Love and Tentacles
By:
December 14, 2009
A few months ago, a friend of mine started Twittering his doodles. An irrepressible draftsman, Walter Sickert has the kind of old-skool muse that demands daily tribute. A sketchbook is always ready pocketside and, at any break in the action, instead of surfing the web on his phone, he draws.
September
EdRiEEiRdE
Lady in the Squid
Doodling would seem to be the perfect fit for Twitter – casual, interruptive bursts of a few lines at a time. And yet like our increasingly complex language games within the 140-character limit, the doodles have gained in momentum and complexity, evolving ever-more elaborate linework and iconography. Of course when doodles ascend to art they leave their larval nature behind, as Matthew Battles has argued in a previous HiLobrow article. Technology has perhaps mediated the creatures’ metamorphosis.
ViKtaGraph
theCrowleyKey
Sagan & Cash
Walter Sickert is one-half of the Boston SteamCrunk and performance art duo Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys, in which he and Edrie welcome a rotating cast of guest artists, both human and automata, to augment the choral storylines of an evening, inhabiting and enacting plateaux of deconstructed, ad hoc opera. “Epic theater” in the postmodern era might look a lot like this – a playful, multimedia approach to overlapping narrative, art-historical quotation, audience participation, and carousel-costumed capering, in a visually enhanced surroundsound in which Shakespeare’s four acts run amok, leaving the fifth to fend for itself.
[Sacrilege, Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys, 2008]
The series, WSInkDrip a Day, is only available online.
Facebook galleries (public):
December 09 series
November 09 series
October 09 series
Walter on Twitter: @WalterSickert, or follow the doodles at hashtag #WSinkDrip.
The band on Twitter: @armyoftoys
Band website: www.armyoftoys.com
Upcoming shows: http://www.myspace.com/armyoftoys (next one Friday, Dec. 18, at the Middle East Downstairs, Cambridge, MA
Writtteer
Artists in residence archive.
I am obviously a BIG fan of Walter’s art!!!! Putting it together like this really showcases it
Love the quality and economy of line
WOWOWOWOWOWOWOOWOWOWOWOWOWOOWW
Thank you for pointing out this FANTASTIC artist to me! I can’t wait to see more! Promptly following him on Twitter!
That’s amazing! Does he doodle on his phone? What program does he use?
his art is sublime
their performance also has the character of
21st century vaudeville
and each show is different, programmed to the venue, event’s theme, and available performers
wow! -len
walter is an amazing artist. we have worked with him over the past 2 years on our film, “the why” (www.thefilmthewhy.com) his contributions both musically and with his illustrations have been an incredible addition to the project.
@Joe – I believe that Walter uses stretched Unicorn skin and the blood of a virgin hehehehehe (In all reality – he uses a bunch of different mediums)