Family and friends of the late Seattle artist Jon Strongbow gathered for a memorial panel earlier this month at Emerald Metropolis Comedian Con to inform tales about one of many nice eccentrics of town’s artwork scene.
Strongbow was born in Olympia, Wash., in 1954, and commenced his artwork profession in 1984 after spending a number of years as what he described as “wandering right here and overseas.” He went on to change into a fixture of the Pike Place Market neighborhood in Seattle for over 20 years, the place he exhibited a set of pen and ink drawings known as the Secret Metropolis Collection, produced between 1992 and Strongbow’s passing in 2022.
The Secret Metropolis Collection blends portraits of metropolis landmarks with figures from a variety of mythology, folklore, and native historical past, in what Strongbow described as a “shamanic journey via the streets of Seattle.”
Calling Strongbow a “Seattle artist” has a few totally different meanings. A lot of Strongbow’s artwork is particularly concerning the metropolis he lived in, as each a commentary on and chronicle of how Seattle has modified over time.
In his work, a Navajo lady performs with colourful dinosaurs on the steps of what’s now often called the Museum of Pop Tradition (“Night time Journey”), a dragon visits the Magus bookstore within the College District (“Magus Books”), and the location that finally grew to become Benaroya Corridor finally ends up internet hosting a bunch of Easter Island moai statues as an alternative (“The Secret of the Ages”).
Privately, Strongbow had been coping with liver issues for a number of years, which was compounded by a most cancers analysis, and had been scheduled for a liver transplant in February. Most of his family and friends weren’t conscious he’d been sick in any respect, so his abrupt decline and dying on Dec. 19 at age 68 was a shock.
Strongbow’s work additionally contains 12 jazz albums, recorded each as a solo artist and along with his band Thriller College; Northwest Mystic Collage, a short-run e-book of native collage artists that he revealed in 2022; and the self-published 1988 graphic novel The Fury of the 4 Corners.
The panel at ECCC, “Remembering Jon Strongbow,” was moderated by cartoonist and Seattle Central Faculty professor Leonard Rifas.
The panelists included Strongbow’s brother Marc Turnbow; Steve Beard, the previous co-owner of the Seattle comedian store Comics Dungeon; and Pat Moriarty, an artist, cartoonist, and adjunct professor on the Artwork Institute of Seattle.
Beard, Rifas, and Moriarty had all been buddies with Strongbow for over 30 years, and led a dialogue of tales about Strongbow’s life and work, with occasional participation from members of the viewers who’d met Strongbow over his years at Pike Place Market and within the Seattle artwork neighborhood.
“He was at all times my right-hand man,” Beard mentioned, who met Strongbow in 1991 when he grew to become a daily at Comics Dungeon. “He at all times had one thing to pawn off on you, some novel or comedian that you just simply needed to learn.” He informed tales of Strongbow using his bike from one finish of Seattle to the opposite, searching for extra books for his traditional science-fiction assortment or extra horror B-movies that he hadn’t but seen.
“After I take into consideration Jon Strongbow, from his work and the occasions that we spent collectively, quite a lot of it was in my creativeness,” Rifas mentioned on the panel. “Who I believed I used to be working with was somebody who had had not less than one overwhelmingly highly effective expertise, and relatively than attempt to protect or comprise that, it had guided his artwork and his selections in life.”
Strongbow, in line with Rifas, described his artwork as a private, therapeutic course of, typically referring to his personal physique of labor as “a part of his therapeutic from madness.”
On his web site, Strongbow wrote that his artwork was fueled by “a kind of urgency, in relation to what he noticed because the wiping out of pure sources, not solely within the type of bushes and land and minerals, however of individuals and traditions.” He often spoke and wrote about his research of conventional practices, which included time spent on the Pink Cedar Circle and on the Sakya Monastery on 83rd Avenue in Seattle.
A group of Strongbow’s 3D artwork of Seattle, All One Life, can be posthumously revealed by way of Fantagraphics on July 11. Marc Turnbow additionally mentioned on the panel that he’s exploring choices to launch an unpublished novel by Strongbow, presently titled Unique Wrapper.
