Painted this little Dolly Parton portrait for a friend! It’s my first attempt at a celebrity portrait (if you can call it that) and I think it turned out okay, and I absolutely love Dolly Parton because how could you not. I wish I could just draw pictures of Dolly Parton all the time.

I’ll be traveling for the next couple of weeks but again, feel free to email me about commissions etc. during that time!

.jb.

Drew this pigeon for a supporter of my fundraising efforts! I’ll be traveling for the next two weeks but feel free to send me emails about commissions or make donations while I’m on the road, I should have some email access and will definitely be catching up when I get back.

<3 jb

EDIT: here’s a slightly better final image…

I love the opportunity to foray into adorableness.

–jb

I know this pun has been done but I swear I came by it independently. Also, I have been kind of emotionally focused on my need for a dog. Maybe after I get back from Poland…

Thank you to everyone who has already donated (your drawings and paintings will be heading your way asap), and if you haven’t already, I’ll be doing this until the end of June! If you have an extra chunk of change, it’s a great chance to get a custom zine cover or birthday card or something along those lines. But also, no donation is too small–it all adds up and is really incredibly helpful (and those postcards are pretty cool).

Love,
jb

Drew up this piece today for someone who donated to my summer donation campaign. This actually wasn’t a request, it was just what I was feeling at the moment, but if you donate, you can request things! I refer you back to ye olde summer projects “I need some money real bad” drive, a few posts down.

Anyway, interspecies bud stacking is basically the salve my heart needs right now.

<3 jb

Back to writing final papers for a while,
jb

I was so excited when amazing Toronto-based illustrator Clara Bee Lavery asked if I wanted to do a portrait exchange with her, and even more excited to actually get the results in the mail! My portrait of Clara Bee is above, her portrait of me (as a sexy lumberjack, no less) is below! It’s kind of like we actually get to hang out…

This has been a good month for art–so many of my dear friends are gearing up for exciting summer projects and producing amazing pieces that will look so good hanging on your wall. If you have some cash left over after contributing to my donation drive, or you don’t really want to support my work but are looking for someone else to throw some bucks at, Elle Perez is producing beautiful photography and selling prints to pay their MFA position placeholder at Yale (YALE!). Also, photographer and printmaker Amy June Breesman is graduating and being thrust into the wide world and also making some gorgeous pieces that would look so good in your life.

Hope wherever you are is warm and sunny, and that we can collectively emerge like a 17 year cicada brood and fly into people’s hair.
<3 jb

Everyday I am grateful for you, for the inspiration, support, and friendships I have found in you. Here, especially, I feel that I am a part of a creative community, and I am overwhelmed by the incredible work that I have access to and humbled by the opportunities and love that I am given, in small and large ways. As tacky as it sounds, I am grateful for every reblog, for every like, for every enthusiastic comment. I am excited by every zine trade, every art exchange, every amazing project that my friends dream up and make happen, through these networks we have built.

This summer I have an incredible fellowship opportunity to travel to Poland to do research that will both help solidify my doctoral research and will hopefully result in a visual multimedia piece, that explores memory formation and self-making through image and data capture technologies in the context of Holocaust tourism. I also have the opportunity to collaborate with the talented and singular playwright MJ Kaufman on a graphic novel project that I am bursting with excitement about, based on one of MJ’s extraordinary plays. I hope to also continue work on “Love, The Furies” and to continue putting out zines including Doykeit and the new Long-Distance zine.

In addition to needing to sustain myself while I embark on these many projects during this very busy summer, I am also realizing that I will need to obtain access to a wide variety of equipment and resources that include everything from pens and paper to train tickets for trips to archives to (dream big) a more functional computer. Being a grad student isn’t a very high paying gig (and during a non-teaching summer, a non-paying gig), and I have been feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the financial and logistical burdens I expect this summer to represent.

This is not a Kickstarter or a similar funding platform because I can’t provide you with a final product–this is research and development, exploration and potential. I am asking, if you read Sassyfrass Circus in all its guises, if more zines and writing and comics and workshops and new directions from me sound exciting to you, to consider donating any small amount to help make this possible. If you have access to any non-monetary donations/suggestions/loans that might help, this would also be greatly appreciated. These would include, most urgently, use of a large-format flatbed scanner (will travel within reason), at-home photoshop access, and a remote shutter release for a Canon Rebel T3.

I have created a donations button that links to paypal, which you can find in the right hand column of this blog as well as at the bottom of this post. I will be offering small tokens of gratitude for folks who are able to support this project, detailed below (so please include your address and requests when you fill out the paypal form)! I will be accepting donations and sending out rewards until I leave for Poland at the end of June.

1-5$ donations will receive a heartfelt thank you and link.
5-10$ donations will receive a handwritten thank you note and a set of 5 postcards (pictured above!). Also, I will follow you on twitter (see Melissa Joan Hart’s kickstarter campaign).
$11-20 donations will receive a a thank you note, set of postcards and a copy of my zine Doykeit (or request a different zine).
21-30$ donations will receive a small original drawing (requests are fine!) and a very heartfelt thank you.
31-50$ donations will receive a small original watercolor painting (requests are great!).
I will also discuss larger commissions for interested parties!

Thank you so much,
<3 JB

I have been half-following the controversy over Justin Bieber’s visit to the Anne Frank house, at which he left the note, ““Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.” Initially, I chuckled, and shook my head at the legions of defensive Beliebers who took to twitter to express that they didn’t actually know who Anne Frank was, much less why the Biebs himself would desire her Belieber-ness! But the comment stuck with me–there is something so sweet and sad and hopeful and strangely, potentially radical in Bieber’s trans-historical desire to know or be liked by a girl who loved celebrities and in spite of everything was very much a teenage girl, who touched millions of people after her death. I suspect, although most of us don’t have our own fan-base neologisms, many of us agree that Anne was precisely “a great girl,” that we hope she would have liked us and that by all rights she would probably be a Belieber (who isn’t, a little bit, deep down?).

Matt Weinstock for the New Yorker wrote very close to the initial article that I would want to write, if I extended this piece and as I think about questions of politicized memorialization and the “life” of the memory (though some of his moves are unnecessary, i.e. his meditations on celebrity). I am further interested in thinking about the more perhaps insidious ways Anne Frank has been used, precisely as nationalist martyr. If Anne Frank is to act as a screen, what are the appropriate myths and ideologies to be projected onto her overbite, her fly-away hair? What are the multitudes of ways in which Anne Frank exceeds her diary, her self, but also the expectations and demands we place upon her? Weinstock writes:

I think Bieber can be forgiven for thinking of Anne as someone who’s still breathing. The writer Shalom Auslander dubbed Anne Frank “the Jewish Jesus,” and like Jesus, Anne Frank is constantly being resurrected. Anne’s defenders seem not to understand that her appearance in irreverent sequels to the diary are crucial to keeping her alive as the “little bundle of contradictions” that she was. Our collective vision of Anne is always in peril of drifting into somber martyrdom (if you haven’t read the diary in a few years, it’s easy to think of her this way), and the so-called trespasses on her memory are really vital acts of defibrillation. For example, Auslander’s spastic novel “Hope: A Tragedy” presents her as an ancient attic-dweller plugging away on a follow-up to the diary…Similarly, Philip Roth’s novel “The Ghost Writer” envisions an Anne who survived Bergen-Belsen, came under the wing of reclusive author E. I. Lonoff, and had to fend off the amorous advances of the Roth stand-in Nathan Zuckerman. Even Cynthia Ozick was momentarily moved to what-if speculation, writing, “It is easy to imagine—had she been allowed to live—a long row of novels and essays spilling from her fluent and ripening pen.”

The works of Auslander, Roth, and Ozick are obviously rooted in the disbelief that we all felt upon first reading the sentence, “Anne’s diary ends here.” Who can accept it? And who can resist grappling with a story so widely known that it risks becoming cliche, or myth?

It’s also worth linking directly to an article Weinstock references, an interview with Anne’s stepsister Eva Schloss that is worth reading for Eva’s own story as well as for her comment that Anne “probably would have been a fan. Why not? He’s a young man and she was a young girl, and she liked film stars and music. They make a lot of fuss about everything that is connected with Anne Frank.”

-JB