I'm a knife, I'm a knife- cut cut cuttin' around.

Hey, I made a wood cut.

It's a small one but I like it. It is featured in an online magazine as well as some older work. I've relocated back to Texas and my work space has gotten smaller. Like, it consists of my kitchen table and that's about it. It makes the scale of my work much smaller.

The act of creating something new was at once terrifying and like slipping on old, comfortable gloves. I've said I wrestle with depression, I've changed meds, and I'm liking the change. It makes me less lethargic and a bit more energetic.

It started out a little different as what it ended up as. My work is born from frustration. Lots of timidity on approach, continuing until my brain is shouting at me to just DO it. I was thinking of graffiti paste ups and the impact of graphics. I wanted to make something to echo that kind of immediate effect. An image that you see while rolling by in your car, bam. Just for an instant, there's an image and you're left with all the wonder and "what was that?" because you noticed it, but don't have time to spend with it. I can't throw it past your face at 75+ miles an hour, but I wanted to leave a little of that ambiguity. Remnants of Santa Muerta iconography and Käthe Kollwitz funeral procession woodcuts. We don't know if the image is in prayer or being set for a funeral. At least I don't. I'm open to interpretation. 

I was sad. I'm still sad. I might see light- an intermission.

Does anyone use these anymore? We're lonely, and this stuff makes us lonelier. It's supposed to be a tool for connecting-- yet it's all trying to sell something. Branding, marketing, networking, blugh. I'm a curmudgeon this way. I want people to see what I've made, possibly consider what I have to say (if any of it is worth considering) and myself to avoid the limelight. I've always been this way, preferring to go unnoticed but let my work speak for me.

I'm struggling though, because no one looks at work. They look at me, at all the sound and little hiccoughs of fury. I don't want to market, I don't want to be a brand. It's the reason art doesn't pay bills for me. It's the reason I work construction and grind my body down prematurely.

But all these reasons are bullshit.

It's because I'm afraid (and healthily so). I'm a type 1 diabetic. I live in the USA. Health insurance and drug prices are a tragedy. That whole "do what you love and follow your dreams" sentiment is for the privileged, or those more capable with their money. Those that have a safety net (or will never need one). I'm not trying to get in a pissing contest about suffering. Everyone suffers uniquely.

I'm complaining and I'm not happy about it. The good news is, things are picking up. I'm excited to work on things again and I'm coming out of a very long battle with very severe depression. I was taken to a print festival- It Came From the Bayou!!!, which was fantastic. I forgot how exciting it was to be amongst people who were working, and passionately at what they do. It was fun to talk techniques and ideas. It kinda rekindled some embers which I hope I'm in turn encouraging into flame. Now I just have to balance that with relationship, children, sleep and money paying labor intensive work.

Updates will be irregular (as usual) but will exist again. 

Apologies for the silence.

Volley XVIII: Back to work, jerk.

I've been in a slump. For a long time. Barely producing, and never finishing. I moved from Des Moines to Houston, to a much smaller space with many more distractions. Free time (and the internet) is your enemy when trying to work. Now that I've set up my drafting table and a flat file to store some of my junk, it's time to start cleaning things out and unpacking. And organizing. I'm working as a crate builder now, so I have access to lots of fancy cabinet plywood scraps. I'm getting some fancy knives in the mail to start working on woodcuts. The only problem is, I don't really have space to print, or access to places to print anymore.

Recently there was a figure drawing session at a gallery in Midtown. I attended, dragging many things in tow to scribble for a few hours. Here are some of  the results. Everything was done very quickly. With the longest poses being around ten minutes. But most averaging between three and eight minutes.

I really like this one. Something about the marks and the look of her hair reminds me of those sixties style graphic ads.

Drawing two people at the same time was interesting. I really wish they interacted more, as in twined limbs or some kind of embrace. Regardless it was fun to draw. They liked my drawings so much I gave them one. I didn't really get a picture of it, but the layout reminded me of a Mignola cover for Hellboy.

I'm glad I jumped back in to drawing. It's been at least a year since I've done any figure drawing from the model. For the amount of time allotted, there should be a lot more information here, and it should be done with a lot more confidence.You can tell. Well, maybe you can't but I can. It looks like I'm out of practice. I need to go outside and draw people.

Also, late new year's resolution. Update at least once a month.

Volley XVII: Tapes!

I got hired to do some album art by a friend of mine who owns a record label. I spent a night or two working on a few drawings to try to make something to fit the theme of the album. I haven't drawn daily for a long time. As such, it takes me longer to get started and my head gets in my way. The album is based on the film "Vampyr." The film itself is very atmospheric and ethereal. The sound is like a toned down Delìrium Còrdia. Granted, the original score long predates the Fantômas album by decades. I had seen the movie previously and found it creepy and surreal, but could not remember a lot specifically from it. Google image search wasn't super helpful either. There is however the iconic scythe.

So why not start there? It had to happen quickly, so I whipped something out in pen and ink. And started buzzing from fumes. Don't use ink designed for graffiti in a tiny apartment kids, protip.

Starting to look very metal, no? I sent it to Paul going "Ohmygudpleasehelp," because I'm an insecure bastard. In a typical Paul fashion-- that being very direct, but coated with a generous helping of unsparing humor, he responded.

He's right, by the way. And we went back and fourth for a bit about approach and planning an image. It's an interesting drawing, but what does it do? This guy's some goon with a scythe just standing there. There's no interaction or engagement with anything. Graphically it works, but it can be better.

At Paul's suggestion, I gave myself an hour (double the time it should have taken me), to hash out some thumbails and complete a new drawing. I was listening to things to put me in the mood, like Velnias. This is done in gesso and charcoal and was as far as I got in that time. The hands are derpy, but I like the textures that are happening, and the hazy quality of it. I was thinking of the vampire either coming from, or dissolving into the smoky background. That's not clear enough though (ha.) and I think I was just fixated on repeating that brush stroke. 

Finished product. Hands are less derpy and the girl actually has legs now. There are some really cool things going on, but still it's a constant reminder that I need to be drawing more. Unfortunately, this image wasn't used. The band had their own artist, but truthfully, she made a much more delicate and haunting picture than I, and that works much better for the sound of the band.

I did get to use an (older) picture on the back though, which works well to offset the delicacy.

The album is out now, so please go buy it. He's a good dude, and the sound is haunting.

Volley XVI: The Male Gaze

Recently, I sat in on a figure drawing class. I also had the time to shoot a bunch of them in between scratching my head to fix this. I'll be out of town for a bit, but you probably won't notice any less irregularity in updates. All of these were done in under half an hour, forty five minutes max. With charcoal and white chalk. 

 They all begin the same way, with a gesture/drawing of the skeleton in vine charcoal, and then I start building. My drawings don't feel very solid, or rather the figures don't feel very grounded, but they themselves do a good job of having mass. Like they're being sculpted. Which is weird to me because I focus on line and movement of it a lot. Or at least I think I do. 

Volley XV: I look at myself way too much.

Actually, I don't. It's a real problem. I have body image issues, in that I'm pretty fuckin' ugly. I used to give the description "bridge troll like," when people asked about my appearance, but for the sake of maintaining a type of chaotic good/chaotic neutral, Paul gave the descriptor "Taco Dwarf." Which fits perfectly.

Regardless, as money is tight and I haven't gotten out much to draw others, I had a friend come over and photograph me. And a deer skull. I was remembering Hamlet, or rather the grave digger and Yorick in particular. I want to make a picture that is whimsical (for me, in that no one is screaming) and has elements that are in conversation with eachother. I also like the idea of ritual, and the me in the painting is not holding the skull in a manner of study, but rather one of contemplation, or as if he were engaged in conversation with it.

Now based on these images, you might be pondering "what skull, you dope? All I see is a weird looking chubby dude doing an Errol Flynn (and failing) impersonation?" Well fear not viewers. It is said that Sargent, in his attempts to capture Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, he composed multiple watercolor studies. This may have been due to the fact that he was struggling to get her skin tone correct and she kept hiding it behind (as was customary for the time amongst celebrities) piles of leaded white makeup and unnatural coloring. So here's study number one. More to come soon. 

Volley XIV Down in the Cellar

So, getting hung up on the painting. I completely obliterated the torso to pale it out even more, but lost all the structural marks in it. I sat in on the tail end of a class taught by an artist I respect very much (including the fact that she's a giant nerd, and very charismatic) and she asked me what my finished plan was for the piece. I responded in the mindset of "oh, I don't know, I want to play with some gilt work, and he might be clothed and...."

To which she said "yeah, but how's the bottom half going to be?"

"I'm not sure. I was thinking maybe his guts could be falling out and I will demolish the bottom half with a hammer..." She asked if I had any studies done for that. Nope. Not a one. She said I need to get the idea for the image completely fleshed out. She's right of course, but it's completely antithetical to the way I work. It's also what separates the big dogs from the puppies, if you will. I've always largely made work by a call and response. I put something out there, stare at it, and then it tells me where to go. It makes me move so much slower. It also makes my images not strong. And never finished. So at this point, I think I'm going to return to the stock photo. It won't be a hundred percent translation.

 I think painting in the style of photo realism (or as much as I'm going to attempt to ape it)you have to push the depth, space and form more than you can achieve with a photograph.

 

Saying that, you can actually see how the photo has completely flattened out, even though I've pushed space in the background. I've actually painted in the hakama. Complete with ridiculous bow in front of it, and it has helped to anchor the figure.You can see the difference between the scabs of paint on the left arm and the blended quality on the right arm. Hopefully the two will meet somwhere in the middle.

 Remember me talking about how things are never finished? I intend to cover every inch of this panel with paint. and then destroy it with a hammer and knives. But it's the coverage, and the completion that counts. You may be asking: "Why?" Well, it's a challenge to myself to complete something as opposed to just get it resolved enough to be "show ready." Which is bad-artist speak for "I ran out of time, but no one will know that I consider it not done." Scratch that. Some people know. And you sell yourself and your work short that way. I've made lots of work that I feel comfortable with calling done. But they're not done because they're finished, they're done because I have nothing left to say, or to offer by continuing to work on the piece. So this is an exercise in completion. At the very least it's "let's see if the primitive monkey can finish the pretty picture." Pay attention to FLCL especially. God I love that show.