Digital painting on a Cintiq graphic tablet.

I recently acquired a Cintiq graphic tablet, which is the single greatest piece of equipment I've ever worked on. This is my first portrait. I'm looking forward to spending countless hours playing around with new styles.

Roseanne Cash

another illustration for The Progressive:

Recent Illustrations for The Progressive magazine

Here are some of the commissions I've done for the Progressive over the last couple years:

James Cromwell


Amy Ray


William Greider


Paul Haggis


Arundhati Roy


Maude Barlow


Lewis Black


Scott Ritter

Timmy Takes on Wall Street

Wall Street loves to take Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's money.


Also, check out this song somebody wrote about Paul Krugman:

sucking up

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It may be the Era of Change, but it's politics as usual in DC. Last month, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele found himself groveling to conservative demagogue Rush Limbaugh after Rush's scathing rebuke of his mild criticism. We can only imagine the amount of sucking up he's doing now to salvage his conservative credibility after saying that abortion should be an individual choice!! Meanwhile, ideological whore Joe Lieberman found himself crawling back to Democratic Senator Chris Dodd, who backed his opponent Ned Lamont in the last election. Joe is desperate to reingratiate himself with liberals after stupidly abandoning the ideology just as it rose to power in the US. Then again, Just Regular Joseph was never a liberal.

Can you DIG it?

Admittedly, this is more shameless self-promotion than political cartoon, but dig my painting on the cover of the new edition of Boston's weekly entertainment magazine, the Weekly Dig.


It's a painting of some relatives of mine in Ireland 45 years ago. Since this is a political art blog, I'll make a clumsy seque and say that I sincerely hope that the recent violence in Northern Ireland does not lead to a return to The Troubles.

Rush

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Hillary Goes To China

Her first trip as Secretary of State:

Copyright Infringement?

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[UPDATED WITH NEW LINKS]


I drew the above picture freehand, obviously copying the Shepard Fairey Obama HOPE poster, which copied Mannie Garcia's (or the AP's) photo. I changed the image to add Baxter Orr's SARS mask. I used ink pens that weren't the same color as the Fairey poster, so I put it on Photoshop to adjust the colors to be closer to Fairey's colors (and to deal with the shortcomings of my crappy scanner). Any difference between this image and Fairey's image is a result of my failure to draw it perfectly freehand, not a result of a conscious attempt to make a significant transformation.

So, am I guilty of copyright infringement?

If you haven't been following the AP/Garcia v Fairey copyright lawsuit(s?), then you're missing out. I'm not a lawyer, but it's pretty fascinating stuff in terms of the questions that arise about art, photography, copyright, ownership, access, appropriation, theft, hypocrisy, consistency, ethics, greed, and creation. Not a bad list, eh? Check it out:

AP threatens to sue Fairey.
Fairey sues the AP.
Fairey's Obey Giant website.
Fairey on Charlie Rose.
Hypocrisy? Fairey threatens to sue Orr.
Orr had appropriated and changed Obey Giant with a SARS mask.
A discussion on copyright and fair use law.
The law.
More discussion on the law.
A blogging copyright lawyer weighs in.
Another blogging copyright lawyer weighs in.
The debate is on,
And on,
And on,
And on,
And on.
And then there's parody. One of the landmark cases about parody is Leibovitz v Paramount Pictures, in which the Naked Gun 33&1/3 parody of the pregnant Demi Moore Vanity Fair cover was upheld as fair use.
Here are a few other interesting cases.
And if all that doesn't have you confused yet, check out this article that points out that parody is protected, but satire is not. I hope the writer of that article, Jesse Walker, won't mind if I quote this insightful analysis:

"In the press or the academy, it's considered normal for more than one interpretation of a piece of art to coexist. In a courtroom, only one interpretation will enjoy the blessing of the law, and there's no guarantee that a judge playing critic for a day will agree with [the defendant's] subtle analysis."

Adios Muchachos

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The Hat Is Too Much

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