This Sunday, my assistant and I will be pushing my art on the mean streets of Narberth, PA. Swoop in and scoop one up. Click here for more information.

Eric Campbell • Narberth-Bala Cynwyd Patch • February, 2012

When Todd Marrone isn’t teaching, he’s painting. When he’s not painting, he’s writing. When he’s not writing, he’s on a podcast. And no matter what he’s doing, he’s tweeting:

• “Chinese handing stars are safer, but you still have to know what you’re doing.”
• “There has to be an easier way to learn about dinosaurs than having kids.”
• “Look, @CourteneyCox just joined Twitter. She’s going to ruin it just like she did when she climbed on stage during Dancing in the Dark.”
• “Breathe Wrong® nasal strips are just clothes pins. Save your money.”

Marrone, 37, an art teacher for 15 years and a Belmont Hills father of two, has entertained a variety of interests and media since he was young.

“For me, it’s important to always have projects going,” said Marrone, 37. (When giving his age, he added, “I’m reading at a 50-year-old level.”)

Marrone grew up in the northeast suburbs of Philadelphia as an only child, convinced he would grow up to be a monster-movie makeup artist. He drew and painted often and watched endless television in all flavors.

He attended Kutztown University and joined Welsh Valley’s faculty once he graduated but continued producing art and marketing it on his new website, a novel approach for an artist in the 1990s.

“I got lots attention from local media and international media for using the Web,” Marrone said. “Nowadays, you can’t even really be an artist without sharing your work online. Producing anything is all about putting it out there and seeing how people react to it. It’s very social. For me, a piece of artwork doesn’t feel finished until I’ve shared it as publicly as I can.”

Marrone is part of a group of friends that produce podcasts known as Used Wigs Radio, riffing on music, art, writing and culture in the Philadelphia area. They’ve produced 93 episodes over six years.

He started using Twitter after one Used Wigs interview subject told him about it. At first, the tweets were for promoting his art, “but every once in a while, I would just write something silly, and I began to get a really positive response.”

Aggregators of comic tweets such as HappyPlace.com and WitStream.com began picking him up, Marrone said: “To see my tweets alongside professional comedians’ is really rewarding.”

Marrone knows “I might walk the fine line” as a teacher making jokes on Twitter, he said: “I live very publicly. I recognize and I know that to my boss or to my students, I have a responsibility as a role model.”

The Internet has been a boon to young fans of art, Marrone said, remembering how much longer it took him to form his artistic tastes when he was his students’ age.

“They can really find work (online) that speaks to them. I do see kids actively seeking out and getting excited about artists and artwork,” Marrone said. “I think it’s a great time for a young person to become interested in art.”

Marrone’s children with wife Heather are ages 4 (Rocco) and 1 (Matilda). He said he won’t push them to be artistic or to be involved in as many activities as their dad is.

“I think nurturing their interests is the most important thing. I want to be supportive no matter what they do,” Marrone said. “Maybe they’ll rebel and be accountants or something.”

Songbird, Jolie Holland, and I recently rapped about music, art, religion and Daniel Johnston at Philadelphia’s World Cafe Live. Listen in.

Play Now: http://www.usedwigs.com/pod/JolieHollandInterview.mp3

iTunes: Download, Listen and Subscribe

More: Jolie Holland and Pint of Blood

Last evening, I found myself at a pal’s relative’s bar with pals and relatives. I drew a picture of my lovely wife on a filthy napkin and my wife returned the favor. Longtime comrade, Scott, and sister-in-law, Kimmy, followed suit.

Formed during a recent printmaking course, this printet will be featured in an upcoming two-person gig.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Art does not end, nor begin, with the artist. Images are consumed, produced and consumed again within an aesthetic ecosystem. I nudge my work, encourage it, steer it but I don’t make it from scratch nor do I individually own it. It doesn’t just create a dialogue, it is a dialogue. I am a participant in the conversation. A rung in the ladder. A thread in the tapestry.

This series represents relationships between me, visual and musical influences, the audience, a handful of artists whom I worked alongside and the photographer who shares the two-person show… to name just a few.

Hello, my name is Todd Marrone and I’m a quoteaholic. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been infatuated and inspired by bite-sized nuggets of wisdom. Enjoy a cluster of my favorites:

Famous People

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
-Albert Einstein

“There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.”
-Pablo Picasso

“How wonderful yellow is. It stands for the sun.”
-Vincent Van Gogh

“Everytime I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something I think about the person who made it.”
-Keith Haring

“A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.”
-Michelangelo

“There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.”
-Charlie Chaplin

“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
-Mark Twain

“I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, the Beatles did.”
-Kurt Vonnegut

“Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.”
-John Lennon

“Hot can be cool, and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool, man, jazz is jazz.”
-Louis Armstrong

“I never practice; I always play.”
-Wanda Landowska, pianist

“Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Sometimes I paint it and then see it.”
-Jaspers Johns

“I like your work at a distance, but when I come near I’m always disappointed to see that there are objects.”
-Abstract expressionist, to the painter Andrew Wyeth

“Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.”
-John Ciardi

“I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I’ve ever known.”
-Walt Disney

“Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.”
-Edgar Degas

“To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.”
-Pablo Picasso

“I shut my eyes in order to see.”
-Paul Gauguin

“I feel as though I haven’t seen an object until I actually start painting it.”
-Janet Fish

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a
child.”
-Pablo Picasso

“When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college- that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?”
-Howard Ikemoto

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
-Pablo Picasso

“Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
-Salvador Dali

“Only the mediocre are always at their best.”
-Jean Giraudoux

“Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.”
-Michelangelo

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way–things I had no words for.”
-Georgia O’Keeffe

“An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.”
-James McNeill Whistler

“I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.”
-Marcel Duchamp

“A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.”
-Sir Joshua Reynolds

“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
-James Thurber

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
-Pablo Picasso

“How important are the visual arts in our society? I feel strongly that the visual arts are of vast and incalculable importance. Of course I could be prejudiced. I am a visual art.”
-Kermit the Frog, Muppet

“Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.”
-Georges Braque

“He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist”.
-St. Francis of Assisi

“A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.”
-Paul Gardner

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
-Charles Bukowski

“You can never do too much drawing.”
-Tintoretto

“I do not want ART for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.”
-William Morris

“If it is art, it is not for all. If it is for all, it is not art.”
-Arnold Schonberg, composer

“A painted picture is like a vehicle. One can either sit in the driveway and take it apart or one can get in it and go somewhere.”
-Mark Tansey, painter

“My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can.”
-Keith Haring

“The only time I feel alive is when I’m painting.”
-Vincent Van Gogh

“I paint in order not to cry.”
-Paul Klee

“In life beauty perishes, but not in art.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

“The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you are an artist.”
-David Hockney

“We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.”
-Will Rogers

“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”
-Susan Ertz

“My work is done, why wait?”
-Suicide note left by Kodak founder George Eastman

“After I’m dead I’d rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.”
-Cato the Elder

“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.”
– Leonardo da Vinci

“In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism and skepticism and humbug and we shall all want to live more musically.”
-Vincent Van Gogh

“Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don’t expect Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself. That’s what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be. There’s nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can’t wake you up. You can wake you up. I can’t cure you. You can cure you.”
-John Lennon

Not-So-Famous People

“Your art is too cartoonish, you had better start taking yourself and your work more seriously! F”
-Anthony Evangelista, former Kutztown University Instructor

I invented the icon and imagery for an interesting, arts-inspired, interdisciplinary endeavor instutituted by my educational institution.

Join me in Northern Liberties as I unveil dozens of art adorned album jackets. In addition to the “groovy” wall candy, expect spinning by Philadelphia’s DJ iLLumadel, live art, art giveaways, a trunk show, munchies and spirits.

Thursday, September 17th, 6:00 – 9:00 PM
Arcadia Boutique
819 N. 2nd St. Philadelphia, PA 19123

The collection of recycled record reliquaries will be on display throughout the autumn.

Every summer, I attempt to spruce up my cyber-domicile by adding a few new banner images to the mix. The above six snaps are this year’s contribution to the gaggle of randomly rotating mastheads.

Sneak a peek at a few of the original pieces of f’art (free art) to be handed out during tomorrow night’s UsedWigs LIVE. With door prizes like these, who needs enemies?