art making

With the dearth of video, clickbait headlines and information at its fingertips, who, if anyone, reads blogs anymore? Read: Is there really a point in me prattling on with this platform.

Answer. Probably not, but it still feels like a useful means of communication. At the end of the day, how is the process of image making understood by intermittent snapshots? Or am I seeing this unclearly? Perhaps, if I was making images which were actually doing their job then posting TikTok videos and instagram reels left and right would be the best way to communicate what I am doing.

I don’t really feel that way though. I have always enjoyed words equally as much as I have enjoyed image making. The turn of a phrase is just as beautiful as a well made image. I had hoped to use this platform as the primary means of sharing my daily drawings this year, but that hasn’t really happened as of yet. The first day that I made one of the 88 Donruss portraits I was too taken by the concept of having members in my card community guess the player.

It is a performance that I have enjoyed. At that point I wonder if the work is solely the watercolor or if it is also the game that is played with my fellow collectors when they guess the identities of the players? I always did want to be a rock star. I wanted that give and take with a crowd. At 42 the idea of being in front of people and adored is repulsive but I still enjoy the push and pull that is a crowd and a creative impetus.

It has proven to be a productive first week of the year for me. I really enjoy the portraits that are coming of it. I think maybe I will use this space as a weekly roundup sort of experiment for the time being, at least as the space pertains to my daily drawings.

I do feel very attached to the words, but the only way a daily post makes sense is if I provide a history of sorts of the player that I’ve painted and I’m not really interested in that currently. A que sera sera.

…Beautiful friend, the end. The year draws to a close and so I reflect on my successes, failures, and the circumstances therein.

At the beginning of this year I felt incredibly disconnected from my art making and artwork. I was still creating a lot of work but it was feeling like a whole lot of work. I wanted to reestablish my curiosity in the art making process and find my creative voice again.

Daily Drawings

The first thing I did was to begin a daily drawing project again. It took me some time to arrive at an actual subject matter that really felt compelling to me. I began by simply painting one of the kids toys every day, but I quickly narrowed my focus to a plastic toy soldier every day. The project was quite similar to doing a series of gesture drawings at its best and kind of a throw away painting at its worst. I enjoyed the process whether it was the former or the latter.

Now I am coming into 2023 and I am trying to think what I want to do next for a daily drawing. Part of me wants to do a painting of a junk wax baseball card every day. Another part of me wants to do something a little more natural. We’ll see what happens.

Geometric Patterns

While I spent a good portion of the year really trying to figure out what to make the one thing that remained with me the whole year were these small watercolor and ink drawings/paintings. While I begin with a relatively small vocabulary or partitioning, I became more and more interested in the various ways that a pattern could change or shapes could interact within the same picture plane.

While I spent plenty of time trying to create small watercolors in this manner I later abandoned the idea of finished pieces for a library of different patterns in a small sketchbook that I had used. The sketchbook needed new life. I had started a project which really hurt in the beginning of it. so the only thing to do was to apply a new metric to the book.

I began to think more deeply about how something might be the same size or scale but feel different, occupy a different space entirely. I worked with many iterations, though I still plan to create a whole lot more. I even began to think about traditional tessellations like those that you would see in a Moroccan courtyard or MC Escher’s work.

At some point I will share more of these. I have a ton of pages like this.

Freedom

Ultimately, I am an artist who is still trying to find what I am doing in world which includes single parenting, working multiple jobs, and feeling incredibly cut off from a vast majority of what I had previously done.

I find myself thinking about that Bukowski quote: “When nobody wakes you up in the morning and when nobody waits for you at night and when you can do whatever you want. What do you call it, freedom or loneliness?”

It is neither on its own. Much like in the Buddhist tradition you can feel good sad or sad happy, I feel that freedom and loneliness do not operate independently of one another. I am sometimes lonely. I am sometimes sad. I sometimes feel empowered and full of joy. But that is all just being a human. I don’t know anymore that any of this, no matter what you can do, whether it be Barry Bonds hitting one million baseballs into McCovey cove or Katie Ledecky swimming a half mile faster than you can walk it or Leonardo DaVinci drawing a perfect circle makes any of them more special than anyone else.

I think we all just are.

So goodbye, 2022. Hello, 2023. I await you in the unceremonious manner that a sober single father of two would.