Review: Virtual Candle by Grant Gronewold (aka HTMLflowers)

Fort Thunder ended more than a decade ago, can you believe that? For those who don't know about it, Fort Thunder could loosely be described as an art-hive / music and event venue started by Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale, located in an old textile factory in Providence, Rhode Island, which fed off the creative juices and dollars of the legendary(?) school of design. Fort Thunder put on concerts, wrestling matches, noise dance parties, all that, but a huge part of their scene was the visual art and sensibilities of Brinkman and Chippendale (of Lightning Bolt fame), which drenched each event in iridescent neo-fauvism and expressionism. Eventually other artists started living and working there, and a community blossomed that had a lasting impact on contemporary visual design probably, can't say I'm an authority on these things. Let's look at the names: Brinkman, Chippendale, Paper Rad, CF (via Paper Rad), Ben Jones. Go look up more, I can't do all your homework for you.

Add Grant Gronewold (a.k.a. HTML Flowers) to the list by proxy. Though coming along well after that scene was done, Gronewold obviously ingested large doses of those artists as a child and now speaks that language natively, and he uses it to make irridescent visual poetry. His first official collection is called Virtual Candle, and is out and ready for purchase from Spaceface Books

Mr. Gronewold has this way of making art and comics that is both deliberately unpolished and highly refined. Lines, colors, characters, nearly everything is held together by unfinished or deformed yet recognizable shapes, and the rest is carefully placed in the wrong places. These deliberate fuckups and incompletes are actually the most sophisticated aspect of his style, because through them you feel like Gronewold is not only admitting to his imperfections, he's making triumphs of his mistakes.

Both the art and the writing can seem like nonsense, but I assure you it speaks to personal emotional and psychological truths. The combination of deformation and imperfection makes it at once unabashedly sincere, poetic, and moderately to severely ridiculous. The first few sections of the book, for instance, are comics about "The Twins", a pair of unidentifiably fuzzy humanoid creatures who go on crude and childish adventures through nature and society. They piss on trees and in rivers of sorrow, poke the moon with sticks, etc. They say "dude" a whole lot. According to an interview with It's Nice That, The Twins is one of the the artist's favorite parts: "They're avatars for me and my closest friends and adventures we've had or ones we should have had".

The Twins section feels like filler, but it provides a decent introduction to the artists overall outlook on life. These Twins comics are classic stoner nonsense: poop jokes and joyful stupidity. It's great if you're into that kind of thing.

When Grant puts his emotions on the page and combines it with that radiant Fort Thunder energy the effect is powerful and intimate. Grant has cystic fibrosis, and like the more than 30,000 other people in the States with this condition his life came with a rather short expiration date. Imagine a doctor telling you they know when you're probably going to die, telling you and your family to prepare for the worst if treatment doesn't work out. Today, with regular (but often brutal) treatment, CFers often break through several life expectancies, each time being told their clock has a little more time. Speaking specifically about his stick and poke tattoos, Gronewold says that doing them for friends and fans allowed him to "regain some kind of control over my body" while coming close to his third life expectancy. 

With intense emotions and something to actually say, the Fort Thunder / Paper Rad / Whatever aesthetic of color and simplicity and childishness can be devastatingly intimate. The most important thing about Grant Gronewold is that his style and his emotions are completely entwined and you can feel it on the page and on his Tumblr. There is no pretension. What may seem to some as affectation is really just Grant speaking how he learned to speak. 

And yes, I said stick and pokes. Grant apparently let a few brave individuals live out their wildest dreams of letting a Tumblr-famous weirdo repeatedly stab them with a sharp ink-laden object, and included a bunch of pictures of the results in this book. This is as intimate as it gets short of someone getting pregnant. Grant, speaking on his tattoo work, had this to say: "I can’t believe people let me mark them forever. Crazy ding dongs!" He's being modest. His stick and poke drawings have the same intelligent naivete as his comics and traditional drawings. 

I'll leave off with some random images from Grant's Tumblr, because that's how I first found him and also because I can't bear to break the spine of this book to scan  more of the awesome drawings in it. Hopefully you'll enjoy them as much as I have over the years. I also highly recommend reading that interview with Grant by It's Nice That, so you can get to know the artist more in his own words. 

The Gronewold himself

That Catastrophic Aesthetic

Photo by Adam Wallacavage, taken shameless and without asking from his instagram page

I really tried hard to figure out what beers to buy on my way home today. I planned to write a review of some comic, and having suffered through the eight hour first world problem that is a busy tuesday at work, I needed something to slow my thoughts down enough to grab them. I wasn't keeping track of the weather. I didn't take note of the massive wall of doom in the sky over Philadelphia.

I made it to Beer Heaven, yes that's what the beer store is called, in time to make getting out of the car a small act of bravery. I drove from sunshine New Jersey to hell-sky Pennsylvania in 30 minutes, and by the time I was at the last stretch to Heaven I saw the air turn grey and evil, the leaves lift from the ground and spin in clouds across everything, and heard the wind roar. Then the torrents of rain started. Huge globs of rain. Since I'm so brave I parked and ran in and out of Beer Heaven as the Gods pissed down upon me, knowing now that I would need at least one bottle of Victory Storm King.

Deptford, New Jersey, where car-flipping hell broke loose

I've had a couple apocalyptic dreams the past couple weeks and I'm on this weird end of the world kick. All I could think was: this is it. This is where I begin to hate myself for not stocking up on guns and canned beans and survival tactics. I'm dumb and I'm also an asshole, because apparently half a million people are without power because of this storm. Trees were downed, shingles were torn. A fucking car was flipped over at a mall I used to go to as a kid, all because of the gusts from this freak 30 minute storm. I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up tomorrow and it was more devastating than is now apparent. Hoping for the best.

Somehow I didn't notice this on the ride home

At one point, around sunset, I get a text suggesting I look out the window, and I do. The whole city had turned orange from the moisture in the air catching the sunset and spreading it all over. I rushed to put my pants back on so I could go see what the world looks like after the apocalypse. I was not disappointed. Never has golden hour been so gold.

I saved a bunch of pictures I found of this massive orange sunset from a group I'm in on Facebook. The last two are my own, taken while roaming the street, belly full of Storm King, feeling orange and astonished.

3 Items for a Monday

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It's Monday, but don't worry about it, it's almost over. And there's been some exciting developments around the world and across the solar system that may reaffirm you're faith in the value of being alive all weekdays, Monday included. I'm going to list some now, but if you don't feel particularly inspired by them I refute any responsibility for your continued hatred of the work week and the rest of existence.

Item 1: Vintage Science Fiction Magazine Omni has been released on Archive.org

Founded in 1978 by co-founders Kathy Keeton and Penthouse publisher Bob Giuccione, Omni Magazine was a monthly collection of science news, science fiction, science speculation, with some spiritual / paranormal fuckery mixed in for finishing. This publication had consistently on-point cover art, original fiction by some of the most famous names inside and outside of genre fiction, and a hedonistic enthusiasm for the bizarre future they knew would soon devour their culture. They were the original publisher's of stories by William Gibson, George R.R. Martin, William S. Burroughs, and also had a hand in popularizing H.R. Giger's paintings.

There are a lot of issues up, and I barely had a chance to look at any of it. Topicly they can be everywhere, but the same theme pervades: the psycho-social effects of knowledge and technology on our fragile little societies. I need to take a day and a six pack to look through it as much as possible. Who knows what kind of tech-anxieties and science dreams we've forgotten about that are waiting there for us to find again.


Item 2: We landed a thing on a fucking comet seven months ago and that shit's finally working!

I'm using "we" very lightly so you can feel like you did something. You didn't do shit, and if you're in America or any other non-European non-member state (with the exception of Canada) you did even less. This comet lander was the product of the European Space Agency, or ESA. To ensure conspiracy theorists have enough to occupy their time, the lander was named after an ancient Egyptian obelisk which, along with the Rosetta stone, helped humanity understand what the Egyptians were saying with all those little pictures.

It's news because one: The spacecraft didn't land where it was supposed to land, bounced a couple times and almost escaped the comets gravity altogether, then fizzled out of functionality for 7 months, before waking up a couple days ago fully functional and ready. Before it fell asleep it took some amazing pictures of the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko from a distance. I remember seeing these ominous photos a while ago and being amazed, and then being devastated that it looked like the mission was an almost complete waste due to a crash landing. So it's an inspirational comeback story.

And because two: As far as we can tell no one has landed on a comet before. That's important somehow. Here are a couple of those beautiful pictures:

Item 3: Better bullshit through technology

Have you ever wanted to invent a story and make it reality? Of fucking course you have, man. Thanks to flash-research in the age of Wikipedia and Google, you can almost sorta maybe do that, if enough people don't have the resources or interest to look into the facts. Yes, it happened, according to this article in The Kernel.

In 2002 a couple of movie nerds, haggard from from a day in the film industry and perhaps knocking back Belgian trippels at just the right pace, invented a man, a maniacal film director who's methods were toxic to his film crew's psychology. Their names were Gavin Boyter and Guy Ducker. A venting session at a Belgian restaurant (in London) turned into an 11 year journey to turn this fictional psychotic director, dubbed Yuri Gayudkin, into a historical fact using Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, and any other internet information channel available to them. Their hoax was so convincing, that a completely unassociated hopeful playwright was getting ready to pen a script about the entirely fictional auteur. He wrote to the author of a blog about Gayudkin, who was a friend of Boyter and Ducker, asking for more facts about Gayudkin, as "information is really sparse on the web." All of the information he needed was of course lodged firmly in Boyter and Ducker's asses.

Feel better yet?