Rick Walter at Visual Arts Collective

Last weekend I went to see Red Light Variety Show at Visual Arts Collective. It was pretty cool -- think Cirque du Soleil with pasties. While I was there, I sketched this piece by Rick Walter. Didn't see a title for the piece, but I thought it was interesting. Aw, it looks so forlorn for a horrifying bat-winged disembodied head thing.

Isaac Grambo at Visual Arts Collective

This was one of a couple of silhouette-style pieces Isaac Grambo had at the Visual Arts Collective when I went there a week ago. Love the red tie.

Ben Wilson & Erin Ruiz at VAC

I sketched these a while back already, when I went to see Three Tall Women, but they might still be at the Visual Arts Collective. The first is by Erin Ruiz, from her series "Slings & Arrows (or goodbye enemy!)" Sorry about the ghosting from the picture behind it when I scanned this one.

I have to think she and Ben Wilson collaborated a bit on the naming of their exhibits. The following is a partial sketch from one of the pieces in his series, "Hello Friend."

Ben Wilson at Visual Arts Collective

I love Ben Wilson's art. His comic style is fantastic. His stuff appears on Boise Weekly covers a lot, and I've seen it a few times at the Basement Gallery, but this is the first time I've taken a stab at sketching one. This one was up at the Visual Arts Collective, and the boy in the costume reminded me vaguely of Max from Where the Wild Things Are. Granted, it's more of a pink fox costume, and the boy in the costume appears to be aiding some smaller creatures in green squirrel costumes while being menaced by a puppet, instead of terrorizing monsters far larger than himself. Wilson's inking style is a lot more spare than Maurice Sendak's, and it's one of the things that makes his art so recognizable. (I wish that came out better in my drawing; I think my original black and white pencil drawing captured it fairly well, but when I added the color it overwhelmed those lines.) And Wilson seems to favor elongated faces out of proportion with the rest of the body he's drawing, again unlike Sendak. But this picture nonetheless reminded me of that book for some reason, which is why a) I sketched it, and b) I feel totally justified in linking to the trailer for the Where the Wild Things Are movie coming out this October. Not sure how you stretch a story that short into a feature length film, but I guess we'll know then.

Paste Eater and Erin Ruiz at Visual Arts Collective

The artist behind the red cat balloon I've done my best to capture here goes by the name "Paste Eater." I kid you not. This fantastical piece was one of his two most prominent paintings at the Visual Arts Collective (I assume it's a he -- not that the act of paste-eating is gender-specific). The other, a huge square painting with two separate skinny panels at the sides continuing the picture, depicted a huge black mass of warped houses with fiery windows and doors, and little white cartoony ghost houses rising from the hellish mass -- some with halos and wings, and others reminiscent of Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde. You can see a small snippet of the painting on the right here. My boyfriend thought it was the perfect depiction of the housing crisis. I'm inclined to agree.

The other artist at VAC is Erin Ruiz, whose cartoons are primarily waist- or neck-down views of scrawny-legged people hovering in the air, or being flown by birds or an umbrella. Like Paste Eater's art, it's delightfully whimsical. The gaunt flying figures are a perfect counterpoint to some of her other works on display -- roly-poly nudes of enormous girth. One picture of a rotund naked woman had a small clam shell at the bottom of the page, in what may have been a parody of Botticelli.

Visual Arts Collective

I've been to Visual Arts Collective before, when it was on Grove Street (it's on Osage now, just off Chinden behind the Woman of Steel Gallery). I remember ... lots of sculptures with gas masks. So when I went to watch Boys' Life there a couple weeks ago and look at some of the exhibits at the same time, I knew to expect some unusual pieces.

I was not, however, prepared for a detailed, cross-hatched ink drawing of the evil toy monkey from Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders. (Hi! I'm Satan-approved!) It was surrounded by the faces of three men, rendered in watery sepia India ink.

The evil toy monkey was actually from one of my favorite exhibits at the VAC, a collection of circus-themed sculptures and paintings. I'm afraid I don't know who the artist was, because not all of the pieces at VAC were well-labeled. There were pieces with painted clowns and sculpted elephants and warnings printed on the canvas: "Beware of dog." "Warning." "Use only as directed." "Keep out of reach of children." I liked these mixed media collages a lot. I think clowns should be kept out of reach of children as a general rule.

[I'm writing this post a few weeks after I took these hastily scrawled notes about the art, and I don't entirely understand what all of my notes say any more. But one of them, with a line drawn to my notes on the circus pieces, says, "Create your own schizophrenic puppet." I think that was the text in another of these circus-themed collages. Whatever it was, I'm pretty sure it was awesome.]

Another of my favorite exhibits was a sculpture with several rubber gloves, each of which had a label printed on it: "Take one tab by mouth every 24 hours." "Lexapro -- used to treat depression." "Prednisone $5.32."

There were also some collages on newspaper with painted images of red skulls, space shuttles, diagrams of the brain and pictoral step-by-step instructions for putting someone in a straitjacket.

It would be easy to consider the art pretentious if there wasn't a band onstage at the time playing songs with lyrics like "rock out with your cock out" and "hung like Jesus."

The large black and gray paintings with silhouettes of ginkgo leaves, dragonflies and dandelions were both nicely done and a nice change of pace from the often confusing message pieces. So was Alchemy, a collection of miscellaneous colorful resin squares.