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?