Art for Dil Pickle Club Revival 12/9/10


I made some art last Thursday to support an exciting new incarnation of Chicago’s legendary Dil Pickle Club, finishing just in time for sale at their event that night. 17 unique, poster-sized (18”x24”) text pieces with stenciled spraypaint and freehand marker were priced very accessibly to benefit the initiative and were well-received by guests, with one enthusiastic collector ensuring that none remained(!).

The original Dil Pickle Club was a legendary speakeasy/cabaret where creatives, activists, civic doers and all stripes of social misfit gathered in early-1900s Chicago, forming a vibrant hub of entertainment and proletarian intellectualism from the jazz-age through 1934. The phrase “Step High, Stoop Low, Leave Your Dignity Outside” was a sort of motto for the club and emblazoned on its door. 

The organizers of this newest revival include Paul Genesius Durica, Fred Sasaki and Mairead Case, active agents in a number of creative communities and well-poised to carry the mantle, extend the rich tradition. Rather than a fixed location, this new Dil Pickle Club is an itinerant series featuring short presentations of off-beat, controversial and/or intellectual topics from a wide range of engaging guests at various venues all over town.  

So, first I made a brown paper frame to lay on each sheet of paper and demarcate a “target zone,” then sprayed in the first and last words to establish boundaries for the image area. 
I used a water-based acrylic latex spraypaint that I’ve recently fallen in love with, which can be used indoors(!) and and dries very quickly, along with a water-based poster marker. 
With the top and bottom of the image area established, I varied placement of the rest of the stencilled words, and then really enjoyed the writing. Although several are similar, no two are the same, and a few are considerably different. 
Lastly, I made a jig with a raised-letter label and rubbed a graphite stick across it to brand them as “official” Dil Pickle paraphanelia, next to which I wrote my name and the date.  
Out of 20 I set out to make, I only goofed a little bit on three of them. After delivering the good ones with the good people at the Dil Pickle event, I finished up some other work for the morning and then took a couple of the goofed-up pieces and made this playful composite for kicks. 
After weaving the strips, I cut slits and tucked the ends in tidily. 

For more about the original Dil Pickle Club, Wikipedia is good for starters, or here’s two books: 
• Mark Moscato’s Brains, Brilliancy, Bohemia: Art & Politics in Jazz-Age Chicago — Preview  |  Purchase
• Franklin Rosemont’s Rise & Fall of the Dil Pickle — Purchase

The website for the Dil Pickle Club Revival is thedilpickleclub.tumblr.com. 


three categories of current

Lots of new fresh paint on paper on the worktables, and that feels great, especially with the first snow falling — looking forward to hunkering down into good work this season. Photos and store items soon, friends. Rounding up what’s out & active right now from all available flat surfaces, sorting into three key categories, each with respective merit:


text paintings (wc?) 8/23/10


Click these images to see bigger versions. Four sketches underway since yesterday: slightly warm paper with black markers, black LetraSet transfers rubbed-on with a plastic putty knife, Golden acrylic Titanium white, white vinyl Gothic letters and Scotch tape.

Rookery Prints

Six silkscreened colors, 100lb French Whitewash Cover, 18x24” Limited edition of 70 Earlier this year I had a great experience performing an edition of prints with Sonnenzimmer, one of Chicago’s premier silkscreen shops, and after a busy season have finally vetted, signed and editioned the results — available now on my brand new electronic storefront: robfunderburk.bigcartel.com! Below are some session photos and notes. To purchase prints, go to robfunderburk.bigcartel.com. See, this wasn’t a drawing that we scanned and noodled with, or blew-up on a xerox machine or anything — the whole process was very direct and completely manual. Referring to photos and location studies, I drew what would become each separate color with black paint on a clear sheet of film laid directly on top of each preceding stage after printing. The result is a series that captures the drawing experience very directly, including discoveries along the way and very little revision or redirection of efforts. Rather than a series of reproductions of something that happened before it, each of these prints represents an original act that happened in a multitude of 70. For more info about the Rookery Building itself, see Wikipedia or therookerybuilding.com. And if you visit the Rookery, be sure to step inside and see its beautiful atrium — and in the NW corner, find the one marble-clad support column that’s open in the back to reveal the fantastic ornamental skeletal iron that’s underneath it all. To purchase prints, go to robfunderburk.bigcartel.com.

Resuming work on ACM’s Bestiarium

Project’s back on & barreling forward!! Here’s a peek at latest progress on illustrations for a special bestiarium project with Chicago’s ACM — here’s my posts regarding it to-date. They’ve got a lot of great material assembled for this issue, including short stories & poetry from a wide range of authors; stay tuned for release info! The Onager, according to antiquity, understands the lunar cycles, and in the background is an interpretive rendering of a local plant called the Marsh Blazing Star. Above image is current status, and below is the working draft.

Memory Lane: LOA Series 2002

Have been rounding-up documentation for a whole new robfunderburk.com and traipsing down memory lane a bit — From 2002, here’s session photos for a series of paintings produced collaboratively with multi-instrumentalist Zebulun Barnow (Z: Why didn’t we record the audio again?…). This experiment was a sort of dry-run for a live performance a few days later at Chicago’s Mars Gallery in support of Madshak Dance Company’s annual fundraising event. Point of order was to bridge gap between audio & visual execution and find ways to synchronize mark-making with musicianship. Photos here are c/o Paul Mroch, who managed tools & paints on-set for this session and the performance. So for example, in the above, the searching lines in the bottom two-thirds correspond with me locking into the rhythm structure, and the white paint represents timpani drums and higher range instruments laid over top of it. Later we created relationships with harmonica and other electronic instruments, and over the course of these experimented with building layer-upon-layer as well as excavating, essentially digging into the accumulated surfaces.

Above, left to right: Me, Zebulun Barnow, Paul Mroch.
Some of the completed work from this “rehearsal” session are posted on my website.
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At the Madshak event a few days later, I brought 13 prepared surfaces, each 2x4’ and painted flat black, along with an arsenal of acrylic paints, and after a robust session that may have lasted a couple of hours with a very enthusiastic audience, the results were auctioned off and otherwise sold. I may have photos of some of these buried deep in my archives yet, and I’ll love to post an update if/when they’re located.
 
Would any of you have any photos of the work or especially the actual event to share?… Definitely drop me a line, if so: rgfunderburk@gmail.com


Memory Lane: Open End Mural ‘04

Here’s a few pics from a 2004 painting project at Chicago’s Open-End (now AV-Aerie), an art & performance venue — a sort of wrap-around wall mural designed to interact with fixtures and vantage points as people move around in the space.









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