Last post here

For about a year, I've been running this blog and another at Wordpress ("My Own Damned Business"). Turns out that Wordpress is more to my liking, so I'm going to just blog there from now on. Many thanks to all who have checked out the blog here.

The Four Seasons: Fall

Here is number three in the "Four Seasons" series -- "Fall:"

Bornin' and Dyin'

So I'm on my way home from my evening visit with my mother, who just turned 94. For a person that age, she could be doing a lot worse. I'm driving along, and I think, Yeah, she's doing OK, but the fact is, she's dying. A few months, maybe a year -- two at the outside -- and she'll be gone. And then I think, You could say that about a lot of people at that old folks' home she lives at. There are a lot of folks there who are dying. There's probably quite a few people in this town who are dying. All over the world, when you get right down to it, there are a lot of people who are dying.

And then I think: Yes, but, at the same time, all over the world, right now, there are a lot of people being born. There are new lives, beginning.

That's how it is, all the time. All the time, all over the world, there are people dying. And at the same time, there are people being born. That's what is going on. Old lives ending, and new lives beginning. All the time.

I don't know how all that looks to anyone else. Under more normal circumstances, I would probably see it as obvious, maybe even -- sad to say -- as trivial. But right now, I look at it, and I see something wonderful, and awesome, and maybe a little terrifying. I came home, and I told my wife what I had been thinking, and I swear, while I was talking, my hair stood on end, and I almost choked up.

And I think that's all I know how to say about it, right now.

The Four Seasons: Spring

Well, the same thing happened with this one -- I couldn't leave it alone. I'm looking at some late nights, now, getting caught up with other things:



Both this and the previous piece are Staedtler Marsmatic technical pens, Rapidograph ink, and watercolors, on Arches 140 lb watercolor paper.

The Four Seasons: Summer

This is the first piece I've worked on, for a long time, which I found it almost impossible to leave alone. Freelance deadlines, responsibilities, commitments, promises -- all had to fight to pull me away from working on this:



This will likely be the first of four similar pieces -- the four seasons. Spring is next.

Gulliver in Brobdingnag II

For an iPhone/iPad app, Gulliver in Brobdingnag -- the final version of the illustration I uploaded Monday (damn -- how the days whiz by!):

Gulliver in Brobdingnag

Well -- I hope that you all had a truly marvelous Christmas, and are enjoying a Happy New Year.

Yes, it's been a while since my last posting. Deadlines, you know. If you are familiar with the Greek myth of Sisyphus, then you will know what I mean when I say that meeting free-lance deadlines is a Sisyphean endeavor. You roll the stone up the hill, it rolls back down, you roll it up again.

Anyhow, this is part of a work in progress, for another iPhone/iPad app. Gulliver again, this time in Brobdingnag. (Wasn't Swift great at inventing names?). This time, Gulliver is the little guy:

UAL DC-3

And now, once again, for something completely different:



This is a projected illustration for another iPhone/iPad app, this one a bio for kids about a the first woman airline pilot. Medium: watercolor -- actually one watercolor for the plane, another for the clouds, Photoshopped together.

The Artist As A Serious Young Man

Using Photoshop, and some of what I've learned about contrast in the years since I did this self-portrait.



The original is actually charcoal, not pencil. Done almost thirty years ago.

Was digging through some old stuff, looking for something else, and I found this self-portrait, done many, many, many, many, manymanymanymany moons ago.



Gahwd Dayum, I was serious back then. I especially like how, with the grim humorless methodical meticulousness characteristic of everything I did back then, I placed the right side shirt collar outside the sports coat I was working in, and the left side shirt collar inside.

The Wages Of Signing Up To Do A Freelance Job

Take on a free-lance job, and you take your chances. The work is usually at least twice as involved as you expected, and the client's grasp of how much work illustration requires is usually worth a chuckle. But -- you're running your own show, and people are paying you to hone your skills at something you love doing anyway.

So, that's all fine. The long hours which earn a small fraction of minimum wage -- no biggie. No, the real pisser is when you produce an illustration that you actually quite like, and, well, no, that's not what they want. My current project is the Adventures of Theseus, and this is Medea, enraged, fleeing Athens:

No, it's not perfect. Work done under deadline rarely is. And the client wants the dragons done differently. But I like those dragons, and the way the sequence of their heads strengthens the sense of movement. Alas, it will never be seen, except here, and my website, and the other blog, and Flikr, maybe. Hmmm . . . . Sometimes you gotta love the Internet.

And sometimes you have to love Thanksgiving, too. The older I get, the more often I hear myself giving voice to hoary old cliches, like, "the older I get, the more important family becomes." Thanksgiving is the premium reminder of that truth.

Beauty

So I'm on my way this morning to see my Mom. She's 93, and doesn't do the best job in the world of feeding herself. I cook breakfast for her every morning -- pancakes, sausage, omelettes, French toast, those kinds of things -- so I know she gets at least one decent meal every day. I'm bicycling, because I need the exercise and because it's a lovely late fall morning. The pavements, houses, trees, are all wet, because it rained last night, but there's lots of blue sky. Here and there. Between the clouds. Pedalling along, I look ahead, which is West, and I see a magnificent rainbow beyond the edge of town. Besides being beautiful, this is a hint to what is about to happen, because, you see, it takes rain to make a rainbow. That doesn't occur to me, as I pedal on. It occurs to me when the rain shower, which had made the rainbow, comes on into town to meet me. The shower starts suddenly, and gets heavy fast. All at once I'm wearing wet jeans, and a wet hoodie. I take shelter under a tree for a minute or so, and am reminded, standing there, that trees in the fall do not make good umbrellas. From under the tree, I look back the way I came, and I see the rain falling, all lit up by the morning sun behind me. It looks like countless tiny pieces of sunlight falling from the clouds. The rain eases off, and I get back on the bike and pedal off, standing on the pedals, moving fast. The breeze is cool in my face, there are a few raindrops still falling, and the freshly washed fall townscape is all lit up by the sun.

When I get to Mom's, I tell her about the shower that caught me on the way. I have a little trouble explaining to her why I'm glad I didn't drive.

So This Is Kind Of Different

Wednesday nights, I teach a painting class, one of those zero-credit community-education classes, at the local community college. This last time, I did the first part of a two-part demo on painting faces (not the same, interestingly enough, as face-painting).

I had to work fast, because I want my students to have as much time as possible for their own work. So this is the work of maybe a half-hour to forty-five minutes:



It's from a black-and-white photograph which I found on-line, and can't post here for © reasons.

For most of this demo, the original photograph was upside-down. See Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain for more about this trick.

Adventures of Wallace and Thaddeus

My usual exquisitely-prepared morsels of ad-hoc verbiage, apropos of these drawings, will be served up in due course. For now, just the images:

Mr. Podmore Tackles Proust

Last night was a dark and stormy night, followed in due course by a dark and stormy day, in the Wet. Drizzly. Willamette Valley. of. Oregon.

Meanwhile, the Sketchbook, which had been lonely all through the months of September, and most of October, finally received a few brief visits from the Artist. He drew the Sketchbook a story of a man he knew a long time ago, very similar to his own self, who made a habit of reading, or trying to read, preposterously long works of fiction, especially in times of dark, stormy, Oregon weather:



I am actually almost halfway through the six volumes of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, perhaps better known as Remembrance of Things Past. It's very... um... let me see... ah... French!... yah, that's it... utterly, ineluctably, relentlessly French.

The Happy Gardener

It's a lovely autumn, here in Oregon. The leaves are turning colors gloriously, on most of the trees. A couple of months ago -- shortly after my last post here -- I exchanged the existential angst of being between freelance jobs, for the much more visceral angst of finding that a freelance job I had taken on was going to be much more work than I had anticipated. We won't talk about the money. I finally got to the project to a point where I could get out of the house, yesterday morning, and take an actual walk, and look at the trees changing color, and smell the crisp fall air, rich with woodsmoke and other scents I couldn't identify. It's astounding, the way little things like that can sooth your soul, when you've been doing without them for a month or two.

I might have a little time for myself to draw, now, and I have some ideas simmering on the back burners of the cast-iron wood stove of my mind, but nothing to show yet. Here's the last drawing I was able to do in my sketchbook, before the walls of the last project closed in around me:



And here's one of the illustrations I did for this last project:

It's actually for an iPhone/iPad app, a rendition of Gulliver in Lilliput, for kids with reading disabilitie, to be published by Brain Integration, LLC. Here, Gulliver is using some handmade stools to step from the outer court to the inner court of the palace of the monarch of Lilliput, who wants to show off his palace to Gulliver.

Here's another -- Gulliver being introduced to the monarch's family.

The Frontier Poet

Am between free-lance projects. A strange state: suddenly I have some free time. Now I can do some drawing for fun -- when I'm able to forget the possibility of poverty, destitution, starvation, and death, and like that. Because, you see, no current project = no certain future income.

As I say, an interesting state. The soul and the body are both making demands. The soul says, "you gotta do something for fun, for your own satisfaction, otherwise the whole thing becomes pointless." The body says, "Yah, and how many calories does artistic satisfaction provide? and how much of this month's mortgage payment does it cover? "

So I do both. I do some stuff for fun, like this one -- the Frontier Poet:


And I do some stuff for (possible) money --- a new addition to the T-shirt Art folder, in the freelance portfolio:




Well, that second one was fun, too. I think the design came out well. But still.

The Happy Birder

Finally got a break between projects, and an idea for a drawing, at the same time:

Yah, that's a weird hat he's got on. That's the sort of thing that can happen when you just start the pen moving, and then make everything up as you go along.

Thoreau, and the Illustrations of Henry Bugbee Kane.

I am wholly of one mind with Alice, who asked,"And what is the use of a book without pictures?" Many's the book I have owned for years, just enjoying the pictures in it, before I got round to reading the text.

One such book was the Bramhall House edition of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, illustrated by another Henry, Henry Bugbee Kane. I don't find much, if I Google the man. This is one of those things which defies my comprehension, because I think that Henry Bugbee Kane was one of the finest artists and illustrators of the twentieth century. The illustrator's job is to bring the text to life, and Mr. Kane does this magnificently with Thoreau's books.

In any event, here are three of the illustrations that he did for Walden:




This one in particular is a favorite of mine. It captures so well the feel, the spiritual essence, of autumn:



Used copies of this edition of Walden can still be found, for not much money, on sites like Addall.com. If you're into Thoreau, and good illustration, I recommend it highly.

Thinkers and Poets

An Artist's Adventurous and Romantic LIfe

In between feverish bouts of artistic inspiration, I've spent some pleasant hours digging, this last month. To re-cap: we found a sink-hole in the back yard, near the back fence. This was caused, as it turned out, by a series of leaks in our SEWER PIPE. The original pipe was what is known as Orangeburg pipe, very common in houses built fifty or more years ago. Orangeburg pipe has been likened to a 4-inch-diameter tar-soaked cardboard toilet-paper tube. Hot new technology, about a hundred years ago.

We had a Rooter man here a couple of years ago, because all the toilets wouldn't flush, and it turns out that in the process of unplugging the sewer line with his power snake, he knocked a couple of big holes in the Orangeburg pipe. Maybe two-by-three inch holes. One hole was near the back fence and about eight feet underground; the other was upstream, about eighteen feet closer to the house, and only four or five feet underground. As a result, sewer drain water started leaking out of the upper hole, draining downhill through the gravel bed under the pipe, and leaking back in through the lower hole, taking soil with it. Lots and lots of soil found its way into the city sewer main -- hence the sink-hole.

Ultimately about 20 feet of the Orangeburg pipe had to be replaced with modern PVC pipe. By me, in person.

This is what the sink-hole looked like, with me in it, after I had widened it and deepened it enough to uncover the lower leak in the sewer pipe, the one which created the sink-hole. The bottom of the fence behind me is normally just above the level of the lawn. I'm well over six feet tall, so I figure the hole I'm standing in here is around 8 feet deep.


This next picture was taken about a month later, after much digging. We had to dig a second, roughly rectangular hole (seen in the foreground), about twenty feet nearer the house, to get to and repair the upper hole in the pipe, four or five feet underground. At that point, it made no sense not to uncover and repair the pipe in between the two holes. Hence the narrow section of the trench, just wide enough to get down to the pipe. It's a good thing I did that, because the pipe in that section was in very bad shape.



Wearing my usual dumb-ass being-photographed grin, here I stand at the deep end of the trench, straddling some of the new PVC sewer pipe.


Here is my fetching wife. She's helping with shoveling dirt back into the trench, but she is also helping to give a sense in this photo of the size of the pile of dirt we've still got to move.



My very approximate calculations tell me that the weight of the soil which was in the trench, and is now in the pile, is around one and a half tons. I think my numbers are wrong. I think it's more like two tons.

Thinkers and Poets

Is it the thinkers who carry the poets? Is it the poets who fulfill the work of the thinkers? Who matters more? Who's having more fun? Who would you rather have a beer with? Who invented beer in the first place? -- Questions apropos of something started in the sketchbook:




The plumbing inspector was by today. We're approved. We've started shoveling dirt back into the trench. I'm still going to try to get pictures.

Rogelio Naranjo

Came across another amazing artist, on Flikr: Rogelio Naranjo. I know nothing about him (yet) but the name, and that he was born in 1937:


The Flikr page is someone named "ephemera assemblyman." Worth checking out. A lot more Rogelio Naranjo work is there, plus there are a lot of Google images for that name.

Sewers, Continued.

I worked it out today: in the last month, I've dug, by hand, a trench in the back yard almost twenty feet long, about two feet wide, with an average depth of at least five feet. I'm six feet four inches tall, and the grass of the backyard lawn is well over my head, when I stand at the deep end of the trench. I believe, I hope, I almost pray, that the digging of the trench, and the repair of the sewer pipe at the bottom, was completed today. Pictures soon. Tired now.

The Gathering

What's it mean? Who knows? I had some good laughs doing it.

A Piece of The Gathering

Here's a piece of the newest thing in the sketchbook. What to call it? "The Gathering," I think. I should have the rest done tomorrow.

Sewer

This week has been mostly a sewer-repair nightmare. Too much time spent in a hole in the backyard 8 feet deep, trying to mate PVC pipe to old concrete pipe, in a work space way too small. I have developed a profound loathing for mud, especially the slick, slimy, sticky clay mud you get in the Willamette Valley. And the floor of this hole is a layer several inches deep of that kind of mud, because ground-water is eternally seeping in from the sides.

Life goes on . . . oughta have something new tomorrow.

Still Life With Mustaches

Honest to God --- I don't know where this sort of thing comes from:


But it cracks me up when I'm doing it.

From the sketchbook, with a border added in Photoshop.

Elven Archer

As a free-lancer, I have to display a wide variety of potential product to potential clients -- so far, anyway. So, a couple of days ago, I bid on a job for which the client wants some female elves, as archers. My initial bid included some good images, but no actual elven archers. So I did this sketch, as a supplementary image for the bid:



I like her stance.

Landscape With Nesting Birds

I must have seen a picture of one of those giant stone heads on Easter Island in a National Geographic when I was a kid, and the image stuck with me. I've done tall skinny head sculptures, and tall skinny head paintings, and tall skinny head drawings, for years. So this is from my sketch book today (well, the border is from Photoshop):