Masterminds Finalist Mari Naomi

This Thursday SF Weekly will be hosting Artopia, an art show at Project One featuring the 10 finalists in our annual Masterminds contest. That night, we'll award $2,500 grants to three lucky artists. In the meantime, we'll be previewing the works of the works of the finalists here on All Shook Down.

Mari Naomi has made a name for herself among comic nerds for Estrus, which she described in a 2007 interview with SFist as "mostly a collection of embarrassing autobiographical comics about my love life." But while some have fallen in love with her comic, we fell for her paintings and watercolors. Our favorite pieces are her watercolors that combine two of our favorite things: Clowns and sumo wrestlers. These sumo-wrestling clowns belch primary-colored balloons as they grapple with each other and assume those funny sumo-style squats.

We also admired her works using recycled materials such as the "Broken Heart" series. In "Set Them Free," Naomi painted comical fishes on the panes of an old window that swim by a collage of love letters and gifts from high school boyfriends in the background of the frame. In her works, she manages to be humorous and vulnerable at the same time, qualities that seem as though they should be familiar to Estrus readers.