The Mighty Lark

Everything seems different right now. Life is not going as planned and so I find myself fighting the urge to delve further and further into self. I’ve started reading more as a way to ground myself. Social media and personal interaction seems to exacerbate my feelings of indecisiveness. With this lack of stability in my daily life comes a more clear idea of what it is that I want for my work and my work goals, however. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the way that I work and the way that I prioritize. These are two things that I have had issues with for a little over a decade.

I have, for as long as I can remember, been of the mindset that more to do is better than less to do. In order to be successful, I thought, you must always be producing. I see now that this isn’t really the case. It is hard to be “on” all the time and that isn’t even accounting for all of the time that a person needs to spend marketing, promoting and building relationships with clients. There is too much other work to do to realistically work on your artwork all of the time, and yet, that is what I’ve often tried to do. It isn’t terribly successful from a business perspective. I have, however, my craft has gotten a lot better than it was when I first started working.

Lately, with problems stemming from what I think I would sum up as maturation issues, I’ve been thinking about the steps that I’ve skipped. I can’t go back and make myself not skip those steps. I can try to build a new foundation, working my way from the bottom again. This seems hard. Everything can seem hard. I’ve found, however, that there are several things that I’ve wanted to do in my life, that I haven’t. There is no reason for this other than fear of failure and rejection. And so I have to ask myself if fear of failure and rejection is worth the price of never trying at all? I don’t think that it is.

One of the things I’ve wanted to create is a podcast. I always wanted to start one, but never felt like I had anything to offer that wasn’t already out there and if I did, then it wasn’t really worth people listening to. My daily watercolors have given me a bit more confidence, as I realize that I’ve put in work that maybe other people haven’t. I know a thing or two, even if it isn’t, at times, the expected knowledge. Now I am beginning to think that maybe this different sort of knowledge may actually be a strength and not a weakness. Isn’t that what individuality and creativity is all about anyway?

And so, I’ve started a podcast where I vocalize the thoughts in my head while I am creating my daily fish bug watercolor. It began as a way to try to get myself out there in a different way and now I am realizing that it helps me see the value in what I do, the methods that I am capable of, and that I am actually able to vocalize what it is that I know how to do. These three things seem to me like the root of the ability to sell oneself. So as my confidence grows in podcasting, I suspect my confidence will grow in speaking about my work. You can check out my podcast on itunes, under The Mighty Lark or on Soundcloud at https://soundcloud.com/mighty_lark.

Here are some of the more recent bug illustrations that I have created after I started the podcast. I had to start a second book to house the second half of the year. These milestones feel so good right now.

I mentioned that I also had started to read a bit more again. Yesterday, I took an hour to myself, and went to the park to read a book. I intend to take some similar time today. I felt surprisingly more at peace just by allowing myself that time. I think that going forward the biggest key to being successful in my artwork is to allow myself to be successful in daily life, with my wife, my son, and myself.

Peace

Mike

I’ve determined that I will share with you the rough draft of my notes for my artist talk on Friday. I have been under the assumption that nothing has changed in me since before graduate school for the longest time, but I now realize that this is a fallacy. My work has changed, as too, my voice has changed. Let me know what you think of the notes.

to·tem

ˈtōtəm/

noun

noun: totem; plural noun: totems

a natural object or animal believed by a particular society to have spiritual significance and adopted by it as an emblem.

This body is really a culmination of several years worth of work. Tonight I intend to share with you the source of my interest in totems and native artwork, my love affair with found surfaces, the intersection between illustration and painting, and how we arrived at this point.

I have lived in Seattle twice. The Seattle Art Museum, SAM, has an extensive collective of Pacific Northwest Artifacts. I’d like to stand in front of you and say that my interest in totems was derived from my exposure to this work. It’s not. That exposure did not hinder my interest by any means, but I can definitively say that it was not the source of my interest in totems.

Seattle, I think it’s safe to say, is known for its coffee shops. I frequented many of them. One of these was Top Pot Donuts, which made a might fine donut and some mighty good coffee. One morning after a domestic dispute, I found myself seated upon patio furniture out front of Top Pot eating a maple glazed donut and drinking a large coffee. As the crumbs started to fall through the perforations in the wonky table, I realized that I had a visitor. A small bird was hopping from one side of my foot to the other, on top of my foot, around in circles and every which way, ecstatic over the falling crumbs of my donut. While in my vacant domestic doldrums, it occurred to me that there was something about this bird, something not quite like escapism and not quite like omniscience, but firmly placed in a realm of entropy. He, or she, I am not really aware of the distinction in colors of this particular city dwelling species of bird, was completely free to hop around and eat crumbs, or, to more importantly, fly away.

Let’s fast forward approximately three years. I was working with a gallery called The Hive in Los Angelos. The curator of the Hive requested that the artist regulars in his group shows all create an avatar. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time, although it now has in recent years, but what I was searching for in an artistic avatar, was anonymity, escape, dream seeking and freedom. I wanted a world full of choose your own art adventures, because I felt that my own world presented myself and my peers with such a limited offering of adventure. I immediately thought back to my tiny bird friend. He had the capability of all of the adventure he could possibly dream of. I titled him the Mighty Lark, and he was all of the things that I was not.

I followed the Mighty Lark with a multitude of characters, all of which I thought were just cute little creatures, but all of which actually seem to carry little bits of my persona. I carried them to graduate school, where they were dismissed and ridiculed and I tried to hide them, but they kept coming out. They kept coming back. I couldn’t hide my little illustrative troupe. They were my in crowd that I could never attend to in my real world. I carried as well my desire for found and weathered surfaces, another key element to my work that I could never begin to explain.

As I kept day dreaming about and developing these characters and these surfaces, I kept trying to come up with what I thought of as “big boy” art ideas. I wanted to create work that would appear in major galleries across the world, that would make people go oooh and aaaah in the way that Jeff Koons’ huge shiny things make all art snobs and A.D.D. kids go oooooh and aaaah. But what has occurred to me in the past year is that I didn’t want to say anything that big. I didn’t want to make the things that kept appearing in my art text books which were categorized as successful fine art.

And so this past year, I realized that I need to provide a frame into my day dream, some way to separate the viewer from my characters and illustrations. To this end I discovered the grid. It was mathematical, but avoided the rules, just as I did in high school so many years ago. It was about color and order. It was about framing. I determined that I would provide my viewer with the right side of the mushroom, so that they could shrink into my headspace. More importantly, however, I realized that my band of merry and mellow characters needed their own cosmology. I needed to separate them from this earthly realm and don them with the moniker of myth. I needed to make them a spiritual other. As I was attempting to create this more spiritual idea of my characters, it was then only logical that the images of Pacific Northwest Totems began to mean something to me.

The characters in the original totem poles and native art told myths which related the origins of that which was important to each tribe. As I began to breathe the vital air into the pictorial lungs of my illustrations I started to realize that these characters and machines were actually very vague representations and allusions to the ideas and beliefs of my own tribe. Like the artifacts of actual tribes, however, I have always wanted my work to feel old, to feel like it has its own history, and so, suddenly it occurred to me that, “hey, this found wood thing carries some history.” It carries age. It is the perfect medium for constructing totems out of. This is obvious. What were totem poles made of? I had my answers, for now at least. I have come as far as I have come.

And with that I will open the floor for questions.