Adios Summer, Hallo Autumn

Last week I finished off and mailed away my contribution to the upcoming gallery show Monsterbation that’s to be held at The Pony Club in Portland, OR. The show’s theme is centered around sex and monsters, an idea that could have been fun and light-hearted but in my melodramatic claw went in the opposite direction.

It didn’t feel right to blindly draw monsters fooling around considering, at least for me, sex is an incredibly personal matter. So I borrowed a page from the Italian Renaissance and centered my painting around my first boyfriend and as many personal memories and obscure symbols about him I could fit into a single piece. Everything you see in the piece, from the oven mitts to the cowboy boots to the blinds on the window are all intensely personal and could be cloying and saccharine but thanks to their anonymity, (hopefully) it doesn’t come off heavy-handed.

I’ve been working on this sucker for over a month now which I mostly spent trying to relearn how to paint.

I’m always astonished by artists who can pull out such sucker punches with their work, sculpting beautifully one week only to turn around and etch the most marvelous thing you’ve ever seen, the next. For example, Jillian Tamaki and that damn quilt of hers. I was already a huge dorky fan of everything she’s ever done ever but once she posted photos of that embroidery, my little oaken barrel of appreciation tipped itself over Niagra Falls and I haven’t looked back since. In my work I try to bathe myself in that same Tamaki-tub, but I feel with this painting that is especially true. Whether or not it was successful, I don’t know.

In the ornate frame I painted black for the piece.

A detail.

A tiny little pun based around my old college nick name “J Rock”.

The show will be up at The Pony Club from Oct. 4 through the 31st. And if anyone is interested in purchasing this boner beauty, it’ll be available through The Pony Club’s website. When it goes online over there, I’ll post about it here.

In other news, I’ve temporarily paused work on The Title. I’ve been busy writing the second and third acts but last week I hit a little snag in the second act so instead of drawing pages I’ll eventually have to scrap, I’m working through my knotted plot before I go any further. Until then, I’m doing this little comic which I will eventually package into a mini comic to sell online, which you can expect sometime around the New Year. I think I’ve finally accepted that working full-time and drawing comics on the side means that everything for the rest of forever is going to take a little longer than I had originally planned. I mean, don’t even get me started about how far behind I am on A Wrinkle In Time. I know.

Speaking of work and  jobs and such, to help augment my income now that I’ve quit my hellish job as a waiter on a cruise ship (and my new job making window displays at a clothing store hasn’t quite picked up enough hours yet), I’ve put pieces up on my Etsy for sale. Some of it was up last time and was never sold, but there are some new pieces up for sale as well.

ALSO, I’m starting to work on commissions which is something I’ve never done before. I don’t know why I never made that a viable option for myself but nowadays it makes it more sense than ever. SO, if there is anything you would like drawn, a show poster done up, a bit of hand lettering given a tender touch, anything, just email me at jeremysorese@gmail.com and we can sort through the nitty gritty.

Fall has finally hit Chicago and I’ve never been more in love with it. We finally got a coffee table AND a dining room table so our apartment’s almost completion plus the brisk night air has made turning 22 in three days feel especially wonderful.