Joel Hopler

Revisiting the composition of a “Fwoosh” comic frame from a Ghost Rider comic.

A collaboration with Emily Hopler.

I’m choosing to focus on the exposed portion of the comic character’s face. Not all characters wear a mask and when they do, some cover the entire face. The particular style of mask that covers everything except the nose and mouth doesn’t seem limited to a particular type of character. My attention to this is mainly due to the necessity of face masks due to the pandemic that cover this exact portion left uncovered.

This image collects content from the Lone Ranger and a drawing of Conan the Barbarian by John Buscema. The strategy is to trace the content, then mash them together into an abstraction.

After the death of George Floyd and the protests throughout the US, I wanted to use a strategy I have been testing recently, where I trace source content, then mash them together into an abstraction.

In this case, I am mashing images from the Walking Dead and photographs of a black people on horse back during recent protests.

Having recently traced and added on to the skeletons from Hans Holbein’s wood cut series, The Dance of Death, I wanted to extend this strategy of tracing and adding to other imagery, then mashing those images together. Here, I am focusing on an image of John Wayne in one of his many movies and mashing it together with other tracings from Hans Holbein and Hokusai.

Old english etching as coloring books? Let’s take it up a notch and use an etching by Albrecht Durer of St. Christopher as the bones of a digital painting.

I will collect selected imagery and other content used for the works in progress here.