New Drawing Book Piece

Here's a new piece that I assembled from scraps I had laying around. The Rembrandt self-portrait copy is from a few years back when I was demonstrating linocuts. The same goes for the trilobites. The watercolored background is a little more interesting. I normally keep a scrap of paper laying around on my desk in order to clean out watercolor brushes. Usually that paper looks like what it is: a mess. But this time it turned out looking like a real watercolor! So I kept it and put it into my magnificent collage.

Collage-o-rama

Yes, you say. That's all very "interesting", you say. But what does it mean? Always with the what does it mean. Why can't you folks just look at a piece of artwork and appreciate it for its plastic qualities? ("Plastic" is a word which here means characterized by an emphasis on formal structure.) Notice the three horizontal bands in the composition: black pen, COLOR!, black pen. It's visual action sandwiched by calm line work. What about the left hand side being filled with imagery and it being offset by the right hand side's minimal imagery? That's some dynamic symmetry for ya! How does the seemingly random watercolor relate to the rigidity of the linocut line work? What tension! What part does the text play in how we see this piece? The big, fat letters are on the left, under the portrait and large trilobite; while the monster head is on the right, above the visually light, skinny letters and small trilobite. It seems to provide a sense of movement or tumbling as the heavy top right wants to fall over into the thinner, emptier bottom right. Or does the imagery on the left-hand side anchor it sufficiently?

Wow! Such questions to ponder before we ever get to what does it "mean". Artwork is not a didactic book, it is meant to be seen first, and then we can think about what it means. By the way, I won't tell you what this means. Maybe it doesn't mean much of anything. Or maybe it comments on the vision of the great artist, Rembrandt and what his powers of seeing were able to behold. Your choice.

Drawings Done in Worship or Heads and Arthropods

For all of you who are, no doubt, just coming to this blog and finding the artwork here compelling, I have been writing about the history of my drawing books. You might say that is fascinating and you would be right! The drawing books are where it all happens. They are the place where ideas bounce and roll around for months, if not years. They are where things distill, ferment, simmer, condense, and other cooking-related things happen to ideas. However, what kind of a dish I am making often doesn't become clear for many months into a book.

Two heads

That was true of this book. In fact, I'm still unsure as to what I've made. I gave myself one rule early on in the making of this book: everything had to be drawn from life. There is only one page (that I'm not showing you) where I drew strictly from my imagination. It's not bad, it just doesn't fit.

A head and an arthropod

So I spent(d) a lot of time in church and a lot of drawing can be done there. When I was a Presbyterian, there was A LOT of time to draw during sermons (now I typically have 15 to 20 minutes during a homily!). Anyway, I ended up drawing a lot of heads of people in church. Hence the title of this book. I also drew a ton of crap, crawdad, lobster, arthropods in this book. Hence the alternative title.

Two more heads (presbytery is even longer than the longest sermon!)

The book itself is a pocket sized Moleskine. I bought it on clearance and thought I'd give these "legendary" books a try. It wasn't for me. I didn't care for the hardness of the paper or the way it accepted wet media. I'm sure they have models for that but I like making my own books so much I think I'll just stick to that.

By the by, you can see some of these drawings elsewhere on this blog. But you'll have to hunt for them. And also, I have a lot more scans from this book, and since I am fond of them, I'll post more of them next week.

Sins Committed Sins Remitted

My post on Monday was kind of a cheat. I know that. But then again, this new baby is sucking an awful lot of energy out of our family. It's funny how 7 to 10 pounds of fury and need can run a whole family! Eva is our sixth child and, as such, one can be forgiven for thinking I would remember how difficult newborns are. AHA! That's exactly where they get you! If you remembered how hard it is to have little babies, then you would never dream of having another one. "Never dream"... of course we don't dream now... since we NEVER SLEEP! Or, I should say, my wife never sleeps. I'm sleeping okay, but I have sympathy exhaustion. It's the very least I can do.

We must press on with my narcissistic need... errr... commitment to explicating my work to an inquiring public. It's time to talk DRAWING BOOKS! Specifically the drawing book done immediately after Family Resemblances. As I said, I spent about 4 years making that book and I didn't want to do that again. So I made a much thinner book in Sins Committed, Sins Remitted. 

Sins Committed, Sins Remitted. Those little designs between the words are crosses of persecution.

Albrecht Durer starts things off the right way.

As I was going through this book to get some images to show all my fans out there, I realized this book was filled with collages. I don't know if that means I really liked some of my old prints or if it means I was exceptionally lazy. Probably both.

Actually what I think happened is that I used a strange kind of laid paper that was two-sided – blue on one side and buff on the other. It wasn't really conducive to drawing as much as it made a great surface for collage. It's funny how materials can go a long way in dictating imagery.

Lies

This man is a liar and he has begun to believe his lies.

The drunken minotaur

I have written about minotaurs before, so there's no need to rehash all of that here. But it seemed like a good idea to draw a savage minotaur with a martini and a dainty cigarette. The alligator on the left was the beginnings of a design that I was commissioned to do.

Yeahhhrrrrrrrgghhhhh! :-)

 These guys sing for joy. They exult in their excellence as they are the mighty brachiosaurus and the cunning ceratosaurus!

Oroboros, Jormungandr and a very small tribute to Doug TenNapel

Pig and Alligator

Here's more stuff from that alligator commission. The client wasn't sure exactly what he wanted, so I tried my best to give him full-throttle coolness. There's a hog skull and an alligator skull and crossbones here.

Bird and Skull

The North Museum in Lancaster, PA had a great collection of stuffed birds on its bottom floor. I spent a lot of hours down there looking at those birds, but this is the only drawing I ever made of any of them. The skull is from an old woodcut that I recycled.

This is a small and colorful book. I like it very much. It took about a year to finish. I took some time off before my next, unorthodox book. The one that I will write about next time...

Family resemblances part II

Here's the part where I tell you of my woes. Many thousands of you will have missed my post on Monday. Because there wasn't one. I will just chalk it up to the fact that I have a newborn along with five other kids and a lovely wife who need my attention. If keeping a blog could be construed as a rather selfish thing to do – especially one that is almost completely about my own artwork – then writing one while life is swirling at hurricane speed most certainly is.

So this is my version of a clip show. All of these are from Family Resemblances just like last week. As I said, I really love that book and want to show you a fair bit of it! (Not all of it, not by a looooong shot!) We have lots of woodcuts, collages, maker and watercolor work.

Family Resemblances part I

After finishing my last drawing book, Interplanetary Ambassador,  I knew I had made a mistake in the way I was thinking about the art of a drawing book. If you'll remember, I said I finished that book in about 8 months. Well, this new book will take 4 years to finish. It's called Family Resemblances because everything in it sort of looks like it belongs; nothing is quite the same as everything else, but it isn't separate either. You know? Anyway, I got the name from Ludwig Wittgenstein which you can read about here if you want to. It's not that I was reading Wittgenstein so much as I think I was listening to a lecture about him. Or something like that. The name stuck in my brain and it seemed to work well for this book.

We got some natural history action here. Birds will fly into windows and I will try not to let them go to waste.

I say this book took four years to make. That's because I had gotten my MFA, moved away for "work" and had a baby (my wife actually had the baby; but I was there!). All of a sudden I found that life was not so amenable to me spending untold hours toiling away in my drawing books. It's a big book, no doubt, but not that big, for Pete's sake. I was just unsettled and not able to work on my artwork. It happens.

Oh, yeah! Collage! The bull skull on the right was one of the greatest Christmas gifts I have ever gotten.

I went back, more or less, to the every-page-is-a-work-of-art model that I had gotten into before. That's okay I guess because I really love this book! There are plenty of pages that I still like very much. In fact, there are so many that I will split this post into two. But isn't that self indulgent? I suppose so, and thank you for asking. Certainly you are concerned – especially in this season of Lent – that I am too focused on myself. Well, the thing is, this is my blog where I write about my own work. So I guess it's okay.

Minotaurs and Monsters – a Clark classic.

This one had a lot of impact on later artwork for me. It's genesis (pun!) goes all the way back to Natural History and will continue into a few linocuts that I made as illustrations for the book The Beginning: A Second Look at the First Sin published by Square Halo Books.

Here's another one that grew legs and made its way into a larger painting which you can read about here.

Next time I'll write more about what some of these images are about.

Interplanetary Ambassador

Oh man. Boy howdy. Remember how I said I almost sold my drawing book, Concerning Religious Affections, for a lousy 500 bucks?! Remember that I said I was sick to death of looking at a complicated, all-consuming drawing book? Well, I set out to rectify that with this new book.

While I was tired of the fancy art-piece book, I still wanted to keep a drawing book of some kind. I was enamored of bookbinding by this point and wanted to try a new technique. The coptic stitch I was using was good, but I wanted something more book-like. So I went with a case bound book. (This is the only time I have done this. It's pretty much coptic all the way for me now unless I find something to surpass its beautiful lay-open-flat quality.)

Well, there I was with a new book, a healthy disdain for the whole drawing book enterprise and a very time-consuming thesis project. (The thesis project that I am writing about on Mondays, that is.) I made this book very small with the idea that it wouldn't eat up all of my creative energies. At this, I was a raging success!

Behold the crappy depths to which my drawing book sank!

This book is called Interplanetary Ambassador after a random mailer I received that was soliciting members for some dopey science club. Anyway, this book can be broken into two halves, more or less. The first part is where I was working on my thesis project. This is the part where you can find all kinds of notes, loose sketches, bad drawings, a general malaise of perfunctoriness. Then I finished the thesis project and found that I wanted to make good work in this book. That's when things started to pick up and the second half of the book was made. It has drawings, prints, collages and more.

A mostly unused idea for my thesis.

A slightly more used idea for my thesis.

Of course, I may be an unreliable narrator here. There are some gems in this book where I used it to work out some of my thesis ideas. Mostly ideas that I did not use, but still... In all this book is a mixed bag. It has some really good ideas and a few drawings that I'm still proud of, but it also has a lot of... clutter. I spent about 8 months on this book, which makes it the most quickly completed of my books by far.

Here are a couple of those gems:

Predator and prey...

Collage!

More collage!

Probably my favorite image in the book.

Concerning Religious Affections

Continuing my megalomaniacal obsession with my old drawing books, I will now talk about Concerning Religious Affections. I was fresh off my book Natural History and I had something to prove... to myself anyway. Because, as I have said, college is a time of intense self-interest and I'm not sure anyone else noticed what I was up to!

I dug out a couple of old woodcuts and etchings that I had done years before that were almost successful. That's the thing with me; I don't throw anything out. Well, anywho, I took those etchings, folded them down into signatures and then I made covers out of the very colorful woodcuts. To say I was excited about starting this book is an understatement. I started it off with a red velvet inside cover for Pete's sake! I glued in a couple of real fish! Heavens to Betsy! Heavens to Murgatroid, I even gave it a title page. Sheesh.

This is drawn on top of an old etching. 

Drawing on etching. And as a matter of curiosity, the splatter is from a very minor cut that I got on my finger. I can't say why I thought it was a good idea to put it in the picture. So... 15 year old blood stains, I guess!

It was my plan to make this book a through and through work of art. It would be like no book before. That was the plan anyway. And after a lot of work, it turned out good and I really like it. But. BUT. I was spending way, way, way too much time working on this book! It has drawings, watercolors, collages, you like pop-up? it has pop-up! And more. It has real fish and even a real honey bee in there somewhere. There's even a 1,000 Yen note that I collaged on in this book. Nothing was safe from the insatiable maw of this book.

There's a painting on the left and a collage with woodcut on the right.

I said that I really like this book. But. By the time I was finished with this book (which was sooner than I expected, because if I recall correctly – and who are you to say that I don't, huh? – it was originally four times longer, but I rebound it as a much shorter book)... As I was saying, by the time I was finished with this book, I was sick to death of looking at it. I wanted it gone.

I had begun work on my thesis project and had less and less time to work on an all-consuming drawing book habit. In fact, my next drawing book will reflect my new priorities (stay tuned). I soon found out I was selected for the UF gallery award and was asked to submit three pieces for the director to chose from to add to the permanent collection of UF's gallery. I submitted a suite of prints, a large drawing, and my book! The award was $500. Of course, that seemed like a lot to me (although it didn't even begin to come close to touching the time I had spent on that book). He chose the drawing and I kept the prints and my book. WHEW! I realized pretty soon what a bullet I dodged there.

Whew! Bullet Dodged! And yes, this is where my profile picture comes from.

So far as the contents of the book go, I think the title says a lot. Concerning Religious Affections is taken from Jonathan Edwards' book, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections where he deals with all kinds of stuff you don't want to read about here! But my own religious affections are on full display here. Allegories abound! Cryptic Scriptural allusions and metaphysical metaphors are to be had in heaping handfuls! So take a look at a few of the pages and see what you think.

A strange metaphor known only to me. Probably.

Nostaglia

I am feeling what an old student of mine called "nostaglia". This is because, of course, I JUST FINISHED MY DRAWING BOOK, Dreams and Visions! I have been working on this slowly since October of 2013. The key word here is slowly. All of my drawing books take some time to finish, but, increasingly, they are taking longer and longer.

With my new drawing book, I want to try something... old. Natural History was my first hand bound book and I finished it up something like 14 or 15 years ago. It has a ton of pages, but I was flying through them. I think it was because I hadn't really conceived of my drawing books as actual "artwork" at the time. It was somewhere towards the middle of that book that I realized I was making good drawings and that this could be more than a "sketchbook", it could be an Artist's Book. (If that doesn't sound asinine and pretentious, then I don't know the meaning of the words.) Whatever terminology you want to apply to the book, the fact is, I started poring over my books – sometimes taking years to finish one. I don't want to do that with this new book. But I say that with every new book I start and... well, stuff happens.

So, on to the nostalgia part of this post. I want to give something of a brief overview of my books. I have no idea if that is of any interest to you, but it is to me, and since I am doing all the writing here, I'll just indulge myself. Probably one or two of you will remember that I have already written about my drawing books in the past. That's true, but I want to deal with each of the books in a little more individual detail.

Natural History is not the first book of drawings that I made, but it is my first hand bound book. About half way through I started to think of it as a body of related drawings. Not that that changed what I was doing, it just helped me to have a way of thinking about the book as I was making it.

This is the first image in the book. An introduction.

There is a lot of collage in this book along with a fair amount of animal parts. There are a couple of praying mantis legs in there if you take a good look!

Monsters and anatomy. I'm sure this is a surprise to you.

Bugs, bones and printmaking and even a little bit of pro to-gyotaku before I knew what that was! The tiny little fish is real. It's been there for about 15 years, so I'm not too worried about it decomposing.

Fish, printmaking, and the internal anatomy of humilobites. At least I'm consistent. 

Again with the collage!

I have always understood my interest in the natural world. So that was a given for me as I started making this book. But I have always had an interest in the para-natural world as well. (I just made that word up, feel free to use it in your everyday life, but make sure you point people back to me. I'm getting in touch with the proper authorities to trademark it as I type this.) So the old category of "natural history" fit well for me. Way back in the olden days, back when things like cabinets of curiosities were in vogue, plants, animals, shells, oddities, "monsters", creepy pickled fruits. Anything that caught the eye was a go and it all fell under the same quasi-category. And that's where I found the work in this book.

The End

Did your heart skip a beat? Did you get a panicky feeling as your throat seized up a little? Did you think the title to this post meat I was done with writing for the interwebs? Climb down off the ceiling and relax. All I meant was I have finished my current drawing book. Well, mostly.

You see, in the grand tradition of putting carts before horses, I have finished the last two pages of my book before I have finished several of the preceding pages. Why have I adopted this devil-may-care attitude and thrown caution to the wind? Why am I mixing my metaphors? Because I thought of a pun and I couldn't wait to get it down on paper.

You know how sometimes you think of a pun, and then think everyone else will find it equally as clever as you do? And how they don't because, I guess, everyone else is dumb? Well, that's where I'm sitting right now. The smiles on my face and in my head speak to something insanely clever, funny even. Something along these lines:

There was a guy who sent ten different puns to friends in the hopes that at least some of them would make his pals laugh. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

But funnier!

I've teased enough. Here's the image:

Get it?! Huh? Do you get it?!

I assume since you've persevered this long, you'll want to know the medium here. This is a relief rolled collagraph with white ink and a collage of watercolored paper and decorative paper scraps.

And all you sharp eyed devils out there will recognize this fish as a version of the collagraph that I wrote about on January 12th.

The Internal Lives of Extinct Animals

What exactly was it like to be an ophiacodon? A dimetrodon or diplocaulus? Perhaps a lone euplocephalus? You can stop wondering because I can tell you. It was a world of paranoia and existential angst. As my scientific illustrations clearly show, these beasts had a life of strange dreams, misunderstandings and fears of abandonment. 

From the drawing book Sleep of Reason

From the drawing book Sleep of Reason

From the drawing book Sleep of Reason

From the drawing book Dreams and Visions

I think they best serve as a cautionary tale: avoid dreams, certainly don't talk about them. Don't answer the phone, it probably really is a trap. Your kids? they're just as weird looking as you no matter what you do. And are you alone? Does it matter? You're probably looking at the business end of a giant asteroid anyway. Aaarrrooo indeed. Aaarrrooo indeed.

I plan on diving into the psyche of plenty of other animals in the future. I'm in the middle of getting to know another dimetrodon (Yes, another one. When will this magnificent animal stop giving?) I'm, of course, currently hiding many of my other drawings from you because you're unlikely to be able to handle the raw implications of the mental difficulties of some of the most iconic prehistoric beasts.

The Old Man

For years I have struggled with the Old Man. St. Paul uses the imagery of the Old Man to talk about what a man (or woman) is before life in Christ. He says the old man has been crucified with Christ and that we no longer live to him (the Old Man) and he calls for us to cast off this old man. This is a very easy thing to say but not so much in the doing. 

I've tended to deal with it in my artwork in a couple of ways. The first is with the idea of the old man being a literal other body like we have here:

That which I would, that I do not!

At conversion it seems that a man is split in two; with a New Man and an Old Man, both of which vie for control. This is wonderfully and confoundingly explored in Romans chapter seven.

Another way I have thought about the Old Man is through the image of a minotaur. I have about three tons of minotaur drawings. Here are a couple of them:

Minotaur as sinner

Minotaur as tempter

Minotaur as an identity to be tried on

Minotaur as an identity to be cast off!

 What exactly is a minotaur? Here's my understanding of this beast. Man is the pinnacle of creation – we are made in the image of God. And our minds (or hearts) are understood to be the thing most like God. He reasons, we reason; He feels, we feel. But the Minotaur is an obscenity. He is a man, but his reason or heart has been replaced with that of a beast. The minotaur is the complete abdication of a man's mind and passions to his base, animal desires.

I see both of these images – that of the dual-man and the minotaur – as fertile material for exploring St. Paul's compelling imagery. Of course, there is a ton more to say about both the Scriptures and even about my drawings of them. But these are drawings and they are meant to be looked at and not read about!