Number Seven

Yet again, Wilkitie is here to make our rainy days a little cheerier. This month’s print is by Cody Hudson.

Sean Alexander

I just discovered Sean Alexander, local artist and owner of The Helm Gallery.

Of his work, he says, “I started drawing about four years ago while I was going to the Evergreen State College. I was stuck in some sort of dark Olympia spell – anyone who has lived there probably understands – and was writing a lot of bad poetry and loading myself with booze and weed, and then I just started drawing.”

“I remember laying out on my living room floor and drawing,” he adds, “while the second side of The Plastic Ono Band record played over and over. The drawings weren’t very good; lots of dots. Dot blobs and dot mudpiles. I got really interested in fineness though. I think all of that time spent in Olympia has definitely carried over into what I am making now. Obsessive patterning, mutation, cutesie bootsie, shrouded characters, sad looking objects and so forth.”

“I think the drawings are simple meditations that help me cope.”

And finally, an homage to Tacoma:

Bandanas As Art

I found this awesome collection of hand screened bandanas on Niels Oeltjen’s website.

Here’s the backstory:

“Bootlegger was a fine art exhibition exploring the bandanna’s potential as an art object,” he says. “Seeing the bandanna as an element of outlaw style, we wanted to celebrate its aesthetic, its cultural roots, and its history. The selected artists were invited to express their ideas in the form of an original drawing, painting, or print. The images created by the artists were then printed onto fabric and made into bandannas, which were shown and sold at the exhibition.”

Coolest bandanas I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure.

Erin Kendig

As with Ian, I met Erin Kendig in September. She is very intelligent, knows exactly how to ask the right questions, and uses words like viscus. Yet she is refreshingly quirky. Her art is stylized and tightly focused – her mark as an artist is clear in each piece.

“Hello,” she says on the front page of her website, “I like making things. Thank you for looking at them.”

See the rest of her work at littleredgirl.com and flickr.com.

Halleyulia!

Yulia Brodskaya is amazing. A Russian-born illustration major, she now works out of London crafting what are called papergraphics. These crisp, clean, tantalizingly tactile images are stunning.

“I’m constantly experimenting and evolving,” she says, “always pushing my style in new directions: my greatest passion is to explore the ways of combining illustration and typography.” See her entire portfolio, including classic illustration and design pieces, at artyulia.com.

Drawings, Assorted

Here is a touch of my work. As I was looking through it, I realized there are no apparent lines of thought, or clear connections between pieces of work. This is a little sad.

And so:
Resolution 1. Create a collection of work.

Wish me luck!

Chandler O’Leary

I met Chandler O’Leary before I knew who she was.

She was cheerful, and rosy. She shook my hand, and took an interest in my amateur work, even though it was my first paid and complete letterpress project. I felt that if we grew to know each other better, she would be the person to invite me over to bake on a whim.

It was later that I learned she had attended Rhode Island School of Design, and owns a letterpress studio called Anagram. In 2005, she won a Minnesota Book Award. Her work is exhibited all over the country.

In a word, impressive.

She recently moved from Minnesota to Tacoma, Washington, so if you’re natives like we are, you may have the opportunity to see a show, buy a print, or meet her in person.

I just love this stuff.

See the rest of it at anagram-press.com.

Ian Obermuller

I met Ian Obermuller in September. He struck me as a deep-thinker, one of those lucky people who has the ability to simply sit and process their thoughts. The same is true with his work. Among this, it’s his drawings that really stand out, as he began to use them in his poster pieces, and then eventually when he revealed the incredible collection that you see above.

“All I would say,” he says, “is that they are ink and water drawings of African things.”

Quite the profound word.

With a little prodding, he later mentioned that he retrieved photographs of inanimate objects from the internet, and strove to cast each as a character. In this he was very successful. The textures, the poses, the background treatment (or lack thereof) all work to bring the focus towards and give life to each African thing.

See more at snowmanplan.com.

Basically, keep an eye out.