I really shouldn't be allowed out in public.

I just returned from hanging a bunch of drawings and paintings for a show over at Cafe (504) in Oakland, by Lake Merritt. The most interesting thing might be that there are a couple of preliminary drawings that I did for paintings that never got past the sketch stage. This is probably as close as they will ever get to being art.

Everyone there was exceedingly nice and I felt bad about all the negativity that I was bring in the door with me, but I am very uncomfortable with this sort of thing. When you put your work out there you put yourself out there. 

People have a tendency to try to say nice things, but inevitably my fragile ego perceives some sort of slight and I begin the spiral down into a nice warm depression.

Whenever someone sees one of my paintings that has a vampire in it, usually there is some comment like "Oh! That's like on True Blood!"

YES! YES! YES! IT'S EXACTLY FUCKING LIKE THAT. 'B-GRADE TELEVISION SHOW' IS WHAT I WAS GOING FOR!

I understand that I'm not a great artist, and that vampires are exceedingly-hot pop-culture staples, and people aren't necessarily going to really understand what I'm trying to get at with my work, if there actually is anything, but why does the thing they use for comparison have to be the crappiest thing they can think of?  "I like this one 'cause it's like the tee-vee!'

What was I saying... None of that happened at the cafe today. Everyone was lovely.

The real tragedy is ignorance.

This morning I woke up, brewed some coffee, made guesses as to who was to blame for my apartment being such a mess... the usual stuff. As I tried to read the news with my blurry hangover eyes, I saw that there was some kind of TSUNAMI WARNING for the california coast at 7:30 this morning. It was fucking 9:30! I hustled myself over to the window and peeked out through the shades fully expecting to see my beloved Emeryville as a decimated flood plain. Ikea would be a crumbled wreck littered with corpses and couches!

Really.

I swear to fucking god, I AM SUCH A MORON.

 

Sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Good lord, I've been so sick. Some sort of flu with all of the attendant goodness! Fever, nausea, coughing... It doesn't get any better than that! All I could do was sit shivering in my drafty studio, huddled in my blanket, staring at my newly re-started painting and watch all of my momentum (among other things) drain out of me. After a couple of really shitty days I finally started to feel a bit better and got right to work... on a bottle of whiskey. Man, did I miss my medicine!  So good.

So after a couple days of that, I got all my fluid levels up to where they needed to be and got right to work on the painting. I did a rough tracing paper overlay sketch to figure out a likely composition and then just started blocking in the shapes of my new, weird, blobby friends. My preliminary sketch barely qualified as helpful so I just kind of roughed the shapes in where they felt good and base coated them all white to cover up those awful teeth and whatever miscellaneous crap might be underneath the new figures.

Well, this is awful. I think I'll keep reading and find out if it gets any worse.

It has just occurred to me that starting off my brand-spanking-new blog about how fancy and smart I am by featuring something that truly embarrasses me is probably not the wisest move that I've ever made. Being that I'm usually VERY crabby about pretty much everything, you'd think my next move would be obvious... throw this goddamn computer through the wall and be done with all this crap.

That was the old me though. Luckily for my pretty, pretty iMac I have a new positive attitude. The new me thinks that showing shit work is FANTASTIC because it sets the expectations really low for the future!
 

Back to the drawing board. Again.

So I have a shitload of bad habits, but the specific focus for today is my habit off continuously painting on top of paintings that are supposedly done. Or have been done for a year or so.

I do this all the time. First I finish them and pat myself on the back because I managed to complete something. Everything seems to be pretty cool at this point.

I'm not sure exactly when it happens, but inevitably they begin mocking me. Not actually mocking me, of course. I'm not crazy.

Not really.

For no particular reason other than It's not very good, which should be reason enough, I find this painting back on my easel waiting for a facelift. Yes I know that it would make more sense to toss this thing out the window and just start something new instead, but that doesn't seem to be the way I do things. Instead I'm going to going to claim that I'm just going to fix one thing and will end up practically repainting every fucking thing I can find.

There are some parts that I still like and I will do my best to not destroy those parts completely. Those teeth have to go though.  Be honest, you didn't even know those were teeth until you read it just now, did you?

A painter should always have good reference photos, not just a plastic cartoon tooth from your dentist's office.

Hello, cruel world

Well isn't this going to be exciting? The internet, communicating with the world, becoming part of the collective mind..BLOGGING for christsakes! I just can't wait to see how fucking GREAT this is going to be!