I needed a studio day badly. Life has been coming in hot and heavy from every which angle and I just needed a day of utter calm. I finally received it and was able to do some significant work.
It felt great and I nearly cleared my creative plate in the process. I now have just two card sized pieces and one larger piece in the queue. This is not bad.
As such, I have room for two commissions for the holiday season.
Parenting is difficult. I had no doubts of that really, but I never really prepared myself for the amount of time that I would spend arguing about seemingly meaningless things. Brushing your teeth, combing your hair, and getting dressed hardly seem like negotiables. Nor, really, do finishing chores, reading, or playing quietly before you earn screens. However, that is the world that I am living in.
I’ve wanted desperately to make more art since I became a single parent and yet, it is more difficult to find time to make. The time is there though. I have more time to myself. That is why I’ve felt really frustrated that I haven’t been making as much as I would. It’s only been recently that I’ve discovered how much pressure I put on myself to perform as a parent, so much so that I don’t perform particularly well as a parent. And so, when I arrive at this mysterious increase in time, I am exhausted. I am doubly exhausted after the mental battles that I must play constantly.
Of late I’ve been letting the art seep in though. It is still difficult, but isn’t it better if something is difficult and there rather than difficult and mourned for? Yes, I wish that I had the time and space to make that I did before, but I do not. I will not until my children are a bit older or a bit self reliant. In order for them to become more self reliant I must start to let the artwork and the reading and the “me” elements seep in more. They need to spread and grow. I wish to be like this burro’s tail plant; growing in and around wherever I need to be.
What is it about what could have been that makes life so much more interesting? Over the past two weeks I found myself reading The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World by Joshua Prager. The book, of course, tells the story of the 1951 Giants Pennant, but pays special heed to the way in which the Giants cheated.
It makes you wonder. How well would that team have performed if they had not cheated? This year Elly De La Cruz and the Reds young core has served to light a fire under the Reds, propelling them into first place. Everyone talks about Elly De La Cruz’s “it factor.” But let’s take into account for a second the young core of the 1951 Giants. At it’s center were young pitchers, Maglie and Jansen, and perhaps even more importantly a young Monte Irvin and Willie Mays. Would Willie Mays have ignited the 1952 Giants in the same manner that Elly De La Cruz has done for the 2023 Reds? We can never be fully certain because it is fact that the Durocher’s Giants cheated.
It’s the not knowing that I find interesting though. While we can never really know if Walter Johnson would have pitched as well as Randy Johnson in the nineties, or know if Ty Cobb could have hit .400 in the seventies, or if the Fifties Yankees were better than the Nineties Yankees, the biggest question to me will always be how the Negro Leaguers would have faired in MLB.
This week I started working on a series of drawings of the Detroit Stars and of Detroit Tigers wearing throwback Detroit Stars uniforms in the style of 1933 Goudey Chewing Gum cards. I can’t help but feel curious about the what could have beens, but I also just feel so attached to the what was.
I’ve just started Buck O’Neil’s Right on Time. He talks of being so proud to have played baseball with and against some of the most talented ballplayers of the thirties and forties. A man who could have been so bitter, just wasn’t. I think there is a lesson in that for all of us. While Capitalism has built an entire monopoly off of FOMO, what is it to recognize the beauty in the what is and what was.
I think that is why I am focused on this little Detroit Stars project. These men were great, maybe not recognized for being so, but no doubt great. I feel like in my art that is all that I want, to be great, whether anyone thinks I am or not. And really, what is being recognized as great, when you know that you are more of Bobby Thomson shirking the spotlight than you ever will be a Satchel Paige embodying the spotlight.
Over the course of the past three years I have progressively sold more sports portraiture and sports card art. While I feel a bit reluctant to refer to myself as a card artist, I suppose that that is what I have been doing of late. It has certainly proved a little more lucrative than some of my work in the past.
It does feel a bit odd though, as the idea that I found myself working with my first year of graduate school has sort of rolled back around. How odd. The trading cards that I was attempting to make at that time did not go well. I felt too confused as to what I was even doing. I eventually abandoned them only to saw pieces of wood over and over again into tiny little blocks. I still have a lot of them. There were nearly a thousand painted and illustrated blocks by the time I was done.
But now it’s card art I guess. I had tried painting newer players, junk wax from the eighties. My daily pieces have even been of junk wax cards, but while I feel very much into the daily process with those cards, I do not feel quite so into doing more detailed and finished pieces of them.
However, I found this past weekend that something that I really enjoy is vintage card designs. I was commissioned to create a reproduction of a 1952 Bowman and Topps Roy Campanella, respectively. Additionally, I was tasked with creating a Larry Doby Newark Eagles card.
These two projects proved much more fruitful for my creative juices. I felt much more into the process. There is something about historical reference that always gets me geared up. I think that I’m just going to lean into it a bit more going forward.
That said, I’m starting to get some ideas for a series of Jazz cards based off of these slick 1950s Bowman cards. There is something so delightfully simple about the color in the originals that really has me excited. I did a drawing of Thelonious Monk in my sketchbook that I think will be first. I’ll see if I can’t get that together and posted later this week.
Until then, or some other time that the impulse hits me, cheers.
With the dearth of video, clickbait headlines and information at its fingertips, who, if anyone, reads blogs anymore? Read: Is there really a point in me prattling on with this platform.
Answer. Probably not, but it still feels like a useful means of communication. At the end of the day, how is the process of image making understood by intermittent snapshots? Or am I seeing this unclearly? Perhaps, if I was making images which were actually doing their job then posting TikTok videos and instagram reels left and right would be the best way to communicate what I am doing.
I don’t really feel that way though. I have always enjoyed words equally as much as I have enjoyed image making. The turn of a phrase is just as beautiful as a well made image. I had hoped to use this platform as the primary means of sharing my daily drawings this year, but that hasn’t really happened as of yet. The first day that I made one of the 88 Donruss portraits I was too taken by the concept of having members in my card community guess the player.
It is a performance that I have enjoyed. At that point I wonder if the work is solely the watercolor or if it is also the game that is played with my fellow collectors when they guess the identities of the players? I always did want to be a rock star. I wanted that give and take with a crowd. At 42 the idea of being in front of people and adored is repulsive but I still enjoy the push and pull that is a crowd and a creative impetus.
It has proven to be a productive first week of the year for me. I really enjoy the portraits that are coming of it. I think maybe I will use this space as a weekly roundup sort of experiment for the time being, at least as the space pertains to my daily drawings.
I do feel very attached to the words, but the only way a daily post makes sense is if I provide a history of sorts of the player that I’ve painted and I’m not really interested in that currently. A que sera sera.
…Beautiful friend, the end. The year draws to a close and so I reflect on my successes, failures, and the circumstances therein.
At the beginning of this year I felt incredibly disconnected from my art making and artwork. I was still creating a lot of work but it was feeling like a whole lot of work. I wanted to reestablish my curiosity in the art making process and find my creative voice again.
The first thing I did was to begin a daily drawing project again. It took me some time to arrive at an actual subject matter that really felt compelling to me. I began by simply painting one of the kids toys every day, but I quickly narrowed my focus to a plastic toy soldier every day. The project was quite similar to doing a series of gesture drawings at its best and kind of a throw away painting at its worst. I enjoyed the process whether it was the former or the latter.
Now I am coming into 2023 and I am trying to think what I want to do next for a daily drawing. Part of me wants to do a painting of a junk wax baseball card every day. Another part of me wants to do something a little more natural. We’ll see what happens.
While I spent a good portion of the year really trying to figure out what to make the one thing that remained with me the whole year were these small watercolor and ink drawings/paintings. While I begin with a relatively small vocabulary or partitioning, I became more and more interested in the various ways that a pattern could change or shapes could interact within the same picture plane.
While I spent plenty of time trying to create small watercolors in this manner I later abandoned the idea of finished pieces for a library of different patterns in a small sketchbook that I had used. The sketchbook needed new life. I had started a project which really hurt in the beginning of it. so the only thing to do was to apply a new metric to the book.
I began to think more deeply about how something might be the same size or scale but feel different, occupy a different space entirely. I worked with many iterations, though I still plan to create a whole lot more. I even began to think about traditional tessellations like those that you would see in a Moroccan courtyard or MC Escher’s work.
At some point I will share more of these. I have a ton of pages like this.
Ultimately, I am an artist who is still trying to find what I am doing in world which includes single parenting, working multiple jobs, and feeling incredibly cut off from a vast majority of what I had previously done.
I find myself thinking about that Bukowski quote: “When nobody wakes you up in the morning and when nobody waits for you at night and when you can do whatever you want. What do you call it, freedom or loneliness?”
It is neither on its own. Much like in the Buddhist tradition you can feel good sad or sad happy, I feel that freedom and loneliness do not operate independently of one another. I am sometimes lonely. I am sometimes sad. I sometimes feel empowered and full of joy. But that is all just being a human. I don’t know anymore that any of this, no matter what you can do, whether it be Barry Bonds hitting one million baseballs into McCovey cove or Katie Ledecky swimming a half mile faster than you can walk it or Leonardo DaVinci drawing a perfect circle makes any of them more special than anyone else.
I think we all just are.
So goodbye, 2022. Hello, 2023. I await you in the unceremonious manner that a sober single father of two would.
A quick recap in how I was gifted an awesome New York Mets cassette, finished a card art piece and mailed a RAK to a collector of my handmade baseball cards.
I’ve determined that I’m pretty well done trying to make a business of sports related artworks for people. It was no longer bringing me joy to attempt to create work on commission. That said, creating work for friends which focus on some of their favorite players or just making work of players or images that I enjoy feels a little less out of bounds.
This morning I was able to work on a Frank Selee portrait card, which was really fun. According to wikipedia, Selee was manager for both the Boston Beaneaters and the Chicago Orphans/Cubs during the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. He had a heck of a stash. It puts Sam Elliott to shame.
Additionally, the same friend who had asked for the Selee card had asked me to convert his two cassettes of the New York Mets first ever radio broadcast to a digital format. I recorded both for him and when I asked if he’d like me to send the cassettes back he said that I could get rid of them because he had no way to play them. What a score, because I do! I love this old broadcast.
After finishing the Selee and hearing that I could keep the Mets broadcast I determined that I wanted to gift a small painting that I had done of Nolan Ryan a little while back and so posted it for free on Twitter. I was happy that a previous collector scooped it up. I believe that is four of my pieces that he now owns. I’m quite proud of this one as well.
The method is all in the intention. I appreciate the act of giving. I am so pleased with how my cassette collection is developing and even more pleased to do some good in my little community of Mets fans and baseball card collectors.
Christmas has come and gone and we’ve settled into vacation week. Changes loom heavily on the horizon. It’s puzzling how everything I knew to be true for forty years has been shaken at its roots; sometimes shifted and sometimes abandoned altogether in the past two years. My therapist asserts that circumstances are all around us, that we need to tap into sure things, that the only things that we can really be sure of are our breath and the ground that sits beneath our feet.
I’ve resisted this mantra for a long time, but change is ongoing whether I am willing to accept it or not. I’ve taken to reading westerns that my father had in my house growing up and drinking primarily decaf coffee but for my cup of regular to start my day. I’ve relaxed some of the rules for my kids. They have had so much change in the past two years it just seems unrealistic to clamp down harder.
But then, clamping down is just something that I’ve done to myself and everyone around me for ages, expecting everyone to function better while constricting worldviews. Shockingly this has produced inconsistent but generally bad results.
I have, after some trepidation, begun to start anew. Artwork was something that has been set to the wayside for the past two years. True, I’ve produced a daily drawing this year, but I have not been centering my existence around the amount of artwork I can produce.
This freedom sounds innately good, but there is some question as to how one creates and what they might create in the mindset as well. I have struggled with this. Not so much as a sense of artist’s block, but more in a sense of being conscious of what I am making. I’ve begun to liken it to recovering from an injury. We do not immediately dive into activity as usual. We find our edges, sometimes pushing against them just a bit to see if we can go a bit farther or achieve something new.
Last week I began to think about the way that color seeps and dries as an event. I had seen a painting in pastel colors of stripes and I suddenly found myself yearning for a flat tipped brush. I hadn’t used one in ages, but I found myself resolutely and indeterminately focused on watching paint dry. It was one of the loveliest afternoons of recent memory.
Then she’s tells me I’m a creep….
This morning after my swim and my breakfast I cleaned up the table a bit before I launched into my daily drawing. It never really feels like I’ve accomplished anything when I clean. There is always more that I have to do that I have just not gotten to yet, but it is easier to approach my sketchbook when the table is relatively cleaned off and there is space for me to work.
Then I popped on Core which I hadn’t listened to in a while. I had forgotten that I had picked up the first three Stone Temple Pilots albums on cassette but I felt really happy that I had this morning.
It has been a morning of shifting perspectives. Not dramatic shifts, more like an imperceptible plate tectonic sort of move, but a personal weight has been lifted the last couple days that I just could not find a way around previously. Happily that is on its way out.
The Bazooka man feels, in a way, apropos on a day of shifting perspective. He has the biggest gun. Most children will select him first. The word “bazooka” is just so cool to begin with. But what is it to be the man with the biggest gun? What does that feel like? Is it loads of responsibility? Is it the inevitability of being seen?
Currently, I’m reading The Midnight Library, and the main character, Nora Seed, while ruminating on the regret of her abandoned swimming programs and failed relationship with her dad, talks about the pressure of being seen. While it’s true that we all spend the majority of our lives walking around without anyone paying the least bit of attention to us, there is that fear that some of us carry that we will be seen. We feel vulnerable to people’s opinions, shifty looks, and harmful words. Perhaps we even carry those harmful words longer than one should. We develop a chip on our shoulder, people say. We’re too arrogant or stuck up and we don’t want to interact with others. But really, we may just be guarding ourselves, setting boundaries hard so that we are not hurt again by the harmful words of the many.
I wonder if it is ever like that for the bazooka man.
I had every intention of getting a bit more done today than it seems I have so far, and yet, I’ve completed quite a bit. Will this feeling ever escape me? Expectations are the bane of human existence I think.
Alas, I was going to finish up a physics lab that I’ve been needing to do after my therapy appointment today, but I found myself buried in WordPress attempting to find my way around again. My friend set this site up for me months ago and this is the first I’ve really dove in to attempt to do anything. Shame on me?
But anyway, the meat.
Last night I played chess with my friend Nick in the park. It was a good game. We had quite the dance upon my back line as I had taken his key big pieces but he was in position to promote to possibly promote to queen and create some real trouble for me if I were to blunder. I did, but it was a good game. It was the first game that I ever really recall using the King in a tactical position rather than reacting to other players’ moves in terms of retreat.
It is an apropos metaphor for where I currently stand in my life. I have some big events coming up here shortly which will dramatically alter the course of my next 12 to 14 years. I am not altogether certain that I am ready for it, but I feel that it is time to stretch out the legs on the old king and go for it.
It must mean something. I’ve found, over the course of the last few weeks, that I have a renewed vigor in creating, but that I am also less concerned with my productivity and more concerned with the act of making. I have long wanted to work on things for people. I feel my calling is to spread some joy through creation, but money and career has often stood in the way of that calling.
But now I am finding that a morning creating with my daughter, or a quick jot in a sketchbook can be equally as fulfilling as a painting that I spend forty hours a week on. I’ve also spent a lot of my life worrying that I had become a person whose practice is merely a hobby, but I feel less inclined to worry about that now. I make every day, sometimes a lot, and sometimes a very little.
The events in my life have dictated a different sort of living which would obviously lead to different ways of creating. I am starting this site up not as a continuation of what I was once doing, but as a replacement, which is more interested in what I am now doing. It is now after all.
So, if you’ve missed me meandering or wondered what I am working on and thinking about, I’d encourage you to drop on back. If these things are of no consequence to you, that is okay too. Take care, and goodbye for now.