LANKY WEIRD DUDES
by Justin F. Farrar

Well, the time has arrived for Little Cakes' third exhibition, a drawing show(!) titled, Lanky Weird Dudes, featuring the collected illustrations, drawings and sketchbook artifacts of five leggy gentlemen who have spent countless hours traversing their individual mindscapes, detailing the exotic lands they have visited and the magical creatures they have met with whatever is within a lanky arm's reach: drawing paper, magic markers, college-ruled notebooks, paint, grocery bags, cloth, and even the very walls of the Little Cakes Little Gallery!

Through the drawing process, these five artists have meticulously constructed fully conceived worlds, sciences and cosmologies. Despite the singular dreams and visions found in each artist's unique realm, all five share the unifying belief that time spent, heads buried in sketchbooks, crafting one drawing after another, is definitely time well spent. They do not draw for the art world. They do not draw for money. They draw for drawing's sake - to see their imaginary worlds explode to life, evolve, and burn out, ad infinitum. And now Little Cakes has lured them from their native environments, letting them loose in the Little Gallery -- free to build one all-encompassing universe where all their respective elves, monsters, freaks and demons are free to mingle and cavort.

Last show, the Little Gallery morphed into the Fantastical Cave, but this time around, the Little Gallery sprouts into the Great Tree, where Hiawatha brought together the five tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy and forged their constitution. On several plains of consciousness best attained through chemical experimentation, the Little Gallery should be thought of as the sacred meeting ground wherein the five lanky weird dudes are coming together and forging a new confederacy through a large collection of truly tweaked drawings.

Lanky Weird Dude I: Gary Beauvais
Gary Beauvais is a rather silent and elusive shadow living in Detroit where he spends his time making beautifully pulverizing electronic music under the moniker "Mammal", and creating, among other menacing creatures, Fog Walkers. They are moody entities that seemingly creep across the paper because of Beauvais' ability to perfectly duplicate a particular pattern of microscopic inconsistencies throughout a large and dense sequence of meandering lines, not unlike super-string theory.

Lanky Weird Dude II: e*rock
e*rock is a prolific visual artist, animator, designer, musician and publisher of Thumb magazine, who resides in Portland, Oregon. Also, he finds some extra time to run the Audio Dregs music label. "Trying to go deeper in a psychedelic direction with more use of color vibration," e*rock recently said of his latest experiments in drawing. And vibrate they do! His "dudes and creatures in psych-vibration color lazer style" scream, strobe and incessantly stab the eyes with intricately scrawled neon lines - highly evolved precision masquerading as bored-in-the-back-of-the-classroom haste.

Lanky Weird Dude III: Tom Hohmann
In Tom Hohmann's own words, "lots of full color pen drawings, super wild including an unfinished comic strip called 'The Life and Times of Big Dick Danny'......also, a comic called 'Aunt Spigley' which is some sort abstract fucked up childrens book.....[sketches of] elf shit, tree costumes, different elf character ideas....building a teepee...it is made out of different colors of sport jersey material sewn together with many different screen prints of Native Americans as well as some other prints of people with super long hair, made up guys, who you cant see their face or body, just arms and legs sticking out..."I am going to try to create a world called 'Hairmony' where Native Americans and elves, actually pretty much any being with long hair and respect for the natural environment will live together, playing music around fireplaces..."

Lanky Weird Dude IV: Nate Nelson
Nate Nelson resides in New York City where he draws incessantly and plays drums in the two-piece underground rock band, Mouthus. While the other four artists in the show are very obviously influenced by the rough, jagged and oblique drawing styles found in punk and hardcore flier art, Nelson's recent drawings are richly stylized, ornate and absolutely maddening in the ways they seem to constantly shape-shift while also keeping perfectly still like sparkling jewels. Limbs morph into mouths morph tentacles morph into crowns morph into exotic flowers morph into mythic monsters unknown. For months, I was incapable of citing any possible influences on Nelson's style until I saw a book of Indonesian folk motifs lifted from textiles, jewelry, gamelan instruments, pottery, etc. If William Burroughs was allowed to perform the cut-up method with those Indonesian motifs then something nearly half as original as Nelson's work might have been created.

Lanky Weird Dude V: Kyle Thomas
Kyle Thomas (AKA King Tuff) is one gentle soul spending his days in Northhampton, Massachusetts, gluing day-glow feathers to his long greasy locks and making incredibly intricate silk-screen prints that are loaded with sharp wit and hundreds of hidden little critters. In addition, Thomas simultaneously maintains several sketchbooks filled with oddball monsters and mutilated caricatures of those who are fortunate enough to enter his field of vision. When Thomas told Little Cakes that his main piece for the show would be a nature scene, "with tons of fucked up shit going on inside it," made with pencil, watercolor and gold nail polish, the phrases such as "a glam pastoral," "rustic glam" and "glitter hippies" came to mind.