comfort zone

Well, they say you have to paint your way through a whole pile of shitty paintings to get to the good ones. My painting on Monday was terrible. But to be fair, that was mostly because I was too stupid to realize I was painting on paper disguised as canvas, and it was not a surface that liked oil paint.

Fuck you, paper, I thought.

Then I hurried to apologize, because paper is my first true love.

There's a statue of St. Michael at my kid's school that I like a lot. He's really pretty, with a wild helmet, a swirly skin-tight super suit, and alarming nipples. Most statues of St. Michael have him stomping on a monster's face, but this guy is just taking his time, walking over and listing all the reasons he's about to kick your ass.

 

  He'd make a nice painting. IF I KNEW HOW TO PAINT.

The wolves have been out in force this winter, devouring my friends and their children. I haven't been able to attend the funerals, or administer angry hugs, or pour coffee straight down their throats. All I'm good for are cutting remarks to insensitive jerks online and signatures on office 'get well' cards and blips of text in the inbox. So I ordered a couple packs of blank postcards. A piece of mail is like an amulet or a talisman that can keep the wolves back for just a few more minutes.

I hope.

And maybe they'll also remove their teeth from my pant leg.

stylish and hot

The other day I was doing some research for a painting and found this:

This fits my style aesthetic.

But since I can't wear a sexy monk robe to work, I finished knitting the Victorian blouse that has been on the needles for a few months. This is supposed to be a painting prop, but I have already rolled it into a log and put it in a drawer to forget about.

It kept my hands busy and the thought zombies away for a while, anyway.

And leftover yarn means MAKE MORE DOILES. Turns out I don't actually have to worry about becoming a weird doily lady, because the ones that don't get used as frisbies or chicken blankets end up under potted plants until they rot to pieces. Demand > supply. Who knew.

  

So the last few weeks have not been great. The news has been grim, the kids were stuck home with me while it rained torrentially for days on end (see: aggressively knitting doilies), and I handed over all my workshop-travel money to the mechanics who failed my truck's inspection just because the hood was smoking when I pulled up. And because the emergency brake wasn't working. And the wheels were about to fall off.

FINE.

Today the man finally took the kids out so I could paint, because I was stress-baking and stress-cleaning and stress-shopping-for-cabins-in-the-Yukon.

It's too bad I poured all my money into the truck's leaking oil pan, because it is becoming apparent that my next workshop should have been with someone who knows how to paint flowers. Or tree bark.

 Did you know trees can just sprout flowers out of their trunks if they want to? 

They can in the haunted gulch.

It looks okay from a distance, though. Will hang it somewhere difficult to get close to. Like over the washing machine.

Going to try some landscape painting next, and then it's straight back to butts and portraiture.

disappoint

* Went to first-ever eye exam for prescription glasses, due to increasing blindness. Optometrist smiled and said, "Well! You actually still have 20/20 vision, your eyeballs are just too tired and old to focus, due to middle age." 

So now I have reading glasses, and can see very slightly better. Underwhelmed. I expected to be able to see a crystalline world of razor-sharp threads and hairs and distant leaves. I can read the fine print on my boxes of tea again, at least.

* WE CAUGHT THE GODDAMN ROOSTER. All week, I had a big collapsible dog kennel in the trunk of my car, which I figured could be turned into a goddamn rooster trap just by pretending it actually was one. We waited for the weekend to set it up, because I was afraid that if we rigged & baited it and went to work, we would return to discover it completely filled with cats, and maybe parts of a rooster. Or filled with roosters and parts of a cat. In the end, Gavin tricked him into the chicken coop, we chased him into the kennel, and then he went for a one-way drive into the nearest forested area. Which was by the NSA headquarters. For a secrety-type security network, they are not very alert to people ditching wild chickens right outside their offices. Unless they’ve already apprehended Stu the Rooster. Or they SENT HIM. Very clever. We played right into their hands.

At this point, almost all the pictures on my phone are gifs, sorry

* Remember that comic I was making last year? I have finally put my self-doubt in a choke-hold long enough to post the darn thing. Link to the Wilds of Wahiawa tumblr page is on the left. Maybe I'll keep going with it.

* I painted a bug - which someone actually wants to buy. It's a weird feeling. Thinking I might have to put up a shop or something, to get these things out of my basement.

* Gave the Duralar another try, and discovered that I like painting elbows. Also I like the transparency of the mylar in the shadows, making it glow a bit.

* It is choke-your-children-with-coin-studded-pancakes day! And Lent starts tomorrow, to save us all from Valentine's Day. Rejoice. Here is the ridiculously easy butterscotch sauce recipe I use for these occasions, go make some.

finished painting, unfinished business

My watch buzzed while I was at work on Saturday and announced that I had an incoming image text. I ran to my phone, thinking, Oh boy! They caught the goddamn rooster and it's a picture of the rooster tied up in a sack like a cartoon villain! But then I opened it and was disappointed because it was just a picture of our niece competing live on ESPN for some championship college running thing. File under: I'm a Terrible Person.

At the moment of this posting, the rooster is out there cockadoodling like an asshole on top of the chicken coop. Since we can't catch him by ambush or stealth or ingenuity, we have decided to play the long game; we will feed him, and befriend him, and lure him into our arms, and then probably kiss him and love him and keep him instead of chucking him over a bridge.

If anyone has any tips for non-lethal rooster removal, please advise.

GO AWAY STU

Anyway, I finished the latest painting. I can see a dozen things I would fix, but I need to mooove on.

Shook all those little problem details out of my brain with a sketch of one of the decorative statues I have all over the house.

I have been feeling aware of my mortality this week, and it makes me want to paint everything - my family, the house, the town, the hobos, the plants at the botanical gardens, best-loved articles of clothing or jewelry or motorcycle gear. If I had time, I would pack up the plein air easel and revisit important landscapes, sit down with old faces. Leave a body of work that shows a whole picture of a life lived.

Well, no reason not to just get started on all that anyway. At the outside, we have three or four good adult decades to get everything done before the limbs start trembling and the eyesight fails and everything starts snapping off at the joints. GET TO WORK, EVERYONE.

I'm going to go see if Stu the Goddamn Rooster will accept a model fee and come sit for me.

Hourly comics day 2018

This is a participation-ribbon kind of post. I didn't have the good grace to get really sick and spend the day drawing at home this year, so I just scribbled notes every hour and then put it all together at the end of the day. It was kind of a dull, grey day, which is good because it was easy to record, and bad because - damn - this is my LIFE. 

Oh, well.