One of the GATE teachers liked my owl bulletin board so much she gave me a book called October, October by Katya Balen, which prominently features an owl, although that owl is a baby barn owl and my original owl was an adult great horned owl (inspired by a juvenile great horned owl). I wanted to make her a little owl card but baby barn owls are kind of ugly so I drew an adult.
That’s this owl.
Usually, things come together for me. Occasionally they don’t. Sometimes I give up.
i spent 2 days trying to make nephling number 3 a 3-dimensional card with an electric guitar with real strings but I couldn’t find a satisfactory way to attach the strings and after the 7th time they fell out I gave up and drew a 2-dimensional electric guitar, which I am also not happy with. But camp is only 2 weeks long and if I didn’t actually mail them something they wouldn’t actually receive it.
So this is something I made that never aligned with my vision and I had to just accept it as it was and call it finished. And that was the whole “giving up on perfection” part of my artistic process that allowed me to create all the stuff in this blog. Sometimes you have to call it “done” or “good enough” even if you don’t feel like it is.
I started a big (like 2′ x 4′) painting but it will probably be some time before that’s finished. I’m working on a nonfiction book, a sort of biography about the Coyote’s life. It’s a very interesting life. I mostly know the whole story by heart because GOLLY does that guy like to talk and if he can’t think of something new to say he just returns to his greatest hits. Fortunately, it’s a very interesting life. Most of the book is about the parts I was in, but he was 55 already when I met him.
There’s this other thing I want to share here, about my relationship to art, but perhaps that’s another post.
This image pretty much expresses the state of the union, to my mind. It’s been a while since I drew a political cartoon. Almost precisely 8 years. It takes a lot out of you. And I did this the old fashioned way, no help from Photoshop.
This Saturday, April 5th, well over 1,000 protests are expected all across America. Either you know why or you’re part of the problem. I’m glad to live in a city where 75% of the people get it.
I made this sign 2-sided because we’re not going to let the bastards grind us down.
Today I learned that embroidery hoop art is a thing. A good thing.
This week is the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, aka the Festival of Booths, which involves building a small booth in your back yard and then having your friends over to eat snacks in your small booth. As with most Jewish practices, there are numerous rules about the booth. Also, this holiday involves shaking a bunch of leaves with a citron. It’s a whole thing. Today, my parents took us to a holiday party their friends were having down in Vail.
Typically, your booth—the sukkah—is decorated with various items of produce hung from the ceiling (Sukkot is a harvest festival), but my parent’s friends instead opted to decorate theirs with laminated photos of sukkah parties past and embroidery hoop art made by all the people who visit their sukkah.
Koi are not a traditional thematic element of the holiday, but my parents’ friends also have a nice 16,000 koi pond, home to some granddaddy fish, so they were pleased.
“Chag Sameach” is the all-purpose holiday greeting in Hebrew; you can use it for any happy holiday. 5780 is the current year in the Jewish calendar.
The design was executed with a combination of Sharpies and fabric markers.
I’m clearly a bit behind on blogging; I have 2 more paper designs to share this week.
My late lamented mosaic dragon, 1998.
In the late 90s, I was living in a 4th story walk-up in Chicago. Following an altercation with a previous friend/tenant, my roommates and I found ourselves without a coffee table. I came up this old door in an alley, dragged it up the stairs, and spent a couple weeks piecing this mosaic together and building a table under it. Although I did everything wrong, and the table itself wasn’t that wonderful, I was extremely proud of my work. I had this table until about 2003. In grad school, I had a close friend who was blind, and it got a little painful and tiresome to watch him walking into this coffee table every time he came over. I pushed it into the corner and tipped it on its side to accommodate him, and left it that way over the summer when I went to study abroad. In the sweltering humidity of an un-air conditioned Michigan summer, the wood swelled and shrunk with the changes in temperature, and the mosaic fell out. I tried to repair it but it proved impossible. This photo is all the remains of the excellent mosaic table.
Dragon Kite! 1991. Sort of banged up but still cool. Probably would still fly.
My high school offered a gym class (not for freshman, who had to run the mile and lift weights and do all the horrible stuff the state of Illinois required) called Unique PE. We called it Gym for the Non-Competitive Student. This is where all the hippies, Goths, and burnouts ended up. No dodgeball here. We learned to walk on stilts, ride a unicycle, and juggle. One of the units was to decorate and fly a kite. Somehow, I was the only person who actually did it, using markers and colored pencils to draw this fantastic wyvern. The kite only flew for about 10 minutes, since our gym periods weren’t that long when you factored in changing clothes, and no one else had completely the assignment, but it did fly. Then, I put it away, to keep it safe from kite-eating trees.
Postcard from the Idyllia Public Library. Yes, this imaginary library in an imaginary country houses a lovely Chilhuly chandelier. The building itself is based on the architecture of the dorm I live in all four years of college.
Exercise 7, to create a country, was among my favorite prompts in this book. A rather involved set of instruction suggested details to imagine about the place, and, as I have created many, many imaginary countries in my life, it was easy to build something huge and fanciful and fulfilling. It was possible to flex all the creative muscles in a serious fashion but to withhold judgement, giving reign to creativity.
Postcard home: I blanked out my parents’ address, because you know there are some weirdos on the Internet.
The second part of the exercise involved creating a postcard from the imaginary country, writing a message home on the back about a vacation in the imaginary country, and then adding a stamp from the imaginary country. I drew the postcard 8.5 x 11 and made that stamp proportionally larger just because it’s easier to work in that format. I used two kinds of markers: Crayolas and Sharpies. Some of the themes from this exercise echoed in later works.
Especially proud of this stamp. The economy of Idyllia is based on semi-precious stones. It is a island founded by dragons and covered with banana trees. I am the queen.
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