HTBE: I bequeath to the future the story of Guillaume Apollinaire

These words are La Jolie Rousse, the final poem in Apollinaire's final poetry collection Calligrammes. For the last part of WWI Apollinaire was stationed in Paris and there he met, fell in love with and married the redhead referenced in the poem's title. He was still weakened from his head wounds, and died suddenly from the influenza epidemic that swept the world in 1918. Two days after he died Germany surrendered, and as crowds swept through the streets of Paris singing "Down with Guillaume" (meaning Kaiser Wilhelm), Apollinaire's friends were burying their own Guillaume. He probably would have really enjoyed the scene.

Here's the last page in my book, text from an earlier poem:



This will be my last post on the show - it's last day is tomorrow. Thanks to Elyse for the opportunity and to Mark and David for having such great work in the gallery with me. I still have books for sale and will continue to hawk those here and elsewhere.

As for Apollinaire, I'm not done with him yet...

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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune, Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

HTBE: The Little Car

Le Petit Auto (sketch)


The above is the digital sketch for one of the pieces in the show - I don't have a photo pf the actual piece yet, but it's not too far off from this one - close enough for jpeg purposes. You can read more about this poem in an earlier post here.

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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune, Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

Rodeo of Activites

Tonight the show Supple opens at its new home the Warehouse Gallery across the street from the ArtDC Fair. J.T. Kirkland cureated the show and it looks to be great. Extra karma to Sondra Arkin, Phillippa Hughes, Ellyn Weiss and Molly Ruppert for letting Kirkland have space in Warehouse for the show when his original venue bailed out.

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Jesse Lambert has a coule paintings in a show up at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery in Brooklyn.

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Sean Samoheyl has an interview at EconoCulture.

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Barrelhouse rolls out issue 4 with a party Saturday May5, 8pm at Big Hunt Basement 1345 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC. Yes, thats a cover by C'ville art badass Michael Fitts.

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John Adams has 2 shows!

Here and There, Solo Exhibition of new paintings at the Arlington Arts Center.
3550 Wilson Blvd, Arlington , VA. April 10-May 26, 2007.
Opening Reception April 13, 6-9pm More info: www.arlingtonartscenter.org
(accessible from VA Square Metro Station on Orange Line)


Site Specific Wall Drawing at Artomatic 2007 - This drawing will be executed directly on the wall using graphite and Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. The Drawing will be destroyed during demolition after Artomatic closes.
2121 Crystal Drive, Arlington VA. April 13-May 20, 2007
Opening Reception April 13, (I'll be there from 9:30 until 1 am after the AAC opening)
(accessible from Crystal City Metro Station on Yellow and Blue Lines)

HTBE: pals who draw

Apollinaire was great pals with most of the leading avany garde artists of pre-WWI Paris - Matisse, DeChirico, Chagall, Braque. He was especially close with Picasso and Robert Delaunay. His poem Les Fenetres was, at least partly, based on Delaunay's work and was even partly written in his studio.

Apollinaire's ideas of "simultaneity" and collage were influenced by these relationships - he seemed to want to find ways to match his friends visual achievements with his own written ones. He was originally going to publish his calligrammes separate from his other writing, in a volume called "I Am A Painter Too."

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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune, Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

HTBE: calligrammes

In his poetry collection Calligrammes, Apollinaire brought into the poetry arena what he called the "calligramme" - the visual poem, where the arrangement of letters on the page matters as much as what the words say or how they sound. The one above is my redrawing of the poem "It's Raining."



This one is my redrawing of "Heart, Crown and Mirror." These poems lead to contemporary "concrete poetry" and the great work of people like Geoff Huth. The calligramme is even used as one of the 99 ways in Matt Madden's recent book "99 Ways of Telling A Story."



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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune, Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

PS It's my birthday.

more HTBE

I started doing the drawings for the book several years ago while I lived in upstate New York. My wife was in school and I went with her to the library where she would study and I would draw. I did tons of drawings from Apollinaire's poetry, eventually putting together a xeroxed book to see how they fit together. It turned out ok, but needed more work so I shelved the project, intending to come back to it later.

That later was last year when Elyse at Gallery Neptune asked me to show at her gallery during Bethesda's annual literary festival. So I re-drew most of them and made many more, then assembled them into a book.

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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune, Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

an HTBE page and an artist's talk

Apollinaire wrote a great peom for André Salmon's wedding. That's Salmon with a chunk of the poem.

I'll be in Bethesda tomorrow for an artist's talk at Gallery Neptune, so come by if you're anywhere near. I'll tell you much much more than you'll ever need to know about Apollinaire...

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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune , Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

another page from HTBE

Apollinaire was in WWI, fighting for the French, eventually becoming a citizen. He was in the artillery, then in the trenches where he wrote peoms right in the middle of it all. He was reading a literary magazine Mercure De France when he was wounded in the head by a shell, eventually needing two skull operations. After recovering somewhat, he was assigned - get this - as a censor for the War Department. So he got to sit around and read all day in Paris.

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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune , Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

At last you're tired of this elderly world

At last you're tired of this elderly world, 12 x 12", 2007

Franklin has a post today about digital technology and its drawbacks. I thought about this a lot as I worked on the wall pieces for this show, and I made them in a new way for me that incorporated my Photoshop skillz in my process. To get to the above image (with the title being a line lifted from Apollinaire's great poem Zone) first I drew tons of little drawings, some elaborate, but some little scribbles in a back-pocket notebook:



I then scanned them all in, composed and collaged them in Photoshop and output a digital "sketch":



I used this as a guide for putting the pieces together in the real world, and you can see by comparing the top image with the sketch some new things happened in the actual making.

This was a new and weird way for me to work, and I liked it - I was able to find things in the digital part that I wouldnt have found if I just made them in meatspace, but I was able to stay loose and improvisational in the final making. I don't think its apparent I used the computer at all even though it was a vital part of the process.

At the end I looked at the printed sketches alongside the real things and saw why I want to keep the hand in the pieces. There were little mixups and messes, tiny details that made things not quite square or straight, places that had surprises.


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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune , Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

more pages from HTBE

This chunk of text is from Apollinaire's poem "Le Petit Auto", one of my favorites - I did a wall piece from the poem too. He wrote it about the outbreak of WWI and how he and a pal were driving across France to Paris the night it all started. It was like driving into a new era. He ends the poem with this line:




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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune , Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

a page from the HTBE book

The reception Friday night went well - a lot of folks even with AOM happening in town too. Thanks to RF, GS, M+BG, JTK+S, SB, BL and DAW+VKC-W for showing up. Gwydion wrote a nice post on the show here. I also added info on the book to my site here.

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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune , Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

HTBE reception TONIGHT

Wonder of War, 12 x 12", mixed media on board

The reception is tonight - I'll be there with wife and Violet.

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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune , Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

Here's a detail of the above work:

another page from the HTBE book

I originally stumbled across Apollinaire as part of my longtime interest in Cubism. Apollinaire was an early and great friend of the Cubists, especially Picasso. They were pals in the days they were nobodies, and Apollinaire used his writing abilities to again and again defend and interpret the Cubist's (and other Parisian avant-garde artist's) visual work. The image above is obviously from Picasso's "Damselles D'Avignon", and in the book I reference a few other artworks of Apollinaire's time, including one by Matisse. One drawing I made is of the Bateau-Lavior, the crummy, ramshackle studio building in Paris' Montmartre where Picasso, Braque and others invented a new way to represent the world. That new way, that new sense of the world, is exactly Apollinaire's project.

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Thanks to J.T. Kirkland of Thinking About Art for the mention today. As he notes, tomorrow night is VERY busy in the DC art world and unfortunately for me the mammoth Art-O-Matic will be opening the same night as my reception. To the art-loving DC peeps, I beseech thee to come to my opening - AOM will go on until the wee hours, so you can stop by my little thing early.

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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune , Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

another page from the HTBE book

Apollinaire was coming from the Symbolist tradition in poetry, a romantic and at times mystical way of writing. His early work is certainly a part of this, but in his first collection, Alcools, one can see him stepping away from all that moonlight and drowsiness and towards the Paris he was living in - one of automobiles, airplanes and what he later called "simultaneity". Think cubism in words.

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Some online mentions of the show:

Journalista (The Comics Journal blog)

Collage Clearinghouse

Mid-Atlantic and DC Art News

Thanks!

I should also mention that the book is available from me - email me if you want one. Or come by the show and but one there. In a few weeks I'll have it in stock at some online stores...

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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune , Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

a page from the HTBE book

This is the one of the 90 drawings in the book - image by me, text taken from Apollinaire. One of the things about Apollinaires poetry I like is his sense of he future. He has an oversized sense of himself and poet/artists in general as seers and prophets - he calls them hills that see farther; he likens them to airplanes (exotic things in the pre WWI 1900s). His work embodies the spirit of that pre-war time, with his eyes fully focussed on the future and how to make it come alive.

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HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE
Gallery Neptune , Bethesda, Maryland.
April 6 - 28. 2007, reception Friday April 13, 6 - 9 pm.
All the work, and a 100-page limited-edition book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

HTBE image - Chanson

Chanson, 12 x 12 in., mixed media on board

Over the next few weeks I'll be posting images from HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE, my current show at Gallery Neptune in Bethesda, Maryland. All the work, and a 100-page book of drawings published at the same time, is based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. The show is up from April 6 - 28. The book is available through the gallery or by contacting me directly and is limited to 100 copies.

Here's a detail of Chanson:

22 months old!

and she has a blog.

HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE opens today

cover of the 100-page book of drawings

My show HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE opens today at Gallery Neptune in Bethesda Maryland. The work I've done for this show has been a big step in several ways for me, which is something I'll post about over the next few weeks. In a nutshell, I did a series of drawing/painting/collages based on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire, the great French pre-WWI poet. I'll write more about him and his work later as well.

In addition to the wall pieces (7 mixed media things and 3 drawings on paint), I've published a 100-page book of drawings also based on Apollinaire's work. I'll write more about it, and show lots of sample pages from the book during the course of the show. It's available at the gallery, and I'll also have copies I can sell from here.

Starting Monday I'll be stealing an idea from J.T. Kirkland and will post an image from the show or the book on the blog every weekday, and at times writing about the piece or the process I used in making the work of the show. I did a lot of things differently, and I think they worked out, if maybe at times a little clumsily.

The reception is next Friday, April 13 from 6 - 9 pm and I'll be there. Also showing are Mark Behme with some amazingly crafted sculptures and David Wallace with some very graphic collage style paintings.

HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE

Wonder of War (detail)

April 6 - 28
Gallery Neptune
Bethesda MD USA

The work is delivered, it opens tomorrow and I'll be at the reception next Friday. Seven collage/painting/drawings, three drawings and a 100-page book. More later...