I sat next to my daughter painting for a bit today and I was reminded to add some blues and greens, to work the whole piece, and I o just have fun.
She’s pretty good; very intense and unafraid to try different things. I hope no one ever changes that in her. At any rate, with her influence I was able to finish this Nolan Ryan piece today. I am very pleased with it.
Then later this evening I was able to work a very tiny painting in my sketchbook with a big brush. Long live the joy of six year old girls seeping in.
Well, today’s post probably has more to do with remembering baseball history than it does remembering the card. But I owed the universe a little more energy on the daily today after yesterdays failed voyage.
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.
This morning after my swim and my breakfast I cleaned up the table a bit before I launched into my daily drawing. It never really feels like I’ve accomplished anything when I clean. There is always more that I have to do that I have just not gotten to yet, but it is easier to approach my sketchbook when the table is relatively cleaned off and there is space for me to work.
Then I popped on Core which I hadn’t listened to in a while. I had forgotten that I had picked up the first three Stone Temple Pilots albums on cassette but I felt really happy that I had this morning.
It has been a morning of shifting perspectives. Not dramatic shifts, more like an imperceptible plate tectonic sort of move, but a personal weight has been lifted the last couple days that I just could not find a way around previously. Happily that is on its way out.
The Bazooka man feels, in a way, apropos on a day of shifting perspective. He has the biggest gun. Most children will select him first. The word “bazooka” is just so cool to begin with. But what is it to be the man with the biggest gun? What does that feel like? Is it loads of responsibility? Is it the inevitability of being seen?
Currently, I’m reading The Midnight Library, and the main character, Nora Seed, while ruminating on the regret of her abandoned swimming programs and failed relationship with her dad, talks about the pressure of being seen. While it’s true that we all spend the majority of our lives walking around without anyone paying the least bit of attention to us, there is that fear that some of us carry that we will be seen. We feel vulnerable to people’s opinions, shifty looks, and harmful words. Perhaps we even carry those harmful words longer than one should. We develop a chip on our shoulder, people say. We’re too arrogant or stuck up and we don’t want to interact with others. But really, we may just be guarding ourselves, setting boundaries hard so that we are not hurt again by the harmful words of the many.
I wonder if it is ever like that for the bazooka man.
