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.
I’ve spent some time trying to figure out what it is about extinct birds that has me so intrigued. For a little while I suspected that it had something to do with an environmental consciousness; sort of an extrapolation of the climate crisis that we aw experiencing. But to be honest, while I am very concerned with our climate, the effects we as a species have had on it, and most prevalent in my personal world, Maine’s complete lack of winter thus far, I have to admit that this series is not because of sense of responsibility to the environment. It’s the same sort of trope I would find myself falling into while I. Graduate school as for the reason that I prefer found materials.
Creating art with an audience seems at once both daunting and inspiring. Even the most casual visitor to the studio often breaks my concentration for hours. At the same time, I have long wanted to create a mural or some other piece of public art. I enjoy the idea of artwork that is immediately accessible to a broad audience and not simply limited to gallery visitors and the sadly endangered creatures we know as “art collectors.” I have had some limited experience with viewing my work in a public environment. In 2011, I participated in the Billboard Art Project in New Orleans. It was incredible seeing my work at that scale with the actual earth and sky as the backdrops to my representative imagery. That experience left me wanting for a more permanent experience, however. While I was able to see my artwork on a grand scale, I did not experience the process of painting in the midst of the public; creating under observation.
It was with great pleasure, then, to be approached my Meg Shorette, of Launchpad and Central Gallery, to participate in the Queen City Piano Project. Meg and her crew of volunteers placed 5 pianos in parks throughout Bangor, ME. Each piano was to be hand-painted and designed by a different artist. I immediately could see my random and spontaneous patterns working their way across the body of a piano. It seemed to me the best opportunity I had had thus far to paint on a piece of found material and to create in the public. Coupled with this excitement was also the fear of becoming some sort of natural history exhibit or feeling like an animal penned up on display in the zoo. I imagined greetings from the public a la Steve Irwin. “Well, look ‘ere, mate. I’s an a’tist in ‘is natu’al habitat. Let’s poke him, eh?”
I have always envisioned my favorite artists, like McGee and Jasper Johns to be impervious to an audience, capable of focusing on their artwork at all times, while conversing with visitors or not. Jackson Pollack seemed dependent on an audience while painting, to validate his creative act, his performance. Alternatively, I was reading a blog post by Janice Mason Steeves in which she claims that she needs a space to herself in order to create work of consequence and quotes one of my favorites, Franz Kafka, who apparently couldn’t bear an audience.
“You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. for writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind…That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.”
In a blogpost on painting a hallway, writer, Paul Kleiman, talks about Stanislavski’s “Circle of Concentration,” the idea to choose your area of focus. He suggests that when you are painting you are able to reduce your area of focus to the spot right in front of you on your painting, noticing its irregularities and the movements of your brush only.
In truth, my studio practice is very much like this. It is all about solitude and the zen sensibility that a paint brush, palette and surface will elicit. It is about rhythm an motion and being in tune with the surface. I felt that this was a very private endeavor, but when I made it to Pierce Park to paint my piano, I found myself able to shrink my focus, to still create like I was in private. For all intents and purposes, I was by myself. I was unaware of the world around me but for the surface in front of me, but only using the idea of the “circle of concentration.”
I dove into my piano without a clear image of what I wanted it to look like in the end. I stuck with the locked box set of rules that I have been using in many of my patterns recently. The shapes of included in the patterns are all rectangles and vary only slightly within my locked box vernacular. The patterns grow spontaneously; one shape at a time in relation to the previous shapes. I was thinking about Thelonious Monk and Ahmad Jamal while drawing and painting this project, trying to solo using the limited locked box rules as jazz scales. The result seemed to be the most mature realization of the pattern making that I have experienced thus far.
I had relatively few visitors while finishing up the piano, but the people who did visit were interesting to talk with and seemed pleased to have a piece of public art available in the small city of Bangor. Due to my thoughts of jazz soloing, the experience seemed performative even when there was no one there. Ultimately, I found it compelling to create in an arena where people could see me working, enjoy the progress of the work, and take ownership of the process. I hope to create more work in the public sphere in the future. It felt as though the work was co-authored by the community that I was working in and that the work had a purpose to a wider audience.
Peace
-mike
You always want to write yourself as a good character. We always want to be the good guy, someone people empathize with. I’ve been reading a book of Japanese fairy tales to my son the past couple days and it has me questioning the idea of good people. We assume that if we are good people that people will treat us the way we should be treated, we will be addressed equivocally, our deeds will be remembered with satisfaction, but, as in these Japanese fairy tales, however, what if this just isn’t true? What if it’s a misconception that people who are by and large good people are actually not doing enough, or what if without the awareness of their acts both good and bad they are not completely whole?
I struggle with this idea and many other smaller thoughts that may be my undoing, causing a lack in motivation, or may be conversely, my strength, providing my work, love, and character with that necessary depth to be whole. Still, I struggle with empathy. I get lost in the trappings of my work, the idea that I must keep working, solving my own life’s mysteries, creating because creating is what brings me energy and peace. I made a promise to myself that I would work hard enough to get to that elusive somewhere with my art. I set the sights at where certain artists, like Jeff Soto and Barry McGee were showing and creating, determining that I needed to get there in order to be successful. For about a dozen years I’ve labored at this. I’ve created a formidable body of work, but no piece of which has brought me the stardom or notoriety that either of these heroes have attained.
Along the way I’ve married and had a beautiful son. I’ve stopped cooking in restaurants and am now an adjunct faculty member, teaching art to people in their late teens and early twenties. I have a comfortable studio and a comfortable home. I can create comfortably every day of the week.
It doesn’t always make me happy though. I long for so many things I can’t have. I long for places where I’ve felt that I was more creative. I long for better galleries, better artist friends, more stimulating conversation and a deeper and more whole understanding of what it is that I do. If I could just have a deeper understanding of what it is that I am doing, maybe I could focus, feel good about the course that I am on, be validated, both in the creative work that I do and the qualities that I have to offer at my workplace. But the truth of the matter is that beyond receiving a raise, or a newer
shinier teaching position with a tenure track and benefits, there is little validation that I can receive that will affect my life and the life of my family.
Recently, I’ve felt like maybe I’ve been the bad guy in my own story. I’ve felt short with my family and with my work. I went through a month long period where I was searching for new opportunities, new jobs, gallery shows, creative outlets of any kind. I wanted to live life filled to the gills with my art again, but it never occurred to me until I was reading fairy tales to my child that maybe my cup was full and that’s why I’m having trouble pouring more into it.
I’ve created so much in the past two months and I am truly overwhelmed by the experience. My work has grown, but I’m now at that stage where I need to let the soul grow into that space that the work has created. Yesterday, I cleaned my studio again. I consider it the rebirth, just in time for the winter, a season of rumination and creation. Winter always provides me with that opportunity to go slow and reflect. I hope it’s long and cold, because I will be inside filled with the warmth of my family’s love, the joy of my studies, and the satisfaction of my work.
Today was the first day of class for one of my sections of 2d design. Generally my 2d design class is filled with a number of non-art people. This is the nature of a community college, and I will say that most of the time, it is the complete privilege of teaching at a community college. I hae met some incredible people who are multifariously gifted and individual.
Here are a few suprematist coffee pots that I have been working on. I’m interested in the order of shapes necessary to communicate the object. I’ll keep you posted.
When I am busy with my daily life, I often have trouble maintaining my creative focus. When I am allotted time to work in studio or at home I will often feel bitter that I must work right then, that I don’t get a day to just be off from work, free to do what I want. I begin to constrain my creative ideas by overanalyzing daily situations, absorbing outside pressures, and ultimately trying too hard to make as much of my time as possible. When entrenched in one of these ruts it is difficult to remember that I am most successful when I allow my mind to wander.
The other night I was sitting in my easy chair looking out the window. I began to draw a street light in a sketchbook and three days later have done over ten drawings of these street lights. Mind you, were I not working full time over the summer, I would probably have more of these drawings done, but that’s okay. The idea is down. I will be more prolific in the fall when I start teaching again. For now the idea is down, I have something to noodle with, and I am not gritting my teeth trying to work too much out of myself.
