On August 28th in the artistically and culturally vibrant city of Philadelphia, artist Joka presents “Friends Stoning Friends”.



“Friends Stoning Friends” is Joka’s first gig as a curator and with it he’s brought together artists he’s shown with in the past, and artists that he’d always hoped to.



The event takes place at Jinxed, a tattoo-lowbrow-graffiti shop and gallery, at 620 South 4th Street and the list of artists contributing work is pretty impressive. Joka, who’s paintings will be on display that night, are constructed with tiny points made by tips of toothpicks.  He began painting seriously after spending time at Jonathan Levine’s first gallery, Tin Man Alley.

GlubDub:
Tell me a little bit about your style.  When I first communicated with you, you wrote me that you paint exclusively with toothpicks.  Did I read that right?

JoKa:
Yep you read right. I paint all my stuff nowadays strictly with toothpicks. It stemmed from me not knowing how to do silk screening and wanting to attempt to reproduce that effect. So the first painting I did was a solid color background with black dots over it, and by using the toothpick they were all pretty consistent. That led me to wonder if I could do a whole painting that way.



GD:
How did you know this might work?  Have you seen other artists taking a similar path?

Joka:
I’ve looked online and seen a couple artists that use toothpicks to manipulate paint, but nobody really doing exactly what I’m doing to the same extent.

GD:
You’ve obviously found this technique to your liking.  Beyond the actually creating a unique piece of work, what’s been some other positives aspects of painting with toothpicks?

Joka:
The toothpick itself is a very precise instrument, so by using it, it causes for very close attention to detail. I like working very fine and precise. It also causes me to blend all paint off canvas. The more I talk with other artists I know, the varying ways in which we work always come up. Clean up/set up for me is so simple. When I do use a brush nowadays, mostly on frame stuff, I hate cleaning up. I guess you could say I’m a very lazy, but patient artist.

GD:
Where does the feel of your paintings come from?

Joka:
Each piece of mine has a story or a meaning based on what I’m trying to project.  I think people are defined as much by their negative attributes as their positive, and I try to exploit both in my work. Hence my logo of a fly, something I really don’t like.  I started including a lot of meat in my work to counter the usually very vocal, anti-meat beliefs of some, and because its so damn tasty!  I like mixing eras, using Victorian prints and pictures from the 60/70s, to give a slight sense of nostalgia and to show how dramatically ethics and ideas of living have changed.  I try to keep a heavy dose of dark
humor in all my work, but also keep it thought provoking as well. I love art but get very resentful of art taken too seriously.  I see the titles to a lot of my pieces as the punch line to the joke.  I really appreciate work that is clever and very well done.

GD:
How do your paintings come to life?  What process do you go through to realize an idea onto canvas?

Joka:
I’ll start a piece a couple of different ways.  I’ll find pictures I want to use, come up with an idea or sometimes just a title and search for, or take pictures that work.  Then sometimes I just want to make a cool looking painting, and the meaning comes later on down the line. When I first started, I think my work was a little simpler;  mostly to cut down on the time the piece took, but as of late I’ve tried to start layering my work more, and make it even more intricate.

GD:
How have other artists inspired you?

Joka:
I’m constantly inspired by contemporary artists working today.   Every time I go to a show or see new work from an artist I like (Eric White is one of my biggest influences) I can’t wait to work on something.

For more information on Joka, check out http://www.myspace.com/joka444

Adam Ramirez works beneath his Optimism Photography umbrella, specializing in fine art and photography, and his portfolio is filled with very diverse imagery.

Glubdub:
How did you come up with the Exoskeletal series?

Adam Ramirez:
Exoskeletal was a step in a new direction. Originally inspired by many different forms of mixed media, Exoskeletal took almost 2 years to complete.  Once I started examining all the X-rays I collected from friends and family, I realized this was a fantastic way to take some of these painful experiences and mend them into a new form of expression. Other research included medical encyclopedias, fine art nudes, a few graphic novels and even some of my favorite Zombie flicks.
 


GD:
How was Pin Up Players series put together?   

AR:
I've always been a big fan of genres; in art, film, music etc. Pin up Players began as an homage to the origins of glamour and fashion photography. In general, Pin Up Art tends to be very theme heavy, loaded with props and costumes. My favorite pin up artist were illustrators whose work could stand alone without being weighed down with specific motif. Illustrations that explored beauty and sexuality of the individual, without dictating a specific role or attaching some cliché anecdote. My pin up images rely heavily on the natural beauty of the chosen models, but are also rendered into illustrations (using both traditional and digital techniques) as a tribute to all the amazing Pin Up illustrators over the years.
 

 
GD:
Do you always use these kinds of themes to inspire and then display your photography?

AR:
Lately, themes in my work vary quite a bit. I think it's important as a artist to show a range in my work. Exoskeletal was an original concept of a darker and more graphic nature. It was also completely constructed in a digital manner. For Pin Up Players, I felt it would be nice to work on a tribute project which was a bit on the lighter side, with brighter color schemes and more playful subject matter. This project is also created using a few more traditional techniques, converting photographs into lines by hand.

Coming Soon...
A new book from Glubdub.com:
"Max and the Siamese Twins"

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Max who was a little different from all the other kids.  Like the other children, he loved to play, and he loved to laugh, but unlike anyone else he knew, Max had a face growing out of the back of his head.  The face belonged to Max's twin, who hadn't fully developed, and who clung to Max's own body for survival.  The rest of Max's twin lived inside of Max, but as each day passed, and as Max grew bigger and stronger, his twin grew smaller and began to disappear.



One morning Max woke up and Carl did not.  Over the coming days Carl became smaller and smaller.  A few weeks later Carl completely disappeared.  Max's heart was broken.  He had lost his brother and his best and only friend, and more than that, he'd lost a piece of himself forever.

click here if you want us to tell you when it's available

If you ask Liquid what she wants to be when she grows up she'll tell you, "I wanna be a superhero, so I have a lot of fun "liquidizing" my friends into robotic superhero status via caricatures"

Glubdub:
Why is the process you use to breed humans and robots called Liquid?

Liquid:
I love robots and I love science fiction. I think that shows in my quirky art. When I came to Myspace, I wanted a way to showcase some of my talented friends and introduce them to my readers in a unique sorta way, so 'liquidizing' them into superhero status type robots was the beginning of a whole new virtual gallery. I have never had any previous professional artistic training at all so I admire anyone that has an art degree or has had the privilege to study with talented art masters out there. My foundation stands on the fact that there is a little artist down deep inside each of us that is just screaming to get out and I think the challenge is to create something that is an extension of yourself. In other words, when you are done, to be able to sit back and look at it with fresh new eyeballs and see the moment you just captured. I think photographers do this really well. They can stop time by shooting that image in a single frame. Each photo becomes a frozen precious moment. Painters do this too with each stroke of their brush; they truly put their souls upon their canvas.You can also see this in children's art: freshness and innocence.

I guess my first artistic endeavor that I can remember would have been playing with paper dolls as a child. I wanted more variety for my little cardboard doll's wardrobe, so I would draw, color, and cut out new ones and now since I have grown up - along with the digital computer world - technology has surely blessed me and anyone else out there with new tools and software to express themselves. The lovely part about digital work over painting in real time is that you never spill any pixals on your clothes while you create! Ha Ha clean up is easy to accomplish! I love all the wonderful programs out there today. I actually started learning photoshop as a theraputic escape after an accident and it's been a lovely adventure for me ever since.

GD:
When I used After affects which is the equivalent of photoshop for video, I fell in love with a couple of filters because they really matched what I had in my head for the film. Is there a special filter or effect that you use thats kind of defined your style?

Liquid:
Absolutely. I use eyecandy more than any other because it has such a lovely chrome effect. I enjoy taking a digital photo and manipulating it into something fun. The imagination is endless on what can be done today. One of the powerful things about photoshop that I first noticed for photosgraphers, was that, to get a specific effect, one had to use so many filters on their cameras to achieve it and now you can take one image into photoshop and layer it with hundreds of filters if you choose or as much as your RAM can take on your computer. If you are a photographer, even with today's nifty digital cameras with built in filters, you should definately learn photoshop and all it's grand possibilities because it will extend your talent into new rhelms. It's a great time which we live in where we can mesh technology. The music industry is doing this with image in their videos and it's opened so many doors for their music reaching viewers by stimulating the optic nerves along with their fan's ears. When I have had the opportunity to create a cd for an artist, I will put my headphones on and get lost in 'only their sound' while I work in photoshop on their project. It's a way to connect their music to the soundscape of the visual art. That's my "liquidizing technique" in a nutshell. I just sit back and follow the light.

GD:
Tell me more about the book. What kind of a world is it that has half-robots, half-children?

Liquid:
I get a lot of questions about "The Liquid Metropolis" on my site. My goal is to take my little cyborg characters and mesh them with the cities into a story for the book. As for the art that is now in the Metropolis series, the style and perception that I have put into them, If I am truly honest here, goes back to my childhood, because when I was a little girl, like every other child out there, I was curious about heaven and what it looked like. I can remember every wish was about getting inside those pearly gates. I am not joking here at all, every birthday candle I blew out and every penny I tossed into a fountain was sealed with that "Let me nto that beautiful heaven" wish.

Very early my heart was set on eternity and my mind on heaven and what it really looked like. So whenever I would later hear a sermon on the description of heaven or read a scripture that let us get a glimpse of what ;it might be like' I would try to imagine the beauty that it would encompass. Now I do realise that it's really impossible to describe it, because we don't even have words for it and what we do consider beautiful here is just a dull reflection of what it's going to be like there, but my cityscapes that I make are truly inspired by what my mind's eye hopes that it 'might be like' in that other world to come. I love the gates and the thought of glass and precious stones and that the streets would be paved with gold and transparent like. Just the thought of knowing that in heaven, that what we might have thought was valuable here (gold for example) will be under our feet and we will walk upon it there is truly amazing to me.

The whole mystery of that idea excites me and puts things into perspective for me on so many levels and so I hope that shows through in the metropolis cities that I create. To the best of my imagination, they are the new places that are to come. I also love that utopia hope that there will be no sickness or sorrow there. In one of my city's descriptions, which has a hospital, the city boasts that even it's nursery has no baby tears. It's a pain free environment. Who wouldn't want to live there? So, although it won't be heaven, the Metropolis will be "another world" and an utopia that my character in the book will be searching for. She will be on a mission in search of her genetic code as her donar will already live there. The story will have colorful characters such as a steam punk mad scientist that is passionate about cloning and building parts for a group of cyborg and humanoid children and this with a current running parallel of an undercover agent trying to solve a high tech crime. I would tell ya more but then that would spoil everything eh?

The following is an excerpt of a soon to be feature article about Toybox Theatre , which has existed since 1999 building and performing solo and group shows relating to puppetry arts.

Toybox Theater's  work can be seen briefly in the documentary on puppetry, Puppet Festival.

As a small child, I was raised mostly by my mother and grandmother. During this time period of the mid to late seventies and into the early eighties, they both had a knack for hobbies including painting miniatures, doll clothes and costume design (for me on Halloween), and specifically building dollhouses. Subsequently, do to these proclivities; I spent many memorable moments as a very small mind in doll stores, craft stores, and showplaces of tiny things. My paternal grandmother was also a doll maker and an avid collector of clown memorabilia. A collection, sadly, I believe I will inherit soon.

I vividly remember a certain shop we would frequent. The front of the store was a doll/doll house store with aisles of everyday things in miniature. Little chairs and parasols, sinks and doll parts, outfits, base kits and displays. But it was the back of the store which always intrigued me most. It was a rounded hallway draped in blue velvet and it had built in oval showcases. In each was a single doll staring blankly into the room. Being a little boy the age of maybe 3 or 4 years old, I hated the room. I thought it was ‘for girls only’. It also scared me; whenever I went back there I was alone, when I had wondered off from my keeper. But I had too see it, every time we went there. To the point where the minute we walked into the store, I wanted to go, I had to go.



Another habitual haunt my mother would bring me too, was a place called Dispensa’s Castle of Toys in Oakbrook, IL. It was a giant castle filled with every toy you could imagine. Behind the castle was a kiddie amusement park complete with games and an old fashioned ice cream parlor. To enter the castle you had to cross a draw bridges suspended over a mote and the front of the castle was guarded by giant toy soldiers. It had many rooms filled with different toys both old and new and in the center one giant room. In the middle of this room was a mountain with several toy trains and little landscapes. Kites and model planes hung from the ceiling. It was a real children’s paradise and yes, it did exist.



A crucial moment was when I was four years old. I had seen a commercial on television for the broadcast of the Ray Harryhausen classic JASON AND THE ARGONAUGHTS. It was being shown some off day at four or five in the morning. I had convinced my mother that I had to see it. The night before the movie she made me go to bed extra early so that I could wake up to see it. I think I went to bed around eight pm. But I did not sleep. I stayed up all night laying on the top bunk of my dunk bed and stared at the ceiling. Picturing all the exciting things in the film and making up my own.
To this day, I consider this my greatest movie experience. Growing up, I loved the Harryhausen films: the Sinbad films and then later Clash of The Titans. Mostly, for the puppet scenes.



In 1983, I went on a family vacation to a place called THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK in southwestern WI. I do believe this experience had a profound psychological effect on me. If you do not know of the place, it is one of the most unique on earth. It is a strange and fascinating edifice. Built by architect Alex Jordan, each room was designed and constructed then lavishly decorated on top of the next all sitting upon a giant rock. It houses enormous collections of antiquities and curiosities. Including hundreds of dolls, puppets and automatons. It is my favorite place on earth and I have been back several times as an adult. It is about three hours away from where I currently live.



I always thought as I kid, I was good at “playing with toys”. I played differently than the other kids in my neighborhood. I always tried to make them move convincingly. My brother and I would often play in the basement of my father’s house where he had his work room. When we were quite young, he showed us there how to Frankenstein our broken toys together to “fix them”. We liked this and soon were taking all our toys apart to make new ones. We got toys for parts. We would play games where we would scurry off to our separate corners and try to out do one another with our creations



When I was in sixth grade, I gave my first public puppet show. I got to be the Cyclops in an adaptation of The Odyssey. My teacher was very fond of puppetry and worked it into her curriculum. This was a big moment for me.



Of course, I also grew up with a t.v. culture that included much puppetry in its programming. Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, The Muppet Show, Sid and Marty Kroft, Thunderbirds, and later Pee Wee’s Playhouse, when puppeteers were still guests on the late shows.