Tag Archives: art

Illustration – Nude Study

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There is no genre of art older than the nude study, the bare human form. It commands our attention and often makes some of us turn away, either in modesty or – more sadly – in shame. The question of its endurance as an art-form throughout the ages is an interesting one. To my mind, the nude is deeply symbolic philosophically, and elegant in its accidental eroticism. The nude is both attractive – and to many, uncomfortably attractive – because it symbolizes true vulnerability; exposed flesh presents a form with nothing left to reveal.

The nude subject is in its most confident and vulnerable state, achieving these at the same time. This cannot be found anywhere else, and that is why nude studies are so captivating, so mesmerizing, so subtly profound. We objectify and sympathize, simultaneously, and this duality forces certain truths to snake their way into our consciousness, about how we view our own bodies and how we use them.

I am proud to be both painter and subject in this genre, to continue this great tradition. In a media landscape that barely bats an eye at extreme violence but suppresses the most natural of sexual desires, I regret only that my artwork isn’t more filled with genitalia.

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Self-Portrait With Glasses

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I have hundreds of pages of sketches sitting on my bookshelf. Many of them were produced during a period following the financial collapse of 2008. I was laid off, from three different companies in succession – a bizarre land-speed record, I’d say – and was working in a temporary position at a call center, absorbing other people’s anger and frustration because of their own credit card debt. It was a hard time, but I did the best I could with a worthless education and very few resources of my own. It’s easy enough to satisfy a coffee-shop budget, though, and I re-acquainted myself with a very useful tool: the bicycle.

I was living “on the cheap” during that time. And it wasn’t all-too-terrible.

I met a lot of great people back then, and one of those individuals become a daily collaborator in artistic adventure. We didn’t go to clubs or movies, weekend trips or dinners out on the town. We drank cheep beer and indulged in the most lovely of all free commodities, conversation and creativity. It wasn’t a master’s class in rendering, but rather was a couple of guys occupying various Tucson coffee shops and bars, with mechanical pencils and sketch books at the ready.

We would throw down meaningless – absolutely meaningless – drawing challenges. “Sit here, fool. I’ll sit across from you. Take your pencil. I’ll keep the time. I’ll sit still. You have three minutes. Draw me.”

It was all fun and games. Literally. And it’s actually pretty liberating when you’re guaranteed to fail.

Show me a three-minute ‘perfect’ portrait, and I won’t (necessarily) be surprised; the world is full of genius. But show me that, and you will have shown me one of maybe ten people on earth who can do it. The idea, really, is to short-circuit the very real ‘fear-node’ that prevents one from starting a drawing – or any work of art – in the first place. We wanted to override that fear, eliminate that fear. You have a minute, maybe two. Not many people can sculpt a Michelangelo ‘David’ or paint a ‘Mona Lisa’ in a minute or two. You literally get a free pass. All you have to do is just scribble.

But then I started to revisit the scribbles to see if there might be something worthwhile there. Interestingly, there are a few promising articles, hiding in the piles and piles of otherwise wasted paper.

The image above was a self-portrait challenge. My friend had dropped by the apartment, and it was a woefully empty apartment at the time. My girlfriend – ex-girlfriend – had just moved out to be with a gentleman who played bass guitar in a local band. He was, up until that point, a friend of mine, too. I felt pretty betrayed, pretty alone. Feelings were hurt and I was wounded – my faith in humanity was running shallow. Needless to say, the lack of furniture, the heartache, and the smattering of empty wine bottles about the limited square-footage were probably not resting well with my friends; a few of them were concerned about my well-being.

My buddy Trent was over one day and, after some YouTube time-waste, some cigarettes, and a few beers, he tossed a tattered sketch book at me and instructed me to sit in front of a mirror (plucked from the living room wall, setting on the floor in the living room) and draw myself. The rules for this particular challenge were simple:

1. I wasn’t allowed to look at the paper in my lap; I could only look at my reflection and draw without looking down.
2. I wasn’t allowed to lift my pencil from the page. I had to draw myself without ever lifting my pencil.
3. I had exactly ninety seconds. We both were (are) collectors of stop-watches. He plucked his watch from the pocket of his thrift-store vest, looked up at me, and said…”go.”

I wasn’t surprised by my failure. At the end of the ninety seconds, I looked down and sighed, with relief, that it actually looked like a human being. I quickly buried the sketch with the hundreds of others. It wasn’t until, years later, I started looking at the old sketches, that I started seeing something I couldn’t have seen back then: some of these sketches are actually quite interesting. Our context can blind us, and what seems like a past failure can become a present opportunity. I know that this image isn’t the ticket that’ll save me as a creative professional, but it is interesting to me, today, in a way that it couldn’t have been interesting to me back in 2008.

This image reminds me, in an odd way, of Picasso’s end-of-life drawings. There’s no grandiosity here; I don’t think of myself as possessing the kind of brilliance that Picasso possessed. But there’s a simple, basic, and raw quality to this image, a stylistic quality, that reminds me of some of his lesser works. I’m happy to possess the compulsion to save everything – I would have abandoned this image a long time ago – because I scanned it, archived it digitally, and found it recently while wiping my hard drive.

So here you have it. A broken-hearted man, bespectacled, rendered in pigment and ink on cardboard. A simultaneously confident figure, weighed down with rejection and a crippling fear of loneliness. If you can think of a good title for this piece, please let me know in the comment section.

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January 17 – The Good Book

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01-17 Bibliophile post

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
~Mark Twain

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I have a massive collection of books. A massive collection.

Like many of my ilk, I’ve looked back and realized that I have always been a collector. My younger self collected a wide variety of useless things, from wall posters and semiprecious stones (every family vacation had me on the lookout for rock shops) to previously-viewed VHS tapes and pogs (when  those were in fashion – yeesh, how embarrassing). I continue to collect music, but the most obvious thing I collect, quite naturally, are photographs.

Thinking on it, I collected baseball cards even though I was never, ever a sports fan. Things went pretty sideways once I discovered that trading cards existed for comic books. Heck, my obsession even took me down the path of outright criminality; I got caught stealing Marvel Ultra trading cards at the local supermarket when I was probably twelve or thirteen. I was absolutely terrified by that experience, and painfully ashamed. I also survived and would you believe it, I didn’t steal cards any longer. Instead, I started collecting actual comic books.

The early 1990s were a wonderful time to get into comic books and, for twenty years, I’ve been waiting for those lovely creative people in Hollywood to tell some of those stories on the silver screen. The first major series I got into was an X-Men story-line called “Legion Quest,” in which Professor Charles Xavier’s son travels back in time to execute Magneto, thus preventing all of the damage Magneto has done in his lifetime. It’s another iteration of the “if you could go back in time and kill Hitler” thought experiment. I have always loved this about the X-Men stories. They’re thoughtful, and thought-provoking. Initially, the X-Men were a vehicle through which the authors discussed American prejudice, mirroring the experiences of ethnic minorities. Today, stories of exclusion and oppression also reflect the marriage equality movement. The world is always so quick to point at a group and shout “freaks!” And the X-Men, in these stories, are the freaks. It takes the anguish of real-life problems and de-contextualizes them, allowing us to think about these issues from a fresh perspective. It’s brilliant.

Hero stories are all morality plays in the end, and they’re infinitely more sophisticated than they might appear to be on the surface. It has been fun watching media like graphic novels and video games achieve the mantle of high art and experience legitimacy in the eyes of the wider public. Once upon a time, comic books were for kids and video games were nothing more than a waste of time (and yes, they still can be, so don’t get me wrong). The video game industry has now surpassed Hollywood in generated revenue, and graphic novels are now being made into feature length films.

Progress, ladies and gentlemen. The nerds have won, world. Deal with it.

The “Legion Quest” story-line was jam-packed with the what-if’s of time travel tales, and it laid the foundation for an even larger and monumentally engaging story: “The Age of Apocalypse.” I’m venturing to guess that this is what the next movie, “X-Men: Apocalypse,” will be presenting. It’s an exciting time to be a fan-boy, indeed!

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Needless to say, graphic novels also led to plain-old books. Large-print illustration books, art history books, some first-edition Steinbeck novels, throwaway Vampire Chronicles and Stephen King tomes, and hallowed American classics from the greats like Conrad, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. Every move, from dorm room to apartment, apartment to house, city to city, has seen me lugging impossibly heavy twenty-eight gallon Rubbermaid containers stacked with books. I can’t seem to let them go, and I often will pluck a book off the shelf and thumb through it for inspiration. Hell, I rarely even sold my textbooks back in college.

The picture above is a studio photograph of a pocket bible. On the University of Arizona campus, probably my sophomore year, there was a day when a group of missionaries stood on damn-near every street corner, every intersection, and every entrance to the student union handing these things out. Green vinyl covers and tissue-thin pages. I took every single one that was offered to me as I crisscrossed the campus on my way to class – until there wasn’t any room left in my backpack. I probably made off with about thirty copies. I went immediately to task making art projects out of them, and a series of photographs like the one here. In retrospect, it was probably a little scandalous that I collected all of those books, but I don’t think the world is in short supply of King James Bibles.

I guess the jury’s out, but I’m banking on the Good Lord being as forgiving as they say.

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January 16 – Those “Creative Types” We Know…

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01-16 Creative Types post

Artists and egos go together like milk and cookies, now, don’t they? Where you find the one, you’re likely to find the other. It’s as though creative people are perpetually prepared to defend their work. And we all know what defensive personalities can do, don’t we? That’s right. They can lash out viciously like frightened wild animals. Bisbee boasts a wonderful arts scene in Southern Ariona, and that wouldn’t be a lie. But the happy-go-lucky vibe Bisbee also likes to boast about itself? Well, that’s not entirely correct. The fact is, the economy there is contracting and the town has gentrified significantly from the dirt-cheap 1960s of yore. Rents are higher, fewer dollars are flowing into the town, and there’s greater competition for a seat at the winner’s table. Sometimes there are hurt feelings when you struggle to promote your work, and sometimes you get thrown under the bus. Sometimes our melt-downs are very, painfully public.

That kind of thing happens in a small town, I guess.

During my tenure, I created enough problems for myself with this big old dumb mouth of mine. I’ve also quietly watched other peoples’ struggles unfold like a great big dusty rug on social media, ready for a thorough beating. We take our licks and hopefully learn something from the experience. We also discover who those people are that never seem to enter the arena, but always sit on the sidelines like carnival barkers, ready to cut you down to size, and ready to help fan the flames of a small conflict into a dangerous firestorm. Having a creative passion is something of a spectator sport, especially in a small town, but heck – criticism is part of the game, too.

People that can’t handle criticism should never pursue a career in the arts. Period.

In my humble opinion, when an artist is surrounded only by cheerleaders who celebrate each attempt as though it were the Mona Lisa itself? That’s absolutely freaking wonderful! We all need positive support. But it also means that the artist may be in the perfect position to experiment with something new, to try a new subject, style, venue, audience. The real danger of a town like Bisbee is that it’s such an incredibly small and insular place, and there are a lot of big fish. Things can get ugly when resources are scarce.

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I say all of this not to stoke the flames of malcontent. It appears as though the most recent round of conflict in the Bisbee art scene has played itself out (at least in social media). I say all of this in relation to the image above, made by a gentleman who used to live in the brick building on Brewery Gulch across from the dog park. That is, if anyone ever really recognized it as a dog park. At one point or another, I think I remember people jokingly referring to it as “parvo park,” which didn’t inspire much confidence. Nevertheless, the brick building was festooned with mesh wire, painted mannequins, Christmas lights, and other random, presumably “found” objects. Some viewed it as an eyesore, others loved it. Visitors could be seen taking pictures of it with their smartphones every weekend.

I can’t pick sides. I don’t know the whole story. I just know that the eccentric old beast who decorated that building doesn’t live in Bisbee any longer. He may have brought it upon himself, or maybe somebody just didn’t like the cut of his jib. The extent of my knowledge is that he was run out of town. The right mixture of hubris, ego, madness, creativity, and drugs will always yield interesting results – and I’m confident all of those elements were at play. When creative types collide, sparks fly.

It’s my understanding he lives in Jerome now and he’s happy there, so there’s that. I don’t miss the dog park, but I do kind of miss the crazy decorations on that old building.

Oh well. Time marches on.

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