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Announcing the publication of “Exquisite Cartoons”
The North Country. Yeah, you know it. Then again, maybe you don’t. Snow, ice, canoeing, fishing, roadkill stories, and nonexistent cell service. We could learn a lot from its plucky and resourceful inhabitants if we would only slow and stop grousing about spotty Internet service. Like the days before cars and snowmobiles, residents still to learn to entertain themselves through the idyllic summers and the long sometimes brutal winters. Gosh darn it, these Americans can still make things to play with!
The folk “cartoonages” collected in this book were originally inspired by the Surrealists (the French ones circa 1910 not the rock group). Those jaded creatives sitting around their cafes invented a game called Exquisite Corpse where each artist would draw one section of a body (for example the head) then fold the paper so the next artist (drawing the upper torso) couldn’t see what had already been done. At the end all four sections of the “corpse”are revealed! Mon Dieu, nous sommes des génies!
Pass the cognac, etc.
Between hunting moose , creating huge ice sculptures of Hessie the sea monster, and chasing bears out of the compost pile, the hardy people of Minnesota’s Gunflint Trail are all artists. Like the Balinese who said (before their international airport went in) “we have no art”, these people also have no art if you exclude chainsaw sculpture and lumberjack poetry jams. “Up North” the Exquisite Cartoon has become a veritable way of life. “Artists” (largely but not exclusively minors but working mostly in non-sweat conditions) would come and go, some would even “grow up” and go off on their own vision quests to Alaska or college, so the population of Exquisite Cartoonistas shifted and changed over time. Among these artists you won’t find any whining about fame or distress at not being represented by a Soho gallery. Heck no. This is real live up here.
Thanks to advances in book publishing I have been able to collect some of these works before the purity of this culture is lost to postmodern diffusion. So Skol, drink up, for drinking is life (or something like that). Coffee is good too. Even decaf can be guzzled with gusto.
