Some Corpses are More Exquisite Than Others...

I've known Ralf Schulze a longtime, since the late 1980s. We met in the wild, weird world of underground comix and 'zines. I think Ralf sent me a few of his comix in trade; "Dinky-Doo" and "Zombie Vomit" and that started a friendship that has endured until today.

Ralf lives in Richmond, VA and recently I spent a weekend up there hanging out with friends. Ralf and I met for lunch then settled in for some beers at Steam Bell Beer Works (sidebar - great beer and friendly folks, worth the trip). Ralf brought along a sketchbook and asked me, "Do you want to draw?". I sheepishly admitted that I haven't been drawing much, feel self-conscious drawing in public and have no idea what I would draw and after the bullshit excuses were out-of-the-way, we settled down to work.

I started off with a shapely dragon-salamander creature, falling back on the ten-year old boy mind that is forever doodling during geometry class.

Ralf is more in-touch with his abstract side and went with these two images; one vaguely obscene and the other reminded me of a Simpsons nightmare (I'll leave it to you to figure it out)

After warming up, we got down to business and decided on the theme "MASKS" for some exquisite corpse fun. The rules of EC are simple, gather a group of artists (or those that want to pretend to be artists, essentially the same thing) fold some paper and each person gets to draw a section. The rub is, you don't get to see what the other people drew in their sections until the end.

We set-up two pieces of paper so we could both be drawing and pass the paper back and forth until it was time for the big unveiling. The first two drawings we set-up with horizontal folds and one of us started at the top and the other the bottom. These two drawings turned out surprisedly coherent. I particularly like the one on the left (above photo) with the eyepatch.

For the second group, we decided to mix it up and folded the paper in quarters, working vertically with one and horizontally with the other. These two certainly hit a more zany quality that we were hoping for.

I appreciate Ralf prodding me to get back to drawing, lighten-up and have some fun.

Good times!

OK HW