Martha Hull - cute and deadly art and stories

Welcome back!  I am wishing myself this as well as you.  I am getting double-dog-dare-serious about making and selling my subversive little picture books for unconventional adults and teens.  So I will start keeping you all in the loop about how that is going- and I am sure there will be other delightful anecdotes too.  Stay tuned!

I am super excited about this.  Recently I met some art business counselors at a Hello Etsy event here in lovely Portland F*cking Oregon and they helped me, well, "see God."  In an art business sort of way.  I am reigning in the robotmaking and large canvasses for the sake of my most beloved childern, my picture books.

I have pulled out my Death's Daughter and the Basket of Kittens final drawings and the treeworth of paper I have been hoarding to do the paintings on.  I have picked the name for my own publishing house, Fluffpocalypse, and will have that url pointing to a real website once the books are ready for you to purchase.  I'm shooting for soon on that.  You might not want to do your Xmas shopping yet.

I am now debating giving Belladonna a nose- back in the olden days, I did not give children noses to make their wide-eyed innocence more prominent, but I'm kind of into making faces look a bit more like real faces- stay tuned on this front. 

So welcome back to the wild world of me.

There will be lots of stories to tell.  Oh, yes, there will.  (And pictures!)

Thanks for finding me.

This blog is duplicated at:

http://marthahull.typepad.com/marthas_hull_on_wheels_bl/2011/10/guess-whos-back.html

So the Universe gave me a huge gift last week.  A picture book in its entirety.  It came all in one sitting, unbidden, and it even fits perfectly on the pages.  And it's rated G.  Yes, that's right, my first picture book that is apparently a "children's book."  (WTF!)  I'd better go cuddle with some spiders now to make up for it.  Actually, I'm not going to look a gift book in the mouth.  It's called Brigid in the Word Clouds.  It's a little story about happiness squishing gloom.  I guess it's a summer story.

So I met Hoff this weekend, the foremost collector of harmonica cases in the world.  Click here for a cool Stuck in Vermont video.  He commissioned me to make him a robot doll harmonica case.  I will be melting again!

I have been sending works into the show Portlandia.  Season 2 starts filming... soon?  At first, I (and I suspect they) thought they were looking for "good" art.  Now they are looking for "bad" art.  So I made this:

The irony is that I couldn't have handled making this emotionally except in the summer.

Wish me luck!  If things go really well, I could get to have my art ridiculed on national television.

Since I have no art news I feel like reporting, I would like to share with you my favorite poem of all time.  Which might help explain a lot.

How Is Your Heart?
by Charles Bukowski

during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
whores
I always had this certain
contentment-
I wouldn't call it
happiness-
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occuring
and it helped in the
factories
and when relationships
went wrong
with the
girls.

it helped
through the
wars and the
hangovers
the backalley fights
the
hospitals.

to awaken in a cheap room
in a strange city and
pull up the shade-
this was the craziest kind of
contentment

and to walk across the floor
to an old dresser with a
cracked mirror-
see myself, ugly,
grinning at it all.

what matters most is
how well you
walk through the
fire.

The catch?  You have to come to the Portland Blueberry Piecake next Monday night (October 4).  Contact me if you need directions or an explanation of what Blueberry Piecake is.

They have been making a serious environment for October happening and there will be an art shed where I'll be showing some original paintings.  And... I just made a new painting that I will be GIVING AWAY by a drawing, in honor of my birthday month.  Just drop your name and email in the box, and one lucky person gets to fill a spot on their wall with an original Martha Hull.  Artwork.