The newTRADITIONALISTS Art Show and Opening.

 

Featuring our own Paul Palcko, Kyle Margiotta and Anthony Pedro.

This show has been about two years in the making. I jokingly said a while back that I would love to see a show with these guys and we could call it “The serious side of the PCS.” That thought never went away, I love what Kyle, Paul and Anthony do and I wanted the proper venue to really highlight their talents. Fortune smiled upon me when my good friends over at NicholsBerg Gallery in Chestnut Hill asked if I had any ideas for art shows. Flash forward to right now and I have just sent out about thirty press releases, posted all over the place and am eagerly awaiting the postcard you see above.

The name might have changed but I am honored to be curating what I still think of as the serious side of the Philadelphia Cartoonist Society.

I hope everyone in the group can make it out on May 5^th for the opening reception, fittingly scheduled on Free Comic Book Day.

You can find out more about it at the Event page here.

Mythology and the Forgotten Gods Show - Tonight at Phantom Hand

TONIGHT and the next few weeks, Phantom Hand (located at 6th & South in Philly) will be hosting "Mythology and the Forgotten Gods", a group art show curated by Anthony Pedro. It's a great show with an awesome group of local artists. Please see the showcard below.


Here is my (Jeffro's) Minotaur piece for the show. I drew it with a borrowed pencil at Bob & Barbara's listening to Kelvin, Rich, and Lucky during Wednesday's jam session. I was lucky to sit alongside fellow cartoonists James Kaminski and Michelle Miller with the legendary Bob Dix behind the bar. I finished the inks at the bar, but a swarm of Wharton students came in around 10:45 and grossed the place up. So I had to finish the colors on my lunch hour yesterday at Paolo's Pizza on Pine Street.


Tonight's show will be especially celebratory, because we found out this week that Phantom Hand has been granted an extension in the gallery space for being an 'exemplary member' of the Arts on South program. We will now be in our current location regaling you with art and assorted hand-made sundries and occasional free beer and baked-goods until mid-August.

Anthony Pedro - TOOTH, TUSK & TALON @ Proximity

Opening Reception: April 1, 2011, 6pm-9pm
Proximity Gallery

If you've ever broken bread with Anthony Pedro you may have noticed a distant look in his eyes, a twitch to his ear as if listening for an approaching storm. Anthony Pedro is in fact a Haunted Man. Down through time blows a wind carrying with it the whispering of grasses and the sad song of flora and fauna long since fossil fuel. He hears this, whether or not he chooses to, and is bound to record it in pigment and oil. The cacophony of teeth in flesh and cackle of nearby hyena keep him up late on tempest wrought nights. The banging of kettledrums and guttural chant is so loud he might as well be standing white knuckled on a steamer, bobbing silently on the Nile or Amazon.

Anthony's pockets are always bulging, filled with a strange array of tools and charms, lest he be ill prepared for when Gia comes crashing through the wall of sleep, the thin veil of time, and confronts him with all the tooth, tusk, and tal...on of his nightmares. He collects bones and hides, but what we don't see is the phantom flesh and sinew that collects and writhes, bleating, howling his name in the horrid tongue of the bush. Even when at peace, his hands twitch and move as if caressing an unseen rifle stock, carved with ornate fetishes and beasts on a drunken night around a campfire in the Burma jungle. Anthony has long since followed the ignis fautus into the misty woods and never returned. Anthony Pedro is a Haunted Man.

While his time as man is of current standing, his soul exists on a wholly different plane, a plane that is choked with vines and abnormally large vegetation. His spirit runs through jungle, desert, and forest alongside beasts man can never ...again behold. His earthly body is a beacon for his mind, which receives the crackle and hisses of transmissions, reporting his travels, hardships, grief, his kill. This is why Anthony Pedro's work is so important, so vital to us. It reads like an environmentalist's journal, which is doomed to jump to and fro different periods, eons, and hemispheres. Without Anthony Pedro's paintings we would not know about his other life, his true self, or his curse. And when soma joins pneuma, and Anthony leaves the present time, we can take solace in the fact that he is now complete, and will forever walk the forest smiling, periodically making bird calls. And when he is gone, his paintings will tell an epic story of an adventure more expansive than the Odyssey. Anthony Pedro is a Haunted, nay, Hunted man.

words: Sam Heimer

Proximity Gallery
2434 East Dauphin Street (in Fishtown)
Philadelphia, PA 19125
Contact: 267-825-2949
E-mail: janel@proximityart.com

AGE OF REPTILES CLOSES TONIGHT - March 18, 2011

The Age of Reptiles show (curated by Anthony Pedro) closes tonight. If you haven't been out to see it yet, please get there. A whole bunch of PCS members and Autumn Society members have some really decent work in the show paying tribute to what Dan Rather called "History's Greatest Generation" - the Dinosaurs!

Here is my contribution to the show:

"No Extinction" by Jeffro Kilpatrick

For more information and to watch a video of the show's opening, please visist the Autumn Society's site by clicking HERE.

Rain Gives Rise

This picture shows a Thalassomedon feeding on fish in the Cretaceous Sea while Ancient Ammonites drift by. The Thalassomedon is a type of plesiosaur, that had a 20ft long neck. Scientists think it may have used this long neck as stealth to sneak its way into schools of fish while its body could remain hidden below. They also think it may have fed like a crocodile or alligator thrashing its head from side to side.

Ammonites are one of the best ways scientists can date the ancient seas. Their shells were easily fossilized, and flourished through out the age of Dinosaurs. They grew pretty big sometimes with shells 3ft across. They looked like squid with a beak for eating other cephalopods.

"The Past is a Wilderness of Horror"

10"X20"

acrylic on panel

Detail - Ammonites adrift

 Detail - Ammonites adrift

detail - Thalassomedon chasing a school of unknown fish 

This picture depicts an Ultrasaurus and a pair of Pteranodon Ingens.

"Lizard Beyond Others"

8"X10"

acrylic on panel

detail

detail

These pictures will both be shown in The Age of Reptiles show, premiering at Paradigm Gallery Tomorrow evening. It is a show I curated and will feature many of your fellow PCS brethren. Sam Heimer, James Heimer, Paul Palcko, and Jeffro amongst others. I hope to have your support.

I also look forward to your sincere critiques of the pictures I have posted, I always appreciate suggestions on what I could have done better. Also if you are unfamiliar with my work please visit here ( the link on the sidebar is broken) also follow me on Facebook where I update often. Please find below the promo card for The Age of Reptiles and the Facebook event link.

onFacebook

First Post

this is my first post over here w you guys and been checking in now and again and seeing the fine work over here and humbly ask your opinions and thoughts on this and any future postings. I don't get offended easily so feel free to leave your honest opinions either good or bad.  I've been posting for a while with the "other society" and out of the near 300 followers over there the same four people comment every post, so I guess I'm looking for fresh outlooks on my work. p.s if you want to see more of what I'm about view my page (my link on here doesn't work) here
so feel free to snoop around and share any thoughts over there as well. thanks again -Anthony Pedro
 

"The Buffalo Dancers"

acrylic on panel

11"X14"