Some Fire, Many Irons

I tend to work on a lot of paintings at once. Watercolor dries quickly and doesn't take up much space which means I only have to have one or two stacks of warped paper sitting around my house instead of a whole room full of canvases. Some of the multiple-painting approach is necessary - get too eager and the new paint bleeds into what's already been applied. When you want this effect, it can be beautiful and is one of my favorite ways to transition colors. But I get excited and want to rush to see a finished painting and end up making a mess. Jumping to a new piece while the other dries is one of the ways I force myself to wait to prevent messes.

The other reason I work on a few things at once is because I have to be in a certain mood for each painting. Some will sit half-finished for weeks until I'm in that mood again, while others will be a one-day affair from start to finish. The deformed dog (with uncolored burrito) was something I started weeks ago and loved the colors but couldn't get back into the same groove until last night. Sometimes I'll test the same colors or techniques on another piece or on scratch paper to see if the time is right and if I don't feel it I have learned not to force it.

The second image here is a portion of what I think is the finished groundwork for a painting of a fairy godmother surrounded by rats. I actually wanted to do this one on a larger piece of paper with a lot more rats, but I wanted to at least get the idea out to see if it worked and also got tired of drawing rats after about five or six. The sky in this one was really important to me and I will probably go over it even more before filling it with stars and giving a little more focus to the silver moon (which you can't see in the blurry picture here).

And while it wasn't intended, I realized as I was working on it that I was really feeling (yet another) Sunset Rubdown song. So what the heck, I'll post the lyrics here:

Silver Moons
by Sunset Rubdown




confetti floats away like dead leaves in the wagon's wake
there were parties here in my honor til you sent me away
and now silver moons belong to you
i'm passing the baton from the old mare to the fawn
it was out of line but it was fun, didn't you love the part right before the dawn?
and now silver moons belong to you
i'm off to the ballet and to practice all these ancient ways
tell the new kids where i hid the wine, tell their fathers that i'm on my way, and say:

maybe these days are over, over now
maybe these days are over, over now
and i loved it better than anyone else you know
and i believe in growing old with grace
i believe she only loved my face
i believe i acted like a child
making faces at acquired tastes
and now silver moons belong to you

and silver moons belong to you
i'm off to the ballet and to practice all these ancient ways
tell the new kids where i hid the wine, tell their fathers that i'm on my way, and say:

maybe these days are over, over now
i think maybe these days are over, over now
i believe in growing old with grace
i believe she only loved my face
and i think maybe these days are over, over now

gone are the days bonfires make me think of you
looks like the prophecy came true
you are a fallen tree, he is a fallen tree
how old are you, no, how old are you?

under all the folds of your dresses that you wear
there's an ocean and a tide and a riot in the square
over are the days that the congas made your hair
sway around to the cadence of your hey ho hey ho cheer

under all the folds of the dresses that you wear
sway around to the cadence of your voice when you sang there

Bids For The Kids

I'm not fancy enough to attend (read as: I hate getting dressed up), but the piece conceived by my son and painted by me is now listed in the catalog for the upcoming Puesta del Sol auction. For some bizarre reason my painting is listed in the online catalog with the image of a totally different painting. Maybe this is a clever strategy to trick people into actually buying my art. I suppose I could create an account on the auction site to view the complete listing, but I'm much too lazy for that.

At least the listing for the classroom project I helped with has the correct picture:

http://puestadelsol.maestroweb.com/

Sol y Luna, A Black and White Affair
Dinner and Auction
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Bellevue Hyatt Hotel
Doors Open at 5: 30 PM

I think anyone can go to this thing, so you should. Just say you're me.

Under The Sea

If I could be any kind of human raised in an alien environment, I would be the Martian kind like Valentine Michael Smith in Robert Heinlen’s “Stranger In A Strange Land”. Not so much for the grokking or the founding of a religious cult (although both sound fun), but for the ability to sit at the bottom of the pool for hours. As it stands, I max out somewhere between a minute and two minutes. The doodles here are only loosely affiliated because they live in the water in my mind, but I do have a very personal painting-in-waiting along the lines of “Bear”. When the time comes for me to actually make it, I want to be able to depict the comforting, invisible cocoon I envision around me under the water.

Sometimes I can convince myself that if I were to open my mouth and breathe in I would simply continue on with my meditation, cycling the air trapped in my fur like an otter. Other times I imagine breathing liquid oxygen like in Jim Munro’s Angry Young Spaceman (http://www.amazon.com/Angry-Young-Spaceman-Jim-Munroe/dp/1568582080). I like moody coming-of-age sci-fi with an underwater theme. I haven’t been painting recently for a few reasons, but as of right now I’m full of motivation and ambition and provided I can carry that through to the end of the day should have a very productive night and will post the results. Fairy godmother of rats, here I come!

You Are My Sunshine

I finished/scanned/uploaded a few things in the last couple of days. I'll update the galleries at http://www.spiralsinlove.com/ soon, but at least for now you can view the finished pieces at imagekind using the links below.

Rubber: A Painted Review

If I said too much here, it would kind of defeat the purpose of getting my feelings out in the painting...

A Friend In Need

A drawing in white ink on dark paper. I haven't decided if it gets a companion or not.

Ice Cream, I Scream

This zombie...has ICE CREAM. I'm heading out to watch a movie about a homicidal car tire, but maybe I'll have the energy to finish it when I get back.

The Safety Dance

I got some new paper that I wanted to try out, so I went with something pretty safe for me - a portrait of a single zombie. This paper is a little smoother than I'm used to so I'm still trying to figure out the best way to apply the paint. For the record, I like paper that is really rough and textured because it makes the paint unpredictable and I like to try to eke beauty from chaos.

I Got Stripes

I don't actually have anything against unicorns, but when it comes to doodling I do like to see these symbols of purity put into lousy situations. It's trite, so I don't do it that often. This one came up mostly because I wanted to practice painting stripes.

Cold-Blooded Old Times

I'm probably getting the story wrong, but my mom recently showed my current art to someone I went to high school with (I don't talk to anyone I went to high school with so I guess she's my liaison) and they responded with surprise..."That's what he's doing now? He needs to go back to what he was doing in high school. THAT was what he was good at."

That story got me digging through my piles of art to look at what I was supposedly so good at when I was 15. I was lucky enough to have an art teacher who let me do what I wanted and gave me access to a full range of art supplies. I wasn't that angry, but all my friends were so I spent a lot of time trying to come up with something edgy or with a hint of violence, like the red smears on the otherwise pretty basic study above.


But when it came down to it, I wanted to have a certain amount of humor in what I did. Sometimes it was a dodge to distract from anything personal I might have put into my art, but usually it was just to make myself laugh. (A note on the painting above - I didn't actually finish it, my girlfriend at the time did. I learned that I don't have the attention span for oil painting.)

So I signed my name as an "A" for anarchy and made silkscreen vampires, but while my friends were carving ankhs into their skin I was making sure that the vampires were having the best time an undead parasite could.

Honestly, bright colors aside, I see vampires like the one above as much bleaker than any that I might have drawn in high school. I think the biggest thing for me right now is that I've been working in a consistent style for almost a year, which is by far the longest I've stuck with anything art-wise. Maybe I'll paint something violent soon, for old times sake.

I Make Sunshine

Sometimes you have to make your own sunshine. Sometimes it's a full-time job.

My son goes to a school with a sun-referencing name and they're having an auction soon (remember these?). He asked me if I could donate a painting of my own; I was game as long as he helped me with the idea. He described a race of alien creatures that looked like squat birds and in place of heads they each had a tiny sun.

A few years ago I drew the doodle above and wrote a corresponding poem based on Jonathan Richman's "I Eat With Gusto, Damn! You Bet". I'm taken with the idea of making your own light when the world gets dark, so I was especially happy to start in on the sun-headed aliens.

Because, uh, I make sunshine, damn! You bet

That sunshine comes for free!
You like the shade?
Then hang out there
But the sunshine? That's for me!

Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space

The original text on the image above was "Celebrate life, with ketchup!", but I thought that was too obscure even for me. I've been sick (again) and on spring break so I haven't been painting much. That's my excuse, but the real reason is that after any event where I show my art (in this case the Happy Delusions show opening) I get discouraged that people didn't fawn all over my art and hand me bundles of cash.

I'm not in this art thing for the money. If I was, I would have stopped a long time ago. I have to draw, paint, write...get it all out whether I'm getting paid for it or not. But since I'm making it anyway I'm treating it like a business and no one wants to see their business fail. Unless they're committing some kind of insurance fraud or other scam. I'm not doing that either, no matter how fun it sounds.



So I'm getting back into my painting routine tonight. In the meantime, I scanned and uploaded a couple more finished paintings. I loved my sketch for the Moonface painting but I'm not thrilled with the end result. Head Like A Heart, on the other hand, is one of my favorites in a long time. The original is not available for sale because my daughter claimed it as HERS.

Lost In The Trees

This started as a goofy doodle of a dog with a grotesquely deformed (that's my favorite kind of deformed) foot while I was on the phone with my dad who is currently having foot issues. The dog also has a massive burrito, which wasn't related to anything in the conversation and if pressed I would have to admit that I prefer tacos to burritos even though sometimes the shell cuts the roof of my mouth. I'll write more about my recurring giant foods in another post at some point, once I figure it out a little more.

So I have my sad dog and nasty foot and gargantuan burrito and start tossing trees in the background. Not realistic trees (since I can look out my window and see those), but the trees that live in my mind. I'm pretty sure the Jonathan form of "tree" has been this way since I was a kid, and I am a weak writer for not being able to explain its origins. But it's a tree that looks like a puffball mushroom crossed with a sci-fi building from 1960s futurist art.

I'm going to see this crippled dog through to completion, but at the end of the day I have forsaken him in my heart for the forest behind him. I've been hooked on figures since I started this Spirals In Love thing (www.spiralsinlove.com, buy buy buy), but at some point I now want to fill up the biggest piece of watercolor paper I have with nothing but trees. It can be our little forest, and we don't need any dogs or burritos.

The Haiku Is Free, But You Have To Pay For The Art

Wouldn’t it be nice

Your room could be much better

If you bought my art

Head Like A Heart

My daughter had been eyeballing my pearlescent watercolor paints for a few days, so we sat down together to paint. Teaching her to paint "my way" was an amazing experience. She is almost a blank slate and totally receptive to doing things a new way. Teaching someone also forced me to verbalize a lot of things that are instinctual to me - squeeze off extra water here, dab with a paper towel there... Just like her brother a few days ago, she asked me to paint my version as well. So I got the added joy of interpreting her lines through my hands. Having kids is pretty much the best thing ever.

If You're Not Here...

Then where are you? Time for you to come to Happy Delusions!