A Very Busy January

It might appear that I haven''t been up to much in January, but quite honestly I have been very busy.  I have been piecing together my show for the Studio which opens on the seventh of February as well as putting together notes and lesson plans for five different classes between two different schools.

I have been very pleased with the way that my current projects have been going.  I have been a bit more free with my concepts which has proved quite beneficial.  I determined that I wanted to try as hard as possible to do as much with index cards that I could.  It has been a good way to provide myself with limits in order to focus more on how the content could shift and change.  I found myself quite opposed to this idea of rule setting when I was in graduate school, but now I am beginning to see the point behind what my more educated professors were suggesting to me.  There really is more freedom to exercise when you have picked a control.

After I had loosened up a bit with the index card creations, I began to work on a few wooden pieces that would work in the same manner as the original index card pieces.    Once I had set my rules with the index cards, the transference to a new ground was a much more open process. 

The index cards have made me more open to being honest, wearing my thoughts and feelings as a badge, and enjoying my own personal metaphors.  I have previously tried to find ways around this in my art, choosing instead to make visual jokes with "funny" characters.  I've grown tired of this, however.  This show has been immensely important to my development as a creative. 

I am looking forward to future developments that this index card series may lead to.  I am also interested to see how bringing the more painterly strokes into some of my wooden grounds will change and or work the some of the other works.

Peace
-Mike

Big Doings and Stepping Into the Present Millenium

The move is done.  My wife and I are settling into our new home nicely and with that new home life have come a couple of new exciting tidbits.  She has managed to set up an internet Hotspot so that I can use the internet at home and at studio.  This works out well as I am now able to post to this super duper up to date blog right from the studio.  I also have been granted a new phone from the folks at AT&T allowing me to take better photos from my phone as well.  All of this is making me feel slightly more up to date and much better capable of doing the things that I want to do creatively.

My upcoming show at the Studio is coming along nicely.  The work has really taken a turn for the better in the last couple of weeks.  Once I opened myself up to a wider range of word pieces the show has really made more sense.  I don't think that I had ever intended on being as specific as my earlier pieces were.  The trouble was that I loved the "Today may Just be..." piece entirely too much to make wise decisions about future pieces.  Fortunately the shrinking allotted time always allows me to think a bit more aggressively on the creative end.  Today I spent the majority of my day working on a font for this piece.

 I was very pleased making this font up today.  The M was based on the font used in an Of Monsters and Men album.  The rest of the letters were made to go with that M.  It was nice to be working in a tiny sketchbook next to the final piece.  The results seemed to be so immediate working in that way.  Often I will be working in a sketchbook at home and unable to really visualize the final product because I can't see the surface that I am putting the work on.  Having the final right next to the sketchbook definitely felt better in this way.

I love this piece and how much more subtle I feel it is when I am using this font rather than a more aggressive in your face font.  I wonder what that other font might suggest with this lettering.

With any luck more to come tomorrow.  It is time for the Mighty Lark to fly.
Peace
-Mike

The Last Post of 2013

The year 2013 is apparently over.  It has been an eventful year to say the least.  I know this is true when I start my last blog post with "the year 2013 is apparently over."  I've realized that the majority of my work I has historically been made while I am down in the dumps, coping with life issues or just plain trying to get by.  It never occurred to me that making artwork while I was perfectly happy with my life might prove to be more difficult.  It is hard to make something complaining about your life when you have no complaints with your immediate life.  The past three months seems to serve as a good example of that.

I got married this year and my first baby is on the way.  I can wrap my head around the idea of creating artwork that is fully positive, but sometimes I wonder if that needs to be done as much as the cathartic art process of dealing with inner pain.  Today, however, on the last day of the year, I realized that your joys sometimes need to be understood through cathartic measures as well.  I haven't given myself much of an opportunity thus far to fully really what it means to me to be married or have a child on the way.  I have struggled with creating schedules and giving enough time to my wife and my art, but today, I feel like I got one step closer to understanding how to do this.  I even made a piece of art about my wife.  Here is some of the work that I started to finally put together for my show this coming February at The Studio in Laconia, NH.

Life is good.  Thanks for hanging out with me all year long.  I hope to bring you some cool stuff all next year and for many years to come.  Perhaps I'll even share a couple baby pictures on the way.

Peace
-Mike

Mostly Moving but Still Working

Moving is such a drain on creativity, resources both financial and mental, and time.  Since my wife and I found out that we had to move, we have had our noses to the ground trying to make a bit more money, find a house, and keep ourselves sane.  Throughout this process the only thing that has kept me okay is sharing my friend Shirah's studio space.  I have a show coming up in February and another in May.  I have several projects on the drawing boards that I wish to give my attention so much more than I want to give my attention to a move that at times I feel so completely nonplussed by.

That said, there is no way around the move.  It will happen, and so, that studio space has become a bit of a safe haven for me.  Recently I began to think about the pieces that I was making in the different divided segments on the 6" X 6" panels.  I wondered if I couldn't combine the ideas of pattern that I had been studying in Franz Boas's Primitive arts with the ideas behind those segmented images.  Franz Boas suggested that patterns change vertically but become repetitive or symmetrical to the left and right.  This mimics change in our everyday setting.  Consider the skyline, treeline and land.  They are three different segments to our everyday which change vertically but repeat in a sense laterally.

I have always felt like I work better in constrained proportions.  Long vertical or horizontal pieces have always seemed more comfortable to work in than the traditional canvas shapes.  When I have been stacking these pieces I've realized that I am actually creating a different type of pattern.  Check out the images below.

In addition, I've been trying to do more index card pieces for the show in February.  It is a show of advice and words of comfort from media, relatives and my own sketchbooks.  These word based pieces have struck me as slightly uninteresting as of late, but this morning I started using one of the new sketchbooks that my wife got me for Christmas.  I started to think about the word based pieces as text out of silent movies.  Here is the result.

The patterns grow.  I am beginning to think of words as a really complicated pattern.  That is all that a pun really is; manipulating the patterns that we have created for letters.  I'm off to studio for a bit more work.  I hope you enjoyed the images.

Peace
-Mike

Comfortable in the New Studio, in Maine, and with my Family

This has been a week of major ups and downs.  On Tuesday my wife received some terrible news which we spent the majority of the week immersed in.  That same Tuesday I had started work on a new lighthouse piece.  I had found a piece in the art studios in 401 at MECA last Saturday which started me drawing.  The piece reminded me of some of Jeff Soto's work and a myriad of other artists whose work had graced the pages of Juxtapoz.  Blaine Fontana's animal works seemed to be definitely of the same vein as well.  The thought that really struck me was that whoever this art student was, he had taken a universal symbol, in this case a bird, and placed it within the constructs of symbols which makes up his artist language, rays, drips and cloud blobs.  It suddenly dawned on me that that was one of the missing links to my work.  I work with some many different symbols, the drops, the squares, the waves, and the creatures, but I don't mix them.  I have never been dependent on backgrounds or setting to create images, so it would seem that I should utilize something to enhance the picture plane.  It only makes sense to develop more of a pattern out of the symbols that I use regularly.

If I do make these patterns and mix them with the character imagery as my major point of interest I think that will create the best picture that I am currently capable of.  Patterning is something that I do naturally.  I simply wasn't aware that I was making patterns until I looked at this student's work.

 

I was very impressed with the way the image began to develop when I just started thinking of my normal shape making as patterning.  It allowed me to think of things purely from a design sense.  When I am only concerning myself with shape, scale and color I can create something far more cohesive compositionally and dynamically than when I am attempting to manufacture the proper space.

 

Yesterday my friend and I loaded up my little S10 with two loads worth of stuff to take to the dump and moved some more stuff into studio.  I am finally all moved in.  It feels so good to just have a space that is settled.  Today I spent a couple hours organizing and then set to work on an old piece that was never very well thought out.  I realized that the smoke that I always make is a pattern.  Much like in poetry there are styles which are very formulaic and measured in contrast to other styles which are more free form, this pattern is closer to the free form pattern side than the more rigid patterning rules like checker boarding or honeycomb.  

Here is an image of the new studio set up.  There is a lot of space for books and stacks of sketchbooks and small paper products like circulation cards and index cards.  I love it.

In conclusion, I realized while working on these patterns that life is very much a free form pattern.  People are born just as other people die.  Good times are often immediately preceded or followed by more trying times.  We make friends and we lose them.  We buy new objects to replace our old objects.  All in all, the actions are always very similar.  We are a freely flowing pattern.  I am a pattern that has found some more comfort with the up and down.  It is a pleasure to face the trying times knowing that my decisions influence not only my life but the life of my immediate family.  It is also with great joy that I am able to accept the good times as I know that those times will positively affect my family. 

I feel a bit more whole.  Keep up.
Peace
-Mike

Color, the Kaddish and Jets to Brazil

Today I finished work early and came home to an empty house.  It was lovely.  I packed up some books, stretched out on the couch, read a bit of Allen Ginsberg's The Kaddish, and listened to Jets To Brazil's Perfecting Loneliness.  It was a completely peaceful moment.  Then my wife came home, made a lovely dinner, minus her chipped tooth.  Darn you Whole Foods and your ready to eat Edamame.

After dinner, Courtney shipped me off to studio for a bit with a thermos full of coffee.  It was a great night.  At studio I worked on her Christmas present, which I can't share and a pipe in the clouds piece that has been coming slowly along.  After about an hour of working on the piece, I decided that it needed more color, a little pop in one direction or another.  I retrieved my cobalt turquoise which I hadn't used in ages (way back in the days of the cloud constructors and my show at Lunar Boy Gallery in Astoria, OR.)  After a bit of experimentation I was reminded of exactly how awesome the color was.  While this isn't a terribly good photo I think you will get the idea.

The piece has definitely taken a turn for the better.  I can't wait to go work on it again tomorrow.  Courtney is actually packing me lunch for studio tomorrow as we speak.  Life is awesome.

Peace
-Mike

Hole in the Chest Boy, Good, Deep Friends, and Confidence

I have wanted to make a graphic novel for a long time.  I have never had the patience to really work on one, however.  Usually a writer will provide you with a script and it seems like they are not looking for you to add or subtract from the title.  The illustrator's input appears to not be needed for the story.  This isn't a very good outlet for me though.  I prefer to write my characters, understand them, and make them more about the words and poetics of the situation than I do to show my immense ability to move a character around into a million positions.  In fact, I don't have an immense ability to move my characters around in a million positions.  I am constantly attempting to get better with this, but am definitely not as good as other artists. 

I have been teaching illustration for the past year at a local community college, and this is giving me some more confidence in my work, however.  I have found that by teaching the students the proper steps to go through to build a character and a plot, composition and layout, I find that I am more and more capable of doing so myself.  That leaves the only issue with making a graphic novel the unfortunate fact that most people that seem very interested in writing work for a graphic novel are interested in some fantasy character, science fiction, or violence.  I am not particularly interested in any of these.  I am more of a sensitive kind of guy.  I don't draw to work out dragons or mythical creatures.  My idea of cool is much more reading Sartre and listening to the Cure than it is watching the newest season of Game of Thrones or watching the new Batman series.  I am more the speed of a Daniel Clowes than I am a Rob Liefeld, but everything that I grew up with was more Liefeld.  It took a long time for me to admit this, but once I did, I realized that I can get into this graphic novel thing if it is just a little more sad.

As I was chatting with a friend at work, we began to talk about our writing and drawing styles and it dawned on me that one of my characters aligned very well with his writing.  We met yesterday and started talking more ideas for our character, plot development, and supporting cast.  The result was an idea influenced by Sartre's Nausea, Emo records of the nineties, and a bunch sketches from sadder times in my life.  I am very interested in looking into these characters from the sadder spots in my life as I feel like it will help me identify the character more when he shows up within me.  Perhaps by fully understanding him I will be able to help myself when that character comes around again.

Here are a couple panels from what I've been working on so far.

I am very excited about this project.  I plan on printing the first book in two 8 page zine formats and sewing them together.  The outside cover I think will be a black construction paper cover with a piece of fabric sewn over top.  A hole will be left out of the center of the front cover in the fabric showing the black construction paper behind.    The whole book will be 5" X 7".  This should be rad.  I've been drawing for it pretty much constantly since I met with my buddy.

Peace
-Mike