Post-traumatic Portfilio Review (15 years later)

Getting older, for me, seems to be largely an exercise in accepting my "average-ness" and trying to enjoy life anyway. 

Recently my Dad played a new move on our on-going battle of "childhood-stuff-removal*" by bringing a portfolio of very old artwork to me at my house (instead of asking me to take it while I was at his house).  I tried to ignore the thing for several days but I finally had to confront the beast. 

Afterwards I was traumatized for several days, wondering how and why any adult ever encouraged the young me towards a career in visual art... or allowed me into art school (NOT my parents btw - they thought I should be an engineer or a lawyer). 

Only now am I starting to feel more at peace with the fact that I was not the artistic genius I thought I was... nor, given my track record, am I likely to achieve true greatness. (But being a minor-middleweight ain't so bad...)

I now present a brief history of my late-teenage-art for your entertainment (I couldn't bear to post the truly horrible stuff, so what you see here is still a glossier, white-washed version of what really was...)


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There it is, the portfolio-beast, mocking me from my kitchen counter. The scattered tape holding it together might as well spell "doom"... 

Inside, I was pretty impressed by one sketch pad of drawings. It displayed fairly competent line work and confident shading. The choice of subject matter showed that its creator was clearly among the fore-runners of everything that became hipster-cool in the last 5 years.   

But the drawings didn't feel very familiar to me... 

Then I realized that they belonged to my older step-brother (who studied something architectural around the same time - I guess his stuff just got mixed in with my stuff)...

Oh, here we are. My stuff.
This was pretty 90s-cool... Also a complete and total rip-off of an older,cooler, actually artistic student at my school.

Somehow I convinced the powers-that-were at that school to let me do a mural in honour of the ongoing-history of art. (In the center there was supposed to a frame where they would hang student work.)


This thing was actually pretty huge, covering a whole wall of the cafeteria. I have NO pictures of the actual mural. This is the sketch.

I think I drew these skinheads for a history class... chunky feet and a big heads were de rigueur.

Now then! Here are three masterpieces from first year university drawing class.


The MO of that class was to tear down everything you thought you knew about drawing and develop your "unique" mark-making skills (which looked like everyone else's unique mark-making by the end).


I felt like I learned a lot in this class and became a genius. Everyone cried in this class at least once.


(There was also a crazy guy, a gun, and a restraining order associated with this class - which may be why it lives so clearly in my memory. In retrospect, the crazy guy was also the most gifted artist in the class...)


Unfortunately now, over a decade from graduating, I feel like I left university without ever gaining any classical training/techniques in painting or figure drawing and still struggle to learn this on my own (which is a good struggle... I guess...)**

Wow.
Pure genius.
(...and, may I remind you, this was "the good stuff"... 
The bad stuff was too embarrassing... the good stuff is bad enough!)




Back to the present, my new art-hobby is painting traditional tattoo flash. It's a fun way to learn some new skills and it's relaxing to not worry about making challenging content. It's satisfying to make something that simply looks nice. There's nothing "to get"... I just like doing it. Simple.


Here is the latest. I feel good about it.

I try not to waste time regretting the path I've taken... but I do feel like I've "wasted" a lot of my life thinking I was pretty decent at making art (and then watching TV) when I really should have been working much harder at developing skills.


I've only ever been half-hearted about being in the art-world because I have never truly believed I could make a living there (even as I AM making one!) I've always been so sensitive to the nay-sayers in "real" world and kept one foot out of the "art" world to make everyone less nervous. I think it is time to either get in with both feet or get out completely...






The end.






* My dad wants it all my childhood stuff out of his large house. I don't necessarily want to throw it out but I don't really want it in my small apartment either...  I am trying to leave a solitary box of stuffed animals in his house as I reminder that I once lived there... 


** My personal theory is that it is way more fun to do weirdo/abstract/non-figurative artwork if, in the back of your mind, you know that you CAN to do realistic/figurative/classical things but choose not to.

breakfast spiral

my grapefruit made for a nice picture this morning... 

Merry Thriftmas! (to me!)

Here's a secret: when I need more than a few grocery items and have to take the car instead of walking, I go to a farther-away grocery store that is right near a thrift store... then I can "get my thrift on" while ostensibly "running errands". 

That is what I did today... here are the results. 

*****

Picked up this jolly ol' fellow real cheap ($2). I think he's pretty cool. 
(He is slightly less creepy than either of these pictures indicates.)

What a difference a lighting makes!

*****

I normally steer away from the novelty spoon section but today I succumbed to its siren-call and found this rad SKI-DOO spoon! Worth it!

I also found a Bonhomme de Carnaval spoon - which I bought because the creepy little dude looks like he's sporting a creepy little bonhomme de pantaloon... if ya know what I mean... Why did that make me buy it? I guess because I'm kind of creepy too.

*****

And lastly, some catholic trinkets. No, I'm not catholic - but they have some of the best trinkets... 

*****

My groceries were much less interesting so I didn't take pictures of them.

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Folky Flowers

Whoa. WTF? Blogger is TOTALLY different alladasudden!! This will take some getting used to...

Anyway, just throwing up a little painting my brain threw up about a week ago - inspired by looking at a bunch of Pennsylvania Dutch "Fraktur" paintings. I seem to go back and drink from that well quite a bit...

I drew and inked the lines of this at a painting night with a friend. I did the colouring while in transit last week. To make it fit better in the little book I've been compiling, I cut it out and stuck it on another sheet. 

It's been a looooong time since I let my pencil just wander around without a plan like I did here. It was a nice little journey.

Here's what it was like without colour - which I like. I wish I'd done a scan of it at this stage and could try different colours in the computer... ah well. It's in the can now (not the garbage can... just "finished").

And just for fun, here's an Amund Dietzel fish from my sketch book. 

Thanks for checking it out!


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Thrive Road Trip and Miscellany

Generally I try to find an awesome tattooer that I get along with in my own town and give them all my business for as long as I live there... but last weekend I traveled specifically for a tattoo for the first time.

I guess I'm getting to be a bit of a "collector" as there are several far-flung people on my list now that I would love to get tattooed by someday...

Actually, I always meant to go to this place when I lived closer but never quite made it...

So, the place is Thrive Studio in Cambridge, ON. I got tattooed by Chris Anthon whilst my lovely niece got tattooed by Bryan Simms. Except for all the pain and cursing under my breath, it was a totally great time. Andy Gibson, their apprentice, was there too and they pretty much did an improv-comedy show while tattooing. How our tattoos aren't a big mess from all the laughing, I'm not sure.

Here's a peek - but I'm bruised and scabby right now so no point in showing off the whole thing yet. You can already tell how awesome it is from this shot though...

My niece got the Stoney St. Clair mermaid (that I re-painted and wrote about earlier here) but I don't have a picture of it.

Originally we were both going to get the mermaid but two things happened: 1) I saw this seahorse flash that Chris painted on his FB and I immediately fell in love with it and knew I had to have it, and 2) I got to thinking about mermaids and how what a mermaid does is be extremely pretty, sing beautifully (I can't sing and am only borderline feminine), and lure poor sailors to their deaths*... and that's just not what I aspire to in life.

So, despite the fantastic tits, I opted out of the mermaid. I was mostly into the tail and scales anyway - and the seahorse has both.

(Also, I was born in the year of the horse - which doesn't really mean anything to me at all except that it makes me have a certain fondness for horses that I wouldn't have otherwise because I wasn't raised around "horse-people".)

(And I like to swim.)

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This is a random picture of a fence near Thrive. I liked the acorns.


This is my little collection of old letterpress letters. I don't have a letterpress but I just use these like stamps sometimes. Why did I post this picture?


Because I used these stamps on the tab of this thank-you-card I made for Chris Anthon.

The creature (demon? monster?) is based, but not copied exactly, from Amund Dietzel.

And if you pull his tongue...


He says, "U R RAD!"

... which I thought was pretty awesome...

Unfortunately I get so nervous and awkward about giving people stuff like this that I have no memory of whether it appeared that the recipient liked my offering...

..but I enjoyed making it and I think it must be obvious that it was heart-felt... and that's good enough for me.

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OK. Time for bed.

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* My niece is young and good-looking in a way I never was and has a killer voice to boot - so the mermaid goes better on her. I'm not saying she aspires to kill sailors or anything - the mermaid just works on her in the same way I think the seahorse works on me.

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deck the walls

My "hall" (hallway) is pretty dark and and narrow so I decked my walls instead... mostly over the Sideboard/Hutch (which I haven't changed up in quite awhile - so it was overdue for a new look).

This is my favourite, vintage ornament.

I use to have some others but they are so fragile...

Not going to be around these parts for most of the holidays - so I decorated my Aloe plant instead of killing a tree...

Stockings hung with care. Someone made Husbo's when he was little. I made mine about 7 years ago to sort of match his...

The big "B" + Santa = "be santa"...

The framed calligraphy I just picked up about a week ago from a thrift store. It took a LONG time of me staring dumbly to figure out what it said... but once I did I thought it was the perfect thing to put up for the festive season. Also, it is hand-lettered by some patient soul and that's the kind of thing I find hard to pass up at thrift stores... Can you read it?

The little ceramic Santa is an old one from Husbo's Granny...

I love my oblong, vintage, glass ornaments but having no tree I had to display them differently...



Festival flags purchased in San Antonio, plus little nativity scenes (one in a gourd) that I got in Peru (though you can find them all over the place...)

That's pretty much it for the decking of this place.. there are few other little things but I kept it pretty low-key this year.

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overcoming blog neglect with double craft post

what did i do yesterday while the rest of the world was hard at work?

well... after recovering the homestead from the weekend's festivities, doing laundry, baking some bread, and various other acts of domestic goddess-ish-ness, i treated myself to some pure, ol' fashioned craft time!

i made a pillow from a cross-stitched basset hound picture (from thrift store). i just added the border then sewed it on to an already existing pillowcase.

(this is for a friend who has basset hounds and was recently admiring a cross-stitched pillow in my house (below, on left, found at a garage sale in San Antonio)... i wonder if she'll see this post before i give the pillow to her?)

... and then i finished up this embroidery of some Daniel Higgs flash that i saw here and fell in love with. (Coincidentally, it was tattooed by Zach Nelligan - whom I blogged about before.)

i'm probably going to overcompensate for my lack of posting by posting a WHOLE BUNCH of stuff today... thanks for looking... whoever you are out there that looks at this stuff!

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more swazis

Shane Swift posted these gems on his tumblr today (his tumblr is nice and mostly full of actual paintings he's done - so check it out).

...which reminded me I hadn't yet posted this recent embroidery I did...

This is part of a "sampler" quilt-like-thing that I've been working on VERY SLOWLY for about a year (mostly stalled for many moons but I'm getting back to it...). Anyway, now and then I try out a new technique on this old bed sheet I had around.

I'm not very into doing embroidery because it's really slow and hurts my wrist a bit... but I do like how it looks and it will be neat to work away on this thing for years (or a lifetime) and have a "diary" of images I was interested in at various times...

Below are the previous "entries" in the diary (obviously I've a looooong way to go):

And lastly, these are various swastikas that I found around San Antonio while I was there last month:

(The blurry white jade on black background is actually Chinese jade from the 16 or 1700s. It was in an area of the SA Art Museum that you weren't supposed to take pictures of.)

* Related note, this looks like an interesting book - first published in 1896! Haven't read it yet but thanks to Chris Hold for pointing me in its direction.

* And lastly, here is a post about Pre-WWII roadsigns in Arizona:

http://arizona100.blogspot.com/2010/09/arizona-once-revered-swastika-eighty.html

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nesting

I hope the little bird that made this nest doesn't come back next year to find it GONE. We (Husbo & me) accidentally knocked it over with a van while working at his research site... so I decided to take it home...

I'm not sure what exactly to do with it but I want to make some kind of art...

Sketched it this morning...

Then I put in under a bell jar...

What to do?

What.

to.

do....

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hearts and rope

Here's a cute little flashy flash painting. I opted to not add colour just because I thought it looked cooler on my shelf that way.

And here's a gratuitous cat picture because those little toes sticking out while the cat watched the sunset was irresistible to my camera.

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Ice-fishing Huts

This is a new "in-betweener" painting I did yesterday. It's a bit different than the ones that have come before it in that it is actually a little scene - not just shapes.

I've never been ice-fishing but the little huts seem so cozy despite being situated on and surrounded by ice. How we survive the Canadian winter...

I like the starkness of my painting but I may go back into it and add some shadows/melted water/definition to the ice area.

I stole the image from the dust jacket (below) of a book about "The Canadian Look". I wanted to throw the dust jacket away (because I usually take them off my books) but I liked the picture so much that I had to translate it into a painting first.

Thanks for looking.

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flash dump

Truth be told, I'd grown tired of blogging. Tired isn't even the right word... it's more like I started to feel like it was totally pointless and therefore I wasn't doing it.

However, a friend encouraged me to keep her up to date with my drawing/painting progress and so, with that small prodding, I'm back. I thank her for that because it is nice to know that people care.

So... here are some things...

This lady head is done after Amund Deitzel flash but I'm not going to finish it because I'm unhappy with the shape of her face. (Actually, I have already redrawn and inked her again and I'm not finishing that one either because I just can't get her to have the aloof/angelic look I want... I will eventually come back to her and try again because I like the image but I needed to move on and try something else.)

This bird is from the Ben Corday Tattoo Travel Book and it is the first bird I've attempted. I didn't have any brown ink so I had to use some water colours. I'm not loving my current paper selection or the water colour paint. Anyway, a learning experience.

This one was really fun.

Having gone through art school and done a lot of "life drawing", I've drawn many a penile region in my day... but, as I was never an adolescent boy, I don't think I've ever drawn a random, gratuitous "cock"...

Now I have...

This whole image is so delightfully ridiculous that I enjoyed every minute of drawing it.

It is from the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volume 1. The caption says it is a "humorous youth tattoo known by convicts as 'Duet with sleighbells'". Here you can see my drawing beside the original.

Here's a scan of the inked drawing.

Here it is hanging on my fridge because I thought it was an "A+"... and also funny to use the "This is ART" magnet (picked up at the San Antonio Art Museum) to hang it.

And lastly, one I did yesterday.

Everything on this sheet is Ben Corday flash and I tried to keep the inking style as close to his as possible (so, more brush-strokey in some places than smooth, gradated washes).

Here's the central lady with her original counterpart in the book. I really need to go get some brown ink and maybe some (caucasian) skin tone - because mixing the inks doesn't seem to work very well and I had a hard time getting the colours of the original (which I was trying to do here... for practice...)

Anyway. that's it for now. Thanks for looking!!

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