Abstract and Gallery Comics from Liechtenstein

Abstract and Gallery Comics from the Art Academy of Liechtenstein Foundation Course class (Kunstschule Liechtenstein Vorkurs 2010-2011) taught by Mark Staff Brandl.

 Rebecca Ospelt

 Silja Senti

 Kristina Madl

 Desirée Méndez

 May Hua Loh

 Liane Caroline Weber

 Kerstin Lampert

 Alexander Choinowski

 Besime Sasivari

 Clara Tiefenthaler

 Desirée Méndez

 Clara Tiefenthaler

 Clara Tiefenthaler

 Nina Kleinstein

 Klara Frick

 Michelle Merki

 Silja Senti

Mirjam Büchel

Contemporary Art Center Exhibition: "Meanwhile...." Mark Staff Brandl

Contemporary Art Center Press Release:

 

"Meanwhile...." July 11-August 27 Gallery 3R Mark Staff Brandl with Gary Scoles and Thomas Emil Homerin

The trio creates a comic book installation on site from scratch, eventually enveloping the entire room. Visitors are invited to watch the process and interact with the creators. Their activities are documented in video and photos, also becoming part of the completed exhibition.

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 16, 6:30-8:30 pm

When Mark Staff Brandl of Switzerland was invited to exhibit at the Contemporary Art Center, he realized this would be an opportunity to fulfill a long-held desire to reunite his friends Gary Scoles of Pekin and Emil Homerin of Rochester, New York into an active creative team in order to realize one of his Panels Painting-Installations, utilizing as a springboard the steady stream of comic-related ephemeral sketches and doodles he and Scoles consistently produce. Starting on July 11, the team will convene in Gallery 3R to create the work on site.

The three met in 1965, at the age of 10, in fifth grade at Douglas Primary School in Pekin, Illinois. They became fast friends, spending almost every Saturday and Saturday night together for years, through high school, creating original superhero comic books. Mark and Gary were the artists and letterers, Emil the author and editor. All created their own characters, yet each helped to contribute to and develop the others' ideas. Emil bore the brunt of making narrative sense of them all. Although their lives took them in various directions after high school, the three have remained in contact, sending comics, art and related materials to one another and collaborating on projects.

The installation will commence with a batch of collected comic-art-oriented doodles on various scraps and sizes of paper that Brandl and Scoles will have done and collected over the year prior to the exhibition. These have no planned continuity nor are even consciously link-ed or guided in any way. They will be laid out as well as mounted on the walls and serve as the basis for the event and installation. Then Homerin will concoct a narrative from these, telling the artists what to add, complete, extend, or change. Visitors will be invited to come to the Art Center, watch the process and interact with the creators. After a week, an installation-comic will envelop the whole room. The activities will be documented in a video, photos, perhaps even sections of "meta-comic" where sequences about the creation of the work will become part of the completed exhibition.

The opening reception on Saturday, July 16, 6:30-8:30 pm will also honor Minnesota artist Sally J. Bright in the Preston Jackson Gallery. Food & drink will be provided. Music provided by Paul Adams. Admission is free but a donation is requested.

This exhibit is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Hi-res photos are available.

Mark Staff Brandl: www.markstaffbrandl.com/

Brandl: Litho Comic

Here's another recent 3-stone lithograph I made which exists as a print (one sheet to be hung on the wall) and as a leporello-folded comic book. It is titled Self-Reflexive Mark, with and obvious play on my name. It travels between abstraction and representation, beginning left with images of the three tools I used to make the piece (and usually use), traveling through some "homage" abstractions, to the self-portrait on the right, based on the full length, life-sized self-portrait painting in my last painting-installation, here only a "detail," my hand with the brush.

Brandl: Art Museum of Canton Thurgau Gallery Comics Paintings Acquisition

It is a particular thrill for me to announce that the Art Museum of Thurgau in Switzerland has just acquired 20 paintings of mine! They comprise a representative cross-section of several years of my series titled "Covers," which are Gallery Comics as well as paintings. I am very pleased that they will be in such a great institution and under the care of its eminent director Markus Landert and curator Dorothee Messmer!

Out of Sequence, Krannert Art Museum Video

A super short (2 min. 35 sec.) TV video clip of the exhibition "Out of Sequence: Under Represented Voices in American Comics," which is on exhibition at the University of Illinois' Krannert Art Museum. This video tours the exhibition with its co-curators, Professor John Jennings and PhD candidate Damian Duffy. Mark Staff Brandl's corner Panels painting-installation and Covers paintings in the spinner rack as well as several of gallery artist C Hill's pieces are prominently featured.

Installation/Gallery Comics Artist Mark Staff Brandl Interviewed on "Bad at Sports"

Brandl is interviewed on the award-winning podcast website Bad at Sports! As they write on their blog: "Episode 170: Mark Staff Brandl, Duncan MacKenzie interviews Mark "The EuroShark" Staff Brandl, theorist, writer, professor, artist, and contributor to Art in America, Sharkforum and Bad at Sports."

Go on over, listen streaming or download the mp3 and listen to it on your iPod. Then join in the discussion! Link: click here!

Gene Colan, Health and Help

As many of you know who read my posts and articles, or have heard me speak, I was greatly influenced by a remarkable, painterly adventure comic artist, Gene Colan. I am saddened to announce that at age 85 he has liver failure.

Gene is not only my Master, but has become my friend over the last years. His wonderful wife Adrienne as well. She writes, "My darling, sweet, handsome and brilliantly gifted husband's liver is failing. The complications are very nasty. This week it's fluid retention and encephalitis. He's on powerful meds now to diminish the symptoms. He sleeps a lot and has very little energy."

The author and all around great guy Clifford Meth is organizing assistance for the family, as they have zero pharmaceutical coverage and are paying crippling prices for meds. God bless the no-health-care-third-world- US health system.

Due to Meth, Marvel and DC, Gene's ex-employers are pitching in a bit to help. Which well they should do, for as the major artist on Daredevil, Iron Man and creator of blade and many other "properties" he has received not a penny from the multi-millions made by the movies (which have even featured scenes and designs liberally "borrowed" from his art). Likewise many many famous comic artists and illustrators are giving artwork to be auctioned off on-line. Likewise Meth is donating proceeds of a book he did with Colan.

You can keep up with developments, the auction, and the book here:
http://thecliffordmethod.blogspot.com/ ;
you can donate directly to the Colans via their Paypal account: genecolan@optonline.net;
you can send a card or money here:

Gene Colan
2 Sea Cliff Avenue
Sea Cliff, NY 11579
USA

Check out his art here: www.genecolan.com/

Gallery Comic Artists Brandl and Hill Follow One Another on Comic Book Talk Radio Interviews

(click image to view enlarged)

Hot Links:
http://www.comicbooktalkradio.com/
Archive

Mac McCool, MSB : The Right Width of Gutters

Comic Illustrator and Gallery Comic artist Mac McCool made a short but interesting "pointer" post on another blog concerning page comics:

"In comic art, the "gutter" defines the space between panels. How wide should gutters be? Generally, not so far apart that the panels seem disconnected and no longer belonging to a meaningful visual group and reading sequence (fig. 1). When the gutter width is small enough, the page looks like a pictorial unit (figs. 2 & 3). However, most artists do not reduce the gutter to a single line (fig. 3), and we'll see the pros and cons of this approach in another post. Still, if you have the heart of an experimenter, one device with which very few comic artists have tinkered is gutter widths, especially varying gutter widths."

What are the various equivalents of the gutter on the wall and in space? Clearly empty wall space is one. And that appears to work similar to Mac's suggestion. Yet in several canvases which were also gallery comics, abuttment seemed to work better than white space. Hmm.

Fine Art Comics

Fine art comics, beaux comics, display comics, exhibition comics, object comics, sequential fine arts .....

I have a certain difficulty with the term gallery comics, as it centers so directly on only one possible destination for the works of art presented here. Granted, the term has its strengths. First, it was created by C Hill, who is the first theorist and practitioner to have identified and promoted interest in this direction. Second, it draws a clear, non-judgmental line between comics-intended-for-books, and this work. Third, it uses the word comics, which I feel it is important to retain, for historical and anti-jargonistic reasons. Sequential art and related terms seems so self-debasing, as if comics now are to deny their past and assume an academic stance. Pop art, or Neo-Pop art, doesn't work either, as that is one strand of the past, but not the chief one; furthermore, Pop appropriations of comics were just that usually: stolen citations, NOT using the language knowledgeably, thus not gallery comics.

However --- I think the work we are promoting on this site is art grounded in and utilizing the formal, structural and stylistic discoveries of book comics, applied to works intended to be put on display in some way and primarily visually appreciated. It is fine art, beaux arts, visual art, exhibition art, which has grown out of comics or is an overlap of the tradition of fine art and comics. How could this better be expressed without reference to a particular form of display? Our work is the same whether in the studio, a museum, a collector’s wall, or a gallery. And we would not want to call it museum comics, collector comics, wall comics. Wall and floor comics? Most of the terms I personally have dreamed up are simply too vague when googled. A strong term is needed that clearly suggests a merging of traditions. I, personally, do not have one. I’ll stick with gallery comics, but am on the look-out for a broader one.

Any ideas?