PUSH/PULL Seattle Gallery

If you live in Seattle and have any interest in comics and underground art, you likely already know about PUSH/PULL, an indie-arts gallery and sometimes cartoonist lair.  They are located squarely in the heart of Greenwood, at 85th & Greenwood.  (8537 Greenwood Ave N, underground in the Greenwood Collective, to be exact.)

Comic Life / Between Two Worlds

Maxx Follis, Director of Push/Pull
Gallery, accepting art this afternoon for
the Comic Life/Between Two Worlds shows.

Push/Pull presents a number of monthly shows, and this Friday, August 14th, I'll be one of 20 artists to present work in Comic Life.  The work presented includes original art that was actually used in the creation of a comics story or art related to the cartoonists art and process.  You can find the event page here.

I am more than grateful to have been invited to the show and I can't wait to see what everyone is dreaming up to display.  One of the works I'm showing is my first experimentation with M. C. Eschers "Division of the Plane" depicting Patti Smith getting her hair pulled by a crow. 

In addition to Comics Life, Between Two Worlds, a Twin Peaks art show at Urban Light Studios curated by Push/Pull, will be opening at the same time, in a slightly separate space.  The two shows display an amazing array of fine Pacific Northwest Artists.  Check check.

Exterminator City #4

 

Exterminator City #4 happens August 22nd.  Details can be found here.

I've written about Exterminator City before (here).  What is it?  It's one of the only neighborhood comics tabling event I know of in the United States.  Artist and Organizer Seth Goodkind, one of the resident artists at Push/Pull, converts the labyrinthine gallery spaces into a sort of farmers market for local artists to hawk their minicomics, zines and merch of all array.   

There is nothing NOT TO LOVE about Exterminator City.  First, it is professionally organized and promoted.  Second, Seth is going out of his way to outreach to new and diverse creators.  Third, I have literally never sold more books at a tabling event with the exception of Short Run.  This includes some major regional events....people who love comics come to Exterminator City to buy comics.  Art and ideas exchange hands.

But don't take my word for it.  The Comics Journal sang high praise of Exterminator City in Paul Tumey's article covering the first Exterminator City in April of 2014.   The Seattle Underground Comics Scene is Alive and Oozing, shouts the headline.  And it is!   You can read it here.

Kick Start It!  There's a Push on for a bigger, better Push/Pull Gallery

 

Click through if you dare!  And contribute if you will.
Push/Pull Kickstarter here:  http://tinyurl.com/nfju6pr

Push/Pull is growing and evolving in remarkable ways.  They already provide great programming like monthly shows and Exterminator City.  Now they are looking for funds to create a bigger and more luminous atmosphere for underground artists in Seattle.  I encourage anyone who can to toss a coin into the well  to do so at their Kickstarter site here.

 

The Long Arm of Community

 

Max Clotfelter, the mad genius
behind the community-in-a-publication
otherwise known as DUNE.

I had intended to write about two components of the Seattle comics community that feature heavy crossover with Push/Pull's activities, artists and mission.

DUNE is a comics drawing night that occurs every 3rd Tuesday at Cafe Racer in Seattle.  That's right.  NEXT TUESDAY you should absolutely show up with drawing utensils and $2 bucks in hand to be part of DUNE. 

Until then, all you need to know is that you arrive at 7:00.  You draw a maximum of two pages of comics art.  You turn in the art and $2-3 to Max Clotfelter (the mastermind behind the venture) and next month you come back and receive not only your original artwork back but also an anthology of everyone's work from that night.  You can find details here.

I love DUNE to the ends of the earth.  It is too luscious an event to break it down in a few sentences and I will spill A LOT more ink on it in the next month.

SO--look forward to more writing about DUNE.  Also Intruder, a free comics newspaper published and distributed here in Seattle that features a rotating stable of artist who also exhibit regularly at Push/Pull.

Until next week!

C-log posts on comics, publication and community on Tuesdays.

Zine as F*ck

Poster art by Amanda Blix.

How can I NOT write about the Portland Zine Symposium? 

I learned so much!  Mark Campos and I took the Bolt Bus down and rode the tri-met train from downtown PDX to the convention center.  There I wheeled our 20+ pounds of books and clothes through heat and past a Denny's (Woah, they still exist?) to the convention.

To our left was PsychoNotArt, the main progenerator being quite congenial and selling a space love romantic parody comic plus gooey eyeball art t-shirts.  MJ.  He was funny, laid back and an awesome table-mate.  To the right of us was Nada, a Seattle-based zine, the fearless leader of which compiled art and writing by other people.  His role?  To create beautiful objects out of what they gave him.  Zines with felt patterns, antiquated color Mickey Mouse prints inserted inside, AND


Lovely tiny, precious, rediculously cute match books folded up with a poem inside that says "Don't like it?  Ignite it!".  Reminded me of Lisa Gill putting Haiku inside of Hershey's Kisses the first Alburquerque Poetry Festival I attended. Too sweet.  Everybody melted for them.

Jim Joyce, before the haircut?

It made me think of art as object.  My shiny, flat comics may need a makeover.  Maybe.

At the after party at the Independent Publishing Resource Center (Seattle?  Why don't we have this?)  all of the zinesters were well-fed, well quenched and there was a crazy contingency of Chicago artists who kind of haunted me, since I'll be drawing Chicago into my grapic novel.  One gentleman who goes by Jim Joyce read some powerful prose about catholic guilt.  I tagged him to tell him I once read at the Green Mill as a slam poet, and later said "I think I'm too sensitive."  To which he replied "Not if you held the floor at Green Mill with Marc Smith."


Naw.  Marc "Slampappi" Smith is a sweetie.  Yes, the Green Mill is the birthplace of slam.  Check it out.

Rode home on the Bolt Bus again with Mark Campos and I talking about the graphic novel.  Where is the story about female friendship?  Where is the women's version of On The Road?

Is this my Cindy Sherman Film Still?
Maybe so.
True that, though.

The one story I can fall back on I saw first as a movie.  Julia.  Based on Lillian Hellman's novel Pentimento.  Just that one story.  Amazing.  So, There for the grace of God (or whatever you believe in) go I.

In the mean time, Mark took this shot of me preparing for day 2, lacking lipstick and resorting to Sharpie.  When I arrived I got to connect with several very powerful women comics artists--Colleen Frakes, Amanda Blix and again Annie Murphy.  Also met up with legendary slam poetessa Melody Jordan and had my comics enlisted into the archives of the Whatcom County Library.

I love my community.  Until next time.  I'm off to DUNE.



PS--Huge breakthroughs on the graphic novel.  I'll be writing about that next week.


C-log posts on comics, publication and community that publishes on Tuesdays.