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.