The second edition of the Cloudy Collection is now available! This newest set includes art from Vera Brosgol, S.Britt, Elio, Vincent Stall, Scott Campbell, Bwana Spoons, and me, David Huyck (my print pictured below).

Get yourself a set for just $35 with free shipping to the US and Canada.

See more at the site!

A little while back I had the notion that I wanted to make some letterpress prints with my college friend, Harold Kyle, of Boxcar Press. Then I was also thinking that I know a lot of artists who I’d love to make art with. The two great tastes tasted great together, and the Cloudy Collection was forged in a flaming furnace of fiery, um, flames. Or on a big fat Heidelberg, really.

Prints are on sale now! There’s all kinds of other exciting information about the project on the site, so please take a look.

The happiest of New Year’s to everyone!

The past year was rough on a lot of the country and a lot of the world, but I can’t help but be optimistic. Besides the long-awaited departure of a certain someone with the initials GWB, and the corresponding arrival of Mr. BHO, the extended and expanding Huyck clan had a good year.

In March my older brother made me an uncle. In August my younger brother got married to an awesome woman. And two days before that wedding, my amazing wife gave birth to our pride and joy, Susanna Elnora Huyck, who weighed in at 9lbs 1oz, and 21.5in long! All my photos and videos of her are on Flickr. Susanna has been a constant source of hilarity, joy, and drool, and without even attempting to avoid cliché, she has changed our lives.

It was a great year for drawing things and making stuff, too. Thanks to all who hired me, or invited me to participate in a show, or just brought their kids over so I could draw coloring book pages for them. I count myself lucky to have such wonderful clients!

And of course there is the relocation to Idaho (see above illustration.) We are very excited to be in our new home in Moscow, ID, and I will begin teaching in two weeks in the art department of Washington State University in Pullman, just across the state line from here.

And speaking of the above illustration, if you like the card, please download the PDF and print it out!

Thanks to you, 2008!

And welcome, 2009! We expect great things!

- DH.

I almost forgot to post about this mask I made for the San Francisco Plush You! venue, double punch. And what better day to post a mask than All Hallow’s Eve? See more in this Flickr set, including in-progress shots.

Now go eat some candy!

The inimitable Frank Chimero has done it again! Frank decided that this Wednesday and all Wednesdays forward will be known as Webless Wednesdays, where we all unplug for a day and share our stories of limitless productivity on Thursday. I think I’ll join him– won’t you?

The grates on the street are air vents for the subway tunnels. Whenever a train goes by, the pressure wave of air in front of the train shoots up through the grates and inflates the sculpture. It’s a brilliant and creative use of otherwise lost energy. I wish I had thought of it! (of course, the Twin Cities don’t have subways, so…)

This stuff immediately made me think of the work of my friend Ethan Murrow. Ethan was another Studio Art major in my class at Carleton, and it was always amazing to see what was going on in his corner of the studio. The first time I met him, he was carrying this huge canvas back into the building, and it was this gorgeous, raw landscape painting with straw and detritus clinging to the still-wet oil paint. He had an attachment to land and how humans interact with it, and this theme carried through his graduate work at UNC. I had never seen such work from my contemporaries, and I still think he is one of the best artists, formally and conceptually, that I know personally.

Ethan Murrow, “Off of Gaspé, ready to dive for the elusive whale”, graphite on paper 60″ x 96″, 2007.

Since that day, Ethan’s work has evolved and changed and developed into these huge graphite drawings on paper. They still hold onto that landscape aesthetic, at least formally offering humans interacting with the land. But now they also involve these brilliant convoluted stories of tragic experimenters, people whose only goal is to succeed, and who most often do anything but.

Installation view of “The Freshwater Narwhal Hoax” at Winston Wachter, Seattle, WA spring 2007

I won’t try to retell it because Ethan really does a much better job himself. He was recently interviewed for the Huffington Post regarding his current show called “Dust Mining” at Obsolete in Venice, California. I still haven’t gotten to see Ethan’s more recent work in-person, so if you are in LA, make sure you go see it for me and report back!

P.S. He doesn’t talk about it much, but Ethan is the grandson of renowned reporter Edward R. Murrow. I think I didn’t know that until several years after I met him. Ethan’s personal and artistic integrity is truly a tribute to his grandfather’s legacy.

Anyway, birthdays are good for a lot of things, but especially for getting things that you are not buying for yourself. I keep my Amazon wishlist(s) pretty full, though mostly as a reminder to myself of what I really want to buy or check out the next time I am at a bookstore. However, for my birthday last month I got a gift certificate to Amazon, and I could no longer hold myself back:

Not pictured is the copy of Graphic Design by Milton Glaser (which arrived earlier and has gotten its due lovin’), but in the photo are the contents of my big box of goodies:the latest edition of the Graphic Arts Guild Handbook, a contemporary drawing collection called Vitamin D, Charlie Harper’s Beguiled by the Wild, and Dave Cooper’s (aliased here as Hector Mumbly) Bagel’s Lucky Hat.

• Milton Glaser is an icon in the graphic design world. This book is a must-have for my library, and I love to see the mix of illustration-y with the design-y.
• Similarly, I’ve well-abused my old GAG Handbook, and it was time for the upgrade to this 2007 updated version. A must-have for the illustration professional.
• I’ve perused the Vitamin D book a couple times while I was in grad school, but I had to have my own copy. It’s really a great collection of where things have been going in the contemporary capital-A “Art World” drawing field. And it’s a beautifully-designed book, as you would expect from Phaidon.
• Beguiled by the Wild is even better than I expected. I fell in love with Harper’s beautifully designed creatures and illustrations a while ago after he started getting linked up around the web, but I didn’t realize the illustrations’ titles were going to tickle my inner word-nerd: “Jumbrella” shows the big elephants sheltering the baby elephant from the rain; “Owltercation” shows a murder of crows chasing an owl away. LOVE!
• And last but certainly not least: Bagel’s Lucky Hat is so beautifully illustrated, with lush colors, inventive perspectives and compositions, and lovely details embellishing the periphery. It is a high-caliber production, as we have grown to expect from Chronicle Books. I haven’t read the story yet, and while I would guess it is a great story, I wouldn’t care if it was lamer than Howard the Duck: the illustrations already make up for it.

While I’m sorry for the movers who will eventually have to move yet more books the next time we relocate, I’m not sorry to have these in my collection. The internet is great and all, but sometimes you just need more than 72 dots per inch to view the art.

Seeing the art in-person is better yet, but as we all know, money doesn’t grow on trees. At least not in Minnesota.

It was commissioned for British Airways from the team at Troika. Here’s more about the project.

Beautiful!

(via VVORK)

No, actually it is more abstract than that. Calling it a build-up suggests that there is an end goal. Really what we are trying to convey is that working as an artist or designer or in pretty much any other creative realm means just that: work. It is a steady perseverance that means generating a lot of bad ideas and bad drawings and bad work that will likely never see the light of day. You must keep at it in order to stumble over the really good ideas, the gems that end up at the front of your portfolio.

As a side benefit, while you are generating piles of ideas that don’t necessarily make sense in the current context of the work you are immediately focussed on, you inevitably spill a few unpolished thoughts that will seep into the back of your mind or get scribbled into your sketchbook or stashed in your web browser bookmarks, and you never know when they will leap forth again.

I’ve never taken a class that focuses exclusively on these types of ideas, but I’ve taken plenty of classes that suggest techniques or philosophies orbiting the concepts. I’m exited to compile and experiment and teach and learn from and along with my students. It is all about taking you out of your comfort zone so you can make some good mistakes and generate new experiences and create some new synapses in your crusty little brain. I am definitely out of my comfort zone, which by definition makes me uncomfortable. But the potential for discovery is huge, and much more than worth the discomfort.

Despite the fact that it is a pile of work and it takes discipline to come back to something day after day where you may not see the benefit for some time, I have a great job. I have a great teaching job that gives me access to other professors teaching these same ideas in their own ways, and I have the great job of putting these principles to work in my own studio.

And I pretty much get to draw every day. What job could be better?

This video struck a chord with me initially because of the paper plane, but it also makes me think of one of my favorite mainstream movie scenes, where the boy in American Beauty films a plastic bag caught in a swirl of wind. It is a lovely experiment with no grand motives or any sinister intentions:

(via Fark)

It’s been an amazing year! From finishing grad school in North Carolina to the summer in a remote cabin in the California mountains, and now back in the “Middle” teaching and working in the Twin Cities. Thanks to all of you who have been a part of it and helped make it all happen.

Now it’s time to go have a long winter’s nap, drink some ‘nog, and rip into some wrapping paper (not necessarily in that order.) Thank you all for visiting, and expect a lot more excitement in 2008.

It looks like the AA boys have a spankin’ new website for your viewing and purchasing pleasure. Here’s a classic video of their silkscreen process:

It appears that the work from the residency filmed in this video, an exhibition titled From the Depths, is going on display this week. Here is some more information, and the opening is tomorrow. Wish I could be there!