Einspruch = VICTORY!

Franklin's great show "The Talk That Walked" has a reception tonight in Miami:

For this exhibition, artist Franklin Einspruch has created a series of images, drawn in ink on paper, that together create a set of narratives relating to specific excerpts of great poetry. He works in webcomics, in a manner that finds inspiration in the poet-painter tradition of Japan and China, but taking cues from contemporary American life. These sequential images take the form of multi-directional narratives tying lines of poetry to ordinary human stories, eliciting new interpretations of the verses. Drawing excerpts from diverse sources--ancient, contemporary, and in between--the works constitute an installation-scale collection of short stories, told with both pictures and words, that require the movement of the viewer to read. An accompanying website documents the installation and allows viewers off-site to go through the exhibition virtually, view source texts, and see background information behind the installation.

The website he made for the show is grand, as is the work:

On his also grand Journal he recently wrote a bit about and posted some images of Leaf and Signal:

Another image - I recently delivered the piece Newbury Street to the collectors who bought it out of the show:

 

I added the paper strip. And you can see the edges of a little book Franklan made of the piece in the LaS book.  More on that later once it's offically released.

To finish this all-Franklin post I want to mention what a pleasure it was having him visit and stay with my family for a few days.  He's a courteous and thoughtful guest and game for most anything my crazy family could come up with. He bought me a book on Zen. He met with some of our pals. He stayed up late talking with me. He played with the kids:

(he's up in the fort with Ginger) and he painted with us:

and he's welcome back anytime.

How this happened Pt. 4

From the beginning I wanted Franklin Einspruch's online comics work to be in the show. This work, produced over the last few years, has a clarity and focus I greatly admire. Einspruch hones in on experience and phenomena in his seemingly simple watercolor and ink drawings - simple like a petal on a pond, something lovely covering depths.

His I-70 travelogue series (the first one here) recalls the great travel narratives of old Japanese Poetry masters. They sprinkled their prose with poems as Einspruch uses words and pictures with the same aim - to capture and transmit elements of experience and life.

Einspruch publishes these online and having a work that uses this way to show work was important to me  - this is another lo-fi way to send art out into the world. His comics use elaborate Python scripting and CSS - again, simple only on the surface. In the show we'll have a collection of the lovely watercolor and ink originals along with, hopefully, Einspruch himself at the opening (and Supergirl too!).

I've deliberately left this until last, but he is known more as a painter and well-regarded art writer than as a comics-poet. His writing at the now defunct artblog.net and his new Journal is educational, challenging and clear.  I've learned a great deal about a great deal from reading and interacting with Franklin and I greatly look forward to showing his work and meeting him.

a peek at some lines

Franklin posted this sneak peek of one of his images from the book we're making for the show. The rest that he sent are this good too - I'm really excited about this book.