kinda shifted as I was painting to be a live wolf and moved outdoors.)

In production we called this "the flappy thing".

Aaaaand the postcard book, which is just gorgeously packaged (I can compliment that part freely since I had nothing to do with it, it’s all the delicious design work of Catherine Head).

The outsides...

... and the insides!

Much much much glossy goodness all around.

Where the Hell Did You Get That Banana At?!

“On a traffic light green means go and yellow means yield, but on a banana it’s just the opposite.  Green means hold on, yellow means go ahead and red means where the hell did you get that banana at?!?” — Mitch Hedberg, R.I.P.

I meant to post this on Valentine’s Day but got taken down by some evil germs and forgot.  So slightly belatedly, here’s RED!

I love red.  People who’ve seen my house or my plants (or me most days) might also notice I’m quite fond of orange.  Oh hell I really like to indulge in color, period.  But let’s focus on red today.  (We’ve already talked about black and maybe we’ll do the whole spectrum eventually.)

Red is a wildly energizing color.  It symbolizes strong emotions like love and war:  red is Cupid and the Devil.  People who study the effects of color on we humans have shown that red is literally stimulating:  it raises your blood pressure and heart rate, it’s gets your appetites up, which is supposedly why a lot of restaurants and bordellos are red. (And as you might imagine, blue is very calming.)  This is true even for color blind people — the rods and cones in your eyes process the colors the same way, send the same signals to your brain, even if you’re only seeing shades of grey or brown.  Red is the color of emergencies (police lights and flares) and the color of sex (lipstick and “red light districts”).  You can “see red” or have a “red letter day” or “paint the town red.”

The god Thor had red hair (not in the comics where he’s inexplicably blond, but you know, in real life) and all the red animals were sacred to him:  foxes, robins and squirrels.  (Sorry Thor but squirrels are currently on my shit list because they eat all my figs. I used to hand-feed them peanuts but I’m about ready to sit out back with a shotgun like some crazy hillbilly.) Oh and get this — researchers at the University of Rochester did experiments on the way color affected how attractive men found women.  Pictures of women framed in a red border were deemed “more attractive,” and the same woman in a red dress was more likely to score higher as well.  My favorite part is where they figured out that men would spend more money on women wearing red.  (Take note, ladies.) Red didn’t change how women viewed other women, nor how the men judged the women in terms of likability and intelligence.  Does this somehow connect back to our primate days and bright red baboon butts?

A Flock of Cardinals

In medieval times there were strict clothing regulations — gorgeous pure colors of cloth were only to be worn by the rich nobility (hence the peasants and surfs were always scrabbling about in their drab brown rags).  Wearing a red cloak or coat was only an option for the wealthy or higher ups in the church — a way of broadcasting their power over life and death.

For me, there’s something really classic and gorgeous about huge folds of red fabric, whether it’s drapery or clothing.  And I really slave over those reds, layering them up with different colors and tinkering around until they’re very glowy and bright.  Which is terrific in a painting, but not so easy in the printing world.

Red bits from some of my paintings

When we got the first color proofs of the book we all noticed that the reds had a not-so-wonderful, dead-ish quality to them.  Like old luncheon meat.  It was red, but it wasn’t my red.  I think of my red as a screaming-Corvette, blood-spurting, cardinal-on-fire blazing red.  The good news is that the fab folks at Chronicle agreed that the reds in the color proofs weren’t up to snuff, so they’ve gone back to the drawing board to see what can be done.

The ever-terrific Beth Steiner explained it to me this way:  ”Basically, the red color in the transparencies is unachievable in regular four color process printing. It’s “out of gamut” meaning out of the color spectrum we can capture. So, in order to make the reds more vibrant, less dull, and closer to the originals, we are exploring using a special magenta ink.

The test sheets we currently have use a Rubine Red, which is a special ink made by IPI inks. In talking with the prepress house yesterday, they felt that they might get an even better result going a different route – printing four color process, but then adding a PMS ink “kicker” in the reds, essentially printing the book 5 color. “

So we’re messing around with that and I hope everyone enjoys oggling the blazing inks they’re working so hard on.  Fingers crossed they print really RED!