Curious caricatures

Post delivered the message with enough humor, irony or silliness to make it bearable, leaving us smirking and wincing at the same time.

"Looking back, I think I would have made a few different choices," says a dying fish, flopping around on a desert landscape. A vacant-faced kid states, "I'm mediocre and kind of, half-way proud of it!"

In one installment the Tooth Fairy admits, "I got pregnant at 16." Santa laments, "The bank took my house. I live in my sleigh." And an ogre-like critter confesses, "I eat children. I'm not proud."

After 300 panels, Post pulled the plug on "Your Square Life."

"It was an odd strip," he said. "No recurring characters. No editorial mandate. I could basically do what I wanted. I enjoyed it, but after every weekend for six years, I got tired."

But tired only of the grind, not with his peculiar creative vision. On Friday, he opened "A Study in Curious Portraiture," a solo show at Urban Greens in downtown Anchorage. The comic strip style remains evident in the ink-jet prints on display and, though the words are gone, a strong sense of narrative remains.

A chubby angel sits on the shoulder of a wildly moustached young man. An equally fat devil accompanies a smiling young woman. A wedding party poses for pictures in front a lake inhabited by the Loch Ness monster.

Such images tell stories without using the sometimes long sentences that informed the action in the cartoon panels.

"I often felt I was constrained with trying to deal with the words, making a story or a poem to go with the picture," Post said. "There was a lot of stress in meshing the two."

Escaping the verbal hobbles gave him a sense of liberation as he worked on the current show. So did having the time to work up the pieces and expand on themes and ideas, "the luxury of having 10 months to do a show," as he put it.

"It's nice to be excited about drawing again."

Post was born in Alaska in 1975. He grew up in Palmer, his father's hometown, then attended the University of Washington in Seattle, where he majored in psychology. Not until his final semester did he start playing around with the various computer-assisted art techniques that he now uses.

"I'd always been a doodler," he said. "When I graduated, I started my own 'zine. That led to the invitation to do cartoons for the Press."

He had a day job with the state. (He's now a juvenile-probation officer.) The cartoons fed his need for an artistic outlet, but "I wanted to do something more serious," he said.

Around the time he decided to end the comic, another Press contributor approached him with the idea of publishing his work in book form. He now has a compilation of "The Very Best of Your Square Life," a book of cartoons and puzzles titled "Lies Alaskans Tell Tourists" and two children's books about animals.

"I'd anticipated doing more books," he said. "But my publisher had a family emergency."

Which opened the door to having real artist gallery-style shows.

For "Curious" portraiture, he dug into his trove of old photographs -- some of family members, some acquired at antique stores. The original idea was to illustrate the pictures in an exaggerated, but fairly straightforward way, sort of an "alternative family history."

He initiated the series faithfully following the contents of formal studio pictures from a century ago. But on his blog site, yoursquarelife.blogspot.com, he said he became "less and less enthused" with the results as he continued. As he looked at his transcription of a brother and sister in Edwardian dress, "it just looked empty."

So he added grinning ghosts straight out of his old cartoons. "Everything fell into place, and I suddenly became proud, barreling through the rest with a smile on my face."

His blog explains the "process" that the individual pieces in the show underwent. For instance, "Old Men and Monsters."

"I love these three guys," he wrote of the bearded gentlemen in the antique photo. "I can only imagine the old man shenanigans these guys got themselves wrapped up in. The mind runs wild. I kind of pictured a geriatric 'Where the Wild Things Are' with this one."

"Curious Portraiture" evokes the social commentary of prominent caricaturists, like William Hogarth or George Grosz, without their overt cynicism. It also speaks to Post's increasing technical proficiency. The work is done with greater attention to detail and shading than was possible -- or perhaps advisable -- in the rapidly produced Press cartoons. His ability to accurately portray specific human faces while instilling in them his own slant is also evident.

Their wordless content can stimulate the intellect, as did the quirky texts in the old panels. But the medium retains the Dick Tracy-like simple lines and garish colors straight out of Roy Lichtenstein's famous pop art canvases.

That color thing is kind of hit or miss, Post admitted. "I'm colorblind," he said. "It didn't matter with the 'zine or in the Press. That was all black-and-white. But now I have to use cheats and cues and (computer program) color swatches."

Which may explain why the girl used as the model in "Beauty and the Devil," who could be a brunette or redhead in the original grey-tone photo, comes off as a peroxide blonde in the painting.

"I'm slowly expanding my comfort level with color," Post said.

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Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.