I began using those old-style wire clothes hangers that came with what is termed a cape for a blank canvas in 2019. In my closet I found an extremely old piece of paper shaped like a wire hanger. I must have moved countless times with this particular hanger that finally shed its cape. By then it was worn and had a lot of character and I thought how it might be fun to draw on with ballpoint pen. At the time I was watching the movie Where The Buffalo Roam, starring Bill Murray who plays the role of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Unfortunately I don’t have that original WTBR drawing and proceeded to make my second hanger art about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I have read by then most of the writer’s books and really wanted to include him in my work. The dated look of the retro/throwback caped clothes hanger fit my style for saying something about the author and also about films that I come to love, in general. Over the past years the hurried and frantic ballpoint pen scribbly look gave in to a more refined comic book look. The ballpoint replaced with Micron markers, etc. Then I began to paint on the same surface with acrylic and gouache. Here I want to go over some of the process in making my most recent addition to the Caped Hanger Collection.

For the second colored work, Fear and Loathing in Loas Vegas/ More like Sunday I needed to fuse scenes together plus adlib in order to fit the important elements into the unconventional canvas shape.

The head of the dusty guy isn’t even full frame. So the task of basically inventing a frame was needed.

Here I got a good idea about the dusty guy’s dreadlock like hair. The rest was put together in Photoshop.

So basically I assembled this scene in parts.

The dusty guy’s hair was painted in.

He was toned down a little to pull it all together.

The challenge is to make a standalone work of art that isn’t just a copy from the still of the movie.