Cheapass Crateart on Ebay

As I talked a bit about in my last post, I have put up the first of a new series up on Ebay. My new series, which I have creatively titled "the Ebay Series", will be a constant flow of 10 pieces for auction on Ebay with a stating bid of about $50. If I sell one, I'll make a new one and put it up. If I have 10 pieces up and none sell, I'll stop making Ebay work all together. Its kinda like a virtual Jag Fu that never ends.

Anywho, the first four pieces are posted. If anyone buys one and mentions this blog, I'll take $5.00 off your total, blog reader reward.

I tell you making these piece was a lot of fun. Jag Fu 2008 is starting to get into works (more on this later), and I'm really looking forward to it. Making Crateart sketches, which is kinda what Jag Fu / Ebay Series is, is a fun and expressive act. I'll make a post about the next batch I make, talking about the techniques I use in creation, my influences, my thoughts, all that crap. I owe you guys a look at my new studio anyway.

Here's some links to the first four Ebay pieces:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Original-Crateart-by-Mike-Elias_W0QQitemZ170208010661QQihZ007QQcategoryZ20158QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

http://cgi.ebay.com/Original-Crateart-by-Mike-Elias_W0QQitemZ170208013089QQihZ007QQcategoryZ20158QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

http://cgi.ebay.com/Original-Crateart-by-Mike-Elias_W0QQitemZ170208015253QQihZ007QQcategoryZ20158QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

http://cgi.ebay.com/Original-Crateart-by-Mike-Elias_W0QQitemZ170208017757QQihZ007QQcategoryZ20158QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Crateart MeetsTrenchart

I credit a lot of my influence as an artist to my growing up in Oklahoma. New York City is a wonderful place for art and culture, but I sometimes feel that the only people who understand NYC art and culture are New Yorkers. A lot of Midwestern artists come to a place like NY and slowly divorce themselves from their roots, maybe it is the very reason they chose NYC. Some, like me, find a part of themselves left behind and try to capture it.

A bit on my Dad: My dad, I don’t believe, ever had any intention of being an artist. I recall as a child seeing a painting he had done of my mother. It was maybe the single largest influence to me, I was young and I thought it was amazing. Later, after leaving OK and studying art, and becoming a professional artist in NYC I would go home and see this painting as something different. I would see my father’s work as a young man’s somewhat talented attempt to impress a woman. No issue with that, all artists have been there at some time I think, but what surprised me upon seeing it later in life was that it was not the grand master work I had remembered from my childhood. It was a gouache or acrylic on cheap canvas full of indifferent brushstrokes and a poor color pallet. I’m not saying it was ugly, because it wasn’t. I’m just saying it was the work of a young unskilled painter, and that was apparent.

I never saw my father paint anything while I was growing up. He seemed the last person on Earth you’d expect to be an artist. He had pick-up trucks and guns and loved chili and football and hunting. Other than the one painting of my mother, my parents decorated their house with Middle America, lower middleclass kitsch. There was a print of a squirrel and a chipmunk they always hung, and a saddle that once belonged to my great grandfather that was always in one corner. My dad had a large, framed, Budweiser poster depicting Custer’s Last Stand that always got the center wall space in our house, and I remember them displaying a nearly four foot wooden fork and spoon.

My parents weren’t the only ones to decorate their home in this manner, and I think this is what I mean when I say that New Yorkers only understand New York art. Middle America is full of homes decorated with poster prints, once sold at Wal-Mart for $15.99 and resold at a garage sale for $.25. This concept is something I’ve tried to capture in my work for a long time now. Items like wooden ducks and quilts and electronic waterfall clocks are a direct homage to Midwestern kitsch decoration.

Back to my Dad, once when I was a teenager he decided to make a special decoration, much to my mother’s disapproval. My father bought a small wooden case of shelves with glass doors and put it in our dining room. He then began to collect porcelain figurines that only showed black figures. Not racist figures so much, but kitschy figurines (angles, children crossing bridges, old men fishing), just instead of them being white faces everyone was black. After awhile he had filled the entire case. I remember that I always thought this was a humorous decoration in the house, and I really enjoyed his collection. I liked it then because I thought it was a delightful way for my dad to bug my mom, and because it was something so unusual. Now when I think back to this piece, I think it was a quite brilliant work. My father never made a racist statement by creating and displaying this piece, instead he accused the viewer of being racist by having a problem with it. In its concept, a white family owning and displaying a large collection of black figurines in the middle of Oklahoma during the early 1900’s, I find the piece ahead of its time. The only difference between this piece and work I might do today is that my father just made this piece for no reason and I would, today, call it art.

And that is my dad, doing it just for the hell of it, making art and not even knowing it. One time when I came home from college to visit my parents they had installed this giant popcorn maker right in the middle of their living room. I mean the kind of popcorn maker that usually has wheels and vendors use at baseball games or main street events. When I asked why it was there in their small living room my father told me he liked popcorn. Or the giant piano in their front room, which takes up as much space as a large couch. Atop it are about a hundred karate trophies my brother, Dustin, won when he was five to seven years old and a taxidermied fish affixed to a piece of drift wood. All this kind of thing and a print of a squirrel and a chipmunk, a saddle, and a print of Custer’s Last Stand.

These are the types of things which surrounded me growing up; Background images, and now I make Crateart.

So a couple of weeks ago my dad called me and told me to check out this Ebay posting he had made. My dad had bought a few items at some garage sales and decided he would just glue them together and call them art. He had taken a defused hand grenade, a plaque, and an army patch and, in his own words, spent less than 10 minutes making a work of art. He put this item on Ebay and in ten minutes had 6 bids on it for over $110. He called this kind of artwork “trench art”, because he had seen other works like it on Ebay similarly titled (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trench_art). My dad loves Ebay and I think he was very proud that I enjoyed his Trench art piece.

My dad plans on making more trench art.

As for my conclusions on this story, other than a new respect for my father as an artist and a greater understanding of my own influences, I think I am going to take a page out of my dad’s book. I posted Froot Loop Chuck on Ebay to try to drum up some attention to my website and I have started gathering material and plan to create a few new crateart pieces to be sold on Ebay. I have done some great work in “Teach your children About Johnny Cash” and “Jag Fu”, which were made quickly and for a low cost. This new body of work will be affordable, about $50 gets you Crateart.

After everything I’ve been through as an artist, after all the failures and the indifference of the art community, I still believe in Crateart. A fusion of country kitsch and big-city fanciness, Composition and Squirrels and Chipmunks can make something beautiful. I’ll be sure to post links to the Ebay auctions as they are created. Four works will go up this week.

Froot Loop Chuck Ebay posting: http://cgi.ebay.com/Froot-Loop-Chuck-Close-not-a-cornflake_W0QQitemZ170205108280QQihZ007QQcategoryZ20158QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Working Title

Please read previous post titled "An Idea"

I'm not shitting, this is beginnning right now. First off, I want to arrange a basic plot outline. Over the past 7 years I have actually thought quite a lot about this and have a plot structure in mind, but it needs to be finalized. Look for the first post soon, unless I get lazy and start playing World of Warcraft again (holy hell I hope not, this is a lot cooler).

I will need These people to contact me: Dustin Elias, Matt Puckett, Adam Brumley

I will also need a few NPC players. So its roll call time. You wanna play a part in this story you gotta contact me. All it takes is that you will take this seriously. It will not require a lot of attention, basically you will have to keep up with the story and tell me how your appointed character will react. Imagine this story as a "choose your own adventure" book where multiple characters will make choices that will influence the entire story itself.

For those who are interested, email me with your name, your email, and your phone number at mike@crateartist.com. I will respond soon. This will be lots of fun for everyone. The initial set up time will most likely be a couple of months with updates appearing about one a week thereafter.

just to let everyone know, this is not Dungeons and Dragons. The beginning campaign was, but it switched tracks long ago. I make up my own rules, and this is more like writing. I will make up a plot structure and the players will fill in all the details. Its like a story where the characters are assigned and the plot follows their decisions.

There will be lots of artwork which I will make to go along with this story, so it will be well illustrated. Any artists who join are welcome to add thier own artwork.

I will save the introduction for the first actual post, which will be writen as soon as I can find the first batch of players.

If anyone has any ideas for a title, respond to this post with your idea. If anyone has any ideas of a better way to host this event, please email me ( it will be hard to get me off this blog, I kinda like the idea of a blog campign). Email or respond with any ideas at all.

An Idea

So I had this idea today walking home from the gym. Dungeons and Dragons was always a huge influence to me, my art began there and often returns there. It was a language I created as a kid and developed after years of playing. Before video games, which I suffer a huge addiction to, I played D&D constantly. It made high school a nightmare, but when it was over I realized that I had taught myself how to manage large projects and how to draw. If it hadn't been for D&D I would never had become an artist.

Starting D&D in 6th grade, I soon met up with Matt Puckett. Matt, my brother Dustin, and I palyed D&D for sometimes up to 30 hours straight, and often several days a week. I always prepared the adventures which Dustin and Matt's characters traveled. We added new players sometimes, and sometimes old players would leave, but it was always constant that the three of us remained.

I believe it was in 8th grade I wanted to start a new campaign. I had a firmer understanding of the game by this point and wanted to try some new ideas, which would be better to begin from scratch. Matt, Dustin and I decided it was time to adopt a steady group of players. We recruited people we knew, friends of friends, people we knew who played. As I recall we actually made a list of 10 people and called every one of them to see who would arrive. We didn't actually know most of these people very well other than that we knew they played D&D. In the end, our campaign consisted of (shout out) Lang Lee, Matt Puckett, Dustin Elias, Danny Groshong, Kit Applegate, and Justin Cross. It is important to mention these names because these people later became my very best friends, and it is hard to imagine what would have happened if this campaign had never existed.

The campaign began at level one and was played once a week from the time I was in eighth grade until far after I graduated high school. Kit Applegate and Lang Lee left the campaign but new members were added, most notably Adam Brumley. The campaign lasted so long and the stories became so awesome that several drug addictions, girlfriends, changes in school/life never broke it up. I would estimate that the campaign lasted solidly from about 1990 to about 1997-98 with little pause. The campaign became so great that in 2001, after about 2 years since the last campaign, I made a final campaign which played a few nights before I left Oklahoma for NYC.

In art school, and even now, I would draw doodles of the characters, which after so long developed personalities of their own. Even a full scale painting when the mood struck me. Everytime I saw one of my old friends, the campaign would come up. And I have always promised that it would continue.

Things are so different now. My brother Dustin has 2 kids and he's in Korea. Matt Puckett is the GM of a jewelry store in Mass. Adam Brumely is in Iraq with the National Guard. And I'm here in Florida. But waling back from the gym today, I thought that maybe this blog could be a good forum for the next chapter of our campaign. There's blog space to type, and the ability to respond, even an audience to spectate. There's new players to take on roles of new characters and the ability to make drawings and post them.

If in my artwork I could capture the same level of brilliance I did in my old D&D campaigns I would feel as though I had broken through a barrier that most artists never breach. Yet why must something like D&D be held to a lower standard than art? If one is bullshit, why is the other ivory? I've seen them both long enough to know what the value of each one is and I feel like the addition of a new chapter belongs here, with my artwork. Those who disagree never really understood what Crateart is about.

I plan to begin this soon. This post, and the next one will be posted here and on my Myspace page. I will post on these two pages only unless other oppertunities present themselves.

Howsit Been

Not gonna go into a big huff about new artwork. It's been awhile, and sorry to report that I haven't made much. In art school you look at all those loosers who quit and you think you'll never be one of them. Too much passion, too much talent, that kinda shit. But real life is, well, real. And you can never prepare yourself.

I'm not quit as of now, just been lazy. Easy to be lazy in a place like Florida, but that's a poor excuse. New work's been made, even sold, but the days of spending hours a day in the studio making Froot Loop Chuck seem far away and maybe even missed. I've been making new work again lately, the most since Jag Fu. Hopefully I'll keep it up. The beast of the artworld was an asshole, but it was a motivator. Without it on my tail its easy to be distracted. But from time to time I return, here, and tell myself its time to get moving again. I guess I can't really ever quit, because what else would I have to do?

Baby Art

How I love that little dude. Maybe I'm just a proud father who happens to know a lot about painting materials. No matter, I find the following to be true: Children's artwork is remarkable. As an abstraction, nothing compares to scribblings. Was Jackson Pollock really conscious of his marks? Could he really separate himself from his creation or was he concerned with composition? Who cares, his works' worth millions and my son makes scribblings. But there is something to say for scribblings of a toddler, there was no concern for composition in the creation of my son's work. There was no years of art school telling my son what marks and colors were acceptable and which were not. There was no decades of television, magazines, newspapers, billboards, mail, T-shirts, books, or the opinions of others to influence my son's scribblings. The only influence my son had to make his work was that the panel, like the wall (ugh!), was white. As an artist, my work will never and can never be as pure.

You want more, meet me at the bar and I'll talk about the minimalists and their relationship to my son's scribblings. I'd tell you that my son is a master at abstraction and a master minimalist, and he's loosing his skill everyday he is alive just like the rest of us. But that's a better conversation over a beer.

South Florida Artists Form Voltron

As I stated in a past post, the largest force that kicked my ass off a 9-month World of Warcraft binge was being surrounded by other artists and musicians during my friend's (Noel Heberling's) wedding. Returning from Korea I decided that it was time to find some other inspirational types closer to home. Now I must state that I don't know a soul in Florida. There are a few parents I know from different parenting events, but I know nothing about the local artists or the local art scene.

I tried Meetup.com. For those who don't know, Meetup.com is a great way to find people with similar interests near you. Basically one person creates a sort of "webpage" on Meetup and invites local people to join. The meetup page is perfect for scheduling events in real life. To create a Meetup page costs about $20 a month.

There were a few South Florida meetups already formed, two were outdated and getting ready to expire (the owner didn't want to pay anymore). The third one had very few events and was more geared to professional artists to be that lived about 50 miles away from me. So none were ideal.

My response was to just create my own group and pay twenty bucks. So far, the response has been very good. I have several members and I seem to get a new one every day. Our first Meetup is this Friday at a cool bar I found here in Delray.

In NY, Szalla used to get gatherings of artists to go the Cedar Bar or Kettle of Fish and we would talk till 3am until we were all drunk and full of inspiration. I hope to find that here.

The link to my meetup is http://art.meetup.com/329/

The link to the coolass bar that I plan to bring my group and frequent often myself is http://www.kevroart.com/

And finally the link the MOBA, a funny website I found is http://www.museumofbadart.org/. I plan to try to make a piece worthy of this museum.

Red Vinyl

I am announcing a new series of Crateart titled "the Red Vinyl Series". Works created in the Red Vinyl Series are not for sale. Each piece is gifted to a specific person under the condition that it never be sold nor lended away. This way money has nothing to do with the work, it can't be sold, or bought, or obtained in any way unless I make it specifically for you and give it to you for free. Every piece will be made for a person that inspires me to create work.

The set will have no more than 20 pieces. I would like to do 20 total, but we will see how it works out in the end.

As a former NYC professional artist, I was bombarded with the notion that an artist is, first, a keen marketer of their work. Working int he field of art for many years proved this to be true. With the boundaries of what's good and bad art so fuzzy in our contemporary setting, talent becomes secondary to the ability to convince a client that you are a worthy investment.

In conflict with this thought is the dated notion of the sublime, that art has the ability to transcend itself form just a physical object and becomes a passageway between mankind and the divine. Less boldly stated, that art must be more than a pretty object or a wise investment, that it must be condensed with the passion of the artist and that it must transport the viewer to another place simply with its presence.

Practicality vs. Romanticism.

I have chosen a side with this series, and it is a sure loss. Red Vinyl will never make me famous or pay the rent. They will be created with one person in mind, and with that person's influence on my life as the motivation for its creation. In turn, My intention is to have the pieces bestowed with the greatest value and sentimentality by the person they are gifted to, the one, and only one, intended viewer.

I shall write more on Red Vinyl as I see it form. Below are a few pictures of Red Vinyl #2 (Jason Szalla), in progress.

A Trip in Korea

I don't want to harp on my vacation too long, as this is a blog about Carateart and not Mike's vacation blog. But it is true that life effects art, or at least I like to let me life effect my art. So I'll harp a little.

I never left Seoul the entire time I was in Korea. I was only there a week and Seoul is just a fucking awesome city. Imagine that you were only in NYC for a week, would you think to leave to go check out Buffalo? Hell no.

To explain Seoul properly I would like to dispel any existing perceptions on what Korea is like. I must admit to having some American bias before entering and was quite surprised to see where I had landed. Korea is not a "totally different" culture. Its not Mars. Many customs we have in the US, Koreans also have. Florida is a much freakier place. If was easy to order food, find a bathroom, get a hotel, etc. Many of the younger Koreans speak English. There are like 4-5 English channels on television. The porn sucks, so does the food, but like any big city there is a wide variety of foreign competition. Also, I would like to point out to those traveling that the dollar is not all-powerful there. A buck is worth about W1000, which is worth about a dollar.

Seoul is a grand city, much like New York. They have a strong public transportation, a huge population, and various districts that specialize in goods (shopping, food, art, fabric). The people of Seoul are well educated and quite proud of their culture. They are happy to suggest things to do and even join you if you invite them.

The most I have taken back from Seoul, the things that will linger and resonate in my life are so: I miss the city. Being in a real city for a week has made me realize how far away I live from the energy. In Seoul I was treated with a great deal of hospitality by the people, and I find that a good example to follow. Americans are much more hostile to foreigners and it is shameful. there is no limit to the amount of things you can put on a moped. Squid and cocktail sauce don't mix. Inspiration is like a light that surrounds you, it keeps you in the groove and it gives groove to all around you. NYC taxi drivers actually drive kinda safe. Being lost in a strange city is almost always a good thing, if its scary thats even better. good stories come from weird shit. The way to beat a Stasis Deck is to be patient and wait for an optimal round. My brother, Dustin, and I are night and day. He joined the Army and I'm an artist. Yet despite our many differences something musta happened deep int eh Oklahoma mud that bound us. I miss him a lot. Playing Magic and bullshitting with Dustin is about as good as it gets.

Other than that, if you want to know more about Korea or Seoul buy a guide book. Here's a standard tour-book picture.

I Got Seoul

So much happening. Why I work in spurts I do not know but I am always either on or off. Right now I am on, and I feel very bright. Things are happening in my studio again, the painful beginnings where you don't know what to do and you search blindly for inspiration. The project currently is Red Vinyl #2 (Jason Szalla). It is a project I began a few months ago and never delved past the layer of ice on top (mostly due to Karazan). Its ugly right now, but its happening and that's what's important. Everything is given way to this, I promise I ain't slacking no more, at least not for some great length of time.

Tomorrow I am getting on a plane for Korea. my brother joined the army a few ago and he's at least not in Iraq. I'm looking forward to visiting him, this trip has been planned for ages. So Red Vinyl will have to wait till I get back, but I'll be working while I'm there. I will be searching for answers and ideas. I'm bringing a camera, my new journal, some watercolors, and some running shoes.

When I get back, and things get a little more presentable, I promise some pictures of Red Vinyl #2 and maybe a pic or two of my vacation. I'll try to send you a blog from Korea too, so keep checking in.