For a weighty Bloomberg Markets story about multinational criminal gangs using intimidation and violence to get poor eastern europeans to sell their kidneys.
What was crazy was some of the complicit doctors in the story, so I included them in the roughs.
Gangsters, a former Ukrainian kick boxer in this case, search for people willing to sell a kidney for $10,000 or less.
They sell the organs for 15 to 20 times what they pay, profiting from misery of the gravely ill and poor.
The most heartbreaking part is when they only pay the poor people half what they promised and often their health is wrecked.
For today's NY Times Op Ed and first job with Matt Dorfman.
The article was mostly about China wanting Korea to stay divided, so I had to explore that in the roughs. But I was really hoping I could get away with a conceptual portrait.
Luckily Matt agreed AND was willing to go to bat for the idea.
And thankfully gave me an extra hour to paint it.
This was for the Zellerbach paper company calendar. The calendar was titled "Year of the Tree" and I got the month of November. The company later went under and was bought out, so the calendar never was produced, so I thought I'd give it some life here. Happy Thanksgiving!
Got a call from ESPN the magazine, not to spoof Roy Lichenstein of course, but to illustrate the Seattle Mariners rebuilding their baseball team and possibly trading their star players Felix Hernandez and Ichiro Suzuki. The editors suggested a garage sale scene or the player's sitting on a pile of dynamite, which I explored.
But after doodling the Mariner's logo over and over, I saw that I could turn it into an explosion, to go with the expression "blow up the team".
And the explosion I was drawing kept reminding me of my favorite Roy Lichenstein painting "Explosion" 1965.
Of course I could have easily drawn my own explosion, but I thought how fun would it be to spoof the Lichenstein, and maybe, just maybe, some readers would enjoy the spoof as well.
I knew the art directors would, and Oliver Yoo who art directed this, went for it, thanks Oliver!
I love spoofing famous artworks, just for the fact alone to closely study their compositions.
Of course I didn't want to hide this fact, so I wrote "Apologies to Lichenstein" along the bottom of my illustration, like Bob Staake wrote "After Escher" on his brilliant New Yorker Cover last July. Which I loved and have on my studio wall.
Later while researching the painting, I stumbled across this website "Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein"put together by art historian, David Barsalou who has spent 25 years (looking through 30,000 comic books!) to find examples like these, he has found more than a 140.
Which made me realize that I should have actually written "Apologies to some unknown '60s comic artist, because unfortunately, the original source of "Explosion" I spoofed wasn't on his site. Perhaps Mr. Barsalou needs to look through a few more comic books ; )
Of course everybody knows Lichenstein was inspired by the comics but I had never realized how directly he drew from them, including the text. I figured he had and but never really thought too much about it, because I understood what he was going for. But after seeing these, examples, maybe he should've have written "Apologies to Tony Abruzzo, John Romita, Jim Pike etc etc." under his paintings....
Here's "my" piece in print. My little acknowledgement at the bottom ended up being removed by the magazine, as unnecessary or distracting, which is probably correct....but it was necessary for me! It made me feel better.
