A Whole Lot About Art

This post is public so feel free to share it.

All,

I’m hitting pause on Fazed. I said before how I was writing it week to week, not making it up as I went but working off an outline that was leaner than what’s normal for me. It’s fine, but I had written all of Downtown Beirut and Enthrallment up front and I think those came out better. So I’ll keep working on Fazed and figure out what I want it to be.

During covid I went back to art-making, something I’ve done not much of since graduating from Parsons School of Design in 1997. I don’t mean book covers so much as stretching a canvas and busting out the paint. So for the last 4 years or so I’ve been making stuff and moved my skill level up considerably. I also got serious with the tools needed to properly draw and paint digitally.

A few select details on how:

Dave McKean’s Cages. One of the books that got me interested in narrative drawing in the first place. His cats alone, genius. It always felt god tier, unattainable for the likes of me. I spent some time tracing his pages. Tracing the same pages over and over. Don’t underestimate the learning potential of such an activity. It’s not work you show anyone. The physical product just goes in the recycle bin. But now I had a tiny grain of an idea how Dave McKean’s brain might work.

Combine that with semi-dry brush technique left over from my time in art school and you get this. It’s not great, and you can see the Cages in it pretty plainly, but it has a lot more life in it than my Channel Zero work.

Those Cages fire escapes.

I added the tones and color after the fact, because I thought it still looked like crap without it.

I’m a collage artist. It took me a few decades to see that clearly. In art school I dated someone who was very much a collage artist, carefully cutting images out of magazines and old books and painstakingly arranging them on paper. That’s not me, but I’m closer to that than I realized. I just do it digitally and try hard as hell to make it look like that’s NOT what I’m doing. At least to create a little plausible deniability.

I have a vast library of scanned textures, distressed text, and misc bits and parts I rely on to make things look like this:

I had to fuck with the image as much as possible, which is fine, but because I was afraid of just using a straight image. Like my old college girlfriend, or someone like Marlene Weisman. It made me feel vulnerable, like undressing in public (one imagines) or using a shortcut…? It’s not that at all, I just had yet to get over my mental block.

But is that “me”? I don’t know yet.

Art school, art education, like so many things, is wasted on the young. I still make my living as a writer, but considering going for a MFA.

More on this to come.

b