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The people of Portland, ME haven’t seen much of me lately.  I have been holed up in my house for the most part over the past week.  I am working six days a week between teaching and a deli position.  The rest of my week can easily become preoccupied with reading, painting, and writing, all of which seem to have eclipsed my traditional social life over the past several weeks.  I am, frankly, becoming tired of being on show at all times and just want to get some work done.  I have started searching for more open calls, some residencies, some new illustration work.  I like my teaching, and I enjoy my art work, but the restaurant and deli work has to go unless it is at a super class joint where I can really work up a good looking plate.  Plastic disposable containers just aren’t my bag.

There are a couple things on the horizon.  First I am proposing a two person show with my good friend, Julia, for which I have been trying to put together some new work.  The intent of these pieces is to paint/draw machinery which implies motion and sound.  I am not sure how successful they all are yet, but it is an entertaining and challenging goal which allows me some room to discover new and untapped creative resources.

The piece to the left stayed as is.  I really like it.  I will be painting up the background a bit to give it a color to pop off of but it is for the most part very much done.  The piece to the right was not sitting right with me last night, nor was it really feeling very good this morning and so it has seen several incarnations since this image, the last one in the image below to the left.

I can’t really say that I kept much of the original.  The piece to the right is still in the drawing phase and I think will include more arrows like that first piece to the top left.  It is good to work with this old machinery again.  I enjoy the movement that becomes implied by the connections between parts.  I really hope that as I develop the series I can make marks that indicate movement.  For now, I guess the pieces are what they are.  Hopefully Julia and I get our show, though.

In other news, I have been invited to create four pieces for Artstream Gallery’s 10th Anniversary show.  That is super cool and I am very much looking forward to being involved.  Last but not least, the Yancey Family Sugar Bush has asked me to redesign the labels for their maple syrup products.  I am really excited to work on that project as it is both interesting and nabs me some syrup.  Double bonus.

I hope you are all doing well.  Catch you on the flip.
Peace
Mike

Or maybe it is too early.  I’ve been on a weird hiatus from making work.  I’ve been thinking a ton, working on some illustration projects, taking some drives, hanging out with some friends.  The idea that everything that I have ever needed to be more successful was really in my depiction of my present state had never really occurred to me, but as I was sitting with my friend Ben tonight, I realized that that was where my only downfall had ever been really evident.  Persistence and work will pay off, but the attitude in which you communicate that work to other people, the attitude with which you approach the inevitable pitfalls and tribulations will be read into.  They will strike a greater chord than some of your positivity, because unfortunately everybody knows negativity and has a quiet, defined box in which to store it.  Negativity is easily dealt with, even if dealing with it is merely to ignore it.  Positivity is a difference in perception, sure, but also a difference in understanding and communication.  More to come later….

For now, here are a couple projects that I have been working on while I have been mistakenly telling people that I am not working that hard.  I have been working.  Hard.

 These second two images are idea sketches for a text solution to a new market in Portsmouth, NH.  I am honored and excited to be working on these.  I hope you like them.  The “A”, I think is slated to become a tent and the bricks in the other two letters are to become more like that in the “A.”

My head is whirling, but I am too tired now to do anything about it.  Here’s hoping to wake up a little sleep deprived tomorrow.  It seems sure to happen, really.  Thanks for reading.  I really appreciate it.
Peace
-Mike

I am terrified.  Change can be a huge blessing or an absolute anxiety bomb, and this time it has ended up being a gigantic anxiety bomb.  It’s a ridiculous situation to find myself in.  Good things are on the horizon, but I don’t understand them, don’t know what to do and don’t know how to proceed without feeling a little bit lost for a bit.  I’m going to be a teacher in a little less than a week.  I am going to be looking at a class full of students telling them how to illustrate.  I’ll be relaying the finer points of illustration, the ideas which I most want them to glean from my speech.  I can’t even spell without a word processor underlining my mistakes in a curly red line.  Oh my.  I feel overwhelmed, but, I know, that at the same time, it will be totally okay.  I’ll do fine.  I won’t know what I am doing, but I will fumble my way through it as well as I can, and most importantly, I will get better.  It is a new era.

With that in mind, I have been spending the first week of this year hiding from the very things that make me happy.  Over the weekend I finally put together the first Thursday Night Throwdown Poster of the year, and between yesterday and today I put together the first major piece in the commission that I am putting together for a clean energy man that frequents my coffee shop.  I have been a ball of stress but am finally starting to ease into the gotta do it mindset.  Procrastination with me is a science.  I need to worry about something for ages before I start it.  Thank the lord drawing feels so right and can make all of these ills slowly pass.  Drawing is my golden ticket. 

Here is the poster that I put together for the TNT this month, courtesy of an awesome dream by one of the employees at Bard.

 Here is the first piece that I have put together in a while for the commission as well.  I have been struggling with the ideas surrounding the connection of the pieces.  This method finally made sense, although I will most likely need to modify some of the measurements, etc.  It is still a step in the right direction.

That is all for now.  There is more stuff on the horizon, but I really need to get some lesson plans written up before I can spend much time working on them and ruminating on what they mean.  At least there is more to come soon.

Peace
-Mike

Today I cleaned and organized my space here in studio and in my house.  Sometimes it is the number one thing that I need to do in order to keep working.  I unfortunately am not very good at cleaning up every day as I often try to keep working until the very last minute that I can get away with and still get enough sleep to not be a zombie the next day at the day job.  Anyway, I cleaned today and it feels really nice.  As a result I worked on several different pieces in different zones of the studio depending upon the type of work and I get to type the blog up in the corner that I have intended to be the reading corner forever, but have never organized or cleaned enough to actually make it so.  Let me just say that I am excited to read a Wild West magazine that my Dad sent me after I finish typing all of my thoughts out here!

I’ve been pretty steadily working on the large scale cross hatched piece the past two weeks or so.  The friend who commissioned the piece granted me some reprieve in our deadline, but I would still like to get the piece done sooner than later.  Tonight was a little bit of a test.  I felt done with the piece after about four hours of work.  It is easy to get into but also very easy to get tired of.  We’re talking the same motion for several hours at a time.  Tonight I forced myself to keep going, however.  There is a high that you get when you finish something that you didn’t want to finish earlier.  So today I filled a large area of the piece that I didn’t think that I could.  I am stoked, and the piece is starting to look pretty great and just as round as I was originally hoping for too.

 These first three images represent how the piece appeared on Tuesday.  Since then I have worked on the panel in the last image and the panel in the first image.  I flipped the panel on orange over so I could work on those space at the bottom more freely.  It is really starting to tighten up.  The line on the original drawing was really not straight.  So I added a little hiccup in the pipe which I am a huge fan of.

Jasper has not granted me any space all weekend.  In fact he is editing some of the text that I am writing this very minute.  At least he’s cute. 

Here’s how the panel in the first image is turning out.  I finished way more of this than I thought I would tonight.  I am so pleased.  Well, I need to be running so I can relax a bit before I hit the hay.  Also the angle that I am trying to type at is in direct opposition to how this cat is sitting.  My hand is falling asleep.

Have a good holiday.
Peace
-Mike

It’s Friday morning and I am still feeling a bit off schedule and tired.  This is most definitely because I traveled to Massachusetts on Tuesday night to participate in a live painting event with fellow artist Monkey Chow at the Treat Yo Self – Holiday Edition hosted by The Great Scott.  It was a pleasant trip.  I rode the bus to and from Boston.  On the trip down I laid out the drawings for two pieces to complete at the event.  Drawing on the bus in the dark proves to still be one of the more peaceful activities that I have experienced.

Painting in public is a strange experience.  I was grateful to be painting with Aaron (Monkey Chow) as well as being able to spend the majority of one of my greatest arts inspirations, my friend Billy Griffin.  Billy ambled about talking about art, San Francisco and his new foray into being a New Englander again, all while delivering adult beverages and grabbing me water for my paints.  It was truly excellent to see him.  However, people watching you paint is a strange case.  At first I found my motions to be a little tentative.  Then I found myself saying, “This is what you do, so lets just do it.”  The interesting thing about that was that I started to feel almost arrogant in my motions.  As the night wore on, I realized that it was just another space to paint in though.  I became pretty involved in my two paintings and just worked. 

My interactions with people were varied.  When young people like my work and get excited, talking about drawing and loving art, I inevitably give them something.  I can’t help it.  I love that raw excitement about what folks think is cool.  It’s better than selling a million pieces.  Having enough money to live is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but someone showing you how genuinely excited they are with your work gives it validity small green pieces of paper, which ignore their own lack of financial backing, can never provide.

Here are a couple images from the night.  Please pardon the photo quality from my flip phone.

 I really liked these two pieces.  It was a good experience to feel how involved I could be with something while surrounded by a distracting situation.  You will notice in the last picture my friend Aaron painting.  His work came out awesome.  As was fitting, people really loved his stuff.

Wednesday morning Aaron dropped me at 1369 Coffee House on Mass Ave, where I sat and pondered the hipster crowd I had just observed, what to give my little sister for Christmas, and made plans to meet with my friend Eric at the ICA in Boston.  After jumping off the T, I exited the street right next to this mural that Os Gemeos put up.  The joy that I felt upon seeing this piece made me as positive as ever that art is what I live.  I guess the ICA was cool too.  I’m only kidding.  I think I will follow up with some thoughts on what I saw at the museum in another Holiday weekend post.

Enjoy your weekend folks.  Sometimes the enjoyment of our holidays is all about the capacity to remain in a quality mood in the preparation stages.  Should y’all be in Portland and need a last minute something, give me a buzz.  I’ve got a pretty good inventory still even after the holiday sales.

Until next time.
Peace
-Mike

Sometimes I have trouble with large projects.  I lose interest.  They take a long time.  I think of new ideas and I want to work on something else.  I find myself in studio wrestling with my own consciousness.  I must keep working on x-y-z project.  I must keep going with what I am going on.  This piece was a change in that I felt compelled to work on it from the get go, but then the fellow who commissioned it from me told me to take my time, and then it got put on the back burner and as such, it has taken me until the fellow has now asked me if he will get it soon for me to get back into it.  Now I’m into it again and it feels pretty good.  The mark making still doesn’t translate well from small bic pen cross hatched pieces to larger pieces done with a brush.  Also the brushes do not stand up well to being drawn with for more than 3 or 4 days.  The point does not hold up.  I may need to purchase more expensive cross hatching brushes or approach this type of piece from a completely different angle in the future.  We shall see.

Here is what I have so far.  I intend to finish it by the middle of next week.  Sorry for the late night picture phone quality photo.  Better photos to come.

In all reality I should be able to finish this panel tomorrow and hopefully the final panel between Saturday night and Sunday.  Then next Tuesday I will be in Boston for Treat Yo Self, live painting.  I have no idea how that will go, but it’s exciting either way.

Portland I love you   (but you’re bringing me down.)
Peace
-Mike

Tonight is the MeCA Holiday Sale.  I’ve been making work that I claim is for the Holiday Sale for the past month and a half or so.  I never feel as if I have enough stuff, but as I was filled with anxiety trying to figure out if I was ready last night, I laid out all of my work and counted again.  I have nearly 70 pieces for sale as well as a number of prints.  It’s been a productive month or so.

This will be the first time that I am offering a number of quality prints along with originals.  I am interested to see how this affects my sales.  Will I sell a reduced number of originals and more prints?  Will the prints sell at all?  I have no idea.

Amongst the prints are several pieces from old shows that I have really enjoyed. 

This was always one of my favorites.  I have 8 by 10 inch prints available.  The colors came out spot on, which has always been my worry in the past.  I am also including a print of The Feeder:

This was probably the most intricate piece from that era of my making.   The piece has been sold so it seemed only logical to give the work a new life.  This is one of the major reasons that I am excited about doing some prints.

I will not be charging much for them.  You can get them for 8 to 15 dollars depending on the image.  If they do not sell, I will make them available on my Etsy page as well.  Wish me luck.  It’s been a lot of work getting to this point.

Peace
-Mike

When I was in undergraduate school studying illustration, I used to tell my friend Mandy that if you’re feeling down you should draw a monkey.  I haven’t drawn monkeys in years.  I don’t know why, but at the same time, I use the cartoon characters that I do draw to achieve the same thing.  Sometimes I just lose gas, work too long, or get too moody to produce and then I need to choose whether to make something cute or to go read a book.  Tonight I tried to make something cute.

What do you think?

I had these two guys in mind as they were the creatures that I used in the Bard Coffee window illustration that I made this week.  I really like them, although the bear in the window looks fatter, and I think is thereby a little cuter.  Maybe I’ll try to make a different one and see if the size of his mid-section is directly proportional to his cuteness. 

Until then.
Peace
-Mike

My schedule has changed at the day job.  It has become the morning job.  I start work Monday through Thursday at 7:30 in the morning.  I realize that this is actually a normal time to be starting work, but after years of working late into the other end of the morning, or going out to play a bit after working late, it has been a difficult transition.  This has been particularly frustrating with the upcoming Holiday Sale at MeCA which I was counting on to pull in some serious dough.  As is usually the case however, I spent a couple days stressing out about the amount of stuff I had and then actually counted said stuff, finding that I had plenty of work to show.

The drops series has been very good to me.  I am really starting to piece together some paintings.  I wouldn’t call these pop surrealist or low brow or any other movement I’ve attempted to fit into.  I feel like they are exactly what I am; melancholy and a bit child like.

I’ve also been toying with some phrases and making word related pieces.  I haven’t finished very many but I have a couple pretty good ideas.  Unfortunately these depend a bit more on my poetic abilities which are, well, lacking in comparison to some very good friends of mine.  I am very proud of this piece however.

Lastly, I figured out what some of my obsession with structure was within my MFA studio work.  I started a new piece and was able to start putting away my thesis.  I actually didn’t make the connection between cleaning up studio and putting it away and figuring out one of the keys to its inception until just now, but it makes sense suddenly.  It is done now.

Here is the new piece dealing with some of the same issues.  I’ll explain some other day when I have more time.

It has a ways to go, but that’s the joy of doing what I do.  Life is getting really busy again.  Keep up.  Keep your head up.  Stay true.  These are the things we all have to do.  Much love to you all.

Peace
-Mike

For the most part this was a very productive week.  I have two days in Portland and then it is off to New York state to see my folks.  I’ll be traveling with my art school buddy, Ed.  It will be nice to take a break, though I wish that I could have gotten more done with this series of work before I left.  I suppose I’ll have a little time in the next two days though.  We’ll see.  I am not usually too productive on the days that I work in the deli.

This week was notable especially for noticing the similarities between commonly used subject matter.  I always think of my work in terms of different series, but of late I have been cross-pollinating these different subject matters in order to  arrive at a different set of imagery.  It’s been good not only in developing new compositions but also in realizing all of these subjects are really driving at.  It was a very good week all around.

Here is some of the yield.

I think that my body of work is really starting to make a jump in quality.  There is something about reacting to prior actions and size and spacial restraints that really gets you thinking like an artist.  I am very pleased with the results.  As my friend Ed said today, “You’ve really been working.”  I had wanted to get 200 pieces done in October and November.  Admittedly that is a ridiculous clip which is preposterous to keep up with, but I can say that I have finished over 40 pieces thus far, which isn’t so bad.

Hope all is well with you.  I’ll be back soon.
Peace
-Mike