This picture was taken over a year ago. Me, Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt had decided to do something grand. We wanted to tell a story of love and death in a central European city made out of paper cutouts- inside Jim’s loft in Melbourne. Here I am drawing some houses.

It’s called I Have Your Heart.

After some years of cursing, absinthe, round-the-world plane trips, and cutting out tiny curlicued gates that made Jim want to throttle me, the rough cut is done.

Team Crabapple, Boekbinder, Batt, reunited

It’s extraordinary. I want to take credit, because I drew the thing, but if it was stick figures it would have looked just as good, with all the passion and genius and obsessive work Jim put into it. You’ll see, and you’ll love it just as much as I did

Besides watching the rough cut, here are some other things I did in the last two weeks.

(left to right) + portrait commission, inspired by the Ballet Russes.

+ Being from New York City, I’d only seen guns in negative contexts.  Fred got his first gun when he was 10.  i wanted to see what they were like for real.  We shoot rifles. The first time I squeezed the trigger and there’s the boom and the kick back and the hot shell coming out, the rush was like nothing else. By the second time, I realized that my eyes were shot from detail work. I couldn’t hit an elephant.

+ poker chips for Shell Game backers

+ the first tendrils of a mini-project me and Warren Ellis will be dropping next month.

+ my mother, looking tattooed from a projection while she traces out the lines for my next Shell Game painting, Syntagma Athena

+ signing drawings of my own eye from George Hearts Maria show in Germany

+ light is the new ink

+ With Veronica Varlow, who, in a chartreuse lace slip and flowers in her hair, looked like the motherfucking absinthe princess. Late night drinking vodka gimlets with my beautiful art family, welcoming The Impossible Girl back to New York

Spoke about art, politics, and feminism (lots of eye-rolling about women-only panels at conferences- they suck) for Tous Rebelles, a documentary for French German TV channel ARTE.
 

Finished Our Lady of Liberty Park, my tribute to Occupy Wall Street

This has been a month of brutal work, devolving into a feral art troll who bites when humans come near. On Monday, I start a mural.  But the next two days?  Lying in bed drinking booze-laced coffee, reading, listening to Grace Petrie and Gainsbourg and Ay Carmela.  

Cause September, dare I say it, may be even worse.