I experimented with making a tiny book this weekend.
Tiny Book
Pointing at Wayne Thiebaud
On Christmas day a week or two ago, an American painter named Wayne Thiebaud died at 101. I had never heard of Thiebaud, nor can I remember ever seeing any of his work. Which, now that I have, feels like a fatal flaw in my two years of higher art education.
I’d like to write a full piece on Wayne Thiebaud, but today I’m just going to point at some of the pieces that stopped me in my tracks the other day as I was poking around his past. Specifically his landscapes. Not the subject matter he became famous for, but certainly the subject matter that ensnared my imagination.
Look at how soft those clouds look!
These works feel like glorious caricatures of space. Caricatures of land. And that’s something I’ve never seen before. And I love it.
And now I’m going to let this all percolate and soak into my subconscious and see what comes out.
Nike Workwear
Today, a video from one of my favorite internet filmmakers, Van Neistat, led me to this wonderful brand, William Ellery Technical Apparel.
A maker out of New York City producing “outdoor and workwear apparel from vintage wears, envisioning each garment’s unique story.” With “boyhood sentimentality” shaping the clothing and the company.
I, of course, fell in love with it all straight away.
And the wonderful images and pieces sparked an idea in me. A collection of Nike workwear.
I love it when a juxtaposition strikes me. A juxtaposition that seems to fit itself so nicely into an illustration. And I love it when an idea comes from a specific trail of things like today.
The work of William Ellery’s founder, Trevor Davis, reminds me in ways of the work of Tom Sachs.
Tactile, custom, and hand-made. It makes me want to sew something. To make the things I use and wear even more my-own, outfitted to do and look exactly the way I would like.
Maybe I’ll get a sewing kit.
A Painted Hand
Hooray! Hooray! For those moments of sudden inspiration. And energy to boot! To stay up many hours past my bedtime to create a thing.
This time, to (digitally) paint a hand, on a Friday night after dinner with new friends. Where, at one point, one of them scrolled back through old artwork of mine, and I became fixated on the (digital) oil paintings of figures I did a couple years back. My how the time goes.
Here, the piece, a couple days later. I can’t tell if I’ll do more to it, the spark of inspiration has passed. It is quite a fickle thing, inspiration. And pushing forward regardless is a skill I must work to improve. Must, must, must.
But here is something. Something I made.
And above is a screenshot from the process, as well as the original image I used as reference. A portrait of the great artist, David Hockney.
Save Ralph
The sphere of commercial illustration and graphic design is not known for its groundbreaking introspection or abstract meaning. It is easy to doubt whether or not I will ever be able to create things that move people or make people think or make people laugh in the same way a book or a feature film or a even my friend singing in their living room can.
Just yesterday, though, I cam across a new animated short film called Save Ralph. It inspired me to keep striving for better. To keep practicing, to keep writing, to keep drawing, to keep dreaming. Maybe I won’t ever direct a feature film or write a book that changes someone’s life, but I think one day I could make something like this.
Something that uses a playful, children’s-book aesthetic to speak about real issues and strive for real change. There is something really special and unique about that juxtaposition. Something that really captures my imagination. (Like creating a gritty world around Peter Rabbit.)
This short film beautifully highlights the power of storytelling, imagination and art in the fueling of social change and the passing of ideas.
This video made me think.
Sharpie and Newsprint: A Collection
I spent a chunk of my evening alone in the apartment drawing these 18×24″ sharpie-on-newsprint scenes.
It was quite a fun process, and, as always happens when I pick up a pen or a paint brush, it made me want to do more traditional work.
But it makes me want to draw with sharpie and pen more often specifically. There’s something really freeing about completing a drawing with no ctrl+z. The inability to erase presents a higher bar of entry to the drawing process, but once you’ve forced yourself past the bar, it can be a much more enjoyable process. No more kneading back and forth across the same spot on the page over and over.
You’re stuck with every line, no matter what, so you start to let go of some of that tension, and just let the lines fall where they’d like.
This evening also helped to fortify my opinion on quantity masking crudity. These drawings are not beautifully crafted – and yet, as soon as you start building the quantity, the total picture starts to become more impressive.
Goya and Van Gogh
Two famous painters from history – Francisco Goya and Vincent van Gogh – were born on this day, 275 years and 168 years ago respectively. I do not have anything very insightful to say, I just scanned through each of their works again this evening, and pulled several ‘comparable’ pieces (only in rough terms of color and subject matter) to put on display here.
First we’ll start with self portraits, hard at their work. (These remind me of one of my favorite paintings)
Churches with blue skies.
Women in blue.
And finally, secluded gathers behind tall trees.
It’s quite beautiful to see how unique these two worlds are. And, despite how different the subject and scene of each painting is, how clearly every work fits in to the over arching world of the painter.
Both Goya and Van Gogh really found their thing. I wonder, when I’m old and gray and looking back at my life’s work, what my thing will be.
Here’s a bonus video about a piece of Goya’s work by one of my favorite YouTube channels.
Lino Cut Crow
The other day, I carved a lino-cut for the first time in about six months.
I chose a crow with a feather in its cap, because me and two friends do a poster challenge together every weekend. This weekend, instead of choosing a specific medium or design, we chose a word. Each of our three posters were inspired by the word feather.
Here are all three of our posters (you can click to enlarge).
Quantity Masks Crudity
Even crude work becomes impressive in high enough quantity. Like Jason Polan’s Every Person in New York.
Pretty much anything becomes impressive or beautiful to us humans in high enough quantity. LEGO clone troopers. Layers of paint. Words repeated a 100,000 times in a row.
Sometimes, if you find yourself struggling to create a singular masterpiece – create 50 or 100 or 1,000 small, crude pieces. And the mass collective can become the singular masterpiece.
If you’re struggling to write the book, just get one sentence down today. In her book on writing and life, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott describes her own writing process. She sits at her desk, wondering what on God’s green earth to write, maybe hyperventilating a little, until she finally notices the 1-inch picture frame beside her monitor.
“It reminds me that all I have todo is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being. All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story in my hometown, in the late fifties, when the trains were still running.”
The title of that chapter is “Short Assignments.”
Lots of short assignments lead to big payoffs. Often times, quality only comes with quantity. With practice. With repetition. Or simply, with enough of the bad that it simply morphs into a giant, singular good. David Bayles and Ted Orland display this idea beautifully in their book, Art & Fear:
“[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”
This project – drawing 100 of something – taught me this lesson in my second year of art school. In my case, it was finding spaceships within splotches of watercolor.
Today, I started a new quantity-over-quality project, with these 2×3 inch paintings of shapes. It was fun to paint with real brushes again, rather than my stylus and computer. And though these are not special in any way individually, I’m hoping once I fill a wall with 30 or 40 of them, the quantity will mask the crudity.
Sharing Paint
I was toddling around the living room tonight, having closed my laptop for the sake of my eyes not melting out of their sockets, when I heard a cheer from the open window. My street is full of bars and restaurants, and as spring has started to emerge, the weekends have gotten louder and louder. I glanced out of the window and caught a glimpse of a TV on in an upper room across the street, and what looked like a basketball playing. I wonder if the Bucks are playing right now… I flipped on the television, and found myself dropped into the middle of a 90s crime drama. I started changing the channels, looking for tall dudes in green, when I landed instead on an old grainy image of a man painting against a black backdrop.
Of course, I know Bob Ross. But I realized in that moment that I’d never actually sat and watched Bob Ross paint before. I’d seen images and short clips forever, but I’d never sat with him. So, having very little inclination to do anything else, I leaned back and watched. And listened.
And felt that this was exactly what he was meant to do. He seems to really love painting – and to love to share painting. And if he doesn’t, what does it matter? It made me want to paint. And certainly it made countless others want to paint as well.