posted: September 29, 2008

This week's New Yorker cover by Barry Blitt is another great one, playing off the classic Saul Steinberg New Yorker's view of the world.    Discussion over at Huffington Post here.

posted: September 27, 2008

This is an image I did which accompanied an article in The Wall Street Journal about David Foster Wallace the week after his passing.  I thought his words were a good, thoughtful read, especially for artists.  David Foster Wallace was a great voice which will be terribly missed.   Here is a link to the story on the WSJ website.

posted: September 26, 2008

This is Sergio's page in this week's Washington Post page for kids.  Sergio will be closely monitoring tonight's debate while he ponders jumping into the race on the Flightless Bird ticket.

SERGIO '08 !!!

posted: September 26, 2008

This is an illustration I did for a label for "the dissident" a new beer from Deschutes Brewery in Bend, Oregon.   The beer took about a year to brew and I finally got a bottle this week.   I hadn't done a beer label before so it was fun to work on this new format.   Audelino Moreno was the art director on the project. 
There is an article about the brew HERE at Beer Advocate:
"To give The Dissident its characteristic sour taste, the brewery used a wild yeast strain called Brettanomyces (also known as Brett) during fermentation. Known throughout the wine world for creating earthy undertones found in many European wines, Brett is used in the beer fermentation process to create strong flavors typically associated with Belgian beers. Unlike English varieties that use traditional inoculated yeasts in the fermentation process, beers made with Brett take much longer to ferment and require additional barrel finishing time to balance the sour flavoring. In The Dissident's case, this meant aging a portion of it in Pinot noir and Cabernet barrels for more than three months. Another key flavor component comes from the Central Washington cherries that were added 12 months ago.
     Due to the wild yeast, The Dissident required special treatment and was held in isolation under lock and key apart from the rest of the brewery's beers to avoid any cross-contamination. A secondary bottling line was also brought in from an outside contractor to facilitate The Dissident's bottling and ensure the beer and wild yeast never touched the brewery's machinery.
     With a beer this wild and truly unique, Deschutes needed a special label to alert consumers to what lay inside. The resulting image immediately sets The Dissident apart from the other Deschutes Brewery beers, even the Reserve Series beers.
     A very limited amount of The Dissident will be available at the end of August as part of the brewery's Reserve Series in hand-waxed 22-ounce bottles and on draft at select establishments. MSRP for a 22-ounce bottle is $9.99."

The top of the beer has this dripped wax element, which gives the package a nice look.  It's a Flanders style brown ale.

These are some drawings I did of crows while sketching ideas for the label.

Click HERE to go to the Deschutes website for more info.

posted: September 20, 2008

Thanks to everyone that came out to the opening of my show in Toronto.  For those that couldn't make it, scroll down to see the work and photos from the exhibit.  Please e-mail or call the gallery about availability of the work, sizes, medium, etc., thanks:
Lonsdale Gallery 410 Spadina Road, Toronto, ON  Canada M5P 2W2,  tel: (416) 487-8733
e-mail:  info@lonsdalegallery.com,  Gallery director:  Alejandro Cardona
Please click HERE for an online review of the exhibit.  The work will also be part of the Toronto International Art Fair from October 2-6.

posted: September 19, 2008

This is for an article about embracing the economic doldrums.  Have a nice weekend!
CLICK HERE   for a fun vintage Alka-Seltzer ad.

posted: September 16, 2008

Sergio was offered a unique opportunity to explain the issues of the 2008 election to children in The Washington Post.  For the next seven weeks until the election, Sergio will be featured in the KidsPost page of The Washington Post every Tuesday, reacting to issues such as the environment, the economy, education, energy, etc.  This week's page is the environment and global warming.   He made it to the cover of today's paper!   (see above)  The interior layouts are below. 

posted: September 15, 2008

For about a year, I've been illustrating regularly for Businessweek on a number of subjects concerning the horrible economy—bad loans, investment banks, unemployment, etc.  Some of the illustrations are below, along with an article from today by TIME's Joe Klein.  He discusses John McCain's inability to deal with all of this.

September 15, 2008

Their Brand is Collapse

John McCain is up with an ad touting his "experience" to deal with the financial crisis. But no specific experience is cited--which is attributable to the fact that McCain has been a happily orthodox Republican when it comes to financial regulation these past 26 years. He's against it. He's against Washington telling you how to run your business. The unseen hand of the market and all that...
This has been the long-standing Republican bait and switch--scaring small businesses with the threat of new regulations if the Democrats win, commiserating with larger businesses about the evils of environmental and plant safety rules, while lifting as many regulations as possible governing the financial titans whose credit should be at the heart of new economic development. But that hasn't been happening: the financial titans have been going for the quick buck rather than the sound one. Money and creativity have been redirected during the Reagan-Bush era away from substantive loans to real businesses into a Ponzi scheme of borrowing by investment bankers, so they could engage in the most irresponsible, if lucrative (for them) speculative lending imaginable...In this sense, the mortgage crisis was a perfect metaphor for Republican financial governance: Investment banks like Lehman--R.I.P.--took loans to invest money in...bad loans. In this case, the loans were bad mortgages. This is called throwing good money after bad.
Actually, John McCain has excellent experience--a ringside seat--in the vagaries of this experiment in greed and anarchy. He was a member of the Keating Five. This was the signature scandal of the Savings and Loan crisis, twenty years ago. It concerned the insider help that five Senators gave Charles Keating and his Lincoln Savings and Loan, in return for contributions and gifts. The deregulation of S&Ls--community banks dedicated to local mortgages (like George Bailey's bank in "It's A Wonderful Life")--enabled slick operators like Keating to make reckless loans in new areas where they had no expertise. The final tab to the taxpayers was $165 billion.
McCain wasn't the worst offender in the scandal. He was included in the Five to make it bipartisan (the other four were Democrats). But he knew Keating, partied with him, made inquiries on his behalf. He once told me that his role in the scandal was harder on him, in some ways, than being a prisoner of war "Because my honor was called into question."
After an experience like that, you might think Senator Honorable would have devoted himself to preventing other such crises--to making sure the Big Wall Street Casino was operating according to rules that wouldn't screw the small investors and, more to the point, the taxpayers. But he walked the anti-regulatory party line, with only occasional exceptions...and tried to lay down a smokescreen of righteousness by campaigning against small potato[e!]s like legislative earmarks--money to study the mating habits of, uh, crabs, in, uh, Alaska (proposed by Governor Honorable).
What we are seeing on Wall Street today is the result of an ideology gone amok. There was call to loosen and change the antiquated regulations governing investment back in 1980. But the Republican era has seen that loosening go to the point of near-cataclysm. Banks are failing, markets dropping. We are in the midst of a slow-motion economic crash. What happens next is an economic contraction: loans aren't available, so businesses can't expand. A crash comes at the beginning of a period of economic trouble.
John McCain, after his political near-death experience, could have made the responsible regulation of markets one of his great causes. He didn't. And today he said, once again, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." I hope he's right, but it's entirely possible that he knows as much about our economy as Sarah Palin knows about The Bush Doctrine.

posted: September 10, 2008

 Click HERE for video of Obama on the 'lipstick on a pig' phony media controversy o' the day.

posted: September 5, 2008

Newsweek's Amid Capeci (former AD at Rolling Stone and Esquire) has hosted an online roundtable discussion with Philip Burke, Steve Brodner, Dan Adel, and Victor Juhasz at the Society of Publication Designers website.  It's a great read and gives a lot of information about the work in the show, how the artists work, and the state of political caricature today.

Please check it out at the new SPD.org blog site HERE. 

While you're there, wonder around the new website, it has a lot of interesting articles, worth checking it often.   Many thanks to Amid for getting in touch and putting this together, he's always been a big fan of illustration. 

posted: September 5, 2008

I've worked on a number of recent assignments for my former colleagues at TIME magazine and thought I'd put them up as a group.  It's always nice to get a call from them. 

This one was for a column by Michael Kinsley about voting for candidates based on their bios  (McCain's time in Vietnam, Biden's loss of his wife and daughter in a car accident, etc.), and how campaigns take advantage of these kinds of voters by repeating the stories over and over.

This was for a column that discussed ways that the Olympics could change China's oppressive tendencies of the past and open up the country to the rest of the world.

posted: September 3, 2008

Giuliani is speaking at the Republican convention this evening.  Tune in for his special brand of fear mongering which was nicely captured in this portrait by Hanoch Piven!   
It is one of five portraits by Hanoch which are part of the POLITICS 08 show.  This piece was published on the cover of The Progressive magazine.