Art & Story Blog

“Here she comes, you better watch your step.
Shes going to break your heart in two, its true.”

I observed this woman during lunch, and while I don’t really know if she’s a Femme Fatale, it certainly seems plausible. The curves seem pretty dangerous and she exuded a confidence and a high-maintenance luster only seen in shampoo commercials. She seems well mannered, but I think if she didn’t get her way she could turn a man into a eunuch with one step of her heel.

A new tool arrived on my doorstep Saturday: the Kuretake brush pen. It’s essentially a fountain pen with a brush tip. I’m so impressed with the elegance and quality of this pen! Thanks to John Sanford for the tip. I’m delighting in the smooth flowing thick and thin and just experimenting with the various qualities of line it’s capable of. The above drawing was done with the Kuretake, as were the drawings in my previous two posts (”OMG LOL” and “Sad Toad Man”).

This one, as is the case with a lot of my drawings, is largely the result of just experimenting with line. I happened to draw a character on the right and began playing with abstract line on the left. As the abstracts evolved, I began to see a relationship between the two. I imagined that the abstract stuff was something this character was seeing. A drug-induced hallucination, perhaps? Or maybe the result of sheer psychosis or a hyperactive imagination? Or perhaps it isn’t so literal. Maybe we are seeing a representation of his emotional state. The odd thing is the disparity between the wild quality of the abstracts and the extremely sedate expression on the guy’s face. I imagined he’s trying to stay cool in the face of all this really crazy stuff he is either seeing or thinking or feeling. “Don’ trip,” he tells himself. Don’t trip.

This video I saw last week of Oliver Sacks in 1986 is still resonating with me and the above drawing/painting brings to mind, yet again, the quote which turned up in one of my doodles:

“One way or another, people want to live creatively and they want to live vividly.”

These are some sketches from my ongoing quest to find the cartoon me. I am still warming up to doing some autobiographical or semi-autobiographical illustrated tales (a.k.a., “comix”) at some point. Note: The character in the bottom right is not me. I don’t know who that is.

I’m in the process now of compiling a list of story ideas and there are a lot more than I thought there were. I’m keeping them in a journal I’m calling “Short Stories” in homage to Roald Dahl. In a story by Dahl titled “Lucky Break — How I Became a Writer” (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More), he explains that he kept a journal bearing the name “Short Stories” and whenever he’d get the inkling of an idea for a story, he’d jot down a line or two. He kept it very simple and straight forward. Just, as Dahl described it, the “slender threads” of a plot. Almost every story he ever wrote started out as a thought written down in that journal.

I came up with this over breakfast on Sunday. My fiancée Jamie seemed a little disturbed by this guy and perhaps a bit frightened by the crazy look in my eye and maniacal cackle I uttered while working on him. There can be such strange delight in conjuring grotesque imagery or truly pitiable characters. It’s just so raw. Kind of a pure expression of some dusty corner of the imagination.I tried to imagine what was going on with this guy, somewhat after the fact. I think maybe he’s having a little moral dilemma and carnivorous guilt over his soon-to-be snack. Or perhaps he’s contemplating his own decay, of which the fly is a reminder, waiting for him to rot a little more so it can have a snack of its own. Reading into this image sends chills down my spine.

My impulse is to delete this post and not subject you, dear viewers, to its sad visage, and to save myself the embarrassment of exposing what might be some ugly part of myself. But I will try to be brave in the face of all this. Look upon this tortured soul if thou wilt, but I beg you, do not judge me.

:P

I paid a brief visit to LACMA recently. It occurred to me that it would be a nice place to get an espresso in the sunny afternoon and it’s not far from where I live. Not much was open there at the moment, due to construction of some new buildings, but their permanent collection was open and I have a membership, so I figured I’d take a quick stroll. I stopped at this painting by Arthur Mathews titled, “Monterey Cypress” and decided to sketch it. These types of cypress trees are pretty common in my hometown of San Francisco, so it instantly called back fond memories and feelings of home. There is a sort of softness and friendliness in these trees and this landscape.

This was drawn about a month ago on the inside cover of a new Moleskine sketchbook (small). Drawn with a water-brush pen filled with ink.

This is somewhat of a return to the sort of content I used to draw a lot more of. That is, somewhat abstract surrealistic landscapes. Play with line and form and composition and a sort of "growing" of what could be organic forms rising up from the ground and taking on shapes that are suggestive of things perhaps we’ve seen before. Take a look around. What do you see? Maybe a cactus, an onion or radish, a duck or a snail, a trumpet, a plume of smoke, a chimney, a balloon, a musical note. A unique scene can kind of evolve out of this stuff. I don’t really know what it is when I start out, but I try to follow my feeling and intuition and use the opportunities presented along the way. It’s nice when something more cohesive comes out of it. There can be a message, or a theme at times. Maybe just an aesthetic idea or something more literal or suggestive.

I’m not exactly sure what’s happening here, except that it is maybe some sort of microscopic city. These forms are a combination of the natural, organic, and the constructed. If you can see the tiny vertical lines in various places atop the forms, it was my thought while drawing that these are perhaps people of some sort. Possibly you and me, or possibly some microscopic life form. Like the Whos in Whoville. Anyway, that can give you a sense of scale and maybe what it might be like to live in this world.

I doodled this while watching this one-hour interview from 1986 with Oliver Sacks:

As you might see from the comment I left on the YouTube page, I found it fascinating and inspiring. Now I want to read his book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” I’m pretty sure this title has come up in conversation fairly recently, it so rings a bell, but I also think one of my figure drawing teachers in college may have handed out an excerpt from this book. Something about learning to see and a recounting of a blind patient who became able to see, but did not understand what he was seeing. Because he had never seen, everything was completely abstract and he had to take the wild sensory information of color, light, dark, and shape, and learn to associate it with actual 3-Dimensional forms and space, of things he’d been familiar in a tactile way for his entire life thus far. It’s possible this wasn’t from Sacks’s book, but watching the interview called this to mind, all the same.