The Surreal Art, Music, Comics, Animation, and Writings of Michael Lowell Teague: 2022 marked the Twentieth Anniversary of this website, which began under the name blenderkitty.com, after my comic strip at the time.
Labels are straight-jackets, but surrealism is a suitable description for what I do. My mature painting style roughly corresponds with the emergence of “Pop Surrealism,” (also called The Low Brow Art Movement) in the 1990s. I discovered Pop Surrealism, perhaps like many other contributors, after the fact.
mlteague.com may overwhelm the first-time visitor. Any artist building a museum to his own vanity (admittedly) may be justly accused of showing off. But the average high functioning autistic has nothing like my opportunity, so must relegate his or her life’s work to dusty shoeboxes left in the attic: never to be unpackaged, organized, or understood as the creator intended—if intent was formed.
Navigation: My creative ventures are grouped either by chronology or special interest. The Directory (above) will move you, like connecting corridors in a museum, through each wing of exhibits. Time stamps in red purple are provided where content is regularly (or irregularly) updated.
“Your powers, if I may say so without offence, seem superior to your opportunities.” ~Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes
Gallery Organization: Six galleries of paintings and drawings are presented here in reverse order, with the first three gallery pages covering 2010 to the present, while the second group of galleries cover 1997 to 2009. These latter galleries may also be accessed through a separate link below. The final gallery contains landscapes, and it too has its own link below. One may navigate all galleries consecutively through next/back buttons.
(*) Contact information regarding purchase of my artwork may be found at the bottom of this page, and also at the top of individual gallery pages.
Relatively Speaking: Grandiose canvases of scale are about as fanciful to an apartment dweller as notions of adequate ventilation. Regardless, I have modestly honed my craft in these conditions, and have lately introduced true pictorial space to my compositions. Cosmetically, it might appear that I am a prolific painter, but one Saturday afternoon yard sale would easily wipe out ten years of inventory. Last Update: 12/16/24
One Painter’s Oeuvre: My La Luz de Jesus Gallery show of 2002 anchors this selection of work. It is bookended by what immediately preceded and followed it.
A separate portal was created for these pages since the art is less organized and contains biographical and explanatory material:
Art School Porfolios: Early in these pages, I discuss materials and influences. In the last pages, post-art school, we get thick in the weeds.
Sketchbooks: Due to the in-progress nature of sketchbooks, pages in this section are regularly updated. With the creation of my YouTube channel, my sketchbook work has increased as a source of content creation.
These pages also include outlier paintings and drawings. Last Update: 6/22/24
Discography: Links to my music have been reactivated for individual music pages. However, I am still using Bandcamp as a archiving service.
I adopted Captions of Industry as a band name, although my OCD perfectionism does not tolerate bandmates. Last Update: 11/21/24
Blender Kitty and More: This portal includes both The Blender Kitty Archive and The Profiles in Confusion Archive. Additionally, an overview of my comic development is offered through a third set of links, which includes excerpts from my Xeric Award-winning comic book Epic Dermis. I no longer make comics so these pages are largely unchanging. Last Update: 9/15/22
Smallish Landscapes: When I undertook to paint landscapes in 2020, they were to be small and in some sense accessible. This genre is something of a special case within my painting output, so I present it here, away from the factory floor showroom, as its own link. Last Update: 8/30/23
Icarus Transfigured: My novel began as a work of speculative fiction in 2003, and it was not until I was diagnosed with Aspergers in 2007 that my protagonist became openly autobiographical. Autism not only informs the subject matter of the book, but it is itself an autistic creation.
Icarus Transfigured is a genre bender, though it may be broadly characterized as a metaphysical ghost story. The best description for it falls within a category of modern fiction called strange fiction. I discovered writers in this sub-genre around 2020, and the term works to cover my wide-ranging material.
The central story follows an artist to a new town and situation, as provided to him by a mysterious benefactor. He falls in love with a young woman he meets at a Halloween party, yet cannot separate his love from the house this attachment comes to haunt.
I hope no one is led to my novel under a false premise. It is not Oprah book-of-the-month-club fare, or encouragement for parents with autistic children. Perhaps what I intended by my book was to inspire those with autism to think differently (creatively) about what having autism means.
The Travelers-Back: My second novel may be loosely regarded as a sequel to Icarus Transfigured, although more so in theme than in plot or character. The “wedding” that ends Icarus is echoed in Traveler’s fairytale introduction. The reader, in stumbling into these events, feels the protagonist is trying to catch up to something he forgot.
The novel is a collection of distinct stories, with each recasting the living and the dead in different roles: A house under observation appears to be occupied by mannequins, and perhaps one corpse. A game of Telephone links the two worlds of the living and the dead in another story. A theatre where a murder is reenacted brings death uncomfortably close to the audience in a third tale.
Sleep and dreams attempt to repair these ruptures, and to unveil The Grand Design. Grief supplies the token and admittance for each, and though the messages received may be imperfectly understood, they are nevertheless transformative.
Pirate Ship Aesthetics: I do not have the resources, patience, or interest to make polished animation. God created metaphysics to get around the obvious, so I will leave the exhaustive work of constructing animated sequences that move objects conventionally from here to there to others.
My New YouTube Channel: I launched a YouTube channel in January 2023. Links to videos, as they become available, will be listed here. Last Update: 12/03/24
Failed Ventures, Homeless Projects, and Rumination: This portal is a catch-all for what did not find a home elsewhere. It may be read as a blog on far-ranging topics, including autism and art criticism. Personal accounts of near-death experiences and captures on Google Streetview add spice to the pot. Last Update: 12/18/24
Advice Sought: When you discuss creativity as it applies to websites, the default is: you must be talking about web design and not content.
I am always on the wrong side of a definition.
Artist websites do not appear to be a thing, by which I mean, they have come to resemble cruddy business cards that one forgets are in the bottom of one’s ten year old billfold.
Artists’ websites tend to be one of the following: (1. site no longer exists. (2. site is long abandoned: i.e., filled with broken links and/or non-responsive design. (3. site is a butcher-block website designed by a third party, in which the artist’s sole contributions are a few images of their art and maybe an email address.
Any advice on how to promote my website will be appreciated.
Buying My Art: My method of finding collectors for my art is boutique and involves a personal touch. Those interested in purchasing work may contact me via email. From there, we converse and work out the details. I’ve never had a dissatisfied customer. (Prints of my work are not available at present): teaguemichael5858@gmail.com
This is a listing of all current pages on mlteague.com with title page descriptions. This map is also accessible from the drop-down Directory menu on each page.
Every page on my website is a unique destination. Google’s search engine is incapable of understanding the nonverbal nature of content such as music and art images. These pages contain less text overall because music and art speak for themselves. Yes, overviews and explanatory materials are included here and there, but you can only say so much before you begin to intrude on the visitor’s experience.
Half the pages on my website are not indexed by Google. This is not a failing on my part but a failing of Google to develop rich content algorithms. Because my site has few visitors, Google does not regard my writing (even of a creative nature) as having “quality” or “authority,” which is a bizarre way of arriving at criteria for evaluation.
Google Search is like a hammer looking for nails. A screw looks like a badly designed nail, so it gets penalized.
Copyright © 2002-2024 michael l. teague all rights reserved.