Thursday, March 31, 2005

Virus Mail

Received four ATC's from Pascale Hulin of Jumencourt, France for my mailart call. This ongoing call has been plodding along since June 2003 and Pascale's cards bring the total received to 194 cards. You can check out this call and the documentation so far by going to the page at mailartist.com.



His envelope also had some very cool postage which I assume may be popular cartoon characters in France.

Monday, March 28, 2005

Luna Bisonte Prods

I recently received two fun booklets of visual poetry by John M. Bennett.



You can always tell his work by the uniquely scribbled text which is as recognizable as a Ralph Steadman sketch. John has been getting a lot of traction with his I// l amp/ san d/ : : :// cLuster/ poem which is being documented in the Five Million Copies blog.

John M. Bennett is currently the curator of the Avant Writing Collection at Ohio State University and you should definitely check out his excellent web site to see more examples of his text poetry, visual poetry and sound poetry.

Sunday, March 06, 2005

JDCB Gallery

Honoria Starbuck has a cool collaboration going on over at her LiveJournal.com Blog.

It's a Johnny Depp Coloring Book with pages that resemble Man Ray's ray-o-grams.

Here's my Golden Boy:



It's lame, I know - so you can do much better. Surf on over to her site for the full details and send something to her via email or Blog-post. And don't forget to check out the EMMA (Electronic Museum of Mail Art) website which she currates.

Saturday, March 05, 2005

Cone X Shunz

The other day I was drinking a cup of Joe in a popular local cafe called Vinaka's. It is a funky place where you will find surfers, artists and even the mayor sipping coffee at the tables inside and outside. It is always busier and tastier than the Starbucks across the parking lot. I sat over by the magazine section where alternative newspapers, local band flyers and assorted print paraphernalia is displayed. On top of some copies of the Reader, there was a paperback with a label on the cover stating: "FREE Book." The book was titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by DAVE EGGERS. The sticker went on to say that I could have the book as long as I logged onto the web site www.bookcrossing.com and register my find. You are supposed to go to the journal entry page, enter the BCID number, and leave a brief note so that others will know what's happened to the book. When finished with the book, I'm supposed to pass it along to a friend or release it into the wild for someone else to find!

So I did. I read the book and it was pretty good and I posted a journal entry on the website.

The next day I got an email from the person who left the book saying thanks for posting and that she was into ATCs and liked my web pages. She got my web site address from the bookcrosssing profile. So now I found a local person to swap artist trading cards with! Hooray.

She's got some excellent images of her artwork, illustrations, ATCs and dolls on her blog at WildSpiritArts.

So if you see a book lying around with a big sticker on the cover . . . snap it up, read it, add a journal entry and pass it along!

Friday, March 04, 2005

Complex City Art

Here is a close-up detail of Rael Mail's truly original drawings. Like a master Jazzman listening to the rhythm section, he can improvise (with his pen) and create unique artwork through progressive strokes which he stitches together to form a new melodious image.



See more of this mailartist's work:
http://www.art.net/kiyotei/raelmail/index.html
And send him some mail if you like what you see.