{"id":2308,"date":"2017-09-13T18:16:24","date_gmt":"2017-09-13T18:16:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/?p=2308"},"modified":"2017-09-13T22:28:31","modified_gmt":"2017-09-13T22:28:31","slug":"lies-and-ugliness-the-original-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/2017\/09\/13\/lies-and-ugliness-the-original-art\/","title":{"rendered":"LIES AND UGLINESS: THE ORIGINAL ART"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p> $\"\"$ (UPDATE: This original artwork was for sale today \u2014 and it sold in less than an hour. WOW. Thank you and congratulations to author Mark Van Name<\/a> for scoring this for his collection.<\/strong> Most importantly, we\u2019ve chosen to donate a portion of the proceeds to Mexican earthquake relief, and are now deciding which charitable conduit is best. NEXT: I\u2019ll have FIVE previously not-for-sale Loteria original artworks available for purchase, with portions of proceeds going to further help victims of recent natural disaster in Houston, Florida, the Islands and Mexico.)<\/strong><\/em>\n

*******************************<\/p>\n

Like many of you, I\u2019ve been trying to do my part to help Houstonians devastated by Hurricane Harvey, as well as Floridians and Islanders impacted by Hurricane Irma. The Mexican Earthquake victims have not left my daily attention, since that massive 8.1 earthquake struck on September 7th. They need our help there, even as they\u2019ve been heroically offering their own<\/em> relief assistance to the United States.<\/p>\n

Sixteen years ago this week, Americans felt compelled to rally around our own. Whenever I look at this piece of original art, I think of 9\/11. I had become a fulltime professional illustrator in April of that year, resigning my job in the residential architecture field. More than anything in the world, I wanted to be a professional sf\/f book cover artist. It was a heady time. I was slowly building a pro art career, as publishing clients were beginning to take notice of my early cover and magazine work. That morning, I was sketching ideas for the cover of Brian Hodge\u2019s collection Lies and Ugliness<\/em>. The phone rang, and I heard my mother\u2019s voice, \u201cAre you watching?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTV\u2019s not on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA plane crashed into the World Trade Center. It\u2019s on fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh my god.<\/em> What channel?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of them<\/em>,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOK. Love you. Bye.\u201d<\/p>\n

I watched a towering grey cloud billow across a field of blue, as my drawing hand went buzzy and tingly \u2014 and then the second plane hit. I don\u2019t remember any work after that. What I do know is this cover idea was born on that terrible day because one of the morning\u2019s thumbnails eventually evolved into the final artwork you see here. I\u2019ve always called this artwork \u201cLies and Ugliness\u201d because that\u2019s the name of the book it illustrated, but those words and their synchronicity resonate more profoundly as years unfold.<\/p>\n

In those fledgling days, I was experimenting across a wide range of media. I still have people ask me, \u201cWhen are you going to do another shadowbox assemblage cover?\u201d This cover was one of those, and the answer is \u201cnot anytime soon\u201d because these were so time-consuming. I did my assemblage covers by hand, with traditional media. The drawing and painting wasn\u2019t the time-consuming part. It was the search for found objects, the construction, and then the careful installation of the pieces. It added an uncertainty and vitality that was incredibly fun, but not the most efficient process either. I was learning lessons and working through my influences at that time \u2014 Cornell, McKean, Bantock, Rauschenberg, and so on.<\/p>\n

In my 2006 art book Cover Story: The Art of John Picacio<\/em>, I shared what I thought about the manuscript, and what I was thinking when I did this artwork, \u201cUpon closer study, there was a common denominator: the exploration of faith and sexuality and their effects on the mundane and epic \u2014 especially their effects on the perception of the \u2018truth\u2019. In many of the stories, Hodge almost seemed to relish in the violent ideological collisions between the pagan and the Christian. There\u2019s a mad love of ritual\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

I also described how the original was created. \u201cI drew and painted the Christ figure in mixed media on masonite, and then positioned it into a homemade wooden box that was built and painted proportionally to the cover dimension. The gargoyle is a a found object that I carved, textured and painted to make it more fearsome. After carefully melding the painting and the gargoyle, the two were surrounded with silk roses, which I painted and touched up individually by hand to make them look just right.\u201d<\/p>\n

So here we are \u2014 sixteen years later \u2014 and I\u2019d like to use this original artwork to help people in need, as best I can. I\u2019m donating 10% of the proceeds from this one to the food bank or relief charity of the buyer\u2019s choice.<\/strong><\/em> I\u2019m also pricing this original lower so that it gives the best chance for a donation to occur. For example, my Loteria original graphite drawings (11\u2033 x 18\u2033) currently sell in the $5000 range<\/em>, so the price listed below for this early shadowbox original is a rare<\/em><\/strong> bargain for my stuff \u2014 and these shadowbox originals almost never become available. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Dimensions:<\/em> 12.5\u2033 wide x 19\u2033 high x 2.5\u2033 deep<\/p>\n

Weight:<\/em> 7 lbs. (before shipping)<\/p>\n

Price:<\/em> Only $1500 (includes free shipping within the continental United States \/ please add $100 for shipping outside of the United States)<\/p>\n

Contact:<\/em> john (at) johnpicacio (dot) com \u2014 Email me with the subject line \u201cLies and Ugliness\u201d. First come, first serve. We\u2019ll exchange emails and I\u2019ll give the payment contact info so that we can finalize the sale via Paypal. I\u2019ll then donate to your favorite food bank or relief charity \u2014 and ship your artwork to you.<\/p>\n

Good luck, all!<\/em><\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(UPDATE: This original artwork was for sale today \u2014 and it sold in less than an hour. WOW. Thank you and congratulations to author Mark Van Name for scoring this for his collection. Most importantly, we\u2019ve chosen to donate a portion of the proceeds to Mexican earthquake relief, and are now deciding which charitable conduit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[182,116,216,59],"tags":[250,251,254,63,248,253,217,252,249],"class_list":["post-2308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-life","category-for-sale","category-original-art","category-picacio-art","tag-assemblage","tag-harvey-relief","tag-hurricane-relief","tag-john-picacio","tag-lies-and-ugliness","tag-mexico","tag-original-art","tag-quake-relief","tag-shadowbox"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/LIESpicacio.jpg?fit=2000%2C2925","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5te7x-Be","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2308"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2324,"href":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2308\/revisions\/2324"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}