A Truckload of Art

Not to be confused with heading off to another party loaded down with cases of beer (they just happen to make good boxes for packing books). The past few moves have inexorably led to a slimming down of the ephemera and accouterments that get hauled around, and yet somehow throughout all that I've maintained this noble fiction fantasy that "I have less than half" of what I used to collect. So the question then becomes: just where in the hell did all these damn comics come from? The illusion was broken when looking at a pickup load of comics, and linking this proliferation with a corresponding output in both all the great stuff that's been published over the past six years or so, and my own matching growth in interest and enthusiasm. The biggest challenge by far was somehow coming up with a "desert island" case to ship Down East with me. After that it's a juggle between the burgeoning storage unit, the recycling station at the transfer site, more hole-in-the-head used bookstore credit and donations to the Literacy Council of Alaska. And while schlepping all this crap around in the dark at thirty-below is getting really old, I probably shouldn't whine and just be grateful that at least all my artwork is 2-dimensional, not to mention mostly fits on a flash-drive too.

Intermittently posting over the next coupla weeks, what with the upheaval well under way. I do have a bunch of backposted material that'll gradually seep out once I hit the road, random unearthed items that I've stumbled across in my excavations that'll make for some interesting, if not amusing, retrospective-perspective. That or the narcissistic history will completely bore the shit out of folks. But I've been using a spiffy tabloid-sized scanner and uploading a trove of samples from early work when I first moved to the Interior, which has in-turn birthed a brand-new blog-post category "Cheechako." Been meaning to document all the first appearances in print for some time now and digitize a sort of an antique road show of art - and obviously what better time than when staring down the barrel of an imminent move? Leading into that series will also be a rash of even earlier of work done from the drop-out days (and I mean that in more ways than one), appropriately enough categorized as "Old School."

Yeah a Truckload of Art
is burning near the highway
Precious objects are scattered
All over the ground
And it's a terrible sight
If a person were to see it
But there weren't nobody around
(Yodel)

 
- Terry Allen