Hot of the presses, a new accordion book titled “Heaven and Hell”. I’ve had an idea for a while about doing a book about love / hate because I thought the juxtaposition would be interesting to see. The idea morphed into heaven and hell, even though I’m not religious at all, because I was inspired from some paintings by Tiepolo at the Metropolitan.
I have to say, drawing hell came a lot easier to me, because I know what happens in hell: torture, pain, eternal torment. I know what eternal torment looks like. Presumably, heaven is bliss, but I didn’t really know what that looked like without going the XXX route. Turns out, in most paintings I found, people just chill out in heaven…which is kinda boring. So I made the people in heaven hug each other…while naked. I figure, your clothes don’t have a soul, so they don’t go with you to the afterlife. Also I’m better a drawing naked people than clothed people (that’s because 90% of the figure drawing classes I’ve had were with nudes).
I wanted to submit this book to Printed Matter , which only accepts editions of at least a 100. I had to make this book simple for the sake of my sanity. Making a 100 books by hand is no walk in the park, let me tell you. The whole book fits on one page, printed front and back. There’s no hardcover, it’s just a simple accordion, although I glued gold paper on the cover for the title. As it turns out, it’s going to take 2 months to find out whether Printed Matter will carry my book, but in the meantime it’s available at Desert Island and Recession Art Gallery.
Below you can see the successive steps of silkscreen printing. I forgot to take pictures after printing the second and third colors.
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