Giant IOU

One from my Visual Slushpile photo blog:


As I've ranted in my blogs before, I'm of two minds on graffiti - having been both a graffiti artist and a property owner whose building was defaced by graffiti in my contradictory past, I take each example of this "art" on a case by case basis. I can't condone any graffiti that defaces someone's home, someone's place of business, or a historical structure. Especially when the work is really, really, really lame, such as this "IOU" tag is.

But I have to say, this one makes me scratch my head in wonderment: how the heck did they do that? It seems spray-painted but the letters are impossibly tall, and I don't think they dragged a scaffolding out there just to do this. I'm guessing they duct-taped the sprayer button down on a can tied to a long stick?

Stolen Italian Icon Found at Speed Museum

Very interesting piece today from the New York Times about a painted gatefold icon that was stolen in Italy in 1971. 40 years after it vanished, it turned up in a dusty back storeroom of Louisville's Speed Museum.

The Speed's not to blame, though - they acquired the piece from a reputable gallery in New York for $38,000 in 1973, just two years after it had been purloined. How it got to that gallery is a matter that is still being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security. (Seriously? Since when do they handle 1970s cold-case files of burglaries in Italy?)

According to the article:

Under a settlement negotiated by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York and announced on Monday, the Speed will soon turn over the painting to Homeland Security, which will transfer it to Italian cultural authorities. (The collector who owned the painting in 1971 has since died, and the authorities will be responsible for determining who is entitled to it now.)

Before that, however, the museum will show the painting, which it has not exhibited for at least a decade, from June 9 to July 3 as part of a small exhibit that will, according to the museum’s director, Charles L. Venable, “contextualize it in a larger world of provenance research and repatriation of works of art.”

The Kilowatt Kid

Cruised by the Frankfort Avenue Art House the other day and spied a new addition to his menagerie: an antique standup of Reddy Kilowatt, inexplicably in Western gear.

J.T. Dockery's Spud Crazy

Jackson County's very own J.T. Dockery will unveil his new Spud Crazy graphic novel (based on a story by Nick Tosches) tonight at Lexington's Institute 193!

From Institute 193's blog:

J.T. Dockery is one of those rare artists that seems to exist both within the work he creates and alongside the rest of us in the “real world.” Women, booze, cigarettes, and shady characters spill onto the page and seep back into real life–drawn, stacked and stashed into portfolios or passed on the street. No one is safe.

Spud Crazy, originally published as a script in The Nick Tosches Reader, has been re-imagined by Dockery as an excerpted graphic novel. Wielding his penchant for fragmented plots, bizarre themes and mash-ups, Dockery has composed, directed and illustrated Tosches’ original script into a visual film complete with soundtrack and frame-by-frame action. The resulting package is some new hybridized publication: part comic book, part musical score, part academic essay, part artist-edition and all SPUD.

The exhibition runs from 6pm to 9pm and will feature a live performance by the Spud Imperials.

Pig Stump

Somewhere in the vicinity of the Oldham County - Henry County border, this pink lipstick-wearing pig was seen in someone's yard, apparently sculpted from a tree trunk.

Marvin Finn's Grave

The Kentucky folk artist Marvin Finn, known for his primitive woodcarved chickens, has a suitably beaky headstone on his grave in Louisville Cemetary; presumably designed himself.

Sherry R. Deatrick

Louisville attorney Sherry R. Deatrick wears a lot of hats in addition to her legal career - playwright, gallery curator, theatre critic, award-winning journalist, and - most notably for me - a creator of whimsical and mysterious artistic creations. Not only has she done some amazing mosaics and crochet amigurumi, but her papier-mache miniature heads have charmed art buyers all over the nation. Because her law practice is her primary pursuit, her art exhibitions are rather infrequent - which makes them all the more special occasions.

In 2004, I attended her one-woman show "Heads" at her own Deatrick Gallery in Louisville, and was so captivated by the rows of tiny peculiar papier-mache heads that I purchased one - a duck wearing a small tiara-like gilt crown. It remains a prized artifact in my personal collection of weird Kentucky art.


Some may also know Deatrick from her stint as LEO Weekly's theatre critic, earning three awards for that paper for three consecutive years. During that time, she gave the paper a sorely needed emphasis on the lively arts, with feature articles on celebrities like John Waters and local curiosities like Specific Gravity Ensemble (a group known for putting on micro-plays in elevators, who got a great cover-feature story devoted to them). Unlike many jaded critics who phone it in by the numbers or bluff their way through analyses of theatre aspects they know nothing about, Deatrick's passion and enthusiasm for the subject is always high.

But it's her law practice she's most passionate about, and she's become more and more of a crusader in recent years to protect citizens from unwarranted harassment from creditors. In these times of economic turmoil, a good bankruptcy attorney who cares is hard to find. Not only does Deatrick help people get creditors and bill collectors off their backs, she fights back against the collection agencies who use illegal and invasive practices to pursue their claim. In addition to bankruptcy law, Deatrick takes on many different sorts of cases, including helping people get on Social Security Disability, and helping people prevent their homes from being foreclosed.


Meanwhile, rumor has it that the "Heads" will be returning to Louisville later this year for an all-new exhibition. I'll be there, and I'll keep you posted on the details soon as I learn them myself.

Louisville Windchime Gateway

Dedicated in August 1991, the Louisville Windchime Gateway is a little-known public art installation. The enormous aluminum-and-steel set of wind chimes can be found on 7th Street, between Main and Market.


Not sure how the stuffed toy duck, or whatever it is, became attached to it.

Nude Sculpture at the Coleman-Layman Home

The Courier-Journal has a great new gallery of images of the historic Coleman and Layman home in Old Louisville. This nude sculpture on a sidecase near the entrance hallway especially caught my eye.

Telecrylic

One from our Transylvania Gentlemen blog:


More JSH than you can shake a stick at, you stick-shakers. Those obsessive folks at Telecrylic, who have apparently made it their life's work to be monks in endlessly recapitulative study of my droppings, have a new blog that promotes me better than any of my own ever could. Click here to check it out.

"Kamel" Graffiti Gang

Graffiti and vandalism have been a growing problem in Butchertown, and now four persons have been caught on security video vandalizing the Eye Care Institute building at 1536 Story Avenue. The "Kamel" gang are wanted by police for multiple counts of vandalism and criminal trespassing.


I'm of two minds regarding graffiti - on one hand, much of it is very beautiful and essentially harmless. On the other hand, some of it causes a lot of financial hardship for those whose homes and businesses have been vandalized by bored know-nothing teenage spray-painting retards. The problem will probably only continue to grow, unfortunately, and is doomed to be among that set of signs-of-the-times that I call Unsolvable Problems.


Click here for more details in my Louisville Mojo column.

"Gold Teef for Errbody!"

A Jilbertmobile parked outside of Spinelli's Pizza in Louisville, seen Sunday.

Cafe Metro's Mural

I never really cared for Louisville's Cafe Metro (which has recently gone out of business - see our Whitewashed Windows and Vacant Stores blog for more on that). I was also always disturbed by their mural, the symbolism of which I find most unsavory.

Bill Fischer

If you don't know who Bill Fischer is, it's time you knew. Run, don't walk, to his historic home/studio at 1652 Story Avenue. Fischer is without a doubt the most accomplished of Butchertown's artists, with a body of work and achievement that spans decades. His works are all over the map, stylistically, and yet it is instantly recognizable. He has done many amazing murals for churches and synagogues, and to this day is kept busy with more offers than he has time for. His home is open for visitors by appointment: (502) 584-7947.


Some of Fischer's 1950s and 1960s works have the interesting distinction of having been painted with Jackson Pollock's paint. Pollock, avoiding the high costs of New York paint factories, ordered his paint in bulk from a Louisville manufacturer, carefully mixed to his exact peculiar specifications. When Pollock died unexpectedly in 1956, the manufacturer was stuck with a huge order of Pollock's paint that had been just about to ship. Fischer was called and offered to take the otherwise-unusable paint off their hands, to which he enthusiastically said yes.

Tony's Wild Wood

I was driving in Prospect recently and noticed a stump painted blue with a bas-relief image of Popeye on it.

Then I realized there was a carved eagle and a horse head as well. I checked out the website on his sign, tonyswildwood.com, and so should you - he's got all kinds of fascinating folk-art creations.

He also apparently has a shop in LaGrange.

Weird Artists: Adrian Wright

A tattoo artist in Brandenburg, KY, Adrian Wright is quickly making a name for himself as a fine artist as well. His colorful paintings dwell on classic horror/monster film subjects such as Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Zombies, and Skulls. Not surprising, then, that Wright's work is a hit with hipsters of all ages and can be seen displayed in the living rooms of many of Kentucky's most influential people.

Weird Artists: Minnie Adkins

This is another piece from my planned chapter on Kentucky artists for the book that almost made it to press but ultimately ended up on the cutting room floor. It was partially because I was concerned that a popular country folk artist just wasn't intrinsically "weird" enough to merit inclusion in the book. (On the other hand, them there big-city fellers up North probably think we're all weird down there.)

But here on the UnK blog, I take a far wider and more inclusive scope than in the book, so here's Minnie! Click on the image to see the page mockup of what would have been Minnie's page in the book.

Weird Artists: J. Todd Dockery

J. Todd Dockery is a rural artist from Gray Hawk, KY, best known for his intensely crosshatched pen and ink drawings and comics. His work has shown at the Kentucky Museum of Arts + Design, the Deatrick Gallery in Louisville, and the Walker Gallery in England. His sketchily surreal creations recall the obsessive and wiggly line work
of underground greats like Basil Wolverton, Joe Coleman, and Robert Crumb.


Born and raised in the woods of Jackson County, Dockery remains rooted to his native soil, straying sometimes to outlying areas like Lexington, Morehead and Conway but never far from the ground zero that is his ancestral home. He's one of the most genuine Southern-eccentric personalities Kentucky has to offer.

Although beset with sometimes-agonizing arthritis, Dockery manages to ignore the pain without the use of major pain relievers - and not only continues the intensive work on his drawings but also plays drums in a number of local garage-punk bands, most notably The Smacks!, Mickey and the Wild Bunch, Kitty Twister and her Hot Dogs and Cheeseburger and Fries, a street-busking duo with yours truly on guitar and he on drums, percussion, kazoo and harmonica.

Weird Artists: Jeffrey Scott Holland

Hey, that's me! Well, it's my blog, so why not? I'm probably not the weirdest artist in Kentucky (though you might get a different answer if you asked some of my ex-girlfriends) but I do have a grip on a certain unique reality principle, as William S. Burroughs sort-of once said.

Originally I envisioned a whole chapter in Weird Kentucky on weird Kentucky artists, but it sadly got the cut in the final edits and was reduced to a mere page. Here's the expurgated talking-about-myself-in-third-person text from my entry in that material:

Weird Kentucky's own author, Jeffrey Scott Holland from Waco, KY, has sold thousands of his raw, primitive paintings and recorded thousands of equally primitive songs with his various musical projects. From his most recent artist statement:

"I work in a savage, post-neo-expressionist style that is often heavy with line and thick with impasto. For the patient observer, a gradual bigger picture of what I am doing may be formed by studying what I choose to paint and why. My work is about secrecy vs. openness, mystery vs. revelation, rural vs. urban, certainty vs. uncertainty, wave vs. particle. My work is not for the jaded, the ironic, the unenthusiastic, the terminally hip, the perpetually bored. I'm looking for people whose joie de vivre knows no boundaries."

Two years in a row, Holland has showered the nation with hidden green plastic Easter eggs with miniature artwork concealed inside. The majority of the eggs in Project Egg remain unfound, however, and are still out there waiting to be discovered. A third installment, intended to reach a global audience, has been cancelled because of Holland's increasing anti-plastics activism.

Weird Artists: Kathleen Lolley

Like a quaint old children's book turned mysterious and foreboding,
Kathleen Lolley's paintings are a mythical landscape populated by cute
but disturbing creatures, bottles of blood, science experiments,
ships, trees, and houses.

Like many a Kentucky artist, Kathleen has done her stint in the big
city (she lived for a time in Los Angeles and did some work for the
popular SpongeBob Squarepants animated cartoons) but the magnetic
vortex of Kentucky always pulls us back in the end.

Lolley lives a quiet life these days in Louisville, working on her art
which she sells through indie outlets such as Kopilot.