Steampunk

I keep an eye on the doings over at the East End Studio Gallery, because it’s run by some of Houston’s more talented East End Artists, and although I don’t make it over there as often as I ought to (I keep forgetting to put them on the calendar…), once in a while the stars align and I get to sneak over there and be sociable. Or sociable-ISH, anyways. Well, tonight was the second and last night of their Friday Night Steampunk Group Show. Tell the truth, Steampunk grabbed me when it first came up, back when it was more of an engineering motif than an artists’ aesthetic. I’m not particularly enthused any longer, but some of the artists who show at EESG are talented as all get out, so I went on over.

As usual, a mixed bag. Couple of pieces I very much liked, several I thought were okay, most in the middle, and a few that were beyond bizarre. There was a pencil drawing of a Steampunk Penguin going to war that was worth several looks and a couple of good laughs; Julie Zarate showed a painting of a beautiful woman with a clockwork heart and somehow got the skintone to work out so that she looked very believable as an artificial person. There were some other renderings of steampunk-ish women which were attractive work but just didn’t grab me. Pretty much all of the 3d stuff fell into the “I appreciate the amount of work that went into this but it’s just not to my taste” category.

But the pictures were fun.