Daytime TV

I have recently had the luxury of getting a late start to my days. I get up late have a cup of coffee and usually if I have no-one to talk to I'll turn on the tv. I remember daytime TV being bad from when I was a kid in the summertime but it had been a long time since I'd been around during those hours with the freedom to hang out and watch TV, so it seemed fresh somehow. I like the juxtaposition of all of the self help style programs with the Judge Joe Brown's and Soaps. I really like watching the commercials because it lets you know who the advertisers and stations believe are watching based on their extensive demographic science. The commercials are cheaply made and a lot of them have to do with getting you a cash pay out on an injury settlement that you haven't technically even been awarded yet. All sorts of promises of loans for people with bad credit based on trust. Anti fat magic pills and life alert.

I like making up an image of who is watching based on these clues and I think it helps me get some flesh on some of the characters that come out in my drawings. Most of them are basically these partially broken men that I create as a way of calling out my fears and warming up to our imperfect humanity. Through the development of these characters I hope the fragmented stories I'm telling shift their significance toward the shared from the personal.

Riding the Bus

I have never had a  drivers license. Driving gave me panic attacks as a teen because I felt like there was too much going on and that I couldn't keep track of all of the vital things like not crashing. I almost got into a bad crash because I was driving a ford explorer with really narrow yet closely spaced pedals and hit the gas when I meant to hit the brake. I almost fucked somebody up pretty good in that Safeway parking lot in california wine country and haven't had the courage/desire to drive again.

So I've been a perpetual passenger all of these years. Primarily I ride the bus. There is something really grounding about the bus. The bus is such a democratic mix of people. Imagine another circumstance where  hard-luckers, old people, disabled people, students and business folk have to sit next to each other, have to smell each other and eavesdrop on each other. It is a great place to take a closer look at people whom I would normally only see in briefer encounters. I watch and watch others watching.

I wear big headphones to make people think I'm not paying attention but secretly I'm cataloging.

Ideally my compositions will have the same diversity. The same uncomfortable and movingly human encounters.  I don't want to make limousine art I wanna make bus art.

Music

Music is a really big influence on me. I listen to it nearly all of the time. I have my ipod in my pocket nearly every time I leave the house and will put it on even if I'm walking only a couple of blocks. Music sets the atmosphere for me in a really cinematic sort of way. I try to score my life as it unfolds and will spin that goddamned wheel for several minutes trying to find the song that accentuates the scene. Music is another way to glimpse subcultures too. I imagine who the super fan of a certain band might be. How old are they? What would they wear? What else might they like?

Some of this springs from the fact that I like so many different kinds of music and I wonder what people might be able to make of it if they knew the range. Am I more Jim Croce or Ice Cube?

There is also a compositional system used in classical music called fugue and I think it relates to the way I work at times. I don't totally understand it, but the gist of the process is that the first step is the establishment of a theme that then gets picked up and altered slightly by each voice in the ensemble. After these variations are established they are woven together to form a complex single piece with all parts playing simultaneously. Then in the end there are some formal ways of winding it up but I'm not really interested in the end. It is the beginning and middle that I relate to most in terms of my work right now.

The Bins

There is the place in Milwaukee Oregon that has all sorts of unsifted stuff from goodwill donation centers. Or maybe it has been sifted and they think they got the good stuff out already. Either way it is one of my favorite places. It is this big warehouse full of 4 by 8 ft bins haphazardly filled with an odd array of semi-broken appliances, incomplete sets of dishes, clothes, books, parts, christmas decorations, furniture, and lamps. I go there to sift through the bins , mostly looking for paper because everything under 5 lbs is sold by weight. If there is a roll of paper I buy it. if there is anything handwritten I buy it. I am afraid of the people there who seem like pros and are totally willing to jockey for position on new bins with elbows raised and eyebrows scrunched. I think some people live off of reselling stuff they find there so for them it is serious business. People there act like rats and keep shopping carts covered with sheets at the edge of the warehouse and run from the bin with their new find to stash it out of sight. I really like the idea of gleaning both for material and ideas. It is really important for me to have materials and ideas arise more or less organically. I have a hard time trusting ideas I come up with while trying to come up with ideas. I do much better when I try to hone my ability to recognize the value in a passing thought or chance encounter. Ideally I'd just harvest what's at hand and leave the overt calculations alone.

I was talking to a sculptor friend the other day and we were discussing what makes a lot of traditional sculpture we see so stale. I was wondering if it might be the process itself that turns things in that direction. Like I couldn't just go in and do a bronze pour at the drop of a hat and even if I could the materials are expensive so it isn't likely that I'd just improvise what I was going to do. Its like the time it takes to plan out the initial impulse becoming the finished piece takes too long and the idea isn't as flexible and lively as it was at the start because it can't really change past a certain point. I think that is why drawing and photography might be my current favorite modes of expression. I can translate even the most minor idea quickly and capture it in the spirit in which it came.  Maybe the idea is dumb or maybe its the best thing I've ever come up with but they'll both be treated the same and weighed only after the fact. 

Voyeurism

Recently I've had to own up to the fact that I am a total voyeur at times. I love walking by people's houses at night and looking in their windows. I don't stop and look because somehow that feels creepy, but I do try to see as much as I can while I walk by. What is it like in  there? Does it seem cozy or cold? Who lives there and what television programs do they watch? Do they know I can see in ? Would they care if they did? I like to see people in their little animal dens as they unwind from the day and brace for the next one. I treat it sort of like a bootleg biologist who is examining the habitat of a creature that they want to understand better. It helps me remember that people still retain more of their animal innocence than we think. We're still scared of the dark. We're still afraid of feeling exposed. It reminds me that most of us are just trying to live and doing the best we can.

Chess

Recently my friend Shelby and I have been playing a lot of chess. Our games have become these mental wrestling matches and I have realized that I have a pretty healthy competitive streak. We are evenly matched so our games tend to be long and draw out yet manage to remain unpredictable until the end. Chess is such a decisive game. You have only one move to counter the move of your opponent and have to try to think several moves ahead in order to get the upper hand. I like that even in this simple system I can't seem to predict what will happen. It is helping me cultivate a broader and keener sense of vision where the parts in play are not the only parts on the radar.

I often think of the little series of drawings I work on as being like games. I  usually just begin to do something and if I enjoyed it I try to repeat it and see if I can enjoy it a second time without getting bored. I can't make the next one too much like the last one or I lose interest.

Police Sketches

I frequently find myself on the computer with no real purpose. In times like this I often go to google image search and just start typing in whatever comes to mind. Doing this I stumbled onto a collection of police sketches that totally blew my mind. I can't really say why I loved them so much. Maybe its the fact that It felt weird to look at portraiture in that context. Portraits are usually reserved for the important or the people who have enough money to pretend. They also seem like boogeymen. Like they are these super loaded fantasies that are designed to frighten people. So these approximations of people become these frightening icons. I also was interested in how some of the people making the sketches were less technically able to get a workable likeness. I liked thinking that there are there places that are better for committing crimes because their local police artist sucks. I also like how they are most often just a head. In some ways I think of my little drawings as police sketches of a sort.  I like the way a portrait can imply an event or story.

Graffiti

I have always been interested in graffiti as a practice but even more so as an idea. I like the ownership marking something implies. I like doodling on trash. I like collaborating with people I'll never know and I like the idea that what I've done might end up as trash again and that someone a hundred years from now might find it and find a way to make it their own like I did. I've never had the whatever it is that drives people to write on the wall without permission but in my own little world I'm happy to mark up surfaces I find.

History

I am really fascinated with history and how it isn't as cut and dry as we like to think. So much information gets lost or disorganized. I think this is partly why I am attracted to old materials. I feel like they are fragments that add to the overall story but that are small enough that I can't really make sense of them. I like finding handwritten notes and am fascinated by the idea that someone, somewhere in a time I did not live through interacted with this object or piece of paper. It might have been special to them but I find them now basically in the trash. For instance I found pages from this German bible from 1909. It was clearly someone's family bible because it had the names of multiple people in different handwriting all with the same last name. This was somebody's family heirloom and somehow through death or disinterest it ends up thrown out in the least ceremonious way possible. I like to think of them as some sort of symbol of cultural change. The things that were important to people before me have in some ways become trash. It really provides me with an opening to fantasize about the lives of people in different times in the same way I wonder about the people I see on the bus or through the window at night.

The Writings of Michele de Montaigne and Francois Rabelais

There is something really comforting to me about the good natured irreverance of these two 16th century french authors/thinkers. I first encountered their work when I was about 17 or 18. My mom had been a a student of French in college and my parents loved books and never threw them out. I found these school books on the shelf in the apartment I was sharing with my dad, brothers and sister many years after my parents split up and instantly fell in love. I remember feeling like these guys were the least full of shit authors I had ever encountered. They were funny, unconventional, thoughtful and ultimately, sincere. Montaigne's collected essays are like the bible to me. I consult them in times of stress and find them to be incredibly reassuring even as they approach 500 years old. There is also a blunt pragmatisim in  them that I think has influenced my development as a person and the way I think about my work