Adaptation Show

Ahh yes, summer has arrived. And just in time for the to-be super awesome Benjamin Benjamin "Adaptation" show this first Thursday, where all us creative monkeys took some time to make art inspired by authors. To all of you who care not of the long and boring story of how difficult getting ready for this show was, I'll get the important tidbits out first and then you can peruse down this post if you are so inclined. As the flier says, the show opens Thursday the 7th at 5 and goes till 8. I'll be there showing off the three paintings I managed to complete from my Murakami's Women series. If you've read any Murakami, you know that he loves writing these strange women who almost always make the narrators' lives just a bit more insane than it was otherwise. I took a few that spoke to me and here they be:

This one is called "Tuesdays Girl". She is inspired by the short story version of The Wind-up Bird Chronicles called The Wind Up Bird and Tuesdays Women. The story centers around a guy who is out of work, and just having a really weird day. He meets this girl while looking for his cat Noburo Watanabe.



Probably my favorite Murakami Novel is Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World because its just SOOO bizarre. In this book there are unicorns, dream readers, evil underground kappa-like monsters who can be held at bay with paperclips and two entirely separate but intertwined worlds. This painting ("Granddaughter") however, is based off of the opening scene of the book and the narrators lengthy mental wrangling while walking behind this "..young beautiful woman who is, shall we say, plump..". Even with all that other crazy stuff , this is still one of the funniest and most surreal moments in the entire book. Just some guy trying to figure out his own emotions when confronted with what he sees as a fundamental contradiction in his libido.


Finally we have "Sumire" from Sputnik Sweetheart. I couldn't get a good scan of this one but you get the idea. Sumire is the narrators best friend, secret love interest, and eventually the catalyst for a mystery involving an island in Greece. I love this description of her: "Sumire wanted to be like a character in a Kerouac novel—wild, cool, dissolute. She’d stand around, hands shoved deep in her coat pockets, her hair an uncombed mess, staring vacantly at the sky through her black plastic-framed Dizzy Gillespie glasses, which she wore despite her 20/20 vision. She was invariably decked out in an oversized herringbone coat from asecond-hand shop and a pair of rough work boots. If she’d been able to grow a beard, I’m sure she would have."

UPDATE: You can buy prints here: http://johnnyacurso.storenvy.com/ 

Wow this a a long post. Good for you for sticking with it. Or maybe sad for you because you have nothing better to do than read my blog. But anyway, now you can be rewarded (?) with a picture of three other paintings that were worked on during these last two months but for some reason (not finished, ruined and abandoned) will not be appearing in the show. The one in the middle will probably be finished at some point this month, but the other two are dead for good. Just about everything that could go wrong with paintings went wrong this time. I think I just tried to do too much, got distracted, and forgot how to paint. Luckily the series survived, so that's something. Hooray...


Anyway, I hope to see you at the show, but my stuff will be up all month if you want can't make it Thursday. The end.