Latest acquisition

If you’ve been following the “Hanging Around The House” postsMan, I should really finish that…two more posts should bring us up to date., you have a pretty good sense of what kind of stuff decorates the walls around here.

New stuff is coming in at a slow, but constant rate–indeed at the moment I have a small Barry Windsor-Smith print, and a larger Tom Canty print off at the framers–but typically has to rest for a while before I do anything with it. I’m starting to run out of walls.

However, I can’t help get really excited when original art comes in. It doesn’t matter if it’s gigantic original paintings…which, if I ever get around to finishing the series, you will see, or original art from comics. For the most part, the comic art doesn’t end up on the walls–it ends up in a portfolio–but there are exceptions that I get excited enough about to frame.

One of the comic artists I really dig is Scott Morse. If you were following the series, you will have seen that I own six pages of the original art from Soulwind: the “cats & process philosophy” pages, and the final four pages with the “satori climax” moment.

I love these pages, and I really like the faux-Japanese inkbrush style Morse used on them. However, this style is very different from how Morse’s work looks today, and I felt like I should have something in the collection that captures his current style.

So, when I saw a chance to grab one of the painted original pages from his book VOLCANIC REVOLVER, I jumped. You can literally see Morse’s style evolving in this book.

The book was published in black & whiteWell, “brown & white” or “sepia & white” really, but it’s two-tone anyway…, but the framing sequences that open and close the book were painted and reproduced in a greyscale“brownscale”?. It turns out these pieces were painted in colour, a yellow/blue combination that doesn’t seem out of line with Morse’s current works, but which also was likely chosen to reproduce well in the two-tone print.

And I now own one of these pages.

Here’s roughly how it looked in the printed product–you’ll have to imagine that there were some speech ballons on the page:

Well, here’s how it looks if you have access to the original colour painting:

That image is a link to a ridiculously high-resolution scan, where you can see the details of the brushwork, and where you can see the texture of the paper. That hi-res scan is more for me than for you–I’ll probably break chunks off of it and make them into wall papers, etc.

I think I’ll be getting this piece framed sometime in the near future.