I'm not Travis Charest

I'm not Travis Charest, nor will I ever be, and sometimes that is just a depressing fact to admit. I have a good amount of patience while drawing, and can hold a line decently well, but the facts is duh facts.

more drawings

Trying to experiment a bit with character design - drawing the same character from multiple angles. Seems like it should be easy, but since I've never tried it before, it is actually somewhat challenging, as these early, sloppy attempts show. The first one looks like two completely different characters, but I think the second one would be viable.

Drawing the news

Here are two more drawings, from a picture that was below the fold on the frond page of the Sunday Times this past weekend. The first I did yesterday and it is beyond rough, the second one is from today. Can you spot the difference? The third is the source image, which I couldn't find anywhere on the Times website.

Baseball sketches

A couple of drawings to loosen myself up, shake the rust off, etc. Definitely have to re-learn certain aspects of drawing when I go so long without doing it on a regular basis. I think I might need to draw people on the subway more, or go sit in parks or the Manhattan Mall on my lunch breaks and draw people in those spaces to get my chops back. Muscle memory is a powerful thing, but even more powerful is the ability to shut off the conscious observational part of the brain and allow the muscles to take over because they've been trained and drilled so much. The difference maybe similar to a one-on-none fast-break dunk where improvisation comes into play, and a jumper coming off a screen?

hyper-localization

That's the next step, iteration. The next transformation of our mediated lives. A metaphor would be watching your iphone zero in on your location in google maps.

art & commerce & looking

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — The most trenchant comment on the dazzling and enervating spectacle that is Art Basel Miami Beach is written in bold black and white letters on the floor of the Mary Boone Gallery booth. A wall-to-wall text piece by Barbara Kruger, it spells out two quotations. One, from Goethe, observes, “We are the slaves of objects around us.” The other, from a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, reads, “He entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and looked at all objects with a wild and distracted stare.”

From an article about the art fair. Seems to sum up my experience with the Armory show every time I've gone.
http://tinyurl.com/6aq6eh

I have a long, boring and muddled relationship with these ideas. Maybe those who are able to more adeptly navigate the art world exhibit a sort of cognitive dissonance; whereby they are able to separate the emotional and theoretical involvement with their own work from the act of selling it and themselves as part of the style and mode that may currently be in fashion in that world.

Or maybe I'm just lazy and bitter, and not really all that good at selling myself and my work. Either/or.

album art: Indelible Beancurd

Cover art

Interior art

Just finished this album art for my old pals Ethan and Dan. This is the first work I've done as the Liaison to the Sun in about 11 or 12 years. This album is the result of five years of work between these guys: Inspired by the long-distance collaboration that produced the Cooling Pies album(s), Ethan and Dan began writing and recording this album in 2003. They traded visits back and forth between Ohio and NYC, and this gem is ready to go on the world's finger. Er sumthin.

check them on their site and on amazon.

monogram 2: Best Friends Forever

the life of a repo man is always intense

monogram 1: Oh My God

I have always loved interlocking monograms; usually I notice them as sport's logos, but they are all over the place. They are an optical illusion, an Escher-like puzzle for the eyes to sort out.

The more complex the design, the more letters involved, the longer it will take to figure it out, but our eyes and brain seem to have an amazing ability to sort these things out, similar to reading a sentence wth sme of th lttrs mssng without skipping a beat. I think that I am also drawn to these things because they take type and make it into an image, maybe through decorative means, but still. I think I can track this back to looking at the Star of David iconography at the synagogue I went to growing up, and trying to follow the lines around and over and under and through, trying to make sense of it, in my head. I spent many hours drawing and re-drawing these, tracing them until I could draw them on my own.

So I decided to try making some of my own. The question was, what would I make them for, what would the letters I chose represent? I immediately thought I would use instant messaging acronyms, since the juxtaposition of the slow labor-intensive process of drawing these with the hurryupnow nature of their etymology seemed at odds. This strikes me as a similar intent to the slow-blogging movement, though not as crusty or bitter. My intent is to do it as an homage, a glorification of our newfound method of simplified communication. All that being said, here is my first effort. This is a scan of a pencil drawing, colored digitally. I will see what they look like re-drawn in vectors, but I like the idea that they have an element of the non-digital in them as well.

Splat!

Jackson Pollock's got a blog. Its meta. http://www.jacksonpollock.org/

My Wife Looks Beautiful When She Sleeps

Inspired by my good friend Gideon, I am going to try to draw more and post more.
http://gideonkendall.squarespace.com/journal

My wife, Jenni, is a beautiful woman, and I think she looks so peaceful and pretty when she's asleep.