For the past couple of years, squeezle and I have spent our Memorial Day weekend in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We are big fans of Santa Fe (read that as “we like to drink and eat a lot in Santa Fe, NM”), and we try and make a trip at least once a year to relax, throw the munch at some of our favorite restaurants on the planet, and spend money on art that one would usually not expect to be showcased in Santa Fe.

In fact, the Memorial Day Weekend is when we travel to Santa Fe for a very special event. No, it’s not Pancakes on the Plaza (which falls on July 4th and is pretty damn awesome), rather, it’s POP Gallery’s POP Femme Sugar Coated Strange opening and reception. Squeezle and I have been incredibly impressed with Michael and Sharla McDowell’s little shack of wonders since they opened it back in 2007. We had known both of them from their work with the Chuck Jones Gallery in Santa Fe, so we were both delighted that they cut out on their own to showcase artists and works that were more in line with their own tastes, and, subsequently, ours.

One of the best things about the Sugar Coated Strange show is that it really bucks the mentality of a typical art gallery “opening.” Sure, there are loads and loads of fabulous pieces of art, patrons swigging back glasses of champagne, but where it differs is that it really seems to be more like a reunion than an opening.

While this year’s show is just the third, it seems like it’s been going on for just about forever. Squeezle and I have been fortunate enough to meet a gaggle of very talented artists and really get a better feeling of where their art really comes from.

One of my favorite things about this show is that it involves artists who do an incredible amount of “crossover” work into the realm of vinyl and resin toys (one of my other obsessions), as well as other media. See if you recognize some of these names: Kathie Olivas (and, by proxy, Brandt Peters), CJ Metzger, Miss Mindy and (former Dallasite) Marie Sena.

Squeezle and I have purchase multiple pieces from each of these artists and consider ourselves very lucky to have had the opportunity to have met them and spent some time chewing the fat.

All-in-all, it’s a party with just about everything I love about a nice chill weekend. It’s got booze, it’s got green chile, it’s got art, it’s got friends and it even has tattoos (Marie is an incredible tattooist as well as an incredible artist). If you throw in a soccer match, I’d think I had died and gone to heaven.

What I’m saying is that you should go to Santa Fe and definitely go to POP Gallery. At the very least, spend some time with their website and pick out a piece or dozen you’d like to add to your collection. What, you don’t have a collection? Well, it’s high time you got in touch with Michael and Sharla to get one started for you.

If you’re there on Memorial Day Weekend, let me know and I’ll buy you a beer.

I’m not sure if a recent head injury (reference my zombie hammer posting below) managed to rattle loose the plaque clogging up my artistic side, but I’ve been scribbling on just about everything for the past week or so.

I have one gigantic stumbling block when it comes to artistry, however: I can’t draw a straight line to save my life. Sure, everything looks just peachy in my head, but transition to paper is a Herculean effort of “over-the-mountains-and-through-the-woods” between my brain and hand. To make matters worse, the frustration of the effort makes my lines even shakier than they normally would be.

If, by some chance, I do indeed manage to get out a decent representation of what I was attempting (typically on the piles and piles of random scrap paper I keep in my office), I am often hard-pressed to duplicate whatever effort I just made look acceptable.

Even more scary is that the current things I’ve been doodling out look like stuff that Martin Ontiveros has done whilst having a seizure during an earthquake.

By no means do I let any of this distract me from putting ink and graphite on paper: it’s just adjusted my approach a little. I spend much more time experimenting with lines I normally draw straight and seeing if I can duplicate the opposite side of a curve. It’s frustrating as all hell since I’ve been spending the better part of the last decade popping out computer generated graphics like crazy. Photoshop and Illustrator are much more forgiving that good ol’ pen and paper.

I’ve got no problem with computer graphics, and still rely on using the computer for almost 90% of ideas I’d like to move forward into any semblance of a physical manifestation of my creativity, but there is just something fundamentally different between printed images from the screen and something that was plotted out and drawn on a given surface.

Recently I’ve begun playing around with customizing the paint schemes on designer toys (my beloved RealxHead mini fortune cats in particular). The challenges of working with a two and a half inch tall piece of vinyl really turn into a matter of scale. I’ve got grand plans that need to be executed very small, so I’ve turned to working with stencils and my newly acquired airbrush setup. On the screen everything seems just perfect, but trying to cut out wee tiny stencils after printing is just about one of the most annoying things I’ve ever done.

I realize that the more I practice, the easier this will all go and the better I’ll eventually get. It’s a painfully slow process, but I’m willing to stick it out (for now).

I’m a hoarder. I’ve mentioned it before and I totally own up to the fact that I probably have a pathological problem.

The thing is, I don’t give a rat’s ass. I enjoy my behavior. In fact, I can’t even bring myself to watch the crazy Hoarders show on A&E because it depresses me that packrat behavior is the new disease of the week.

Part of my natural cycle as a hoarder is occasional periods of purging. I get tired of the piles of crap around me and want new piles of crap. Over the years I’ve attempted to steer these periods of pseudo-asceticism towards a definable goal: be it the digitization of my massive music collection (an effort in grand fail) or, my current purge, “redefinition” of my toy collection.

I’ve got a metric crapload of toys. More importantly, I’ve got a metric crapload of toys from a company that has pissed me off with their practices and quality (read this; it almost mirrors my feelings). Therefore, I am dumping Western vinyl like crazy.

This is a good thing. I’m sure I’ll fill up just about the same amount of space with Eastern counterparts, but at least (I hope) I’ll be able to make a transition.

It’s actually a fun exercise. It’s like going into your house and saying, “Everything blue has got to go!”

Change is good.

I’m the first to admit it: I’m a hoarder. Worse than that, I have tendencies towards being a completist hoarder. That’s the worst kind there is. Anyone who has been near my home “workspace” can tell you: I’m just a spark away from a fiery inferno of vinyl death. Probably my only saving grace in all of this is that I am very anal when it comes to my hoarding.  I’m relatively neat with my collecting and I’d rather not have anyone mess around with most of the pieces, so a lot is in display cases. The display cases, along with the packaging from absolutely every little piece I’ve purchased, all stack up nicely (well, as nice as a 1:20 Devil’s Peak replica of cardboard boxes can be considered).

It all started with LEGO and Star Wars figures. Somewhere along the way, I found the evil, evil Japanese company Medicom and their collaborations with Japanese horrorcore band Balzac and the Misfits. As mentioned previously, I was already in the swing of a pretty heavy comic book addiction during this time, so that also shrank my “workspace” considerably.

I ran pretty willy-nilly for several years: picking up a variety of different properties for one reason or the other; not really settling on a single variety of small plastic crap to focus on. During this “era of discovery,” I found things about the products produced by certain companies that I really liked, and aspects that just pissed me off. So, I started focusing my piles.

The first vinyl property I honed in on was Kidrobot’sDunny. I got in when the Azteca line hit the streets and quickly snatched up whatever I could find. Not satiated with the 3″ variety, I jumped headlong into the 8″ Dunny offerings as well and managed to amass a pretty good collection of moderately rare pieces pretty damn quickly without breaking the bank. That, however, didn’t hold my attention for long. Sure, I still buy the new 3″ Dunny releases, but I’ve sold off a majority of the 8″ monsters that I picked up. What can I say, I get fickle.

Somewhere in my Kidrobot coma, I re-discovered Frank Kozik. Back in college I had picked up several concert posters that Frank had done and was quite familiar with his work in that regard. I had no idea he had moved on into vinyl collectibles. As usual, I went overboard. First I tried to scavenge all of the Labbits that Frank had produced. For those not in the know, Labbits are Frank’s generic rabbit design that smokes a cigarette. Oddly enough, the form is based off of Frank’s old cat. From Labbits, I moved on to Dr. Bombs (an odd surgeon elephant thing with a scalpel and old-school bowling-ball styled bomb). That dropped me into the realm of Toy2r.

Toy2r doesn’t only produce the Dr. Bomb, they also produce Qee (their “generic” platform collectible), and several other “boutique” lines. Qee, like Dunny, are generic as hell and jazzed up by various global artists. Small, relatively cheap, and very accessible: I, therefore, must have them all.

I think you see where this is going. I tend to load up on one particular thing until, for some reason, my attentions pivot to another property or company. It really is the epitome of vicious cycle. Now I constantly lust over pieces from Span of Sunset, threeA, Super7 and RealxHead. Yup, that last one isn’t even in English and I watch it like a hawk for new releases.

One of these days, I’m just going to take the ceiling out and spread into the attic. Heaven forbid if I ever have to move all this crap out of the house. What’s that? I could change my hoarder ways and stop buying all this useless crap?  Now where is the fun in that?