Chris Simonite's Cubo-Weirdism Blog! A Blog about Chris Simonite's Art by Chris Simonite. Who the Hell else?

If you look at my website, you'll notice that there is now a menu item entitled: "Get Updates." It used to say "Newsletter," but I changed it to better reflect what it is. And weekly (well, almost weekly) updates on my latest works is mostly what it is. On occasion it will actually contain some news, such as gallery shows. But most of the time if you sign up, you'll see my new work before my social media followers see it. One reason I say that it's almost weekly, is that on occasion I forget to send it. I think that's only happened once. Or as in last week, I'm pretty sure there was a glitch. The newsletter I wrote just didn't send. I could have sworn I had received it (yes, I'm subscribed!), but all I had in my own inbox were test emails that I send out before the real deal. Goes to show, I have to be more careful in the future. Anyway, I thought I'd just go ahead and post that "Get Updates" email here so that non subscribers can get a look at what to expect if they subscribe. You can also look at the archives here. Obviously, because of the glitch, my subscribers will not see these two paintings before my social media followers. My apologies to any subscribers. Here is last week's newsletter. I guess I should say here is last week's "Get Updates" email. And yes it does make me want french fried potaters and mustard–okay, ketchup. Mustard on fries? Hard no! [...]

One thing that may surprise you about me, is that I like my art to have a sense of humour. Okay, I'm pretty sure you've noticed this. But it's not as overt as it used to be. There was a time when I made work where a big part of my goal was to make my audience laugh. If possible. I didn't always pull it off. I also did a funny comic strip, so there's that. These days, since I started painting in my signature Cubo-Weirdist style, it's a little more subtle. But sometimes when I show my work publicly people laugh out loud. I have to admit that pleases me. So it probably wouldn't surprise you to learn that I love comedy in general. And that I love stand-up comedy and have seriously thought about trying it. In fact once, I signed up for an open mic. But, sadly, I didn't get a spot. I don't know why I didn't try again. I guess I knew I would bomb. But any good comedian bombs the first time, so that shouldn't have stopped me. [...]

A few years ago, I did a painting of Leela from Futurama. I also did a number of other cartoon character paintings at that time. People seemed to like them enough, but I wasn't thrilled with them. In many ways these paintings were experiments with rendering paintings straight out of my own head. And I feel like the results were mixed. My plan at the time was to do one of Fry as well, but I put that on hold. Here is the original Leela. [...]

For the last several years, I have been relentlessly painting portraits. Almost all of these have featured a single subject. I started doing this even before I began to paint in my signature Cubo-Weirdist style. As you can see below, I was doing it when I painted human/animal chimeras such as this one of Canada's late Queen. Yeah, I know she wasn't only the queen of Canada. In all this time, going back to 2017, if I'm not mistaken, I believe I only dabbled in putting more than one subject in a portrait once or twice. And in both of those cases it was a portrait of imagined faces, such as this one. [...]