College Prep

OK. 


Straight out of the gate, I'll admit that I've been procrastinating for weeks. No big surprise there, as I'm no stranger to delay tactics. But with each inexorable step toward the first day of classes, I long desperately for a mythic, inexhaustible source of inspiration to plan my classes. 


The prospect of showing up the first day unprepared (or, worse, trying like hell to sustain a class for 13 weeks on the scant traces of comprehensible ideas which are currently flitting around in my skull—cognitive free radicals) terrifies me. I must continually remind myself that this is the perennial prelude to the play. It begins with denial and an increasing preoccupation with menial tasks, things that I do to make myself feel busy and productive while the real work waits to be addressed. Like a pregnant mother readying the house for the monumental job ahead, I find myself taking on useful but unnecessary domestic projects. I develop a nesting instinct, or to use a more masculine metaphor, a revving of the engines, before a surge in productivity. And I've been this way since I was a little kid. (I'll spare readers the theory I entertained as an eight year-old, running races on the playing fields. Suffice it to say that it involved an analogy which included a full bladder and a gas tank.)


Maybe it was bravado with a little too much caffeine to jack up my enthusiasm, but this season's academic anxiety began with an attempt to design some new classes for students who were sorely in need of studio credits. We'd experienced a huge spike in enrollment and were granted the opportunity to add five new courses to the books. As outgoing department head, my friend and colleague Jean called me (as incoming department head) to ask for some input and we traded several ideas. There was a lot of enthusiasm at her dining table that Sunday evening, and I left feeling invigorated by the challenge of getting these new classes off the ground. Most of the new offerings are concept-leaning, since that's where the biggest holes seemed to be. We added five classes in all, and worked hard to get them on the books in time for the students to add them to their schedules.


The class I agreed to author and teach is called "Voice + Vision," and it will explore the symbiosis of writing and image-making.  I am really excited about taking a good look at hybrid visual-verbal experiences and I suspected that the students may find the class useful to their way of working, if not their portfolios. It is meant to be a process-oriented class, chiefly concerned with the intertwining paths of verbal and visual thinking. It was my idea and Jean agreed that since illustrators (and artists, particularly in this age of cross-media investigation) are forever swimming in texts and talk, the class could be an important addition.


But theory and practice are different theaters for ideas, and while I still maintain that the notion of a class which synthesizes writing and image-making in various incarnations is a great one, I have my work cut out for me in planning for it and in testing the waters with its inaugural group of students this fall. As intelligent as they are, our students tend to feel the greatest reward when they have mastered material processes or gained new technical skill. They're a bit of a no-nonsense, product-oriented crowd, and I've always struggled in trying to coax from them enjoyment of practice over achievement, of enjoying process without too much attention to finish. So that's the first challenge: simply convincing our students that it may be worth their time to "think about thinking" instead of which glazing technique will render most convincingly the folds of a model's dress, or which Photoshop filter to use when applying a sheen to vampire teeth. 


Additionally, I've found that most literature and pedagogical precedents for this sort of material are primarily concerned with critical writing about art, which can certainly be a valuable dimension of  the students' exploration, but there's not much out there to serve as paradigms for a class like the one I hope to teach. I am looking for a broader scope of applications and interactions—a survey of the landscape of opportunities.


I'm considering a requirement of either a blog or a journal in which the student might explore the collision of word and image. Hence, my use of this blog to inform myself of the possibilities of the medium. I don't know how well it will work for me (and, subsequently, for them) but I thought I'd give it a shot before asking them to do the same.


Lots of stuff, probably too much stuff, has been running through my head and I like to use writing to sort things out (hey, there's a thought). 


More to come, hopefully.

Measuring Depth

I'm on a break from painting. 


I just left my studio, 
my head lowered in thought, 
a furrowed brow the result of gratifying progress, 
not trouble. 
I walk past the cosmos 
and globe thistle 
on the way from the studio to the house 
and in an instant I memorize the scene: 
the way my body dodges the flowers 
which hang over the path, 
dead petals compensated by buds, 
my shadow on the ground to my right. 
I carry my brushes in one hand 
and a cleaning basin 
full of dirty water 
in the other. 


When I am immersed in creative thought, I move in one of two ways: quickly, with the sensory efficiency of a dog; or slowly, absently, my spirit trailing behind me. My mind is far ahead.


My senses are alive and exceedingly sharp in the moments after satisfying some impulse to make things. Every sound is crystal clear, all movements feel mechanical, perfect. This is the product of deep concentration and deliberate, intense visual thinking. The elaborate system of thinking and doing is laid bare, humming in tune.


I wish I could map the electricity in my brain during these moments, to get a sense of what's really happening. I'm no Einstein but I do know when my mind is working properly. It's the best feeling in the world.

Black Velvet Painting, ca 1994

Untitled Painting

Naumachie.

Kouros with a Camera.

A Prayer.

Sink.

My dad and I had very few interactions which might be considered educative. They were usually mysteriously begun, inspired by some masculine wisdom he felt he needed to share with me. Among these exchanges was the time he called me into the bathroom after he'd finished shaving. There was no evidence of the tools of shaving—the can of shaving cream has been put away and the razor had been rinsed and returned to the drawer. All that remained was the speckled, gray debris of his whiskers lining the basin like dirt. He told me to look at it and in that moment my father provided a glimpse of the world we would share.

The Rapacious Creditor

The Prayer of St. Francis

Gutsy Running.

The Joy of Long Meetings.

Absurd visual ideas find their way from the imagination to paper during long conversations. Where I work, there's naturally a lot of doodling going on in meetings. 

Astounding arrogance.

I am posting this on behalf of my friend and colleague Chris Buzelli. Chris' work was not only stolen by a journalist and used without permission, but his objection to the theft was met with astounding arrogance---a slap in the face to artists and designers whose work can be filched and reused without remuneration.

http://www.drawger.com/buzelli/?section=articles&article_id=10164

Finished.

Adding color.

I had to change the image somewhat in the digital translation. 


What works in black and white presents some limitations when considering color, so I scraped out some of the black areas and digitally added color to enliven the image. 

Another.

Above is the scratchboard base for the illustration about understanding our Afghan enemies by studying our historically adversarial relationship with the former Soviet Union. I later added color digitally. It took me a little too long to work through these.

Finito.

It could have gone on forever, but I needed to finish up. I notice when I publish anything on this blog, the colors lose a great deal of their saturation, so I'm hiking it up a little here in hopes of matching the original.

I fixed the horizon, which seemed lopsided.

Stage Two.

Lightening up and making some decisions about color. I like to improvise.

Stage One.

After many sketches the client and I decided on a refined concept for the cover illustration.

I began the foundation painting, a first layer of darker colors in acrylic over black gesso. 

Finalmente. Un disegno sufficiente.

The sketch which was accepted by the client.

More sketches.

For an article about learning how to manage Afghanistan by way of our adversarial history with the Soviet Union. The third sketch was selected by the client.

Sketches

For an article about computational linguistics. Way off on the first few efforts, but I think the latter ideas came close.

iceberg painting

I spent far too much time on this disaster. The form of the face just doesn't work as well  and the icebergs are overworked. Still, the idea intrigues me, and I'll continue to explore it.

 

Iceberg Painting (too)

Iceberg Painting.

I began this series in fall 2009. After grappling with it for some time, the motif began to crystallize.

Iceberg.

New Freelance.

From an article about the impending bankruptcy of Twin River, a slot casino in Lincoln Rhode Island. The article made use of some medical imagery (IV's pulse, etc.) hence the "flatline" gag.

From the Cutting Room Floor.

Now and then I like to post some things that—for one reason or another—didn't make the cut for illustration jobs. Here are a couple of ideas I suggested (and favored, at least in the formal sense) for an article about the transformation of North Carolina from a hot bed of KKK activity to one Obama's swing states in the 2008 election. The editors felt the imagery suggested racism targeting President Obama (not really the thrust of the article), so neither image was used.

More to the iceberg.

It's probably an act of vain folly to include unfinished work on a blog that is mean as self-promotion, but here goes. I think my process is a testament to the old apothegm, "it ain't over 'til it's over." While things look pretty bad en route it's always heartening to turn a corner and see some promise of resolution on the horizon. I worked last night on one of the paintings from a previous post and while it's nowhere near finished, I think I have begun to understand what needs to be done.

Sono tornato.

It's been far too long and a great deal has happened since my last entry, but I'm back in the saddle, having moved home to the US. What a great two years in Rome and the rest of Europe. I have many photos from my travels and will post them soon, but meanwhile I'm including here some stirrings of new paintings. This group is about icebergs, the metaphorical partner to volcanoes.