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.
Both of these paintings are experiments. This one was me wanting to play with a more uniform color palette and rounded shapes. I didn't intend to from the start, but as I worked on it I realized I was subconsciously trying to get a little of Robert Crumb's wildly curved landscapes and slightly too-floppy figures in the mix. I've always liked the results of the more creative artists who illustrated the reading primers I had as a kid where the cheapness of the publisher limited the artist to work within one or two colors.
This other painting has been sitting around for a while. I wasn't even going to finish it and then I thought it would be a good chance to play with really heavy lines. In the end I don't know that consistently heavy lines are something I'll revisit for a while, but working on this did remind me that it can be fun to vary the weight of the lines since I'm using a nib pen anyway.
