Hey, Frank, can I borrow a couple of bucks from you?

The events of this story are completely false. The names have NOT been changed to protect the innocent because...well...none of it really happened. Except for the bit with the toilet plunger.

It was a moonless, shitty-spit night when Andrew Jerz first stumbled through the plate glass doors of the otherwise fairly reputable establishment that is Soulfire Barbeque in Allston, USA. When I say he stumbled through, I mean he literally crashed through, shattering almost all of the glass, but he didn't mind as the tinkling teardrops of smashed sparkles pitter-pattered on the shoulders of his soggy coat, and he shook the sharper pieces off of his clothcap before wringing it out. It was raining pretty glumly out there, which's what had ultimately forced Andrew's entry into the joint in the first place. I don't remember if it was open or not, but Andrew had somehow become some-kind-of-drunk, or at least some form of substance-induced mental delirium, by eating way-too-many McDonald's double-cheeseburgers around the corner; the manager of the establishment had cut him off --- they would no longer serve him 'till he'd gone home and thought about just how much Lean, Finely Textured Beef Product a human body could possibly handle in one sitting. What kind of country has this become?

And so it was in this state that Andrew slopped up to the bar at Soulfire Barbeque, little chinkletts of glass still dusting his shoulders as he ordered, "whiskey, please." There was a strange, bearded man behind the bar and he was making some kind of mischief with a toilet plunger that Andrew didn't really want any part of, "you'll have to order something to eat with it, we can't serve drinks here without food...and we're only allowed to make mixed drinks, no straight shots of hard liquor," (what kind of country has this become?) and Andrew replied, "I don't care how you do it, just make it happen." The two strangers locked eyes for a moment, as the odd, bearded fellow stopped plunging the sink for just a moment in deep thought --- and then his eyes lit up.

Two minutes later, another slinky fellow with a beard materialized from within the kitchen with a fiendish grin. "Who the hell're you?" "Name's Erick," he replied, "and I'm a slinky fellow with a beard," and he slid a plate of something and an empty tumbler across the bar to Andrew, who stared in confusion for one moment. On the plate was a single slice of thick, Texas toast, "what of the whiskey, you bearded freaks!?" But Erick and his cohort, Ian, just smiled knowingly and nodded encouragingly. With a hint of disdain in his eyes, Andrew cut into the toast with a fork as the two slinky fuckers looked on, and a golden-brown fluid trickled from the bread as he sliced. Andrew started in disbelief, and the bearded folk just continued to smile and nod. Andrew picked up the bread and wrung it out like a sleet-soaked scally-cap into the empty glass that the duo had so generously provided. Andrew had his whiskey, and all three of them had beaten the powers that be in this increasingly rule-burdened and fascist CEOcracy that used to be the once free and great United States of America so few years ago.

Naturally, they got to talking about the decline of everything that was good and Holy in this world, and somehow reached the conclusions that Andrew should be doing live painting in addition to showing a compendium of his recent works in an upcoming show that the two had been putting together.

While you're there, don't miss the rare in-person-appearance of an anthropomorphic website, the ever-snowballing-in-popularity Boston Arts Underground conceived by friend, professional seamstress and avid clarinet enthusiast, Sam! She'll be there dishing out all kinds of funky swag, I'm sure.

Tuesday! May 29th! Great Scott on Harvard Ave in Allston, USA! Music! Art! Beer!!!!

Two Ladies

It's a Christmas Miracle...

Confused because you woke up this afternoon - having passed out in the midst of a moderately temperate New England winter's eve? Does your little horse [read: Volvo 240 DL] think it queer to wake up without a goddamn plowed road near? Worried that in your sleep you may have inadvertently traveled through time to the next ice age? Don't worry, you're safe in you're own time. Rest assured: I'm Andrew Jerz XLI and this's your home year of 19-90-230 AD, brought on by a sinister, extra-atmospheric weather machine created by Al Gore to substantiate his claims of unpredictable and illogical weather patterns as a result of global warming. Al Gore is still alive as a talking head in a jar, and is now Supreme Emergency Chancellor of the World, his limited dictatorial powers granted to him by a willing, democratic (yet scared and uneducated) majority some 210 years ago...for some reason he never relinquished his rule...but we all like to believe that even though things are bad and there isn't enough food to feed the world's population, we're better off with the status-quo than some kind of scary, unpredictable world under a different style of hegemony...

While you wrap your mind around that, here's a commissioned portrait, a rejected illustration (go figure), and sketches of babes drawn at Dr. Sketchy's at Great Scott (corner of Comm & Harvard Aves in Allston) hosted by Truth Serum Productions which's - pretty much - the best figure drawing situation you can find, ever.

Happy Freakin' Winter

After a nightmare of a set of comps and revisions, I have two new Holiday posters for Cardullo's Gourmet Shoppe in Harvard Square; they posters will be up outside of the store at 6 Brattle Street for the remainder of the Holiday Season, if you wish to see them in person.



Also, a few new images for a completely unrelated, but way more EXTREME book project involving the hunting of whales, demons, and psychotic attack-vultures:



And, finally, a commission for a rich kid from New Zealand to make him feel a little bit more at home in Boston. The All Blacks have boring uniforms though: so I used Syracuse University colors.

The sea is a cruel mistress

I am writing a cookbook:

And the cookbook that I am writing will be titled, "I've Been a Sandwich Maker for Many's the Year (and I Spent All Me Money on Whiskey and Beer): a narrative, illustrated cookbook by Andrew J. Jerz"

But until that is done, go find my artwork sitting outside 6 Brattle Street in Cambridge, MA. It will be changing every month or two, so always check back to see the next seasonal poster.

Special thanks to Greg and whoever else works at Signal Graphics at 450 Cambridge Street in Allston, MA for making these prints look friggin' spectacular and basically delivering everything I needed and asked for!

Kittens

Lower allston? We can't go down there...it's CAT COUNTRY.

There IS justice in America, after all

Look for my illustrations displayed in front of Cardullo's Gourmet Food Store in Harvard Square, Cambridge in the coming days. I have struck a deal with them to do seasonal promotional artwork for the A-frame in front of their store. Should be up within the weekend.

Some sketches and an excerpt

I will open with a quotation from, possibly, the greatest book ever written, God Damn You, Christopher B. Holmes, Appendix B: "The Grumpiest Man," written, composed and performed by Andrew J. Jerz,

      "Jesus Christ McManus rattled around the alleyway beside the dumpster-kittens and the darkest, blackest, sootiest of city squirrel-rats. On the darkest night, at the ass-most end of Newbury Street in Boston, USA, the party was over. Caked in the shit of two hundred screaming shit-for-brains, shit-for-hands, and shit-for-testicles fans, J.C. "Geez" McManus adjusted his nuts and drained the last swig from his piss-colored libation before using the empty, glass vessel to disintigrate a rodent-insect eyeless freak of a creature that had scurried into the moonlight from beneath a parked box-truck with a deadly-accurate head-over-heals tumble of a toss - a perfectly balanced pinwheel of glass, spit, and probably a little bit of left-over vomit that would have made any Iraqi knife-thrower-extraordinaire jealous of the form and artistry involved. Geez smiled with a heavily narcissistic and self-assured delight, knowing that the blood-spatter on the pavement where a creature of the Lord had stood just moments before - however abominable the wretched golem had been - was the work of his skilled and practiced hand. It was a beautiful thing, and somewhere deep within the bile-ducts and porous, spongelike interior of the man's spleen, some kind of Thanatotic chemical squeezed its way into the blood that pumped slowly - at somewhere around forty or forty-five beats-per-minute - up into the darkly resin-coated brain-synapses of the drunkest, loudest, most nihilistic son-of-a-cunt ever to front the greatest punk rock band in our Nation's fair yet limited history. This was Kenmore Square, some time in the vicinity of nineteen-seventy-fifteen ano domini at three-forty-twenty antemidiem on a vaginally-moist August morning in the precariously balanced outskirts of the country's first and greatest city; and if Norman Rockwell's ghost had risen from the grave to paint one last picture to complete his as-of-yet unfinished Five Freedoms series of posters, it would have been of J.C. McManus in this moment - towering over the dispersing fans at five-foot-twenty-four, and higher than Elvis on drugs that he couldn't possibly name - and it would have been titled Freedom From Really, Really, Shitty Music (and the Birth of a Terrible Beauty).
      "Geez had instigated the literal shit-storm that had ensued within the venue. Earlier in the night, fans had lined the front of the stage with shots of whiskey; but, disenchanted with this horrendously capitalistic show of - what he considered - feigned appreciation ("look how much I like your band, I spent money to show you how great I think you are!"), Jesus Christ McManus drank the shots only after pissing directly into every single glass before the two-hundred kid, sold-out crowd. "Sold Out" in those days actually only meant that some people would have to hang from the pipes on the ceiling if they wanted to come in and see the show. A seat in the ceiling rafters isn't a bad thing except for the exceptional level of smoke inhalation involved, but cancer wasn't as trendy then as it has become now, and Pam had yet to divulge any information regarding her fat face or the lump on her neck to the youth of the generation; and so, the pipe-hangers swindled and brindled and dwindled their way in throughout the show, increasing exponentially in quantity the leading up to the moment that Jesus Christ McManus would take the stage. By the time the man had climbed to the microphone seemingly from a metaphysical trap door cleverly sandwiched between two wrinkles in the time-space-continuum, the roiling masses at the edge of the modest stage bubbled like fire-ant fagioli in some kind of gravity-defying, sideways crock-pot of some extra-perceptual, cackling, demonic Italian nonna - her sagging tits ejaculating directly into the mixture as she stirs and stirs until the still-living creatures boil over the edges, tossing human-shaped arcs similar in physics and appearance to plasmatic solar-mass-ejections across the vaccuum, ultimately crashing into the magnetic sphere of the now performing act on the stage and delivering to the still-earthbound masses the most magnificent show of mixed-metaphor-northern-lights that punk rock and literature can possibly bring you on one page without any variety of visual aide or diagram.
      "And this went on for at least an hour before Geez reverted to his most apelike instincts, becoming suddenly naked on stage so that he might defecate into his hand and disperse his excrement amidst the audience. It was probably the whiskey talking, but most of the crowd was quick to return fire between guzzles of hard liquor mixed with equal parts in human sweat (a mixture that, despite having no apparent chemical properties that would produce such effects, has been known throughout the history of man to produce unruly and unpredictable behavior even from the most refined of social classes [or castes, in Buddhism]; if you don't believe me, mix [in a controlled setting] equal parts human sweat and whiskey and feed it to a succesful bank manager: report all physical results and sudden behavioral changes in your blue notebook before handing it in to be graded).
      "Jesus Christ was vomiting blood just before the final encore, and that was how he knew that it was time for a cigarette break, and maybe a rail or two to calm his nerves.
      "All in a day's work."

And now, a bunch of shit I pulled from my sketchbook, since most new, finished art is currently in-production:

When you do editorial illustration for a living, you don't make a lot of money. When you don't make a lot of money, your financial records become a fascinating, convoluted mess of tax-write-offs that - although they may appear questionable to the casual observer - are actually very necessary and legal. I for one, as well as many of my friends that preclude themselves as ‘illustrators,’ write the entirety of my rent off of my taxes based on the fact that I could not possibly do a single illustration properly if it were not for the four, drunk roommates that I make it a purpose to keep awake as long as possible (as some kind of, what - at some point in history - the intellectuals and social philosophers would have referred to as ‘muses,’ but which I would be inclined to refer to as ‘loud, unreasonable, despicable [yet, oddly intellectual], sex-addicts’), via coffee, drugs ('scrip as well as OTC), and buckets of ice-cold water. Sometimes the paperwork filed to perpetrate this radical abuse of the system slips through the labyrinth of red-tape-processing machines (that will usually simply process the files and move on at the light speed with which they do so) and makes its way to a sentient being that looks upon your poorly constructed case against the-concept-of-paying-a-dime with disdain; this sentient being usually - after reviewing the tax forms - lowers the files in disbelief, pushes his spectacles up his nose (for they have been slowly sliding down as he reads), stares off into space for a moment, and then mutters, "what an asshole," before making the phone calls necessary to assure that this "asshole" pays every cent and then some (asshole tax) of what he owes the government for...whatever it is they do (flying drones into Pakistan, banning gay marriage, and adding wheelchair access to the Neponset River Bridge while the Fore River Bridge remains a shambled and deteriorating mess of hastily constructed, temporary hodge-podgery).

And so, www.wickedrudeart.com is temporarily out of service until I am done paying the government the dues that I, apparently, owe them in great quantity. It is - much like the Fore River Bridge - being temporarily replaced by this much more rickety, but less costly, form of web-based media (and will probably remain so for at least 12 years).

So: Here is a slimmed down version of that which used to be on www.wickedrudeart.com. There will also be more to follow as I do more things, so check back for more new art to follow. And there will be more soon. In the mean time, look for me peddling shitty, hastily thrown-together paintings of the Longfellow Bridge to European tourists in Harvard Square until I pay The Man back!