Christine Nockels Paper Sculpture DAY 13

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Visit www.gothtober.com and click on Day 13

Ms. Nockels brings to us this fine 13th of Gothtober an instructional on how to make your very own enchanting, creepy little paper souls out of office supplies.

Offices can be places for roiling productivity, but more often than not, offices inspire naps, or checking one’s Facebook, or visiting the break room about 20 times in a half an hour. In offices, hard work is expected to be demonstrated through measurable, tangible results yet sometimes… you just gotta do something else. The protestant work ethic can only take you so far, and access into the more abstract world of the mind is a haven. The conceptual narnia of an office is a place where stuff from the supply closet can be so much more, it can be art.

The lines that come from Christine’s pen are fed from a netherworld of passion and heart that fortune 500 companies will never understand or harness. Her work is not meant to be part of a pivotal piece of a company’s continued growth and success, her work is meant to exist and be seen. Art is undervalued in our society, but the expression of human mind and senses is always what people cling to when times are tough. Luckily, artists can’t help themselves and keep stubbornly making art, even while also working day jobs.

Here then, is a way for you to blow off some office steam, stop processing papers and start making things out of papers! Feeling lonely? Make a paper friend! If you don’t like them, you can always incinerate them later. Christine Nockels makes lots of great art, go see some of it, we are especially fond of her series of US Presidents eating hot dogs.

The Stig Strikes Again for Gothtober DAY 12

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Visit www.gothtober.com and click on DAY 12 to see The Stig!

They say that things go better with basset hounds, so we invited The Stig to come on over and celebrate with us for another Gothtober. My goodness, this canine doesn’t disappoint! This year’s presentation by our furry long-eared fellow takes us down an eerie wooded path to tell a story we’ve all been addicted to over the summer. No spoilers! In the footsteps of Flash on Dukes of Hazzard, Sam on That’s So Raven, and Tex Avery’s cartoon creation, the beloved Droopy, The Stig is doing a fine job of becoming everyone’s modern day household Basset Hound!

Make-a-Mask from Wolfcat Workshop from DAY 10

screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-10-17-26-pmVisit www.gothtober.com and visit DAY 10 to get your Gothtober Treat! 

Living and working in Los Angeles, making piece after experimental piece, using lines to communicate shapes and colors, lives the marvelous art wizard, Federico Tobon. I like to imagine him in an exciting tiny yurt on the top of a rickety mountain. The art yurt is very difficult to get to, surrounded by oceans and obstacles at every turn, and Federico is always there, making new things for the world.

He makes drawings, he makes wooden automata, he sews things, he’s always tinkering away and sharing his progress day by day. It brings inspiration to me all the time, knowing that he’s out there flexing his art muscles, eating rice and beans, hanging out with his cat and working on his quest to unite his visual output with his maker spirit.

He’s made us a free download-and-print crafty project, a mask that you can wear to your next costume party! Wear it and then tell everyone it wasn’t you sneaking all the Halloween candy, and they will believe you, since you’ll look completely unrecognizable. Better yet, make Federico’s mask, wear it, take some photos and show us how you’re wearing your original 2016 Tobon Gothtober Mask!

Wolfcat Workshop featuring the work of Federico Tobon has all kinds of curiosities for you to explore. Get his newsletter, go shopping for Tobon originals, see what he’s focusing on now, send him a card! His blog will show you his newest art activities, it’ll make you want to get going on your own projects, I highly recommend it!

Gothtober SURPRISE it’s DAY 9!!!!

Piñatas of bully billionaire politicians are quite popular right now...
Piñatas of bully billionaire politicians are quite popular right now…

Visit www.gothtober.com and click on DAY 9 and well… it might be the scariest thing on the entire calendar this year.

Los Gatitos and their basket of adorable deplorables have collaborated this year to make a short and sweet punk song asking you to please not vote for the Cheeto. I’m not gonna say his name because I’m tired of hearing it, and you know who I’m talking about.

Turn this one on, turn it up and sing along, we need it!

Gothtober 9
It’s always been mine*
But this one I bet
Will be the scariest yet
 
There’s a dangerous monster running for president 
Sick in the head, he’s really not hesitant
To foment violence among his followers
A schoolyard bully with a billion dollars
 
Did you know that
Hitler was elected?
Giving hope to the lost and dejected
But soon he started rounding up Jews
Homosexuals, Gyspies too
Don’t kid yourself it could happen here!
 
With angry talk of rounding up Mexicans
Persecuting Muslims they’re not good Americans
Denigrating women, dredging up hate
Now open your eyes before it’s too late!
 
Please don’t vote for Donald Trump
Please don’t vote for Donald Trump
Please don’t vote for Donald Trump
 
He’s a very bad man, he’s a very bad man!
*not quite true

 

Triple T Day 8 Drawings Show-n-Tell!

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Visit www.gothtober.com and click on DAY 8 to enjoy a slideshow from the family known as Triple T!

The artist of the drawings is 10 years old and VERY into minecraft right now, and rightly aligned her pencil skills to go along with some dragon metamorphosis illustrations to go with this year’s Gothtober theme “Metamorphosis.”

The drawings are available for download so that you may adorn your home or office with poster reminders of dragons, eggs, and destroying the city, and napping! Who doesn’t like napping?

In other news, the photographer, the Mom of Triple T has shared some seasonal recipes from other blogs on her cooking blog, sloCooking, so if you want to check out free recipes for Scary Treats, Frankenstein Cookies, Halloween Cupcakes and more, give it a peek!

Here is also a wonderful recipe for Triple T Chocolate-Avocado Mousse, which debuted at the Avocado & Margarita Festival in Morro Bay, where the requirement was to cook something for the guests using avocado.

A Glorious Stop Motion Explosion with Gothtober Day 7’s Harold!

screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-6-29-29-pm Visit www.gothtober.com and visit DAY 7 for a remarkably tremendous stop motion love letter to the 1995 film “Sense and Sensibility” from Sony Studios.

Harold has admittedly seen this movie more than 100 times, and decided that it was high time a bit of art should be dedicated to a certain celebrated cinematic moment. If you have seen this movie, you know exactly what we’re talking about, and if you don’t… well, perhaps it’s time you rented it on Netflix!

Upon watching this elegantly gorgeous and grotesque build-up of paper parts animation, enjoy the satisfaction and release accompanied by some finely drawn gore that just makes me give an unfiltered, unfettered hat’s OFF to our animator! Undoubtedly, the young and capable and entirely talented Harold spent way beyond any acceptable amount of hours to build this work, and it’s just breathtaking. As you may or may not know, the theme of this year’s Gothtober Calendar is “Metamorphosis” and I dare say, this theme is quite gallantly on display for day 7, we kid you not.

The spirit of this short film is a perfect visual response to both the literary and filmic concept of repression, the classic real kind from 1795 and perhaps the modern, current repression we’re watching while an orange-faced candidate for the presidency makes brains explode merely by saying things out of his face hole. screen-shot-2016-10-10-at-6-35-07-pm

The age of original, soul-crushing good-old-fasbioned Jane Austen-era repression was so strong, mind you, that Ms. Austen remained the anonymous author of Sense and Sensibility until after her death! This woman wrote in a room that had a squeaking board outside the door so that if anyone approached while she wrote, she could quickly hide her manuscript and disguise what she was doing by twiddling her thumbs or knitting lace or whatever people were doing to get themselves through the Napoleonic war. This was not a time to be getting your social vision on, it would be decades before the ethics, passion and exploratory notions in Sense and Sensibility would be truly appreciated.

In Lettres Philosophiques, Voltaire writes

What we find in books is like the fire in our hearts. We fetch it from our neighbor’s, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

And so we’re seeing some of that deep appreciation here in a multi-level artistic accolade from a dedicated fan to a moment, a moment that encapsulates the synthesis of sense and sensibility, in an outrageous transformation followed by a quiet and faithful heartbeat, a bloody, happy heartbeat.

Thank you, Harold Harold, for the blood, sweat, and tears!

Gothtober DAY 6 by Nora R

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Visit www.gothtober.com and click on day 6. It is a slideshow of drawings by Nora R, it is silent, no music accompanies it.
The full title of today’s Gothtober Piece is “5150 – The Wood of the Suicides” 
At the heart of observing Autumn, Fall, Halloween and Gothtober is slowing down, and taking a moment to make friends with the night. The night time of the soul is true and real and necessary. Sadness, emptiness, loss, depression, despair, shame, anger, fear, these are often equated with darkness, but are these emotions bad? No, they are not bad, they are fine as soul, a part of the whole that makes up human existence.
Nora’s Gothtober piece takes the time to take a look at a serious subject, we don’t get a lot of pieces like this, and I’m proud of Nora for having the courage to share her work and this subject with us. Here are Nora’s own words about 5150:
“5150” is the section of the California Welfare and Institutions Code which authorizes a clinician to involuntarily confine a person suspected to have a mental disorder that makes them a danger to themselves, others, and/or gravely disabled. A 5150 hold can at once traumatic and life-saving.
The “Wood of the Suicides” references one of the Circles of Hell, described in Dante’s Inferno (Circle VII, Ring II, Canto XIII). In the seventh circle of Hell, Dante and the poet Virgil travel through a forest haunted by harpies, who feed from the leaves of the bloody oak trees which entomb suicides. The Catholic Church considered suicide to be a deep sin, because it is seen as a rejection of God’s gift of life. 
Dante’s tortured forest is infested with harpies, where the act of suicide is punished by encasing the person in a tree, thus denying them eternal life and damning the soul to an eternity of torture at the talons of the harpies. In addition, the soul can only speak and grieve when it it’s tree is broken or damaged. The trees in the Wood of the Suicides produce blood, rather that sap, and a person remains inside them forever, as a punishment for choosing suicide to express grief or pain.  I read Dante’s inferno in High School, and the imagery of the Wood of the Suicides has stayed with me.  However, I would add a different version. 

I don’t believe in hell, but I do know that some mental illnesses can make this particular circle of hell a reality for a person. People on a 5150 hold are often in great, unimaginable pain, much like the souls entombed in the trees. My piece is an imagining of the internal wood, the internal encasing, that people struggling with severe mental illness can carry with them. 

My hope is that all of these trees are broken, so that people suffering can speak their pain, and tear down everything that keeps us hurting and alone. 

Grassroots organizations on mental illness – The Icarus Project and NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness
Thank you, Nora.

Whose Got the BUGS? Rosalind Helfand’s Gothtober DAY 5!!!

Visit www.gothtober.com and click on day 5!

You’re really going to enjoy this bug puppet show by bug enthusiast, Rosalind Helfand! But also, before we get going on this bug post, Rosalind also included a frog and a crab and a bird. So it’s not JUST bugs… but bugs are a big part of this piece. I asked Roz why she loves bugs so much, she was happy to reply:

Bugs are everywhere! Tons of them. All the time. In and on everything. Including our bodies. Many bug species have been around MUCH longer than humans. They’re survivors and adaptors. They are constructed in all sorts of fascinating ways. Take exoskeletons. How cool are those?! They’re part of an intricate ecosystem and they’re just as important as all the big creatures. But we all need each other — the big and the small. Well, we may need them more than they need us. 

Another fun fact you should know about this piece is that the back of the felt board used for this piece is an actual specimen drawer, see the photo! The other photos above are just a few of Roz’s amazing photos she has taken of insects up close and personal.

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Revolt! Gothtober Day 4 with Jefe!

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www.gothtober.com DAY 4 is by Jefe!

He drew for us a Halloween Fairytale about a little girl who summons a demon to restore Halloween after mean authorities in her school try to take it away!

Jefe recorded his own voice, worked with iMovie and scanned in all of his original drawings to make this piece come to fruition.

When asked about his process, Jefe said:

Gothtober is a chance for us artists to stretch out and try new skills and dance on the wire between stunning success and abject failure (I do need more Halloween cookie recipes though, so keep ‘em coming?).

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Trivia:
• Jefe draws for a living. You can see more of his stuff here
http://www.jefflevineartanddesign.com/
• Jefe’s has a pretty good computer with Adobe Creative Cloud on it.
• Jefe came by his nickname honestly, since his middle school Spanish teacher couldn’t find a suitable equivalent to Jeff.

About working for a Gothtober due date he said:

1 days left, Ommigod! Ommigod! Ommigod! Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression Acceptance. Here some other personality takes over, or I was possessed, or I went into a fugue state, regardless I drew 50 odd panels and scanned them in. 

We’re happy that it all worked out, because DAY 4 is a fun-filled subversive story about what to do when “the man” tries to shut down your Halloween! Don’t let it happen to you!

Bobbugs for Gothtober Day 3

Visit www.gothtober.com and visit DAY 3 to see the Amazing BOBBUGS!!!

Bobbugs is none other than Michael Gump, the Master of Disguise! He and talented colleague, Brandon Minton, collaborated to make a stop-motion disguise especially for Gothtober. Watch how he transforms from mild-mannered mortal man to the shadow of his former self!

Bobbugs conceals  himself with a different every single day. EVERY SINGLE DAY! And he’s on his second year of doing it! years ago he tried on lots of different disguises to make a Gothtober piece, but he decided to try the 365 day challenge, which was so satisfying, that he hasn’t stopped yet! Check out this great story about him that tells you more about the daily challenges Michael faces in creating a new look every 24 hours!

Find his daily disguises on Instagram@Bobbugs!