Author: mightylark

That’s right.  I’m cranking it out like Elliott Ness here in Portland town.  Last night was so good.  That doesn’t sound dirty at all, but if you’ve been following the blog for the past days you know what I mean.  I’ve been listening to a steady diet of nineties alternative, drawing, painting, sawing, assembling and pacing.  Everything seems to be coming together.  The small bits are making sense with the bigger bits and everything seems to have its spot.  I’m a painter again, not just a draftsman, which is great.

After posting the initial sketch of the thesis project, I immediately started shaping panels to fit the design and then painted said panels.  I rarely measure, so this process is a little more intuitive than you might anticipate.  I like every aspect of the piece to be like creating a painting, not like constructing something from directions.  If I wanted to construct something from directions, I would purchase a paint by numbers kit.

Here’s the beginning.  End to be shared in 3 and a half months.

 P.S.  I am tired.  I look surly, and I would like to leave my house because I am feeling antsy.  I promised myself that I would try to stay here though, just to get myself into the habit.  It’s going to be a lot of work this semester, so I might as well get focused now, rather than waiting 12 days until the semester begins.  Above all else, I have Douglas Adams ringing in my ears, “Don’t panic”.

Peace
-Mike

Today I have spent the majority of the day piecing together a sketch for my thesis show based on the sketches that I started late last night.  When I started thinking about my thesis exhibition I really wanted to play up the idea of the machine and the mechanical aspect to making interchangeable parts, but then I went to Seattle again.  I can’t get Seattle out of me.  It makes me feel something that I can’t quite put my finger on.  It is not a feeling of home, but more this feeling that that is where I grew up.  It is as if you spend your first 20 some years under your parents’ wing and then you are left to your own means.  Wherever you do that, I think, becomes a special place in your heart.  Seattle isn’t the greatest place on earth, of this I am sure, but it holds for me, my youth, and my hopes for a better tomorrow.

With this in mind, and realizing that although I love analytical processes injected in emotional artwork, I want to keep my final piece more emotional.  I am an emotional dude.  I was told this last week that I think about my love life like a woman.  I don’t even know what that means, but it went hand in hand with a comment about me being emotional and moody.  I decided to make a love letter to the place that I have the fondest memories of, Washington.

Here is the sketch.

Don’t let the sketch fool you.  This piece is a huge undertaking.  The speakers are actual speakers, not a painted representation and each one of those little blocks will be a little block.  I might even use more blocks when I am not feeling lazy and drawing all of them.  I haven’t figured out yet if there will be robots at the wall underneath this structure but I think that there will, and possibly a record player playing PNW music.  I attach everything that I remember to the music I was listening to at the time, as you have probably guessed from my blog titles. 

I hope you dig the sketch.  If you are near Portland, ME, I hope you come to see the final in May, and I hope that there is a place that deep down inside you know you love so much that it can bring tears to your eyes just thinking and dreaming about it.

Peace
-Mike

This past week I took a little trip to Seattle in order to re-fuel myself.  I missed my friends.  I missed Elliott Bay and I missed the Olympics.  I wanted rain in January.  I wanted forty degrees.  Seattle always makes me feel like an artist.  I don’t understand the town one bit.  Perhaps it is the street art, though really I think there is probably better street art found in NYC, or maybe it is the people but I can find anti-social people just about anywhere.  What is it?  I don’t know, but I’m ready for some things now.

I spent the trip filling out another set of drawings in my sketchbook for Transient.  I have almost all of that work scanned in.  Now it is just a matter of choosing what format I want to put that work into.  I am not sure what would do it the most justice or if that really even matters.  Maybe I just need to get it out there and what will be will be.

After getting back, I’ve been immensely tired.  I didn’t catch my creative stride until I bought a pound of coffee today at about six.  I made coffee.  I felt better.  I worked for eight hours, even if it is not an acceptable shift by factory hours.

I have been struggling with the idea for my thesis project.  I thought that it might be heading into that area of too formal for me to enjoy.  While on break tonight I started flipping through Jeff Soto’s Potato Stamp Dreams and realized that I was avoiding painting still.  Everything has been a drawing, which is awesome.  That allows me to finish more work in a program focused around finishing a lot of work, but I want to paint too.  I love paint.  I love brushes.

That is where I am at now.  I worked for the next four hours making sketches.  They are quite elaborate, a combination of both the original thesis idea and my favorite two pieces from my first year in the MFA program.  Best of all, I think that perhaps this kind of work could get me a show in all of the galleries that I though would never touch me with a ten foot pole.  That would be cool.

Here is a teaser.  I’m tired and didn’t have the energy to scan in all of the sketches.  Tomorrow.  Tomorrow there will be time.  It will be awesome.  I hope it is awesome for you too.  I know it will be awesome for you too.

I’ll explain all of this in further depth tomorrow.  Until then, get some sleep.
Peace
-Mike

Here are a couple more of the pieces that I put together for friends in Seattle.  I’m very pleased to be in the town and dropping these off.  I am even more pleased to be sitting outside of Victrola coffee blogging it up in the sunshine.  So this is the rainy city, huh?  Just like I remembered it.  Mercurial.

I’ve also while on this trip been putting together a series of drawings that will be compiled in a second edition of Transient.  The first is in the works early next week and I think the second will probably be done by about mid February.  I am trying to be chill about these goals this year.  Last year I felt like I didn’t finish anything and was super down on myself, then looked at what I had done and realized that that opinion was completely ridiculous.

Anyway, here are the new pieces.

This will probably be it for the trip to Seattle for right now.  The rest of my days seem to be filling up quickly, but that is A.O.K. with me.  Have a good one.  Keep on loving 2012.  As Steve McQueen says of the man falling from the ten story building in The Magnificent Seven, every floor down he said “So far so good”.  If all that Mayan nonsense proves to be true, lets go out with a “So far so good”.

Peace
-Mike

Tomorrow night I am leaving for Seattle for four days.  I cannot express how much I love that town, but really a love letter to the town is a love letter to the people IN the town.  In preparation, today I put together some pieces for my friends in Seattle who I didn’t get work out in time for Christmas.  I’m stoked to show up with a stack of art for people.  I miss them so much.

Which leads me to a conversation that I overheard earlier tonight…

I cooked dinner for a group of my fellow MFA students tonight and the topic of who we create art for and what the purpose of creating that art came up, as it always does in these types of settings.  One of my friends was pushing the point that artwork should be in a Utopic setting created by an artist trying to work out the answer to a problem or the means of understanding something, but not to make something that is considered cool or beautiful.  Perhaps there is some truth in this, but I think that the greatest challenge of an artist is to make something that people do find cool.  Perhaps this is a useless goal, but the feeling that I get when I see a person “get” something and think it is cool or actually burst out into laughter, I feel certain that this idea that the artist is meant to be in solitary creating work simply to satisfy his or her own needs is complete crap.

I love the people I’ve met.  Admittedly I make artwork for myself, but in the end I want it to be COOL so that those people will enjoy it, because then we can share.  We can share in the creative act.  We can create the story together.  We can be a community.  I can love them for them and for their ideas and they can love me for me and my ideas.

I’m done ranting, but I’d be interested to hear what other people have to say about this.  Perhaps I am harping on something that isn’t even really that apparent.  Here’s a couple of the pieces that I worked up for my peeps in Seattle today.

Cool or no?  I’ll let you decide, but I didn’t make them because I thought they were pointless.
Have a good one.  Hope the New Year is treating you well thus far.

Peace
-Mike

I am so pleased that I was able to be involved with my friend Sam Mercer’s first poetry feature.  Sam is very creative young poet who creates individual experiences at his poetry readings by asking the audience for a key term or phrase and then creating a unique freestyle poem.  As he was creating his merchandise for his feature it seemed fitting that all of his work was hand written and varied slightly from book to book.

I was glad to offer my services in both illustrating the covers and binding the books.  They are available by donation from Sam or myself, though if many more sell, you may have to wait for the next run.  Keep up.

 This was a very fun little project to work on and it made me realize exactly how easy it is to make a zine.  I always over-complicate the matter by trying to make something too produced.  Expect some more limited run zines from me this year.  I like the idea of making books that are not all the same but are all titled the same.  I also think that I will be making some more standard zines.

Hope you like them.
Peace
-Mike

Today I was sitting at the coffee shop and my buddy Sam looks at me and says “I am the feature poet at Mama’s Crowbar tonight, I have to go home and make merch”.  My immediate response was to ask him if he needed some cover art for his hand written small run zines.

I put together five covers.  Here is the first.  I will share the rest later as I am running off to see Sam’s feature.

I worked at the restaurant all weekend.  It was awesome.  I love my chef and my co-workers.  They are great great people, but when I leave my job I am so exhausted and ready for bed.  Add a 2 and a half hour drive to the end of work and I am pretty much lost to the world for the next 24 hours.  Such was the case this weekend.

I was sitting at my kitchen table eating lunch today wondering if I was ever going to finish anything today.  I cleaned up a little around the house, which I guess is worth something, but I have 2 illustrations that I need to finish this week as well.  It was at about lunch time when I realized that it would do me no good to attempt to do more work for clients after working an entire weekend.  Hopefully this is a sign of logic to come.  Tomorrow I need to wake up and work on illustrations, but after a night of working on my fine art stuff, which is more cathartic and less focused around communicating a specific idea, I feel more prepared to do so.

I am also pleased to have finished up another 15 or so pieces for my installation in May.  My thesis project really is a bit ridiculous, so I think any time that I am feeling a little non-plussed with my day over the next several months I will do as I did today and just crank out some more drawings.  I am also sharing a couple commissions that I wrapped up at the end of last week today.

Hope you dig the stuff.

I am stoked to even have gotten moving today.  At about 6 I didn’t think that there was a hope of doing so.  Have a good night peeps.  Will talk to you soon.

Peace
-Mike

I’ve been making a bunch of the Vertical Mixing series for Christmas presents over the past several weeks.  I have been absolutely awful at documenting them, but I remembered to document this one.  I love the Owlbot.  Expect more from him.

Speaking of which, I was approached by an old friend recently and he has Mighty Lark scripts written up.  I am absolutely floored with them.  He really captured the essence of what I was looking for in that character. 

Starting next week, as a result, I will be putting together a full Mighty Lark story to be unveiled, well, whenever I am comfortably through enough strips that I have a buffer.  I got burned out on that project very quickly when I was behind.  I don’t want to do that type of thing to myself anymore.

Thanks for checking in folks and Happy Holidays.
Peace
-Mike

Thanks to the lovely Meighan O’Toole of My Love for you, I was selected to work on a series of illustrations for the Boston Public School’s library.  The illustrations are used as depictions of subject headings in the card catalog.  I’m posting a couple of these now, and will post the rest when they have all been approved.  This was a really fun project to work on and I am very pleased to share it with you.

I have definitely figured out this year that I love being an Illustrator.  It has been a huge step for me to answer the “so what do you question?” with “Illustrator” rather than “cook”.  Projects like this one really help me to think of myself seriously though and I am incredibly pleased to be in the position that I am now.  I’ve tried pretty hard to get to this point, but all of that work kind feels worth it when I see work like this in the world.

Hope you all like it too.
Peace
-Mike