Month: June 2007

I think this wound up looking like one of those safety guides in an airplane’s seat pocket. In case of emergency, a ball gag will be released from a compartment above you!

“Lustlab Ad of the Week” is a comic adaptation of one of the week’s kinky personal ads in Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger, and I post them here every Wednesday. See it on their site here. LUST, the “Lustlab Ad of the Week” book collection, is scheduled to be released with Fantagraphics Books in January 2008.

Very fun night, lots of people! I have post-hostess syndrome: I said “hi” to so many people and had so few conversations, everything is kind of a blur. But it was awesome, and packed with people who gave me flowers and kisses on the cheek, and told me how great everything looked. If you’re in the Seattle area and didn’t make it to the show, you should totally go and have a drink, the art will be up at Liberty until August 1.

Here are a few photos:

Me and Dani Cone, owner of Fuel, three fabulous coffeeshops in Seattle:

A lovely lass reading my Artist’s Statement:

A friend of mine asked me to post my artist’s statement, so here it is.

Hands are an extremely rich subject to draw. They have so many layers of meaning. As tools, they play a role in practically everything we do, but they have much more character and significance than that.

When we speak of someone’s hands, we often mean this as a metaphor for a person’s character. Hands are very telling. “Working hands.” “Piano player’s hands.” People fall in love with other people’s hands. Drawing a person’s hands is like drawing their portrait – in some ways hands reveal as much about a person as their face does.

The larger paintings depict iconic sexual gestures, ways we use our hands to signify sex acts. I painted them in a very simple style, with simple lines. They are meant to be universal (in our culture, at least), not a specific person’s hands.

The smaller paintings are sexual hand positions, ways we use our hands to perform sex acts. These paintings are from photos of my friends’ hands as well as one of my own, captured as I walked around a party while they, playful extroverts, gamely grabbed and mimed for the camera. [see previous post!! -ed.] Since I intended the paintings to be portraits, they have a lot more detail than the large ones (the shapes of the nails, the wrinkles on the knuckles). You can infer your own ideas of personality traits from each one. You may even do that unconsciously (tentative? aggressive? honest?).

This series has been a blast for me. I love drawing hands. They’re not easy, and it’s been an exciting challenge, especially since I work with as few lines as I can to describe shapes and volumes. It’s also exciting for me to paint on a large scale, since most of my work is usually relatively small – to make a sweeping paint stroke with a big brush, using the arc of my arm.

My intent in much of my work is to depict sex and sexuality in a positive, playful way – explicit, without being literal or graphic. I think of my work as similar to burlesque – playful, teasing, leaving some information tantalizingly hidden. In this series, some of the images might even be considered raunchy (I hope!). But they’re just hands. The rest of the story is up to the viewer.

By popular demand! For those of you who are curious, here are more photos of my process. I had a pretty good idea of the poses I wanted, and took several reference photos for each. Here I coach Tim as he gets a good grab on Dawn’s ass:

The photo I used:

The final painting:

How many people poke their fingers into the chocolates to see what’s inside? Has anyone done a study on that?

“Lustlab Ad of the Week” is a comic adaptation of one of the week’s kinky personal ads in Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger, and I post them here every Wednesday. See it on their site here. LUST, the “Lustlab Ad of the Week” book collection, is scheduled to be released with Fantagraphics Books in January 2008.

Yesterday, the fabulously I-am-so-not-kidding talented Demi and Rebecca Raven walked around Liberty and gave us advice on how and where to hang my art. Rebecca hangs art at SAM (yuh-huh, yes she does). Here’s another announcement for the opening, and the finished painting from the roughs I posted last week.

BIG FUCKIN’ HANDS
Paintings by Ellen Forney

June 20 – August 1, 2007

Opening reception: Wed., June 20, 6 – 8pm
(of course it’ll go later than that, though… it’s a bar!!)

Liberty
517 – 15th Ave. E. (at Republican, in Capitol Hill)
206-323-9898
www.LibertyBars.com
(and I think Andrew’s going to run a special on sangria)

I liked Tootsie Pops better than Blow Pops. They were both better than Dum Dums, though.

“Lustlab Ad of the Week” is a comic adaptation of one of the week’s kinky personal ads in Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger, and I post them here every Wednesday. See it on their site here. LUST, the “Lustlab Ad of the Week” book collection, is scheduled to be released with Fantagraphics Books in January 2008.

On Friday night, I visited a comics class at Evergreen, which was a blast – talked about me and my work, waved around some books and magazines that have my comics in them, and fielded a lot of excellent questions. Jim Blevins (the prof) should be proud, they were awesome.

Olympia Comics Festival: sweet! fun! super-super nice people. Brief, though – I didn’t really have a chance to walk around and meet the peeples and look at everyone’s comics. I did get a stack of mini-comics from people who sought me out, though.

I totally forgot to take any photos, so these are from cartoonist David Lasky:

Ivan Brunetti, the other guest of honor, is interviewed by Frank Hussey, the festival’s organizer:

At the end of the Fest, there was a stage show, with a 70’s-vintage cartoon, a couple of interviews, and a skit, plus I did my I Love Led Zeppelin show at the end. It really works best that way, I think, with a huge screen and a spotlight.

This weekend is the Olympia Comics Festival, and Ivan Brunetti and I are the “guests of honor”. The organizers are paying my way down there and putting me up, which is like, so cool. I even have my own personal assistant, charged with showing me around and keeping me entertained. (The imagination boggles…)

Here’s the t-shirt I designed for one of the sponsors, Danger Room Comics:

The design was originally supposed to feature the graphic below, but it was deemed not family-friendly enough (too bad!):

Tonight I’ll visit a comics class at Evergreen State College (famous for alums Matt Groening, Charles Burns, and Lynda Barry), tomorrow there are all sorts of panels and signings, I’ll do my I Love Led Zeppelin show, and the night ends with a party.

I admit, I didn’t know what a St. Andrew’s cross was. Live and learn! Most are pretty basic – planks bolted together with some sort of hooks for wrist and ankle restraints – but this one has padding, studding, and leather upholstery!

“Lustlab Ad of the Week” is a comic adaptation of one of the week’s kinky personal ads in Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger, and I post them here every Wednesday. See it on their site here. LUST, the “Lustlab Ad of the Week” book collection, is scheduled to be released with Fantagraphics Books in January 2008.

A librarian in Ohio emailed me today to say that I Love Led Zeppelin was censored from her library. My fabulous new pal, Seattle City Librarian Deborah Jacobs, is on the case. Kind of exciting — I hardly ever get to be controversial!