Art on Market Rat

Felt things

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 14:04:17 -0700

I sometimes sew weird litems and specifically prefer 100% wool felt. The mushroom is based on an animated meme I once saw in which a lady plucks a mushroom from the ground and it ends up having an unsettling little face on its stem. I guess the meaning of it was you never know what to expect.

Smith Corona Sterling

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:54:43 -0700

At the time I made this cardboard typewriter, it looked to me like a badly rendered birthday cake with collapsing fondant sidewalls but looking back, it’s not so bad. Like most things I make, I later destroyed it.

It’s a Smith Corona Sterling, my first high school typewriter.

Worst pills best pills

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:49:23 -0700

I was going through some difficult times years ago and processed this partly by drawing and coloring many ordinary objects with highlighter pens. My mother once possessed a large paperback reference tome called Worst Pills, Best Pills 2: The Older Adult’s Guide to Avoiding Drug-Induced Death or Illness.

Pill bottles are one of my top three drawing motifs surpassed only by cigarettes.

Bubo the Owl

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:33:57 -0700

For exactly two consecutive years I had a personal annual tradition of making a headpiece costume for Halloween only with junk I had lying around the house.

This is Bubo the Owl, a robot bird character from Clash of the Titans (1981), a film I had never and still have never seen. I have no idea why I thought of this or tried to make it.

SWEEK

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:24:27 -0700

I painted this based on a Dollar Store tin container thing I once bought - this was easily 20 years ago or more - that had this creature on the cover, accompanied by the word SWEEK written in tilted, fun-house lettering.

For me this creature’s expression captured an anxious horror, impossible to resolve. Existential perhaps. I can only guess that SWEEK hints at its pain.

Screen time

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:15:29 -0700

For a time I loved the Paper drawing app on ipad (which Bending Spoons later bought and destroyed) because unlike most fiddly drawing apps it just gave you like one pencil and a paintbrush instead of a bunch of menu decisions.

I used Paper to draw a lot of round headed guys doing everyday things with flat-mouth expressions, some of which I included in corporate slide deck presentations for some reason.

Baby head

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:05:39 -0700

These are stickers I drew based on the impassive expression of a Bye-Lo baby doll head. I once found one at a thrift store, just the head and hands and a set of instructions for sewing and attaching a sort of burlap sack body form.

The head and hands on their own look like a sort of bored infant spectre rising from whatever surface you display it on, I keep it on a Smith Corona Royal Quiet De Luxe typewriter and imagine that this is what Ernest Hemingway saw on his drinking binges.

Facebook HQ

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:35:08 -0700

I made these dot-sticker scenes in the mid 2010’s to express the stresscore of working at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park.

It was like a city aquarium where swarms of glinting sardines swam in formation toward meetings or shuttles or group photos under jumbotrons announcing hackathons while corporate propaganda posters shouted menacing productivity slogans at you in sherbert colored risograph ink. You always had a stomach ache although everything you could possibly want to eat was right there for the taking.