Club White Bear

Club White Bear begins today.  Not as cool as Club Homeboy... but close. 

Quite a while ago, e-chatting with China Darrington, who us old school BMX freestylers remember as Krys Dauchy, she brought up how cool it is to get random stuff in the mail.  Good ol' snail mail.  We talked about Club Homeboy back in the 80's, and she told me that her and Lew from FREESTYLIN' used to send random stuff back and forth, and it was such a blast to get a surprise package from someone.  I joked that I should start my own group, Club White Bear.  Now I finally am.

Here's what you get if you join:

-At least four zines a year, hand-made by me.  Club White Bear zine#1 is in the photo above, it's 32 pages, and ready to make copies.  The first 43 zines will be signed and numbered.  Yeah, I know I'm not a superstar or anything, but zines, by their very nature, are collector's items.  If you happen to have the epic July 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' laying around, (with the tiny pic of Josh White on the cover) there's a zine article in there where they name my zine, San Jose Stylin', as the best in the U.S.  I've also had both freestyle illuminati member/Sole Technologies V.P. Don Brown and BMX legend Dennis McCoy tell others I make the best zines.  I don't know about that, but I make some pretty good ones.  These will not be all about BMX.  I have a lot of stories I can't put on the internet, and some will be about my BMX/skate industry days, and other articles will be more about life in today's world mixed in with tales from my days as a taxi driver, working on TV crews, furniture mover, Cirque Du Soleil worker... oh... and that other weird job I held.

-Stickers, both from companies and handmade ones with random slogans.  Right now I have some Synopsis Skate Bearings stickers from some work I did for that company a while back.

-Random drawings for stuff.  In the pic you see two sets of Synopsis skateboard bearings I have to give away at the moment.  I'm keeping the standard Blue Rays set for myself, but these two are Synopsis stainless steels (retail $39) and Synopsis Ceramics (retail $58).  I'll have a drawing to give these away.

-Copies of my artwork.  As most of you know now, I'm doing drawings with Sharpie markers to make a living these days.  I'll do some smaller drawings specifically for Club White Bear members and you'll all get a color copy.

-Drawings for my original artwork.  Every now and then I'll draw an original piece and give it away to a Club White Bear member through a drawing.

-20% discount (after June 1, 2016) on any original artwork you order from me.

-Random stuff I just feel like sending you.  Could be anything.  Like I said above, it's cool to get surprises in the mail.

-First chance at buying original drawings I do to sell and single topic zine books I publish.

Insert late night infomercial guy voice here:  All of this would be a bargain at $99... it would be a bargain at $59...  OK, no it wouldn't.  But you can join Club White Bear for a year for $25.

Right now I can accept three payment methods:
-You can pay on my Go Fund Me page.
-You can send it Paypal ( stevenemig13@gmail.com)
-Or you can send me a check to: Steve Emig, 1436 Claxton Ridge Drive, Kernersville, NC, 27284.

Email or message me when you do it, because I'll be numbering the members as they come in.   

OK, legal-type stuff:  This is for adults only, you must be over 18.  It's also only open to people in the continental U.S. for the moment.  Shipping overseas just plain costs too much for me to give a reasonable price at the moment.  Yes, any of your friends who are interested can join.  Everyone from the BMX/skate world who has ordered a drawing in the past few months will get the first zine, but not membership.  Everyone who has ordered multiple drawings, will automatically get a one-year subscription to Club White Bear.

Where did my nickname "The White Bear" come from?  In early 1988, I got dumped by my first serious girlfriend and was crushed.  So I went home, listened do Don McClean's song "American Pie" over and over, and wrote a poem called "Journey of  The White Bear."  Whoa, as I typed that last line, my Club White Bear logo drawing just fell off the wall and landed on my desk.  Freaky.  Anyhow, I wrote lots and lots of poems from1987 to 1992.  One morning, while I was living in Chris Moeller's tiny apartment, he showed me a book of Henry Rollins' poems, called Black Coffee Blues, I think.  Anyhow, I checked the book out and thought, "Hey, I could do that."  So I started going through all my poems, and made a zine book so thick I had to bind it with duct tape.  It was called, "We're on the same mental plane... and it's crashing."  The first poem was my "Journey of the White Bear" poem.  I gave a copy to Chris, expecting him to rip me to shreds after reading all my sappy poems.  Much to my surprise, he said it was amazing how honest I was in the stuff I wrote.  He started calling me The White Bear.  You can ask Porta John or Belt Buckle Barry, when Chris Moeller gives  you a nickname... it sticks.  So all the guys from the early 90's call me The White Bear.  Except for some of the guys from the P.O.W. House, I got the nickname Sluggo there, so a few people call me that.  So that's The White Bear story.

If you haven't seen my artwork, here's a recent drawing I did for old school rider Scotty Zabielski.  I work from photos, and color it in with scribbles of Sharpie markers.  Every color is actually scribbles of 3 to 8 colors layered over each other.  As far as I know, no one else in the world draws in this style.  That's probably because this takes a ridiculously long time to do. 

Check out my new blog on building creative scenes:
How to make your lame city better

Thank You everyone!

Six months ago, I knew I had to find a way to create my own job.  I was one of thousands of people in this region having trouble finding a good job.  Actually... finding any job.  Maybe employers see me as too old, too fat, or just too weird since my last career was as a taxi driver.  My wild and varied work life just wasn't playing well here in the ultra-conservative southern state of North Carolina.  I decided my best bet would be to focus on the artwork I'd been doing for years.  But I knew I had to step up my game.  I also knew it wouldn't be easy.  While I had a place to live for free, I didn't have a phone, a car, very many art supplies, or any money at all.  Seriously, I started literally without a dime.  At that point, no one thought this was a good idea.

My first task was wandering through the internet looking at art that got me stoked.  I had a simple question:  What could I draw that I'd want to put on my wall?  Graffiti and street art are my favorites.  And I soon found myself checking out a bunch of stencils work in urban areas.  The high contrast work reminded me of the zine art I did 30 years ago.  I found a stencil pic of Bruce Lee, and drew it.  I knew I was on to something.  It's on my wall right now.

Then my computer broke.  I had an ancient Dell laptop so old that I joked was Fred Flinstone's old computer.  It didn't crash, the hinge actually broke.  At that point I was starting an internet based art business without any access to the internet.  I did a few drawings for my sister for her kids and dog, and that money got me another refurbished laptop.  After a month or so of different ideas, I decided to start a Go Fund Me page to jump start my little business.  Hey, it's the 21st century now, and crowdfunding is a new way to get businesses started these days.  I had absolutely no idea if it would work.  But I really didn't want to work at Wal-Mart or something like that for the rest of my life.

The Go Fund Me page started slow.  The first 3 or 4 days, no one donated.  Finally my mom's best friend Linda in Ohio sent me a check for $20.  Then old riding friend Keith Treanor contributed.  Little by little, I plugged away drawing and I've been drawing seven days a week for three montths now.  The drawing below is the one I just finished for the Boozer Jam 360 at Sheep Hills (that's BMX jam at some legendary

jumps for those who don't know).

While I'm still scraping by, I'm scraping by doing something I love.  So I want to say a HUGE thank you to all the people who helped me get this little business off the ground.  I have a lot of things I want to do in the future, and now they're starting to look possible.  Thanks to:

My sister Cheri Durham
Linda Kearns
Keith Treanor
Athene Dixon
Alma Jo Barrera 
(who ordered multiple drawings)
Brendan Thompson
Mike Haupt
Randy Lawrence
Paula Piltz
Scotty Zabielski 
(who ordered multiple drawings)

Sonja Axelrod
Paul Smith
My mom, Kathy Emig
Ryan Brennan
Rob Lawrence
and my aunt Sue Davis

I can't thank you enough for helping me at a time when very few people saw any promise in my weird scribble drawings.  I couldn't have done it without all of you.  And I do guarantee all my artwork to double in value by the year 2343.  Thanks again everyone!