8 x 8, mixed media over collaged paper on board

Do they talk? I don’t think they talk. I imagine these odd, undifferentiated little creatures, somewhere between penguins and marmots, shuffling between their tiny homes and communicating entirely in gestures.

But, as usual, I could be completely wrong.

Anyway, original is for sale–it’s on board and ready to hang, but can be framed–and prints are available, as usual.

Honestly, I didn’t want most of it, and it went off to the dump. When I moved out, I stripped down to essentials, and I took all of those. But there were one or two things I wanted, like a fish leather mask my father got me, and a truly awesome statue of Digger, and some miscellaneous usable chunks of board, and some old art of various provenance that I’ll try to get photographed and posted here, in case anybody wants it.

There was also a box of old sketchbooks.

“Good lord,” I said, when I saw it, “what do I want with those? A reminder of how bad my art was?”

“You’ll want them,” said James, loading the box into my car. (It was far too heavy for me to lift.)

I came home, and Kevin came out to help me unload. “We can probably dump these straight in the trash…” I said.

“Are you nuts? You’ll want them!” said Kevin, and brought them inside.

Sigh. I know when I’m beat.

I haven’t cracked the main box, but there were a couple of loose ones in with the rest of the stuff, and going through them was actually much more entertaining than I expected. I always forget that I don’t really draw in my sketchbooks, I generally just do rough thumbnails of ideas, working out some of the composition, and scribble down phrases to go with them. So my sketchbooks were full of roughs that I recognized as later paintings, as well as more obscure  things like “Ninja Bob, Master of the Rubber Chicken!” “Five sardines doing the Indian Rope trick”  a whole bunch of Gearworld thumbnails, mammoth garlic being run off the edge of a cliff in an ancient garlic kill site, and something that appears to be a crucified fried egg.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to remember that I have been like this for YEARS, and I was not arguably less peculiar in ‘05 (or whenever) than I am now. Anyway.

Couple of things that came back with me–I suspect I’m never going to do anything with them, so if anybody is interested in owning some of my early sculptural experiments, drop a line.

He's about 4.5 x 4.5, with a flat balsa back. Might make a neat wall piece, if somebody wanted to attach a hangar to said back.

I seem to recall that I baked the teeth separately for this guy, and found myself pulling a whole cookie sheet of piping hot teeth out. His eyes are red glass…damnit, now I wanna do more twisted faces just as little wall pieces. Sigh. So many ideas, so little time…

8 x 6.5 or thereabouts, mounted on a recessed light wooden oval (I think it was a box lid) so he could probably be hung on a wall with some minor tweaking. Some tiny fractures in the Sculpey, although not really noticeable. And his ears really are pierced and could take earrings.

*With the clarity of hindsight, I finally realized that the delay may have had less to do with having to go through the clutter in the spare room and a lot more to do with not knowing how to orchestrate a visit by ex-wife around schedule of live-in girlfriend-prone-to-highly-dramatic-scenes. As with so many things, I’m way past being ticked at him, and now I just feel kinda bad that he had to put up with that. **

**This is really no reflection on my high-mindedness–frankly, it’s  easy to be magnanimous when everything ultimately worked out so much better for me.  Anyway.

6 x 9, really REALLY mixed media

I suspect most artists have found themselves here at some point. The hell of it is, throwing different media at it works just often enough that you are often seduced into trying, even when you should probably just give it up as a bad job.

If you are not lucky, however, you find yourself staring at something that has turned to a kind of gritty textureless mud, and a little voice in the back of your head says “You haven’t tried egg tempera yet! Or dried macaroni…”

I also finally came up with a self-portrait I rather like. So, since I seem to be cutting things out and sticking them to other things today…

3.5 x 5 on teeny tiny board

Yes, I’m twelve.

Kevin claims that yes, this is me, but this is a man who, having lived in New York for some years, would find it difficult to drive if you taped his middle finger down, so, take it with a grain of salt. (I mean, he could DO it, but he might have to put the hazards on, just in case…)

Prints of the art supply one are available, and the original is for sale, which probably proves that I’m really not “journaling” here.

The whole “art journaling” thing–my spellchecker doesn’t believe journaling is a real word, and I feel its pain, nouns should stay nouns, goddamnit–seems to have exploded at some point in the last year or so. At least, that’s the point where I found myself in a bookstore, standing in the art section, which usually bleeds into craft on one side and photography on the other, and instead of the usual knitting-and-polymer clay, it was suddenly full of spines with the word “Journal” and “Journaling” and lots of subheaders about creative journeys and getting in touch with your inner artist.*

Never loathe to pick up a new art form–I’ve had a lot of fun with assemblage, after all, which mentions journaling occaisionally–I have flipped through some of these books.

Understanding continues to elude me.

I think it’s somewhere between a sketchbook and a scrapbook and an assemblage art piece. Or something. The books (and they have magazines! There are whole magazines devoted to this! With articles with titles like “Journals That Heal” and “101 Secrets to Beautiful Backgrounds”) tell you to be bold and experiment, and don’t worry, there’s no way to screw up, this is your personal journey, there’s no wrong way to do it!

Then they show you dozens of carefully composed collages, heavy on the cut-out Audubon birds and art papers, laden with inspirational quotes, generally rendered by people with magnificent handwriting.

There may not be a wrong way to do it, but clearly some ways are more right than others.

If I was producing stuff that looked like that, they would not be “journal pages.” They would be “mixed media” and they would be “for sale” and I would be somewhat closer to paying “the rent.”

It is entirely possible that every person who does this is actually producing those, I don’t know, but I suspect sampling bias may be involved. (On the other hand, there are artists who’s sketchbooks are unbelievably elegant tightly packed miracles of drawing. My mother is guilty of this. My sketchbooks have large blank swatches and frequent obscenities, and it becomes obvious after awhile that I don’t really enjoy drawing. (Painting, I like. Drawing is more of a necessary evil.))

So I am skeptical. I am also skeptical of the themes of most of these proffered journal pages…it’s always hopes, dreams, the courage to create, soaring with your own wings, imagination, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Seriously, do cicadas never fly down these people’s pants?

I don’t know. I don’t want to slam anybody who gets a real, meaningful thrill out of dream-hope-believe etc. I draw hamsters with bras on their heads, I seriously do not get to judge anybody else’s creative outlet.  But I do find myself gazing at all these visually different but very much similar samples, and wondering if the editor just left out the pages with the incontinent beagle.

At some point, as I wandered the internet, attempting to fathom this mystery–was there something here I could use? I like writing! I like art! I can buy cool paper! This is just an autobiographical comic with an off-screen narrator, right?–Kevin came into the room and asked what I was up to, and I attempted to explain.

“But you have a blog,” he said.

“It’s different. I think.” I stared at the monitor, where some very nice woman rhapsodized about her journaling and how it was so freeing and inspiring and how she grabbed a few minutes a day to paint backgrounds, which, I have gathered, is not like what I do when I paint backgrounds, which is generally just tedious and involves atmospheric perspective.  “It’s…uh…artistic advice. Or growth. Or something.”

He gave me that one look. (Yes, the one some of you are giving the screen right now. Don’t think I can’t feel that!)

“I have no idea,” I admitted.

Never let it be said, however, that ignorance–or profound skepticism–stops me.  If I had an inspirational quote that I was going to stencil on the wall, my forehead, and the pages of my hypothetical journaling journal of journalness, it’d be the one from Twain that goes “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”

I located a watercolor moleskine, and attempted to prepare a background on two of the pages, in accordance with prophecy and Somerset Studio.

It didn’t go well.

I then proceeded to write small amusing blurbs and draw bad cartoons of myself on the backs of the prepared pages, because it turns out having a small portable sketchbook is actually pretty good for writing down such immortal sentiments as “There are never enough opportunities to use Thieves Cant!” and “Why do we even have to have a conversation that begins with “Are those dirty socks on the windowsill?”**

Two days of this later, I decided that I was by god going to do a mixed media piece that reflected one of the sentiments in my journal, goddamnit. I shall not be defeated!  So I picked the one on the very first page, the one that I felt really said something significant and worthwhile and relevant to my life.

6 x 9, mixed media.

Apparently there is no way to do it wrong. So there.

As traumatic as it would undoubtedly be to part with this deeply personal work, torn from the darkest pages of my journaling, I’m willing to make this sacrifice. For…um….personal growth. Or something.

Prints available.

*I am not sure if I have an inner artist. I’ve been making do with the outer one for awhile now. Probably other people do have inner artists, for ease of storage purposes. I sometimes think I may have an inner accountant, since somebody in there worries about money, but that’s not quite the same thing.

**True Story.  An eight-year-old was involved.

I know it’s PMS. I just wish that knowing that mattered.

I am attempting not to brood, and more importantly, not to wander into the bleak artistic underbelly of the internet. Reading about other depressed artists is fantastic if you’re a genuinely depressed artist yourself, but when you just have PMS, it merely leads to more brooding, as you talk yourself into all kinds of hysteria and attempt to assign actual meaning to your hormonal angst and let go of creative blocks that aren’t actually a problem for you in the first place, and you attempt to give yourself permission for something or other (I cannot help but envision this as a permission slip, saying something like yes, little so-and-so is allowed to go on the class field trip to the historic rope factory) when about the only thing you ought to be giving yourself permission for is sleep and potato chips.

This way lies madness and self-help books and “journal” used as a verb.

All that’s really happening, of course, is that the uterus is wandering around going “Hey! Anybody in there? No? Alright, let’s get this crap out of here!” and the ovaries, which are among the most personally malicious parts of my anatomy, are sulking and snarling that if they aren’t happy, nobody is going to be happy, and my endocrine system, a dumb, good natured Labrador type, is cheerfully playing fetch with all the hormones they keep throwing out.

Which is quite unpleasant enough without convincing oneself of further despair, thank you very much.

I never finished this painting, because while the background was kickass, the less said about the foreground, the better.

I come before you today, O best beloved, to confess one of my great artistic failings.

Actually, two.

No, not that I’m basically lazy and have more or less decided that I have proved my ability to paint an extremely complex background and thus no longer feel the need to prove it, not the fact that I have, on a half dozen occasions in Digger, copied and pasted previously drawn panels of Ganesh so that I don’t have to keep redrawing a statue that, after all, doesn’t change at all, not even, speaking of Ganesh, the fact that I occasionally screw up what side his broken tusk is on and then don’t go back and fix it. Nor is it the related fact that I am not a perfectionist, which is somewhat shocking in artists, but to which I credit rather a lot of my success.

It’s not even that I have, on at least one occasion, drawn species together that I know were separated by vast stretches of geologic time (Ambulocetus and Dodo, I’m lookin’ at you!) although I admit, I do feel a certain degree of guilt over that.

No, this is a much more basic failing.

I’ve never done a self-portrait I was even remotely happy with.

Artists do self-portraits all the time, it’s part of the schtick, half the webcomics people I know do quirky little comics of themselves, and I am eaten alive with envy of this, because I keep doing self-portraits and they keep sucking.

This is intimately tied to the second failing, which is that I have never yet worked out a stylization of humans that I was happy with.

With a larger nose and ears, I would be a hamster in a trenchcoat.

Seriously. It’s not just me. If I just couldn’t draw myself, we could have a long talk about my self-image and I could nod politely and agree that I have issues and then just draw myself with a bag over my head or something and call it good.

But it’s not just me. I can draw hamsters and wombats all damn day, but cartoon humans break me. I can do little kids, to a certain extent–they look sort of like hamsters, right?–but not adults, and even the kids are awfully limited. This is why the humans in Digger are so visually weak compared to all the other characters, and why I make most of them wear veils.

Now, semi-realistic, detailed portraits? Not a problem. I don’t do them often, but I can do them. My gallery is littered with examples. There’s a vaguely anime-esque style that I come back to now and again, and I’m pretty happy with it. But a quick little silliness? A five minute doodle to illustrate, for example, The Time The Cicada Flew Down My Pants? No. I try, and it’s awful, and eventually I default to hamsters. My con badge is a wombat, and believe me, it’s not because I have an active inner wombat persona.  When I did a semi-autobiographical comic, I drew myself as a chupacabra.

The end result of all of this was that, based on all the drawings that kinda represented me, fellow artist shatterstripes once said that her mental image of me was a vague impression of something short and chunky that never wore pants.

The only thing about this that works for me is the little Hello Kitty-esque demon heads on the boots.

This was, of course, inaccurate. I am not at all short.

It is a rather embarrassing thing to admit, when you’ve been a working artist for over a decade, that you can’t doodle humans worth a damn, even though most of the artists reading this probably already KNOW this, and have been politely not mentioning it, because we generally don’t bring up one another’s failings in public.

But I keep trying.  I try character design after character design, I beat my head against it, I try styles not even remotely my own, in hopes one will click, that I will finally find SOMETHING that work, something that feels natural and that I can dash off when I don’t want to sit and do a full painting, I just want to immortalize yet another time I was running naked through the house with binoculars.

There is precedent for this. I took ceramics for two years in college because I was really bad at it, and it infuriated me, since that was the first time in life I found myself being painfully bad at something I really wanted to be good at. (Life being what it is, this has happened to me plenty of times now, but I have not gotten significantly more graceful about accepting it.)

Sigh.

Maybe it’s the nose.  So many styles of cartooning humans seem to involve the nose being minimized or vanishing completely, but I have the impressive nose of a Roman senator, and if you remove it, I no longer look as if I’m plotting to stab the emperor on the steps of Pompey’s theatre, and thus no longer look quite like myself.

 

 

These honestly weren't bad, and led to a couple of paintings, but they also took a long time to draw, and various kind parties pointed out that I was making myself a lot fatter and with much worse hair than is actually the case.

I did those three vaguely autobiographical pieces in pink based on the above designs, and those were fun, and came out relatively well, but they were also not all that accurate, and they took at least as long to draw as anything else, so my hope for a graceful stylization that I could whip off as easily as a hamster did not materialize, despite rather a lot of attempted doodling.

Cute style, might work for someone else, but she looks like she might pal around with Holly Hobby. This is not a girl who has ever given a blowjob or accidentally flushed a sock down a toilet.

Marginally better, but I started to get a weird Family Circus In Fetish Gear vibe, and it still just didn't FEEL right.

While preparing this blog post, I went through my fairly vast archive of old abandoned sketches, and found exactly ONE quick doodle of a human that appealed to me.

There! Like that! Only without the bunny ears!

The only problem I have here is that my attempts to duplicate this look only seem to work if the character looks disgruntled and ready to punch someone. My life being what it is, I really don’t spend that much time disgruntled, so the kinks haven’t worked themselves out yet, but I do have hope.

This has no bearing on anything, but I found the sketch while I was digging up self-portraits, and really need to do a painting of it, damnit.

The pear attempts to hide among lesser fruit to avoid detection.

Woohoo! You can now pre-order the Biting Pear plushes for a mere $15 from Patchtogether.com. I have the demo model myself, and he is awesome.

B’lieve it was one of the little blue-tailed lizards–five-lined skinks or whatever–but the extreme lateness of the specimen made it hard to tell.

…right, then.

12 x 24, mixed media

I painted this a good year and a half ago, and thus have no memory whatsoever of what I was thinking about at the time, except that apparently I was still in my vague-Klimt phase, and somehow that spawned a horned girl and her horned rat. Meanwhile, the painting has been kicking around my studio since then, and I keep meaning to get around to scanning it, and then I don’t.
I finally did scan it. Possibly I am just trying to avoid going down and putting more red paint on the walls. The bits that are done look fantastic, but lord, that’s a lot of paint…
The metallics failed to scan yet again–there’s a fairly intricate gold spiral pattern on part of her clothes, which stands out from the copper in person, but not on the scanner bed. Ah, well.

Prints available! Original for sale! Etc!

If anybody is looking to built a mosque in Pittsboro, North Carolina, you are welcome to put it in my backyard. I doubt anybody is, but if they were…

There’s a couple of reasons for this, one of which is the relatively commendable one that we have freedom of worship in this country, goddamnit, and being Muslim is absolutely are valid as being Lutheran or Jewish or my own vague humanist. And I am not one of those idiots that think the existence of a radical fringe of any religion means that every member is a terrorist, otherwise I’d be calling the cops on the local Baptists and screaming about clinic bombings, and really, this is just pointless and exhausting for everybody, and there are enough Baptist churchs around here that such behavior would really cut into my free time.

I freely confess that the other reasons are self-centered, though.

First of all, the wooded space behind the house is eventually gonna get turned into some sort of subdivision, whereupon I can kiss my beloved pileated woodpeckers goodbye, as they require large tracts of wooded area, and our little patch isn’t gonna be enough. I would much rather have a mosque. I imagine it would take up less space than a full subdivision and might leave some trees for my woodpeckers.

You want a muezzin and a prayer tower, too? Knock yourself out. I have a beagle. A call to prayer multiple times a day is nothing.

Secondly, we have far more churches than restaurants in this town. The majority are Baptist. There are also a couple of Mormon, a smattering of Catholic, some Presbyterian, and if you go a little way into the unincorporated areas, you get a lot of Methodists, more Baptists, and on the distant fringes, a lone Buddhist center and the Society of Friends. Go most of the way to Durham, and there’s an Eastern Orthodox place, but it can’t even be considered geographically part of my town. I would love a mosque just for variety.

Thirdly–and this is the really selfish one–the Spanish-language Baptist church about a mile down the road (and which would doubtless incense a good number of people who also object to mosques) causes no trouble to anyone and is directly responsible for the presence of the one really good Mexican restaurant in town. And I will accept a great many things if it means I can get good huevos rancheros.

So I have this fantasy that if we got a large enough Muslim population to support a mosque, we might get a corresponding ethnic restaurant. Maybe more than one. Islam is a geographically diverse religion, after all. We might get an Indian or Middle Eastern place. Heck, we might even get Croatian! (I have no idea what Croatian food is like, but as we have maybe a dozen restaurants in Pittsboro–including the Pizza Hut and the Taco Bell–I will be happy to try it out.)

Do I agree with every tenet of Islam? Hell, no. I don’t even know all the tenets, but I’d be really amazed if I did. But I don’t agree with a lot of the tenets of Christianity either, and we’ve managed to co-exist in town. We shop at the same stores and no one has died or anything. Yes, ideally I’d prefer a Sufi branch set up in my backyard, since I have a great love of the poetry of Rumi, but really, as long as you’re not batshit insane, I’ll extend you the same courtesy I do to every other religion–I’ll assume you’re not all assholes unless you prove otherwise.

Do I have problems with the way that some branches of Islam treat women? Sure. Who wouldn’t?  But y’know, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that if decent Muslims are anything like the decent Christians I know, they spend a lot of time facepalming and going “oh god, these people do NOT represent me…” In fact, I bet it bothers you even more than it bothers me.  So, y’know, I think we’ll probably manage.

Come on over. Put your feet up. Kevin will cook you a halal casserole. I will be over once the parking lot is laid out to try and convince you to put in native plant beds on the islands instead of grass. It’ll work out.