East Roanoke St.

 #black tights #miniskirt #maryjanes #big sweater #turtleneck #shawlneck #undershirt #porch #book group

Getting Through It

 

I've always kept a little collection of wise and helpful words in my head. I certainly don't live by them every day, but they are what I aspire to. The oldest is the Bob Dylan line that I've held onto since my teen years. Also from my teen years, the (maybe) Goethe quotation that was on a poster in my parents' kitchen with a photograph of Willi Unsoeld and Tom Hornbein climbing the West Ridge of Mt. Everest. The Lynda Barry quotation (which she got from someone else but I can't remember who) is something she refers to often in her writing classes, and has served me well over the years when I felt stuck. The Frank Herbert quotation, is from Dune, but once a few years ago, I saw it on a random dude's t-shirt and couldn't get it out of my head. It was during the first Trump administration. I asked my husband Mike about it later, "is that a quote from Nietzche?" He laughed and said, "No, it's from Dune." Anyway, it's the one I think about the most these days.

#cat #plant #ginger #baseball cap #drinking #running #filing cabinet

Sketchbook thoughts

This sketchbook I just made is 3 inches high by 4 1/2 inches wide. My own sketchbooks is 3 1/2 inches high by 6 inches wide. I believe sketchbooks should be small because you should be able to fill the whole page in one short session of drawing. I think you should date the page. I think you should work in ink. I made these little  sketchbooks because I'm teaching a workshop for high school students in a few days about how to keep a regular sketchbook. Its short notice, so I couldn't ask them to go out and get their own sketchbooks, plus, let's be honest, I'm a control freak and I want them to have this sketchbook.

#sketchbooks #small is beautiful #clouds #Tahoma #skyway #forest #control freak

I'm an eighties bitch

 

I keep a dream journal; it's specifically printed for the purpose, it's called the Wander Dream Journal, published by Baron Fig and I bought it at an adorable art and office supply store called Post in White River Junction, Vermont. I was told Post was started by some former Center for Cartoon Studies students, which makes sense because it had some comics specific supplies tucked in amongst the other stuff. I love this journal because I've been trying to record my dreams since I was a teenager, and this journal has helped me sustain this practice for the first time! That said, months often go by between dreams that motivate me to record them, but at least they're all in on place. The format is helpful. There's a page for recalling the dream, a 1/2 blank page to draw what the dream looked like, and a 1/2 page for interpretation. Along the margins are little boxes to check like: Recurring? Lucid? Mundane? Fantasy? Nightmare? It is the perfect balance of a controlled/freeform journal. Highly recommended! I bought it in February, 2020, right before the pandemic went into full swing. If I keep up my regular pace, I'll probably finish it by the end of this year. I remember far more dreams than I record, but it takes a lot of effort to get anything down, or at least that's always been my experience.  Sometimes I have this feeling I'm letting all kinds of awesome material slip through my fingers when I don't record my dreams. But lately I've tried to cultivate more of an "oh well" attitude towards the whole thing. I catch what I catch. The good thing is that this method of recording them seems really effective. When I look back through the journal, the dreams come back to me with remarkable clarity. I have used dream imagery as raw material for comics over the years, but so far, I haven't used anything from what I think of as my pandemic dream journal. I guess it still feels like a work in progress.

I love a man in a uniform

 #hair #glasses #honor #medal #curtains #shoes 

do or don't look back?

 #Douglas Fir #early automobiles #picnic #Thermos #lenticular clouds #pacificnorthwestcolonialism #ladiesinhats #atmospherics #January

The Immeasurable Side of Life

Don't get me wrong, I love a good measuring device. I am most fond of thermometers, all sorts. And I get that we would be nowhere without the ability to measure. And that almost all scientific breakthroughs are related to finding new ways to measure the heretofore intangible. But so much intangibility remains, for which I am thankful, because these are the realms of art, magic and religion. And though I am a practitioner of only one of these fields, I have deep respect for the importance of all of them.

#Douglas Fir #hands #stack of books #house #profile #hat #clothes

Wednesday

 

A walk over the hill

I've lost interest in writing, or rather, the way I used to write. The writing only happens in the midst of these comic strips...so there are hints of narrative, but I'm not super interested in developing them into something linear.  I start to catch what I'm after as the strip unfolds, but I never know ahead of time. So I wonder, do they still contain something legible to other people or are they just personal scraps? My friend Jon told me it's ok not to be interested in narrative...which for me, a storyteller since early childhood, feels deeply uncomfortable. But it's almost physical, like the narrative mineral is draining out of my body as I enter menopause. My friend Tom thinks that as we get older, we start to see "the whole score" as Jack Kirby once said. And that the whole score includes abstractions that aren't usually allowed in standard narratives. And as I post these, my artist ego keeps going, "are they any good?" But Ed reminded me that we're not supposed to know that anyway. Which is a good reminder. Just keep doing it anyway. RIP Jules Pfeiffer, btw. A model for us all.

#candle #furniture #porch #sweater #curly hair #clouds

On a clear day, I can see Tahoma from my window

 

surrender to time

 In this "project," I am playing a game with myself and time, trusting, or rather daring myself to finish the strip, to add writing, or black something out, or add new panels. 

RIP David Lynch 1946-2025

 

In November and December I watched Twin Peaks season 3: The Return along with the Blank Check podcast's retrospective coverage of Lynch's oeuvre. I couldn't stop thinking about it. His work lodges itself in the mental landscape of anyone who seriously engages with it. Goodbye, DL.

Guilty feet have got no rhythm

 

favorite food

 I drew this because I saw a drawing that a dear friend, who can draw beautifully, made of a soft boiled egg, and I couldn't stop thinking about soft boiled eggs. It embarrasses me that this is my response to her gorgeous work, but I post it just the same. All of the strange positioning and awkward body parts and messed up hands and unconvincing spaces disappointed me when I was done working on it. But I wanted to work fast to capture my passing fancy about how much I love making soft boiled eggs, and so I didn't take much care. When I was finished, I wanted to throw it away, or at least hide it away. But I looked at it again 5 days later (today), and amidst the strange fingers and lumpy ellipses, I can feel and remember my soft boiled egg joy --- and that was the original point of the drawing, so.... success? I must remind myself that my "bad drawings" feel that way often because they reveal something I wish to keep hidden. But revealing things is one of the major jobs that a drawing has. Sometimes ya gotta just let your hair down and share stuff that makes you feel uneasy. This has been a very, very difficult thing for me to learn.

Ecstatic

 That feeling that you are at the center of the world, where it's all happening.

When the sky defines my mood

 

A sunny day

 

New Year's Resolutions

 

I like to draw in my car, which is why I keep gas receipts when they are an option. Gas station receipts tend to be narrower than store receipts and the paper is a little bit more absorbent and bleedy, which I enjoy. Sometimes I pencil on receipts when I can't figure out something in my head, like the relationship to a bent arm and a face looking at a wristwatch--- only reversed from the way I drew it a few days ago. A mindbender my mind couldn't unbend without the help of pencil! So ink only--- it's not a rule never to be broken, I've just found that I like the drawings better if I do them only in ink. The connections between imagination, brain, hand, pen and paper seem stronger without that tricky little eraser hanging out there on the periphery, offering me its services. In this new year I want to try some new things. I want to start a drink and draw group, and I want to teach a class about keeping sketchbooks. wish me luck!

Flip sides

 

Good shape, bad shape

 I begin these by filling the back of a receipt with pentagon shaped panels, and then I try to fill at least one or two panels with images. Sometimes, it takes off and I'll complete the whole strip in one sitting. But other times, I leave them unfinished, and complete them at some later date. The words are usually picked up somewhere, something I heard in a podcast, read in a book or lyric fragments. I don't seem to have many of my own words at hand these days.

Repetition

 I like to draw the same things over and over. My dog, Mt Tahoma, Ferry boats, water, evergreen trees, people in hats, people sitting on the train....In a way, they are just drawings of convenience, what crops up when I have some spare time to sit and look. But it's also become a wonderful kind of benign obsession, returning over and over to look at and document the same things, as I move through time. I'm curious about what other drawers find themselves coming back to again and again.

Only first drafts

 

When I was in Pittsburgh a year or so ago, talking to Frank Santoro about the comics he was working on, he said something to this effect - that it was good to just draw the comics and let them be as they are in that first draft form. I've been taking that approach for awhile. At times painful and sometimes revelatory.