Category: Sketchbook

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Freehand Armada Sketch Sketchbook

Typee: Why so Serious?

Herman Melville writes some great adventures.  A couple years ago I read the book “Omoo” and now I am reading “Typee.”  It seemed an excellent counterpart to the book on Gauguin’s symbolism that I am reading as the entirety of the book is set in the Polynesia.  Melville’s characters are always interesting, as the narrator is ultimately him.  He allegedly experienced something akin to what happened in his books on Polynesia, but what interests me, is that when his characters find themselves in the dramatic situation that catapults the plot of the novel, they always find a buddy.

Similarly, as I’ve been working through the ups and downs of my personal life I’ve been looking for company as well and as a result I have reached out to the members of Freehand Armada and I’ve started a couple new projects.  When life gives you lemons, make something new.

I’ve started two new projects with Freehand.  The first is a zine of varmints performing skateboarding tricks.  I will share some of those as the sequential pieces materialize more.  I have the first, a badger doing a nollie kick flip, almost done.  He just needs to land.  The second project that I started is a newsletter project.  I want to do some reviews of all sorts of things in my Portland community; a couple artist studio visits, reviews of gallery shows, reviews of new pinball machines at Arcadia, and a segment that my buddy and I just came up with, The beverage review.  We will review whatever beverage we are consuming while working on our other projects.  Mostly this will become a rolling review of our cheap beer of choice.  The first was of Narragansett and you can read it here.  Each beverage review will be accompanied by a drawing of the can.

I’ve also begun a #nanodrawmo project for the month.  I am going to do a small watercolor of 50 different shorebirds.

I’ve been really into the way that watercolor feels and how mobile it is.  I have gotten to the point where I pretty much carry my watercolor kit around with me everywhere.  These drawings have been pretty quick.  The interest in shorebirds really sprung from a book that I was reading earlier this year on the migration of the Red Knot, a type of Sandpiper, who travels all the way from Tierra Del Fuego to Nova Scotia every year.  That is a long trip and seems fitting to the way that I’ve been feeling about my life of late.  What a long strange trip try to account for all of my needs.
So I’m finding that in order to really be creative and loose, it has been really helpful to push silly projects with my friends.  I was beginning to take myself too seriously.  I need some friends to accompany me on my journey.  Hopefully we don’t take our art directly into the maws of cannibals.
Peace
-Mike

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drawings Maine artists Sketchbook

Stars not where they seemed or were calculated to be, but nobody need worry.

I finished reading “The Hunt for Vulcan” this morning.  The book follows the trajectory of the theory of gravity and how it relates to the celestial bodies in our solar system.  For approximately a 100 year span it was believed that the imperfect calculations on the location of the planet Mercury were due to another small planet named Vulcan.  The book covers the empirical research of perhaps a dozen different scientists, culminating with Einstein, who disproves the existence of the additional planet. Towards the end of the book, Levenson, shared the original headline from the New York Times, which stated, “Stars not where they seemed or were calculated to be, but nobody need worry.”

This statement is such interesting poetry to me.  In the same sense that I’ve been determining that my failures are in fact necessary for my growth, this is a wonderful illustration of how it took a number of different scientists to figure out what seems to be a relatively well accepted and understood idea now; the number of planets in our solar system.  In order to arrive at Einstein’s final steps, however, it was imperative that he modify Newton’s theories, which was a sort of Physics Holy Grail for a couple centuries.  These were laws, information that could not be altered.  It involved a number of very stubborn people who believed, but did not know that there was a planet closer to than the sun than Mercury.  They believed that Newton’s numbers had to work.  It was belief versus a search for truth.  As I spend more and more time trying to learn to draw again, it dawns on me that in a sense, we have come to believe in the theories presented to us in art over the past fifty year.  We believe modernism and post-modernism to be the lens that we need to search through because everything has been discovered, we have seen in before.  But here we have a science that didn’t quite figure, that was accepted for over 200 years, suddenly come shattering down because one person was willing to put the work in.  I’m not sure what I’m after, but as I was reading about Einstein and his penchant to be alone, thinking and working, I felt akin to him.

I am not for a minute claiming the genius that was evident in Einstein, but I do feel the singularity in purpose that he exhibited.  I feel drawn to artwork; the studying, teaching, and making aspects all.  I feel inclined to avoid close relationships, blow up romantic relationships, and focus on my work.  I feel a definite similarity to Mr. Einstein there.

I am wondering what to do with my sketches.  I am not sure that I have made any that I am eager to make into any large scale pieces as of yet.  It used to be that I would grow so excited about my ideas that I would have to put them down on paper instantly.  I am not feeling like that anymore.  I am very much into the idea of creating some figurative pieces with compositions referencing famous artists.  Currently I have most interested in works by Gauguin, Goya, Cezanne, and Sargent.  I love Sargent for his ability to make all of his subjects look remarkably noble.  I enjoy Cezanne and Gauguin for their abilities in abstraction.  Goya seems to me the master of transcendence.  His works elicit such a vocal response from the viewer.

With that in mind, I think my plan is to stick to making drawings.  I cannot make pieces that reference famous masters if I do not believe that my drawings belong in the same realms as said masters.  I have essentially determined that I will learn how to do all of the parts of my artwork that make me uncomfortable.  I thought that graduate school would encourage behavior like this and I think that that is what I most wanted out of that experience.  It didn’t end up being the case, however. I have, on the other hand, realized that where I used to think I didn’t have enough time to complete everything that I wanted, that I now am more interested in working as often as I can rather than worrying about how much I create.  These undue stressors only make my work more claustrophobic and constipated.  I am looking for a freedom in my mark and I think that I am getting closer to it.  I merely needed to reject the idea that learning how to draw very well doesn’t necessarily mean a break with the current trends and goals in modern art.  It is just my journey.
Peace
-Mike

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change failure Maine artists Sketchbook

Failure is the Journey

A Man and his Beer Van is almost ten years old.  My general person has seen so much evolution over the course of the making of this blog.  The past two years have been filled with, “I’m backs,” “I’m going to get around to its,” and, “I’ve accepted its.”  Ten years is a significant amount of time.  This blog has changed immensely and it is obviously reflective of me.

I am currently going through some of the most fierce emotions that I have ever felt.  After three years of marriage, my wife has determined that this is the wrong path.  We’ve been split up, but living in the same apartment, for roughly three months now.  I’ve received advice from a number of people, friends who have emerged from the woodwork from high school and graduate school, to my ex-fiance.  It is comforting to know that these people care about me.  It is more comforting, however, to feel as confident as I have in my own person.  I’ve still managed to create every day.  I have continued to create my fishing fly watercolors everyday, worked more in more in tiny sketchbooks, and even started to clean up studio a bit, working on larger pieces again and gearing up to create a miniature gallery space in the corner.  I have not been idle.  I am proud of this.
I have been worried about what will happen to my son.  He is the single most important person and priority that I have on this Earth.  I have changed, my artwork has changed, my goals have changed, and my expectations have changed, and it is all for the better.  
When I started this blog, I started with a poem written while driving a beer van.  I moved on to sketches and ideas and my thought process.  I then became obsessed with the idea that each move that I made needed to be commercial.  I needed a style.  The blog was a good way to make people aware of my various attempts at pitching products.
Now I am teaching art, however.  I have been to graduate school and spend my days with a 2 year old.  To say that I think the perspectives of 26 year old me are limited is perhaps an overstatement, but I would say that my perspectives have expanded.  I am more interested in a broader range of mediums, ideas, and styles.  I do not think that this has hindered me as an artist.  What I do think, is that often times, we become so focused on being a thing, that we lose sight of enjoying the journey.  I talk about this a lot, but I wonder how much I actually allow myself to live it.  
My journey has been immensely fruitful.  I am content with how I live my life, the people that I have met and choose to keep, and with being a father.  I am content with making art in whatever manner I can.  Sometimes I feel restrained by my responsibilities, tied to a lifestyle that doesn’t seem to fit the goals that I thought I had.  But as I sit writing this, I can see that I am now making sketches, drawings, and thoughts bridging the parallels between the quietude that I experience in living with my son, the mercurial waves of urban development and destruction, and nature.  I am finally finding what my work is about.  I cannot see the future, but I bet that I will continue to feel more pleased with my work as time passes.  
As to this blog, I’ve determined that I would like to return to my roots a bit more.  I am tired of showing pieces in progress as my process has changed.  I am more interested in the ideas and thoughts that are crossing my dome.  That is what I’d like to do here.  Here are a few recent images from one of my tiny sketchbooks that I’ve been working in from Albertine Press.  They are wonderful books with some good paper.  You should check them out if you like working small but with mixed media.

In conclusion, I’m feeling more comfortable in being what I am, making what I make, and working how I work.  I am sure that the manner in which I work will change more as I grow older, but now, at 36 and working through a divorce, I feel like I am the most pleased with the work that I make that I have ever been.  I think that it is reflexive of my life.  Both are full of failures and that is wonderful. Failure leads to new opportunities.  Failure is another chance.  Failure is the journey.

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Hand Drawn Type Pattern Portland Maine Illustration Sketchbook Text

Mostly Moving but Still Working

Moving is such a drain on creativity, resources both financial and mental, and time.  Since my wife and I found out that we had to move, we have had our noses to the ground trying to make a bit more money, find a house, and keep ourselves sane.  Throughout this process the only thing that has kept me okay is sharing my friend Shirah’s studio space.  I have a show coming up in February and another in May.  I have several projects on the drawing boards that I wish to give my attention so much more than I want to give my attention to a move that at times I feel so completely nonplussed by.

That said, there is no way around the move.  It will happen, and so, that studio space has become a bit of a safe haven for me.  Recently I began to think about the pieces that I was making in the different divided segments on the 6″ X 6″ panels.  I wondered if I couldn’t combine the ideas of pattern that I had been studying in Franz Boas’s Primitive arts with the ideas behind those segmented images.  Franz Boas suggested that patterns change vertically but become repetitive or symmetrical to the left and right.  This mimics change in our everyday setting.  Consider the skyline, treeline and land.  They are three different segments to our everyday which change vertically but repeat in a sense laterally.

I have always felt like I work better in constrained proportions.  Long vertical or horizontal pieces have always seemed more comfortable to work in than the traditional canvas shapes.  When I have been stacking these pieces I’ve realized that I am actually creating a different type of pattern.  Check out the images below.

In addition, I’ve been trying to do more index card pieces for the show in February.  It is a show of advice and words of comfort from media, relatives and my own sketchbooks.  These word based pieces have struck me as slightly uninteresting as of late, but this morning I started using one of the new sketchbooks that my wife got me for Christmas.  I started to think about the word based pieces as text out of silent movies.  Here is the result.

The patterns grow.  I am beginning to think of words as a really complicated pattern.  That is all that a pun really is; manipulating the patterns that we have created for letters.  I’m off to studio for a bit more work.  I hope you enjoyed the images.

Peace
-Mike