july

It's a July Frankenstein Kitty.

long time no post

hi everyone, finally something new. I've been moving crossoceans, back to the livid streets of Milan, a suitcase of paranoia with me. Experiencing the constant lack of internet of this country, only good at pizza. Two days before leaving I was called by the West Side Spirit, upper west side newspaper, to do their cover. A movie crew is apparently taking over the area, so they wanted something on the line of those fifties movie posters with the giant monster walking over the city.
in the first row there is a bunch of me, the crazy director is my roommate's body pasted over my friend james face. It was quick and fun.
Back to spaghetti, talk to you all at some point.

my mind stretches i got a sore brain

uhm ok, so the painting with the donut was part of my senior portfolio and was eventually bought from a show in the lower east side. the same couple who bought it commissioned me 3 more paintings same size, same style, same theme. 

For the portfolio we basically had to pick something that we care about and twist it into a cohesive body of work. My body of work was not cohesive at all, it looked more like a bride of frankenstein type of body, but I sort of had a theme: what I cared about was philosophy and food. I decided to work under a title "la pasticceria filosofica" (the philosophical bakery). 

And the Good Intentions painting came. I followed the theme for the other 3 even though at that point I could barely remember what the fuck I meant. I can even remember it less NOW, so I'll just throw some threads.  I am not very articulate when it comes to pretentiousness.

I was going to use some philosophical topics that I am interested in, and explain them through food (first sentence and already we are falling into nonsense) as something that should be a basic need but that in this culture became a mindless habit and a commercial vice.  

For the "good intentions" I threw the concept of Homo Homini Lupus, men is a wolf among other men, the failure in the perspective of an healthy cooperation for a common wealth. A sugar coated treat, the promise of dreams for cheap, but the blades in it (the real price we pay, a planet dying, a humanity wasted in stupidity and demagogy) remind us (or they don't, since we keep swallowing the deadly crumbs) that we are consciously damaging ourselves AND each other. We all have good intentions but we speak well and roll terribly. 

Easy dreams, easy satisfaction, easy rewards, our lives are cheap.

The one with the eyeball-machine was originally inspired by a flyer that someone handed to me. It claimed that god had a wonderful plan for me and it made me quite upset.  Once again, taking what they feed us as sweet and growing an irresponsible optimism over it. Their lies, the soporific pills we swallow under disguise of a luscious soft serve.  God is a mere machine, a  troglodyte  attempt to keep us sleepy and uncritical. The girl's tattoo says -mental disorder global domination-   Keeping people insane through world propaganda. I actually got it tattooed myself hehehe

The next one is based on the concept of absurdity. This used to be a deeper and important concept of existentialism but today it seems to apply on a much more sleazy level. The boredom driving today's life is a byproduct of a culture that owns and produce all sorts of useless crap and find itself not knowing what to do with it. We become absurd as an economic mechanism. How squalid is that? Also, I really wanted to paint my roommate pulling her teeth off, don't ask why, I don't know, but there is something about teeth that I can't resist.  If you look up on a symbols dictionary the meaning of falling teeth it sends you to the term "beheading". There is something about beheading that I can't resist too.

The girl's tattoo translates as "a vexation weights down on me". It's part of a poem called "boredom" by a romantic and pessimistic italian poet, Giacomo Leopardi. 

The last one i think is also about absurdity, grinding shit that doesn't need to be grind but just enjoyed. We make everything harder and much more complicated than what it should actually be,  turning life itself into meaningless. The sticker on the grinder is a quote from Camus. "cette revolte de la chair", "this rebellion of the flesh"   ...his definition of absurdity. I though it made sense if I put it over the grinder,  something supposed to grind flesh. 

Oh, all the tattoos are Disney Characters to underline the lightness and cheapness of this very perverse system that turns down intelligence in favor of ignorance and false happiness.

Uh, I guess I AM articulate in pretentiousness.

my life is sweet as saccharine

Look, I made an illustration for Post Punk Kitchen. Not that it was commissioned or anything, I just did it and sent it to them. Not that they replied or anything, I just sat in waiting mood, chewing on frustration.  I like it though. Who doesn't like punKakes?  

Drawn on shitty paper, inked, photographed, threw in photoshop for some color. For some reason, I always like better the ink version than the final, colored one. 

fiori d'arancio

It's june. Go get married in a graveyard.

stage dives make me feel more alive

Another Time Out job....they called me up on tuesday night and needed the final by thursday morning. I am getting pretty fast, I sketched it out in couple of hours and colored it the next afternoon. I even had time to go for a walk in the park and for my yoga class! 

The commission was just about NY music shows in the summer, so of course I turned it into a HC manifesto. 

Fun fact,  people really DO stage diving over pool toys in Italy. I think it's annoying most of the times, but the theme was music and summer, so here we go.

Here is a dilemma: I tattooed all the people in the picture (there's also vegan tattoos! And straight edge too, under M. "suggestion"). All the tattoos are actual tattoos that I took from photos on the internet. Some of them are pieces by very good artists and original works of art, so I was struggling over the fairness of what I was doing, by incorporating them in my drawing. 

I don't remember what my thread of thoughts was, but I decided it was ok to do it. Then I thought more about it and changed my mind but it was too late. I think I will not do it again, it's not about copyrights or legal shit but more about respect for other artists original ideas. 

M. suggested that in my free time I start painting a bunch of tattoos and keep them for when they are needed. Good advice.

The papergrain texture in my illustrations is due to the fact that I don't have a scanner so I take photos of the drawing, import it and color it with photoshop. That's the result, I call it a "happy accident".

ok bye.

Friendship and Sisterhood

The most recent illustration I did for Time Out. Sex in public places, I am not too proficient on the topic. I actually freaked out because I never do backgrounds, my subjects are usually lost in a painterly limbo with no definition. I can only draw people. And hairless cats. And parts of people or parts of hairless cats. Oh and things to eat when they are sweet and vegan. Anyway, here it was pretty much all about locations but I still managed to put as little as possible.  So my friend M. from Barcelona, that I missed for about one year, just arrived and they called me for this job. We came up with a plan to get this done as fast as possible because we wanted to spend time together. Plan turns out to be: she gives me all the ideas for the six sex scenes and I draw them at the speed of sound and then we go to Atlas and get cupcakes. Honestly, the longest part in my process is to find an idea. I can spend days mumbling over the perfect sense of something and measuring the golden ratio of a concept. It's because I take everything too seriously. So it was pretty convenient to have someone smarter than me that could come up with the same result in few minutes. Thanks M., what would my life be without you? ; )

On the theme of taking everything too seriously, my other friend L. yesterday suggested me to watch the Tom Cruise video about scientology. That, he said, will teach me how wrong it is to take things too seriously and will explain me that everything is ok BUT being like Tom Cruise. I'll try that. 

Also, new website coming soon, thanks to my marvelous Jaz Harold.