"please raise your right hand"

uncle sean

Maybe it's morbid, but right this moment I'm thinking about uncle Sean.  My mother's only brother to survive 'Nam.  He ran a clothing store in Birmingham.  And then one day he disappeared.  Gay men disappeared in the south.  Also men (& women) of my mother's generation, people associated with the Weather Underground, also disappeared.  My mother was associated with the W.U. for a bit.  Mainly because she'd lost two brothers already.  Sean was somebody I don't clearly remember.  He has a face like a forgotten Polaroid.  The light falling on his mustache being forgotten by the photograph itself, by the photographers, by time.  It falls across his glasses like it's being poured from around the edges of blackout curtains, it falls in funnels through the lenses onto eyes that hide their colour.  Were his eyes hazel?  Like my mother's, or like mine?  Did we all have that trait of eyes that were never green, nor blue, nor the colour of cut fall grass?  Everyone knew Sean was gay.  Most of my mother's friends were, too.  One day Sean didn't show up to open his clothing store.  After a week we were all pretty certain he was missing, but no-one knew why.  The bills were paid.  The store wasn't in anything resembling debt.  As far as my mother would speculate, Sean wasn't into anything with anyone.  He was a pretty quiet, unassuming guy.  He had been an artist, and then he stopped, and fashion became his life.  A disappointment to his mother, and an inspiration to his sister, and a ghost to his nephew.  My parents stopped talking about Sean after a year.  And then he never came up again.  A story without an ending.  As simple a mystery as ever lived.  One day is A.  The next day is not-A.  Sean.  No Sean.  My mother never knew.  So I don't know.

Mystery as hereditary trait.  An heirloom enigma.  Why did he leave?  Did he leave?  Or did he get pulled over by a cop, one night in Alabama.  Did he meet someone strange?  Did someone take him from us?

Uncle Sean is a locked, sealed room, labeled 1981-1982?  I don't have the key for it anywhere.

Trust me, I searched.

leading by example

me:  (cleaning)

twentysomething rando:  "You should really get an Instagram going.  Reach out to people and show them what they can do."

me:  "I'm not an internet creature.  I'd rather just lead by example."

rando:  "But people could see what you do..."

me:  "People can see what I'm doing now.  And maybe they follow suit.  I don't have to campaign."

rando:  "Well I'm glad you're doing it.  I saw you working down there, really going farther than you have to.  The gays really make a mess."

me:  "Yeah, I'm one of the gays.  I'm like, 'You guys could really try to keep it nicer, for the straights.'"

rando:  "I didn't mean any--"

me:  "Leading by example."  (walk off) 

beachcleaning / markmaking

Yesterday was an OCD day.  But the basic model kind.  First I took my OCD out on the beach, digging in the dunegrass for cans, scouring the land of all its impacted water bottle caps, and being generally observable by the lazyass patrons as "That guy is cleaning every corner."  Knocked out two full sized garbage bags of rubbish.  Then I took a break to write a while, beginning the Grand Re-Type (as this phase of the process is known) of PROMISELAND, doing five pages.  No major edits, yet.  Then I went back do it, knocking out another bag and taking on a broader swath of greenspace.  After THAT, I went home and started inking.

Inking when I have OCD is one of those things.  Ink is sacred.  Especially when doing brush stuff.  Fucking up is hard on my psyche.  So I try to get the condition "tamed" before doing anything artistic.  Clearly I succeeded, because the brushes behaved and there weren't any hiccoughs of Intent.  As long as the Intent behind the mark-making is pure, the work is true.  But if there's anything hinky going on in my brain things go sideways.  I was cautious, to be sure; mostly the inking was stark bucketfill, with some minor dry brush; I saved the major detail focus for the very end, placing drop shadows and adding weight to elements of the face.

The only lines which may be placed on a Prepared Drawing--  a drawing that's been through all the stages of development, multiple sketches & careful composition  --are lines that Belong.  Lines which "belong" are lines that either emphasize or complete an element of an image.  An eye, for example, may be almost entirely drawn, but if it needs weight or shading along the edges of the eye's orbit (the folds of the lid, say, or defining the planes of the nose & brow) then those should be placed as they are Noticed.  If you see something absent, affix a light stroke in the absence's vicinity.  Affix it where the light source(s) would place it, quickly and by instinct, as light itself does.

This may sound very casual, but it's true:  action's truth is in its invention.  An absence may not be Seen or Noticed until the other ink is placed and cementing itself in the paper.  Absence must be created, as much as anything...  But be cautious: the aim is not to make work, but make work whole.

Casual, shit, this stuff probably sounds Mystical to anyone who doesn't have wrong with their brain what I do, with mine.  Not every drawing winds up like this.  Only the ones my mind deems important.  Sketches, I could give a toss.  Improvisation isn't alien to me.  But some art, it achieves a higher rank in my mind, and must be executed in a certain way.  That's when the rules of behavior start to creep in.  That's when I know the OCDemon is upon me.  The "rules" I have bolded here are not things I consciously think; they are conclusions extracted from an unconscious, semi-conscious, state of null.  The nullity is one of feeling as much as mind.  I do not sit to ink, when under the influence of obsessive-compulsive disorder, unless I am empty of desire.

Which may or may not be 100% true, sometimes.  Because nobody starts working on something serious or "important" without desire of result.  The archer does not notch or loose an arrow without the truth of intent within them.  But are Truth of Intent and Desire of Result mutually exclusive?  I shouldn't think so.  Nothing is mutually exclusive except in chemistry or higher math.  But then, this is not science. this is OCD.  And OCD is groping in the dark with gloves on and a dulled grasp.  I only know what is right, and I am not always right about what is...

Selah.

semi-social / isolation

I'm the sort of asshole who can't do parties.  Generally speaking.  Work has a party, I can't.  Everyone insists they want me to attend, I can't.  The whole crew makes a point of it, I can't.  The person it's for, my boss, she's having a baby shower--  but I just can't.  I leave an envelope offering to do a baby portrait and vanish in a puff of Can't.

And when I disappear down to the beach, to sit in my favourite tree & finish reading about the contemporary history of the theory of postmodernism--  I still can't.  People notice me and remark on how cute I look sitting there, how perfect a place to sit that is, etcetera:  I just can't.  Do I speak to anyone?  Do I interact?  The hell I can.

Eventually the book's done & I descend quiet as a raccoon to fuck off home, to contemplate dinner and whether or not I have anything else in me.  Can I finish art?  Do I want to?  The visualizing comes easy.  The wherewithall, maybe it's the trade war, maybe there's shortages.  In the main, though, it's the people all around.  I want to be social:

But the actuality of interaction, all these voices, all this clamour over fuckall--  it's people.  People make it impossible.  If it were only animals, only insects, only plants swaying in the wind...  But I crave to be able to "relate" to others, to talk, to bridge the surrounding emptiness.  And I can't.  I only want my husband.  I don't want the rest of the world.

the burroughs folio: mikey portman

finished the linework.  have to do the brush and fill in blacks but all the fiddly details are done.  and there were a surprising amount of fiddly details.  i gave myself the assignment but i really didn't know what it would entail until the memo landed on my desk, as it were.  i wrote it but i gave myself a WIDE BERTH on how to interpret & depict things.  sometimes that's a bad thing because i wrestled with this illustration an unreasonably long time considering how essentially simple the composition is.  the proportions of the page are awkward, perhaps...  i grow tired of doing the portraits all on this size paper, but i'm nearly through with this damned thing, so i can go on whether i can't go on or not.  it will be liberating to work on other illustrations of different (greater) proportions again.  i never thought of myself as an artist who Works Big but i've grown to truly enjoy having a fuckin' enormous canvas.  everything feels constraining now

102° in the shade

& Chicago is aswarm with biting flies.  Husband is on his way to visit fam.  Storms on the horizon.

Welcome to the freshly dead dog days.  Bleargh!

Time to count how many comix I've read this year.  And fix some fucked-up anatomy on the Michael Portman portait.  The Burroughs Folio is halfway there.  Maybe I'll tackle the architecture & lighting on the Ian Sommerville portrait next.

Or maybe I'll have the courage to tackle A HERO OF THE FEVER...?

Musing on materials a lot.  Part of why I like chalk so much is it embeds atmosphere in the paper: it works into the weave and powderizes as it works its way ever downward into the paper until its remotest particles hit a ledge and ultimate compression.  Blue chalk worked into paper is as pure as the sky itself, and contains that sense of vapour (and / or humidity).  Chalk is as elemental as charcoal in this respect.

Ink, of course, is Carbon, and is therefore both capable of embodying our bones and blood and representing them, applied scientifically.  And then there's just the blank of any page, which is air and Being itself.  I'll likely never move past physical media because the physical is the medium, to me.  Comics are Real Things, and must be made (by me) with True Elements, not a bunch of post-hoc squiggly "correction" & filtrations with Apps.

Not to preach.  Digital comix are just as truly Comix as anything and I'm not saying anything against them for anyone but MYSELF and perhaps having a long-lived physical record on one's existence as a Creator as opposed to the befuddled flaming moth known as the Consumer.  I'm just an old bitch with opinions.

"Physical media is physical."  I'm the Forrest Gump of comix is what I am.  Lord.

Do you know how long it's taken me to fix this fucking hand in this picture?  I only have two of them to look at, it's not as if I'm lacking for models, yet somehow I couldn't get my head around the configuration of the bones so I could DRAW the fucking thing...  and it's taken half a year of irritibly erasing & re-sketching to get it right.  When I bitch about my skull fracture screwing up my ability to think this is the sort of thing I mean.

I *am* the Forrest Gump of comix.  With more mood swings and memory gaps.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - September 2o26

 [freshly-plagued by biting flies edition.  welcome to the heat dome...]

StormWatch #44 (1996) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Tom Raney

Fell #1-9 (2005-08) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Ben Templesmith

A Body Beneath: collecting issues 2-5 of the Comic Book Series, 'Lose' (2009-'13) - written & illustrated by Michael DeForge

Correspondence from the End of the Universe vol. 3 (2020) - written & illustrated by Menota 

The Ticking (2005) - written & penciled by Renee French

Anti-Gone (2017) - written & illustrated by Connor Willumsen

from the shores of lake canada

It's no longer lake Michigan.  Because I say.  If google can be so broken it wears a gimp mask in public & apple can be so rich they'll disavow sensible design elements like headphone jacks, why can't I decide for my own damned self that Michigan is a rubbish name for a rubbish peninsular state, and they don't bloody deserve a lake.  Now it's lake Canada, and I'm pretty pleased with how easy the process was.  I didn't have to poll anybody, didn't have to fill out any forms or schedule a Youtube Instant Premiere 'signing ceremony'--  even though my favourite kind of televised ceremony does happen to be watching a senescent diapermonger pretend to write his name with a sharpie, there are only so many hours in a day --nope, just wrote "HELLO, MY NAME IS: LAKE CANADA" on a post-it and appended it to the No Lifeguards On Duty sign.  Voilà!  New, better lake.  It was that easy.

Why doesn't everyone do this?

i have flashbacks (part the second)

...and three days later I tell him about them.

He doesn't judge me.

You knew he wouldn't.  So did I.  But admitting to being even a little crazy is a tuff gnarl.  Takes a lot of rolling words around in your mouth with sincere deliberation to get them in sensible order.

But I did it.