David Chelsea's Blog, page 51

Cartoonists On Radio 4

Corny Trio

It's been quite a while since my last radio appearance, but tomorrow I pay a visit to Matt Clark, who is sitting in for the regular host of the Noontime Jamboree on KBOO-FM at noon. I'll be dropping by around one PM Portland time to play some of the kind of music I like to listen to while working- mostly 1920s and early 1930s dance bands and singers.

Rudy Vallee

I mostly prefer corny vocal trios like the Boswell Sisters and Paul Whiteman's Rhythm Boys (pictured), but I'll also be bringing in tunes by my favorite solo male singer, Rudy Vallee, and some 1920s chanteuses like Ruth Etting and Annette Hanshaw. Listeners in the Portland area can tune in to 90.7 FM and computer users worldwide can listen in on their website.

Annette Hanshaw

Noontime Jamboree

Noon-2 PM Pacific Daylight Time (listen for me at 1)

Monday October 18

KBOO-FM 90.7

More Memento Mori

Jeff Burke

As a follow-up to the prior post about cadaver drawings, Jeff Burke shares his memories of working as a life model with "Goliath", the star attraction of Sal Montano's anatomy classes at the New York Academy Of Art:

Sal Montano

Ah, the good ol' days of Sal and Al and me upright and vertical standing on a folding chair, with 'Goliath' laid out on the stainless steel. I heard that he was a bit actor from Hollywood B movies who once played the role of the giant. Solimene mentioned once that he seemed to have suffered a shattered hip socket from a fall from a very high place and that it might have been a suicide. I loved those annual April gigs at Columbia. Thanks for sharing, David

"Goliath"

Following his years in New York, Jeff went on to on to found Hipbone Studio, the excellent performance space, drawing studio and art school here in Portland. I have a folder of camera lucida drawings mostly done at Hipbone posted at the Comics Lifestyle website and blogged about them some months ago.

Memento Mori

I have a piece in a show opening this week at the Portland bookstore Reading Frenzy. The theme is "Forget Me Not" which owner Chloe Eudaly describes as "a tribute show ~ think memento moris ~ to people, places or things that are dearly departed".

In keeping with the theme, I decided to commemorate someone who was already departed when I met him- an anonymous medical cadaver that I sketched as part of an anatomy class I took at the New York Academy of Art in the early 1980s. This particular cadaver was something of a celebrity at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he was primarily used as a training tool for medical students. Nearly seven feet tall and powerfully muscled, he was such an outstanding specimen that it was held over an extra year in the anatomy lab. The anatomy instructor, Sal Montano, told us that he had been a professional wrestler.

For my piece in the show, I took one of my favorite drawings, a study of an arm, and did a watercolor version of it. I have also scanned some of my favorite cadaver drawings and put up a folder of them at the Comics Lifestyle website. For unknown reasons, a number of them are drawn in colored ballpoint. This cartoon gives some idea of the setup at these sessions; Sal Montano is shown with his colleague Alfonso Solimene.

Forget Me Not

Memento Mori Group Show

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7th, 6PM

(Don't look for me at the opening- I have another event in Seattle)

Reading Frenzy

921 SW Oak St. ~ Portland, Ore 97205

RIP, Tony Curtis

Illustration from the New York Observer, 1990s

David Chelsea Takes On Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman as Venus Of Willendorf. Acrylic on paper, 2010

Wonder Woman Day is coming! And this year I have managed to come up with a suitably themed piece of art for their annual charity auction. I chose to depict the classic comic book character as the Venus of Willendorf, a Stone Age figurine found in Austria in 1908, which has become a familiar icon of femininity. I also used the figure in one of my favorite Modern Love illustrations in the New York Times.

Venus Of Willendorf

Wonder Woman Day is an annual bi-coastal fundraising event that takes place each October during national Domestic Violence Awareness Month, which raises money for domestic violence shelters and programs. The event was founded by Portland comics writer Andy Mangels, who invited me to contribute to the first art auction in 2006. I was hard pressed to come up with a clever idea that first year, since I had never read Wonder Woman comics growing up or even watched the TV show with Lynda Carter. However, I did remember reading that Debra Winger played Wonder Woman's kid sister on the show, and I have long had a thing for her, so I chose to do a straight rendering of a still showing the two of them running together.

Modern Love piece for The New York Times, 2004

The next year I got a bit more creative, inserting a Wonder Woman postage stamp into an image cribbed from a Playboy Magazine cover.

Wonder Woman Day art, 2006

This year's piece of original art (or one of many others contributed by superstar cartoonists like Jamie Hernandez, David Lloyd and Roberta Gregory) can be yours. You can view the piece big here. The Wonder Woman Day silent auction will take place Sunday October 24th at Excalibur Comics in Portland. You can also bid online. Details at the Wonder Woman Day website.

Wonder Woman Day art, 2007

Wonder Woman Day V - Portland

Sunday, October 24, 2010 — 12noon-6pm — FREE

Excalibur Comics, 2444 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, Oregon

A part of national Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Ben's Cleveland

Portrait of Grover Cleveland. Acrylic on canvas by Ben Celsi.

Ben has been busy through the summer attending sleepaway camp, learning to surf, and working on various projects including his Scratch game opus Hotel Griven and a video thriller called Apple Jack The Ripper: The Cereal Killer, but he has also found time to add one more to his series of Presidential portraits.



Grover Cleveland is best known for serving two nonconsecutive terms (making him both the 22nd and the 24th Presidents) and for appearing on the $1000 bill, but he has a few other, lesser-known distinctions: he was one of only three Presidents to be married in office, he proclaimed Labor Day a national holiday, and in his second term he secretly underwent emergency surgery (aboard the yacht Oneida) to have a cancerous growth removed from his mouth.

The schizophrenic appearance of Ben's portrait is his way of combining the younger Cleveland of his first term with the older one one of his second. You can view it big here.

Extreme Perspective Previews: The Catalogue Page

I delivered the art and layout files some time ago, but this makes it real- seeing my new book Extreme Perspective!- right across from Christopher Hart's latest, Drawing Fantastic Furries- in a catalogue from Watson-Guptill, my publisher, which arrived in the mail yesterday. Note the publication date on your calendars: February 15, 2011.

A Model Family

New York Times piece, 2004

Wedding Day, 1990

Just in time for Eve's and my twentieth wedding anniversary, here is a selection of illustrations in which I have used our family as models (a tradition which goes back at least as far as Norman Rockwell). First, Eve and the children pose for a Modern Love piece in the New York Times, about a family abandoned by the father. It appears that Ben is a bit grumpy at having to stand in for a nine year old girl.

New York Times piece, 2005

Rebecca Eckler

Next, Eve poses with plastic bags under her shirt for another Modern Love piece, by Canadian writer Rebecca Eckler, about a flirtation she indulged in during her pregnancy. This illustration drew the attention of the gossip site Gawker, which noted that the model in the drawing does not resemble Eckler, insinuating that the Times had intentionally substituted a more glamorous blonde for the brunette author. Not true; when illustrating personal essays like this one I almost always try to make the central figure look like the writer, when I can find reference, but in this case copy arrived without any author's name on it, so I was free to use my glamorous wife.

New York Press piece, 2004

l did not have to change Ben's sex for this New York Press illustration, just invent a screen door for him to stand behind.

New York Times piece, 2006

Lastly, Rebecca poses for this slightly creepy Modern Love piece, about a coed who agrees to go out on a date with her professor.

Thanks, Eve. These have been the best twenty years of my life.

Spherical Perspective: Joe's House

Joe's House. Acrylic on world globe by David Chelsea, 2008. Not for sale. Photo by Tom Lechner. tomlechner.com/

This is the largest and most elaborate spherical painting I have done to date, and the first actual commission. It was painted for Joe Erceg, and depicts the interior of his house. Joe is possibly my oldest friend, in that he knew my parents before I was born. Since the 1960s Joe has been one of Portland's leading graphic designers, and now runs his firm Joseph Erceg Graphic Design with his son Matt. Longtime Portlanders may remember the giant butterfly painting designed by Joe which once covered the side of the Fleischner Building in Old Town.

Photo of young David by Joe Erceg.

For reference, I shot digital photographs, rotating the camera around to capture all aspects of the scene, while trying to keep the lens as much as possible at a fixed central point. I then loaded all the photographs into Lightwave, a 3D animation program, where I assembled them into a virtual collage approximating the shape of a sphere. Since Joe wanted to show multiple rooms in one image, I adopted the M.C. Escherish device of combining three different views, with gravity running in three directions.

Reference photos assembled in Lightwave

Joe provided the canvas, a large metal sphere that was originally the support for a world globe jigsaw puzzle. Work on it took over two years, in between freelance deadlines. To keep the overall task manageable, I proceeded as if filling in a jigsaw puzzle, painting the pictures on the wall first, then the windows, then the plants and furniture, and finally the walls and ceilings. To save time setting the globe up every time I wanted to work on it, I set up a second studio for myself in the basement.

Joe's House, unfinished. Photo by Tom Lechner.

Tom Lechner created this panoramic version which you can view immersively, as well as an earlier one based on an unfinished version of the painting.

Joe's House Panorama

I am interested in doing more commissions like this one. Hopefully the next one won't take two years.

Snow Angel Finds A Home

Snow Angel, the story I originally drew for the cancelled anthology Snow Stories, now has a new home at Dark Horse Presents. The first issue of the new print incarnation of Dark Horse's flagship anthology is due to appear in March. Read all about it in this interview with publisher Mike Richardson, which includes a sample page from Snow Angel along with work by Paul Chadwick, Michael Gilbert and Robert Love.



Some pages from the story, which I colored using a Copic Airbrush, were featured last year on the Copic website.