Excerpt from Girls In The Woods, a short story from a zine I’m working on.
Just got these back from the printer - have to trim them down. Anarchist bookfair bingo cards, for sale at the montreal anarchist bookfair this weekend @ the Fight Boredom distro table! Assuming I can stand again by then. Which reminds me I gotta coordinate my tabling shift.
Human Superhero Pinkie Pie, digital illustration, 2012
Pinkie Pie’s costume gave me pause for a moment but I ultimately went with kind of Sailor Scout-inspired getup. Pinkie Pie’s superpowers include her “Pinkie Sense” (an ability to anticipate danger), and an ability to manifest a sort of chaos magic effect on her enemies (and sometimes her friends). People often underestimate her, which she uses to her advantage, as her style of fighting is quite strategic.
Next is either Fluttershy or Applejack, whichever I manage to finish first.
Superhero Twilight Sparkle, digital illustration, 2012
I happen to enjoy My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic quite a lot, but I was not too thrilled at this. The idea is good - the mane six ponies, as human superheroes! But the execution bothered me - improbable poses designed to show as much T&A as possible, shiny skin, ridiculously exaggerated body types, skimpy costumes, every figure with the same skin tone… somehow it managed to hit on every artistic trope that bothers me about mainstream superhero comics.
So I decided to sit down and make my own interpretations of the MLP:FIM crew as superheroines. This is the first illustration of that series. It’s Twilight Sparkle. Her superpower is magic (obviously), and her enchanted cloak (an item of her own design and creation) doubles as an invisibility cloak and teleportation device.
Wearable Monstrosities series, pieces 1-10 of 15. Slipcast, slab-built, and modified stonewear and terra cotta, held in place with ribbon.
inkstainedqueer asked: I bet you could make really cool tarot cards. Anti-oppressive anarchist tarot cards even. (This is not me in any way trying to pressure you into doing so. It was just a neat idea I had after seeing your rad tributes to cool anarchists.) <3
I’ve been thinking about making a tarot deck, actually! But it would be such a HUUUUUGE project, I’d want to do so much research and I’d want to print them all a certain way… clearly what I need is a wealthy benefactor to give me a ton of money so I can dedicate my life to ridiculously complicated, expansive art projects like this.
Design for a multi-layer screenprint, created digitally. 2011.
I cannot wait to have print studio access again, let me tell you. Gonna make some great prints! Like this one. In keeping with the theme of the last illo I posted here, the figure is Dyer D. Lum, an anarchist and labour organizer from the turn of the last century.
Lum was great friends with the Haymarket martyrs - a group of anarchists and organizers who were executed by the state for their alleged involvement in the Haymarket square bombing (despite the fact that there was no evidence that any of them were involved, and they were all given posthumous pardons years later). It was Lum who smuggled dynamite into the jail where they were being held, allowing one of the prisoners, Louis Lingg, to commit suicide rather than allow himself to be executed by the government. In his later years, some of his writing implied that he knew the actual identity of the Haymarket bomber, but he never gave up this name - even though if he’d done so years earlier, he may have been able to save the life of his friends. Many people who were close to him felt that his guilt over this was a major contributing factor to his suicide.
The quote in the image isn’t from Lum, but rather from a friend of his, describing his attitude towards acts of violence against the state. Lum was well known among his contemporaries for agitating in favor of insurrectionary anarchism, and was seen by more than a few people as having a sort of macho martyr complex. At the same time, those who were closest to him described him as a gentle, compassionate, and somewhat tortured man - the kind of man who went hungry so he could feed his rescued kittens.
Clearly I find him to be a fascinating, complicated historical figure. I plan on doing a series of stylistically similar portraits of my favorite historical peeps, each one in a different medium. It’s taking a while, though. I did two versions of Voltairine de Cleyre - one in litho, one in watercolour - before coming up with something I liked.
Illustration of Voltairine de Cleyre, watercolour and ink on watercolour paper. Quick and impulsive. Could be tidier. Ah well.
I have a deep and long-standing fascination with this woman. The flowers behind her are wilting roses, I’m not sure if that really comes across very well.
Recurring dream, brush, ink and ink wash, 2011.
I’m really surprised by what a huge response my last illo got, by the way! Although I was recently accused of “stereotyping” anarchists (because you know, it is such a well-known stereotype of anarchists that I, personally, have slept with all of them), which was kind of funny. Oh well. With about 600 notes on that illustration, of course you can’t please everyone.
Anarchist Bookfair Bingo, markers and ink, 2011.
Last summer I spent a whopping 8 hours tabling for the organization Missing Justice at the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair. To pass the time, I played this game with some of the people tabling around me. At some point, someone suggested that I should do up fancy illustrated versions of Anarchist Bookfair Bingo cards for the next year, and months later, here we are.
