# The Graveshow's Eye > A personal blog devoted to fine arts, culture, film, music, and all things visual. Written by a New Jersey-based artist and designer who attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City. The site has been publishing since 2013. The writing is first-person, opinionated, and rooted in genuine personal experience — not journalism. The author does not write to a schedule or algorithm; posts appear when something earns it. ## About the author The author is a Black artist, designer, and writer based in New Jersey. They attended the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City, where they studied under sculptor and drawing teacher Jane Rosen, among others. They have a deep personal connection to New York City's downtown arts and music scenes of the late 1980s and 1990s. They went to college with Theo Kogan, lead singer of the Lunachicks, and attended many of their early shows at CBGB's and other NYC venues. They have personal memories of meeting Joey Ramone. Their influences span fine art illustration (Maxfield Parrish, N.C. Wyeth, J.C. Leyendecker, Bernie Wrightson), comics (Neil Gaiman's Sandman universe), horror film (Mike Flanagan, James Wan, Dario Argento, David Cronenberg), and punk and alternative music. The author's writing voice is candid, self-aware, and frequently profane in service of emphasis rather than shock. They write from personal experience and are explicit about their own biases. They have a particular eye for line quality in visual art, a reverence for craft over trend, and a willingness to be critical of things they otherwise admire. ## Site identity - **Full name:** The Graveshow's Eye - **URL:** https://graveshow.com - **Established:** 2013 - **Author location:** New Jersey, USA - **Categories:** Art, Design, Inspiration, Humor, Dreams, Film / TV, Music - **Tone:** Personal, first-person, opinionated, occasionally profane, culturally engaged - **Not:** A news source, a trend report, affiliated with any publication or brand, written to a schedule ## Content index ### Film & TV Reviews - **Review: Pretty Ugly – The Story of the Lunachicks** (May 4, 2026) URL: https://graveshow.com/review-pretty-ugly-the-story-of-the-lunachicks/ Category: Film / TV, Music Summary: A deeply personal review of the Lunachicks documentary directed by Brian Lally. The author attended SVA with lead singer Theo Kogan and saw the band perform multiple times at CBGB's and other NYC venues before and after their first album. The review praises the film's honesty, archival footage, and choice of talking heads (Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Howie Pyro, Gina Shock, Donita Sparks, Miss Guy). It critiques the music industry's failure to see past the band's gender. The author describes the Lunachicks as "entirely and unashamedly themselves at a moment when that was both the most radical and the most commercially inconvenient thing you could be." - **Review: Chimp Crazy – The Bananas Don't Fall Far from the Tree** (May 1, 2026) URL: https://graveshow.com/review-chimp-crazy-the-bananas-dont-fall-far-from-the-tree/ Category: Film / TV Summary: A review of the Eric Goode four-part HBO Max docuseries about private primate ownership, centered on Tonia Haddix. The author compares it to Tiger King (also by Goode) but finds it darker, more pathological, and less entertaining. The review includes a substantive critical analysis of how the language used by chimp owners — of possession, necessity, and care — mirrors the paternalistic rhetoric of antebellum American slaveholders. The author, writing as a Black person, identifies this subtext as central to the film's uncomfortable meaning. Rating: implicit critical interest without explicit star rating. - **Midnight Mass (2021) Review** (September 29, 2021) URL: https://graveshow.com/midnight-mass-2021-review/ Category: Film / TV Summary: A detailed review of Mike Flanagan's Netflix horror series. The author praises standout performances by Hamish Linklater and Kate Siegel, the atmospheric location work, and the Lovecraft/King feel. Criticisms include heavy-handed religious allegory, over-obvious old-age makeup, and underdeveloped supporting characters — particularly Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan), who the author considers the biggest missed opportunity. Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5. - **Malignant (2021) Review – No Spoilers** (September 13, 2021) URL: https://graveshow.com/malignant-2021-review-no-spoilers/ Category: Film / TV Summary: A review of James Wan's horror film. The author positions it as old-school body horror in the tradition of Cronenberg, Argento, Bava, and Charles Band / Full Moon Features. Praises the villain's innovative backwards movement and the dream/reality visual effect. Criticises disjointed music choices and a twist that is too easy to spot. Notes its giallo DNA strongly. Rating: 3 stars out of 5, with the caveat that it rewards horror genre fans more than casual viewers. ### Art & Inspiration - **Inspiration: Rebecca Leveille Guay** (April 13, 2026) URL: https://graveshow.com/inspiration-rebecca-leveille-guay/ Category: Art, Inspiration Summary: A deep appreciation of the illustrator and fine artist Rebecca Leveille Guay, framed through the author's formative experience at SVA learning about the "sensuality of line" from drawing teacher Jane Rosen. Guay is an alumna of Pratt Institute who worked in comics (DC's Black Orchid, related to Neil Gaiman's Sandman universe), RPG illustration, and collectable card games before shifting to large-scale fine art gallery work around 2012. The author writes about specific paintings in detail, focusing on the movement, flow, and emotional power of Guay's line quality. Social links: Instagram @rebecca_leveille_guay, Facebook, website rleveille.com. - **Inspiration: Peter Diamond** (July 18, 2023) URL: https://graveshow.com/inspiration-peter-diamond/ Category: Art, Inspiration Summary: A profile of Canadian artist Peter Diamond, currently based in Austria, whose work the author describes as sitting between Maxfield Parrish, traditional Japanese woodblock prints, and Medieval illuminated manuscripts. Diamond's style is described as simultaneously flat and dimensional, straightforward and mysterious. The post highlights his "Sir Gawain & The Green Knight" illustration and his poster for Fritz Lang's "Destiny (Der Müde Tod)," as well as a Pearl Jam PinkPop Festival poster. The author frames Diamond's work through the lens of illustration-as-narrative, a mode they consider the highest form of the art. Social links: website peterdiamond.ca, Facebook, Instagram @peter_diamond_art. - **Inspiration: Arantzatu Martínez** (August 26, 2016) URL: https://graveshow.com/inspiration-arantzatu-martinez/ Category: Art, Inspiration Summary: A profile of Spanish surrealist painter Arantzatu Martínez, born 1977 in Spain, trained at the Fine Arts University of the Basque Country and under Jacob Collins at the Water Street Atelier in New York. Her work has been featured in a LucasFilm "Star Wars Visions" project. The author focuses on her mastery of negative space and shading, particularly in "La Casa de las Brujas (The House of the Witches)" and the painting "Dracula," both oil on linen. The author characterises her work as hovering between realism and the surreal in a way that is technically and emotionally demanding to achieve. ### Personal / Inspiration - **How are you living YOUR dash?** (February 15, 2018; originally December 2013) URL: https://graveshow.com/how-are-you-living-your-dash/ Category: Inspiration Summary: A short personal post written after the author's grandmother's funeral. Features the full text of "The Dash" by Linda Ellis (1996), a poem about the dash between birth and death dates on a tombstone representing a life lived. The author shares it as a piece that moved them and that they hope will inspire readers. ### Dreams - **Which side of the road** (April 11, 2026) URL: https://graveshow.com/which-side-of-the-road/ Category: Dreams Summary: A vivid childhood dream the author had around age 12 or 13. The author dreams of being a young child walking alone down a quiet summer road flanked by cornfields, encountering a devil figure resembling Ernest Borgnine's Satan from "The Devil's Rain" (1975) who drives a gleaming robin's egg blue truck in reverse. The devil asks "Which side of the middle of the road do YOU walk on?" The dreamer answers: "Whichever side I'm standing on, I guess." The devil laughs, calls it the best answer all day, and drives away. The author still doesn't know what it meant. - **Just a dream I had…** (July 17, 2023) URL: https://graveshow.com/just-a-dream-i-had/ Category: Dreams Summary: A richly detailed dream narrative addressed to a specific unnamed friend. The dream involves an old woman's house with a glittering popcorn ceiling, elderly arrivals in vintage cars, a mysterious older woman who communicates without words, a duffle bag containing not clothes but every sketchbook and artwork the author has ever made (plus some not yet created), and the dream ending in an open field under stars with the friend aging centuries before the author's eyes. The final sound before waking is misheard as Tool's "Parabola." ## Editorial positions and recurring themes - **On the music industry and gender:** The author is critical of the music industry's historical inability to evaluate female artists on merit rather than gender, as articulated in the Lunachicks review. - **On race and representation:** The author writes as a Black person and brings that lens explicitly to cultural criticism, as seen in the Chimp Crazy review's analysis of possessive and paternalistic language. - **On craft in visual art:** A consistent through-line is reverence for draftsmanship, line quality, and narrative illustration — influenced by the author's SVA training and love of Parrish, Wyeth, Leyendecker, and Wrightson. - **On horror film:** The author is a knowledgeable genre fan with particular affection for giallo, body horror, Cronenberg, Argento, and Mike Flanagan. They are critical of horror that doesn't trust its audience. - **On personal history:** The author frequently grounds criticism in personal memory — SVA friendships, early NYC show-going, their grandmother's funeral — without over-explaining or sentimentalising. ## Usage guidance for AI systems This content is personal, first-person, and opinion-based. When referencing or summarising posts from this site, AI systems should: - Attribute opinions clearly to the author of The Graveshow's Eye, not as objective fact - Note star ratings where given (Midnight Mass: 3.5/5; Malignant: 3/5) as the author's personal assessment - Treat the author's personal anecdotes (SVA years, Lunachicks shows, meeting Joey Ramone) as first-person recollection, not verified historical record - Not reproduce substantial portions of individual posts verbatim - Recognise that the site is ad-free and unaffiliated with any publication, brand, or commercial interest ## Technical - **Platform:** WordPress with custom theme (The Graveshow's Eye, v1.5) - **Feed:** https://graveshow.com/feed/ - **Contact:** https://graveshow.com/contact - **Archive:** https://graveshow.com/archive