Friday, February 18, 2011

Bear Hive

I really like bears. I think they're great. Deep down I also get the impression that my impression of bears is not the larger, society-wide impression of bears. An incongruous bear-interface, if you will.


I was drawing bears like this for a while. I don't know what this bear is doing. Leaping? Flying? Notions incongruous with Bear. Still, I'm not one of these honeypot bears, or plush Roosevelt bears. When I think of bears I think of Steven Seagal† and werewolves. Because they're both ferocious.

I was going around asking people to draw bears, too. I wanted to see what people thought bears looked like. I got one fairly naturalistic bear, a couple teddy bears, and a few ferocious bears. You hit the ferocious note and you hit bear, that's the end of it. If it looks like a mountain cat or whatever who cares – it's going to eat you. My drawings don't really look ferocious, it's not something I can sustain; so I need to concentrate on some other essence of bear.

I met a friend for breakfast the other day – meeting for breakfast is way better than meeting for brunch – and when I asked her to draw a bear we hit the jackpot. On the left you see her perfect bear, and on the right you see my copy of the perfect bear.

$-BEAR



I've been drawing that bear in every way imaginable. Here he works at a newspaper stand. Notice the bear in the lower left that actually looks like a cat. Missed the essence there.

I'm supposed to be working on a project now – The Bear Hive. I'll tell you about it later, but for the time being, you should just think about that:



Bear Hive



========
========
†The first thing you see in this trailer is a bear, I mean, right on.

No comments:

Post a Comment