Perhaps an introduction is in order:
Welcome, curiosity seeker/lurker/distant relative, to Or Best Offer. This blog will chronicle a series of drawings
I’m doing based on listings I find in the Pennysaver,
a.k.a. the circular of oddball free-verse classifieds that appears in my
mailbox each week, and with which I have a mild but persistent obsession.
Now you might have questions such as “what is the allure of
the Pennysaver?” and “are you drawing
the listing or what’s described in the listing?” and “this sounds like a lot of
horseshit, if you ask me.” To which I
would probably reply, “it’s complicated,” and “some combination of the two,”
and “that’s not a question, chief.” And if you pressed me further, and you seemed
genuinely interested, and maybe plied me with a couple of free drinks, I’d oblige
you with some background, like I’m about to do right now, even though you
didn’t buy me any drinks, you cheapskate:
In 2011 I decided to draw every front page of the LA Times
for an entire year (the results of which can be seen at Mixed Media Daily
). That project proved to be a great
incubator for a whole host of themes—our relationship to the media we consume,
our waning love affair with paper/physical goods, typography, advertising, and
so on. It was great fun, but inevitably it had to end. And so, after a year of
late nights and countless worn-down Mono 2Bs, my inky muse and I parted ways.
Of course finishing the project did not mean that I was
finished with the ideas that had sprouted from its loamy expanse. I found
myself jonesing for another media source that would provide me with a bumper
crop of au courant text that I could harvest,
grist I would mill into more drawings and more strangely elaborate farming
metaphors.
Let’s cut to my art materials cabinet. In there, flattened
under a pad of tracing paper that I never seem to find any use for, is a small stack
of Pennysavers in which I have highlighted any listing that caught my fancy because of the way it was written,
or because the item offered was intriguing (e.g., “For Sale: Bull Skull”), or because
of some cryptic possibility that would no doubt reveal itself to me if I held
onto it (a rationalization that is not, I imagine, dissimilar to that of the
compulsive hoarder).
Soon enough I put two and two together and concluded that those
little text blocks in the Pennysaver
were written to 1) make you visualize something, and 2) make you desire the
thing visualized. And there’s a weird intimacy in the deal: you are being
invited to inspect a tiny detail of a person’s life, a detail on which that
person has made a judgment (set a price). And you, the prospective buyer, are
being asked to validate their assessment (agree to their price). It’s a commercial transaction, but it's something more as well. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it
was enough to get me started; the Pennysaver’s
endless lists of want and need were making my pencil move (settle down,
Freudians…). And really, when presented
with an opportunity to dream up 60 potted cacti (an entry I have highlighted
but not yet tackled) I cannot in good conscience say “no.”
I’ll be posting outcomes here from time to time. I might throw in some commentary
occasionally. And, if I ever come across
a Pennysaver listing that I feel
compelled to own (I have once or twice), and if I act on that desire (I have
not yet), I’ll tell you all about it.
