Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Artist Profile: David Rees

I kind of feel like I might have an explanation for missing the deadline for the artist profile post on this blog.. For my profile paper, I am chosing critically acclaimed political cartoonist David Rees, mostly known through his "Get Your War On"-cartoons that he published during the presidency of George W. Bush. He has a Wikipedia entry, that mainly focuses on his past achievements as a cartoonist. Currently, he centers on - manual pencil sharpening. I had to contact a friend of my parents' in San Diego, who is an artist herself (www.muellerswanson.com), and who paints and draws a lot, to find out about his name again and his website, but I couldn't get a hold of her until now.
At any rate, David Rees has his own homepage (www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com) that is all about him sharpening state-of-the-art pencils by hand in New York's Hudson River Valley. You can buy them at his homepage for 15$ a piece. Plus, blogs like thisburgess.blogspot.com, as well as traditional media like the LA Times ans The Guardian wrote about him. He has a business model and a good sense of humor ("...every pencil David Rees sharpens is shipped with a signed and dated certificate authenticating that it is now a dangerous object."). But first and foremost, he might be as nichy as it gets...

3 comments:

  1. Ok, but what is the content that he is distributing? The cartoons that he used to draw were mainstream media. Certainly pencil sharpening is niche - but does he use Twitter? Facebook? YouTube? I wasn't seeing that there was really anything on his website that you could analyze. I think you need to revisit whether this will be appropriate.

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  2. Yes, this sounds right. But actually he puts a lot of stuff out there on Twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/letsgetshort), plus he blogs on his own homepage (http://www.mnftiu.cc/) and on the blog good.is. He also promotes comedy shows on his homepage, and he is on Facebook (not a fan's page)...

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  3. Ok, the new links make it much clearer what he is doing. So he is pretty much self-publishing and doing everything online, now, right? Then he will be ok. Approved.

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