Mike Egan: "Death Came To Texas - New Paintings"

September 01, 2014

Mike Egan

Death Came To Texas: New Paintings by Mike Egan

September 6 - October 12

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania artist Mike Egan contemplates matters of life and death from the perspective of a former undertaker, which is what he is. His paintings of skeletons and devils can be appreciated both as gorgeous expressions of contemporary pop culture skull obsession and as thoughtful meditations on life, death and religion.

OPENING RECEPTION FOR THE ARTIST

Saturday, September 6

7 - 9 PM

Reg Mombassa & Peter O'Doherty at Yard Dog

January 30, 2014

Yard Dog will be showing the paintings & prints of Australian artist/musicians Reg Mombassa and Peter O'Doherty during the month of March. They will be playing SXSW with their band Dog Trumpet, showcasing their fantastic new album "Medicated Spirits." Brothers Peter O’Doherty and Reg Mombassa (Chris O’Doherty) formed Dog Trumpet in 1991, initially as a side-project to their “real job” Mental As Anything. After leaving the Mentals, Dog Trumpet became the full-time gig for Peter and Reg.
‘Medicated Spirits’ is the sixth studio album for Dog Trumpet. Here's a video.

Deborah Mersky - Eve's Necklace

January 29, 2014

Deborah Mersky

Eve's Necklace: New Prints & Objects

January 15 - February 15, 2014

Opening reception for the artist

Saturday, February 1, 2014

7 - 9 pm

In conjunction with PrintAustin 2014, Yard Dog is showing the work of printmaker Deborah Mersky. Mersky grew up in Austin, Texas, lived in Seattle for many years, and now lives near Johnson City, TX. She earned an MFA at the University of Washington and has been exhibiting her work since 1980. For her prints, she carves a design in a clay block, prints her images in black ink on Japanese paper, then paints over them with gouache. Her collages incorporate animal and plant remains scavenged from the countryside. As a public artist, she creates elaborate, large-scale installations executed in such materials as glass and metal and integrated into buildings. In Austin she designed the metal fencing along the sidewalk on the north end of the 1st Street Bridge over Lady Bird Lake. Both her public and studio works are informed by the natural world, with natural elements removed from their original contexts and rearranged to create patterns.

See Deborah's artwork here.

Bloodshot / Yard Dog Calendar

December 21, 2013

Bloodshot Records is celebrating their 20th anniversary with a calendar featuring photos taken at their infamous Yard Dog Bloodshot Parties, which we throw every March, during SXSW. Beginning in 1996 with the Waco Brothers & Old 97s, the calendar has fantastic photos of all kinds of great musicians, including Justin Townes Earle, Split Lip Rayfield, Sally Timms and more more more. In addition, there's all sorts of whimsical and historical dates, listings of all our lineups over the years and other tidbits to catch your wandering gaze while you are killing time in whatever office, cubicle or cell you may find yourself in.

We Now Accept Bitcoins!

December 13, 2013

That's right, you can now spend your hard-earned bitcoins here at yarddog.com. Awesome! Just select it as an option at the payment stage of your checkout.

If you're wondering what a bitcoin is, watch this or read this.

Q&A: Punk rocker Jon Langford on death, digital art and Dogfish Head

November 15, 2013

Our friends over at Dogfish Head Brewery have posted a good interview with Jon Langford on their website. If you want to find out a bit about the sources of his inspirations and learn the answer to the question, "what's with all the skeletons?" you can read it here.

Siberian Street Scenes

November 08, 2013

Kurt Herrmann

Siberian Street Scenes

Yard Dog Art Gallery

November 20 - December 31

Pennsylvania artist Kurt Herrmann visits his inlaws in Siberia once or twice a year. Beginning November 20, we will be showing a small group of watercolor paintings he made there this past summer. About his paintings, Kurt says, "On my last trip back to Siberia I spent a lot time walking the streets around the outdoor markets on the edge of town. For whatever reason, they were not very busy and the people and items stood out more than usual. Each street corner, vendor or kiosk seemed like a stage set. The ever present greys, whites and blacks would be punctuated with bursts of color in a red wig or pink shoes. I would make as many mental notes as I could and come home and paint."

Kate Heyhoe's Sugar Skulls

October 24, 2013

The Austin Chronicle has a great piece on Kate Heyhoe's sugar skulls. You can check it out here and/or read it below.

The Art of Death

Kate Heyhoe weaves Dreams of the Dead via sugar skulls

BY CLAUDIA ALARCÓN, OCTOBER 25, 2013, FOOD

After the death of her mother in 2008, Kate Heyhoe found herself submerged in grief and in need of an outlet. "I knew she wouldn't want me to be sad, she would want me to find a way to celebrate her life," Heyhoe says. Inspired by the festive, colorful traditions of Day of the Dead, Heyhoe came up with the idea of making her own unique style of sugar skulls. "I'm a person who cooks with garlic and onions. Sugar is definitely not my medium, but somehow I started doing it and figured it out," she recalls. It makes perfect sense that visual art would be the medium Heyhoe chose to pay tribute to her beloved mom. After all, her mother had designed distinctive wrapping papers and gift packaging for the legendary Stanley Marcus for 30 years. An amazing array of antique papers, ribbons, and art supplies that once stocked her mother's home work space are now meticulously arranged in her daughter's home workshop – an artistic legacy that continues to bear creative fruit.

I first wrote about Kate Heyhoe's Dreams of the Dead sugar skulls shortly after she started making them in 2010. Recently, I received an email from the cookbook author and online food writing pioneer (see sidebar, "Before Art, Kate Heyhoe's First Act") with a video showcasing her newest works of art. With Día de los Muertos approaching, I decided to pay a visit to her Wimberley home studio to witness firsthand the evolution of her amazing creations and to see the place where they, so to speak, come to life.

Cast in store-bought molds from a sugar paste recipe she's developed, Heyhoe's skulls are nothing like the traditional Mexican calaveritas. They range from golf ball-sized mini-skulls with exterior adornments to large, almost life-sized pieces. These are not only decorated on the outside, they also contain meticulously handcrafted miniature scenes on the inside, which she calls "skullscapes." Using her mother's vast collection of handmade wrapping papers, paints, color markers, ribbons, and a lifetime of art supplies, Heyhoe adds feathers, bones, and all kinds of found objects and miniatures to create these tiny scenes. Most skulls include white or black-light LED lights that can be battery-powered or used as plug-in night-light fixtures, and many feature elaborate headdresses.

Heyhoe and her husband, Thomas Way, have transformed their garage and one of the bedrooms in their lovely Hill Country home into what they call "the skull factory." The impossibly cramped yet scrupulously organized studio would bring Martha Stewart to tears. Every square inch is carefully ordered, with stacks of labeled plastic drawers containing all sorts of supplies. "When I was growing up, my mother had walls of stuff," Heyhoe says. "One wall was nothing but gift papers, another nothing but ribbons, another had boxes full of things like birds and bees and roses and sequins and stuff. That was my playground. I never grew out of that! So, things like these end up in my skulls."

Each skull undergoes nearly 30 stages of development, from casting to carving, drilling, painting, decorating, and lighting. First, Heyhoe casts the sugar into front and back molds and lets it cure partially to the right consistency so she can scoop out the interiors; next the molds are allowed to cure completely. Then comes the tricky part: drilling eyes, nostrils, LED slots, and headdress holes. Some skulls meet their demise during this step, and Heyhoe has to start over. If the skull survives the drilling, she seals the interiors with a sugar-based coating, letting it dry before sealing the exterior. After it's completely dry, the skull is airbrushed with food-grade coloring, up to three or more layers of different colors to create the desired effect, such as the copperlike patina on her Steampunk Skulls.

Next, Heyhoe maps out the skullscape interior design. For this purpose, she painstakingly paints miniatures she finds in hobby stores and online. Her latest online score was a bag full of miniature plastic zombie girls, with which she is enamored. "Dollar stores are also wonderful," Heyhoe adds. "You can find all kinds of stuff to use in the skulls." Devils and angels in battle, as well as ancient Meso-American motifs, are also favorites. Before affixing the skullscape, she airbrushes, stencils, paints, or stamps interior elements and backgrounds, then sprays interior halves with acrylic sealant. After the skullscape has dried in place, the two halves are glued together; once firmly set, Heyhoe starts the process of outer decoration. For this, she dyes and rolls out sugar paste, which she purchases from baking supply stores, to make the custom cutout designs that will embellish the outside. She then hand-paints all sugar paste details with a mix of luster dust and lemon extract to add sheen.

The last steps include constructing and affixing a headdress, made from materials ranging from feathers to foam, copper to ceramics, antique papers to original art. Lastly, she introduces LED lights and seals the outside with an acrylic coating to resist fading and humidity. She recommends keeping her skulls out of direct/bright light (to retain color) and avoiding humidity. "I know," she says, "hard to do here. But indoors away from windows or bathrooms is fine." Displaying the finished works of art in glass domes works well.

The results of Heyhoe's work are stunning. The scenes are designed to be looked at from different angles, so peeking through each eye socket provides the viewer a different perspective. "Each skull tells a story, but I let the story develop on its own," says Heyhoe. "And I want each person to interpret them in whichever way they feel, to create a story of their own."

Coming Up Next: Jon Langford's "Don't Talk So Haunted!"

September 25, 2013

October 18 sees the return of the art & entertainment dynamo that is Jon Langford. We'll have lots of new paintings and prints!

Opening Reception

Friday, October 18, 2013

7 - 9 PM

He'll play a few songs acoustically at the opening, then we'll head down the street to the Continental Club for a monster show featuring Jon Langford & The Far Forlorn, the Waco Brothers, Churchwood, and Deano & The Purvs.

Houston friends: please note that the same bands will be at the Continental Club in Houston the following night, Saturday October 19.

Fran Holland Explains His Paintings

September 05, 2013

Fran Holland was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1964. He is the second of four brothers. His father Fran Sr. was likewise the second of four brothers. His mother Mary Ellen was the second of four siblings as well.

He has always been caught in the web of numbers, series, and patterns. They have been the oft-ruminated cud of his fancy, and he found them in the weave of his blankets, the strange darkness of his closed eyes, the rhythm of stair-climbing, and the prismatic magic of his tears. He makes things.

Fran has worked as a carpenter, a museum exhibit designer, a musical instrument inventor and builder, and an elementary school teacher. He cofounded and ran a community workshop called the Tinkers Workshop in Berkeley, California. He currently works as an electrician.

Fran first distinguished himself by failing at most forms of institutionally structured learning. Over time, chance encounters with informal teachers and old books catalyzed his suspicion that understanding was both possible and nourishing. The modern “best practices” that inspired much of his formal schooling were perhaps not the best for him. He has since been guided in his growth by developing alternative personal systems, often adapted from more ancient sources.

His visual art has grown out of systems that he has re-discovered and developed to visually represent and explore mathematics, and to understand, compose, and play music.

Many of his paintings reflect his involvement with the mathematics practiced before numerals, when a particular number was represented by a quantity of counters, such as beans or rocks. “1” can be represented by one counter, “10” by ten counters, etc. In this manner, a number’s appearance, and its relations with other numbers, becomes more concrete, less hidden or abstract. For example,

“36” can be represented as thirty-six marks:

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

this quantity can be reshaped from a line, or a disordered collection, into a variety of possible shapes, including:

O O O O O O

and

O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O O

O O O O O O

O O O O O

O O O O

O O O

O O

These shapes reveal two different series or families that the quantity 36 is a member of:

The square numbers:

1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, etc.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O

The painting “Square with 699 Dots” is a member of this family.

The triangular numbers:

1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, etc.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O

O O O

The two paintings “Natural Succession 33” and “Natural Succession 36” are members of this family.

Another number-family represented in this show is the oblong numbers:

2, 6, 12, 20, 30, etc.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O O O O O O

O O O O O O

The two paintings “Oblong With 16,257 Dots” and “Oblong With 3,783 Dots” are members of this family.

All three families were explored and named thousands of years ago, before Pythagoras. These days they are often referred to as “figurate” numbers.

Other pieces result from explorations with a slightly more modern form, plane geometry, another mathematical world that can often be explored without numerals. These particular pieces resulted from my fascination with the hexagonal star, also known as the Star of David. Creating one by superimposing two triangles was a soothing operation for me. I set out to discover a method for achieving a similar aim with the septagonal, or “Sheriff’s” star.

One solution to this challenge involved the creation of the two shapes explored in the pieces “Septagon With Four Stellations”, “Septagon with Three Stellations”, and “Star Parts”.

Other works:

Division By The Plus:

the plane is divided into four by the plus. Each resulting quadrant is likewise divided, and this process of division is continued until the rhythm of line and space feels balanced. The resulting field of pluses illustrates the mathematical series of the successive powers of 4, so that

the drawing begins with one plus, which is 4 to the zero power

next, four plusses are added in the four quadrants created by the first plus, which is 4 to the first power, or 4x1

next, sixteen plusses are added in each of the four sub-quadrants in each quadrant, which is 4 to the second power, or 4x4

next, 64 plusses are added … which is 4 to the third power, or 4x4x4

etc.

“The plus sign will never fight against the minus sign”

-Alfred Jarry

A Minor:

This painting has been made on the right sides of the 52 white key-levers of an upright piano, arrayed as a fan. The black and white designs hint at the absurd complexity of tuning and temperament, reconciled to the mechanics of the piano, as expressed by the progressive displacement of the inset counterweights.

It has been named A minor as the low note of the piano is “A”, and the scale of the white notes played with “A” as the tonal center is A minor.

My paintings and drawings have all begun as explorations of various mathematical visualizations. The structures and concepts that I begin with engage my eye and mind in a way that both calms and provokes me. Each has been completed through a sequence of small and consistent adjustments and modifications, with a patience I do not possess in any other of my activities. Each is done when my eye dances and rests at the same time.

Painting Numbers: New Paintings From Fran Holland

September 03, 2013

FRAN HOLLAND

Painting Numbers

September 7 - October 13

Optically throbbing, organic designs/images that spring from his obsession with ancient math and science.

OPENING RECEPTION FOR THE ARTIST

Saturday, September 7

7 - 9 PM

Yard Dog Art Gallery
1510 S. Congress Ave

Austin, TX 78704

Fran Holland, who lives in Oakland, CA, is an electrician, musician, inventor and all around tinkerer who has a deep and compelling interest in mathematics. He has for most of his life kept notebooks in which he explores various mathematical principles, formulas and systems of counting. Part of that exploration has been the drawing of graphs to illustrate and help visualize the concepts. Several years ago it dawned on him that these graphs would make beautiful paintings so, despite having no training he set to work. The resulting paintings are indeed both beautiful and intriguing, and Yard Dog is excited to give them their first showing.

Sam Mirelez

August 08, 2013

Sam Mirelez of San Antonio spent many, many long hours in his retirement building birdhouses and models out of aluminum siding scraps. He literally filled his yard and covered his house with them. It's been 5 years since he passed away, but we recently acquired a number of his wonderful creations. See them on his page here.

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