Bonus image: explodingdog's red robot

[Undertoad]

This guy is from http://www.explodingdog.com.

explodingdog is a gent named sam brown, who accepts titles from people, draws pictures from those titles, and posts them to his site.

Over the last few weeks I have become a big fan of explodingdog. I've put the site into the group of sites I visit every day. It's an interesting form, and the artist is very clever.

The pictures are simple, but they have a specific style that the artist has made his own. Rather than try to explain the style, you should just visit the site and look at drawings. (Go now; the link up there opens a new browser window.)

A lot of people don't like art that's immediate and culture-bound. They want art to be hard; the artist had to work at it, so the viewer has to work at it as well.

explodingdog is the antithesis of this. If the pictures were poems, they'd be haiku, not "Howl" or "Leaves of Grass".

Your reaction to the titles and images is immediate, gut-level. Like haiku, the images can be surprising, funny, and lively. Like haiku, their style is intimately a part of the whole experience, and without the "rules" of their style, they wouldn't be what they are.

And like the best art, your individual reaction is most of the experience. The images and titles are so simple, you find that your own thoughts and reactions are larger than what you're looking at.

mr. brown manages to elicit so much out of so little. You feel an odd sort of affinity to his people, even though their "faces" are only two dots, a line and a circle. He gets an awful lot of mileage out of that simplicity. That's part of the point. At face value, it seems any child could do these drawings, but once the style sinks in, you realize that it takes a very adult mind to turn a stick figure into a complex ironic or funny or emotional statement.

And lastly, here is an art form that could not live without the web. Finally. It's not images of art scanned in and posted; it's not some Flash wanker trying to be clever. It's real art that depends on browsers for its consumption and email for its submissions. It deserves a wider audience. Go there now!