Aardvark Art Glass

The books in the above picture are filled with pages of collective drawings I’ve made with my pals in The Lost School of Madison over the years. By “collective drawing” I mean that pictures are created by one person drawing something and then passing it to another person and they add to it etc. and so on. By “my pals” I mean myself and three of my friends Bob (aka “Foster”), Sean and Rob. Since I consider The Lost  School a collective (like the Borg on Star Trek) names are not all that important. I mention us four because we’ve been drawing together the longest and also because I’ll be referring to those guys later on. Anyway, I have about fifteen of these books and there’s probably another ten or twelve of them out there in other people’s possession.”The books”, as I call them, date from 1988 to the present day.

This is a picture of the inside of one of the books. This one contains drawings we made on bar napkins in the year 1990 at the Paradise Lounge on East Main St. in Madison. The drawings are not as remarkable as the fact that seventeen years ago Foster took it upon himself to archive all of these on acid free paper and I still have them. The drawings are better organized than a lot of my tax information.

There’s a very strange quality to drawings made by more than one person. The end product is not usually a unified idea that starts in one place and ends logically in another. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. People tend to add the first thing that pops into their head according to whatever is drawn before. A lot of what’s drawn is not great, nor may it go together very well, but parts of it can be extremely funny and surreal–bits that one person may not have thought of if they were drawing by themselves. It is these “bits” that I intend to reproduce and make into a very long series of beads which will be sold on ebay. Cute animal drawings, such as the fish and squids that I designed solo, will also be available but won’t be part of the Lost School Series.

I have used Lost School artwork in my work before. In fact, I have a Cafe Press storeselling some bar napkin designs on t-shirts and what have you. The black and white outlines have been colored in using Photoshop to make them more appealing. The “I Am Picasso” design has sold the best. I made that one into a bead but it was too sludgy to sell. I’m going to give that one another try because the red bull was really pretty.

Here is the Vampire Star Bird With A Hat. This one will be going up later on today. Eventually text from our collective poetry will be incorporated into these and it will probably make about as much sense an the Vampire Star Bird itself. But it will be new, dammit. You better pay attention to this because I’m not going to repeat all this in every auction. Even though the sun doesn’t rise and set on your understanding everything I don’t want you to be completely confused when the strange beads start coming.