Gallery of the Absurd

Mel Gibson: Boozing With Beelzebub

What better way to celebrate Halloween than to feature the year's scariest tabloid monster! Cranky old Mel Gibson was set loose one night after a vodka-fueled night of debauchery in a popular Malibu watering hole. Weaving recklessly around the hairpin curves of the Pacific Coast Highway, cops quickly pulled him over. Reeking of alcohol and wild-eyed, Mel stumbled out of his car and launched into one of those typical "do you know who I @%*&# am?!!?" tantrums so often witnessed in the Los Angeles area. He slurred on and began insulting the cops with hateful racial and sexual epithets and soon found himself in jail. Mel has since offered a public apology and is meeting with various Jewish communities to aid in his "journey to recovery". His sordid story combined with our obsession with vintage sci-fi and horror pulp fiction novels inspires today's post. Medium: Graphite and ink on paper, digital color/layout. Pulp title by Holly Aguirre.

UPDATE: This image of Mel appeared on the E! Channel's Daily 10 on Nov. 1. Thanks E!

Moving Pictures Magazine Feature

One of my favorite film industry magazines is Moving Pictures Magazine. This well written and thought provoking publication offers balanced insight and engaging commentary about film. This month's Morality issue (Oct/Nov 06) features four pages of illustrations from Gallery of the Absurd along with an interview with the 14. Much thanks to Elliot V. Kotek and Brittany Brenner.

Clones of Bones: Terror on the Beach

This vintage-style pulp novel is modeled after those fantastic sci-fi paperbacks of the 50's and 60's.  In this twisted story of unleashed terror and spine-tingling horror, a mad scientist clones Nicole Richie in order to add to his macabre collection of human curiosities...but his experiment goes terribly wrong when the clones continue multiplying. Forming an unruly mob, they break out of the laboratory and begin to terrorize the beaches across the U.S.  Can these angry starving clones be stopped before it's too late? This Halloween parody created with ink and digital color.

Gallery of the Absurd has been posting several Halloween-themed paintings during the month of October.  Dracula, skeletons, space aliens, Donald Trump....all are fodder for chills and nightmares.  One of the scariest images we saw this year was the Star magazine cover photo of a skeletal Nicole Richie struggling to run down the beach.  Interestingly, she looks cute in many of the photos that were taken of her that day, but Star managed to find the most horrifying photo in the batch and in classic tabloid maneuver, featured it on the cover. We hope our subscription never runs out. Medium: Star magazine cover manipulated with a little Photoshop.

Interview With The Antoinette

It's always fun to replace a slick promotional photo of an actor/entertainer with the occasional unfortunate paparazzi photo. In the treacherous territory of celebrity gossip blogs, much ado has been made over Kirsten Dunst's odd little "vampire bat teeth". Ms. Dunst feels her imperfect teeth are "sexy" and refuses to tread the well-worn path toward the Hollywood standard of perfection. We can't help but applaud her for taking such a daring risk. Still, those teeth make for an opportunity we couldn't refuse to pass up: blending Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette with a little bit of Interview With The Vampire. Medium: Acrylic on board, Illustrator. Post title suggested by Kipling West.

Donald Trump's Hot Air

Donald Trump and his hair have been spewing quite a bit of hot air lately. First, they go on Larry King and share their pointless wisdom about Hollywood celebrities. According to Trump, Angelina Jolie is "unattractive" while Paris Hilton is "beautiful" and "smart like a fox" [note to Trump: Stop insulting foxes]. He prattles on about how he used to dislike Kevin Federline, but changed his opinion when he learned that Federline considers Trump to be his "all time hero". This seemed to really pump up Trump's ego and now he considers Federline to be "fantastic". I'm not really seeing any "smart foxes" in this situation. Oh, and there's more. According to the New York Post, The Donald considers his skin to be newsworthy, "I'm known for having nice skin. My skin is my strength". Yeah sure, his skin is the healthy pink color of a newborn piglet...if the piglet was slathered in massive amounts of orange self-tanner. Medium: Acrylic on paper, photoshop.

Gallery of the Absurd Featured In The NY Times

The article appeared in the Arts section of the Sunday, Oct. 8th issue of The New York Times and was so large we had to take a picture of it as proof. Even then, we still couldn't believe how LARGE it was. We're still in a state of shock. Read the article here. Much thanks to the NY Times!

Madonna: Space Alien From The Future

Do you recognize this person? She graced the cover of a recent issue of Out magazine and was so heavily photoshopped it was hard to recognize that it was Madonna. Why this growing trend of transforming women on magazine covers into space aliens? Maybe it's all part of a conspiracy. An interesting theory making the rounds among UFO/Alien enthusiasts is that aliens are simply time-traveling super-evolved humans visiting Earth from the future. If that's the case, we speculate Madonna will look like this many thousands of years from now:

The standard of beauty defined by Hollywood is already starting to exhibit signs of natural selection toward classic grey alien traits - just look at all the giant heads on stick bodies showing up in the pages of the tabloids.

If this disturbing trend continues, then Esquire's annual "Sexiest Woman Alive" is going to look like this 11,000 years from now.

Britney's Cheetos Featured in French Magazine, Max

Much thanks to Max magazine, Gallery of the Absurd is honored to have appeared in your October 2006 Anniversary issue.