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Deft February 26 - April 17, 2010
" THE LEGEND OF SUM "
Driving home from the local red neck bar one moon lit summer night, Roy swerves his pick up toward a dark shape that is slowly moving along side the road. A loud CRACK shatters the darkness as the front tire breaks the giant snapping turtles' shell in two, right down the center. The great snapper rolls down the embankment into the stream and Roy's laughing fades as the truck turns to cross the bridge to his shabby farm house across the stream. The turtle, floating belly up is carried downstream to the other side and is swept into a quiet eddy where he sinks watching the moon fade from yellow to blood red through the darkening water. This small pool cut into the bank of the stream was at the back Roy's property and he used it as his personal dump site. The water caught in this hole became a terrible toxic soup of motor oil, fertilizer, broken toys, bones and entrails of many slaughtered animals, rusty tools and who knows what else. Over the next few months, a strange transformation took place in this evil chowder as it baked in the summer heat. A creature of revenge, born of cruelty and neglect slid its way out of the sickening mess one dark September night. Roy 's body was never found, nor could anyone explain the slime trail from the bedroom through the field behind the house.
Over the years that followed, other neglectful farmers vanished on moonless nights and folks reported vague sightings of a creature that seamed to be cobbled together from a collection of garbage, an old doll, bone, rotted skin, and broken tools, with a large snapping turtle skull for a head. They call him "SUM".
Bob Conge / PLASEEBO
In grade school and high school I couldn't bring myself to study anything I wasn't deeply interested in. I was always interested in drawing and painting those things in "my world" which often involved some aspect of nature, animals, especially insects, volcanoes, outer space ( planets, rocket ships, alien creatures), American Indians, the Universal Studios monsters (Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dracula). I was definitely NOT interested in math ( algebra, calculus, geometry), chemistry, history ( other than the native Americans who lived in up state NY, whose stone tools and arrowheads I dug for regularly ), and downright hated spelling, grammar, and reading ( with the exception of comics like The Witches cauldron, Mad, EC comics, etc. ). Un-diagnosed dyslexia helped to make most of my "school" experience a nightmare. I failed everything except the art classes, which I aced, this made no sense at all to me, but I knew for sure the one place where I was comfortable was inside my own head. Pretty much a loner from the get go, I hung with the other rejects and outlaws, a few of whom were also interested in drawing and painting.
I was 20 by the time met an old outlaw friend who had reinvented himself during his first year in college. He turned me on to reading and classical music that summer and the remote possibility that I might also try this college thing. I was accepted for a probationary period of the first quarter of freshman year art school, solely on the basis of my portfolio of drawing and painting. I fell in love with learning at what seemed like for me the last possible opportunity. Some six years later, I found I had myself somehow been reinvented and left the cloistered world of University life to open my own Art Gallery for the summer in a costal resort town. By that Fall I had "broke even" for the summer, the operative part of the expression being "broke". So when I got the phone call from the College where this all started with an offer of a teaching position, I was back in the comfort of that cloistered world of the University. I spent another five years on this side of the education fence falling in love with teaching and painting in my studio for gallery shows.
In, I guess what would be chapter three, I left the University life for good, to embark on a new career as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator to replace the teaching salary and continue my own work by painting evenings and weekends in my studio. After a slow start for the first few years my illustration / design studio took off from being only local clients to national and then International, some of this work can be seen on this website http://illustrators.chili.zaks.com/conge/default.asp. All the while I was still working on my own stuff in painting and exhibiting nationally.
(In Chapter four) After too many years of creating the images for other people's ideas I quit the freelance thing in 2003 to concentrate on doing my own work. That work now is an on going series of assemblages I call "Shrines" which can be seen on my website http://www.bobconge.com/ .
In 2004 I founded Plaseebo Custom and have been producing limited edition figures and customs since then. http://plaseebo.net/
The two principals that have driven my career are:
(1) "FOLLOW YOUR BLISS" (Joseph Campbell) and (2) "RE-INVENT YOURSELF EVERY 10 YEARS" (Bob)
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