Keeping promises -- an art journal I owe myself

Moleskine makes a terrific, pocket-sized journal with bristol paper in a japanese accordian fold. Ms. Clarity got me one (Thanks, Melinda!). It makes for an ideal art journal: never intimidating, always a sense of play, expansive when you want it, and portable enough that you can imagine taking it anywhere, pulling it out on a whim, and either drawing what's in front of you, or reflecting on your response to your surroundings.*

This is just the kind of low threshold I need to keep my promise to myself: make more art, post more blogs, no matter how hairy things were. I've even abandoned my habit of 'care' in these drawings, accepting stray lines for what they are: unexpected vectors. I strive for spontaneity and a new way of expressing line and thought. Text is line. Line is line. The page is flat.

I know I'm not the only one who's been staggered recently by the vagaries of life and 'interesting times.' So, I'm not alone. Each of us seeks a way to return to basic principals. To core responsibilities. To reaching out, or plumbing new depths -- whichever it is that brings back our selves, our lives, our heartbeat. Here's to you, and everyone trying to keep the green shoots alive. You know who you are. You have my admiration.

Three journal pages

Are your furnishings plotting something? Sometimes, mine just have a look about them. Shifty, kind of.

... Gumby can squish himself into a ball, and extrude himself through the slit under the door.

Quiet time to read. All we really need is a puffy couch and a ripping good book. Or at least, the book.

*I did not accept monetary or other remuneration for this unsolicited endorsement. On the other hand, no one offered.

Looking ahead, behind and inside

Mail art.

The cool thing about a mail art piece -- in my case (with all due deference to Ms. Clarity, goddess of mail art in my circle)*-- is that, the nature of the audience is generally better known than the audience for a piece of work that "nobody asked for." I created this piece as a letter to my son.** It embodies a great deal of 'code' that, had I been designing for the public, would have been simply enigmatic.

As an example: For my specific audience, we have shared the fun of things I read to him as a child. Comics were a special treat brought on camping trips, and often read by flashlight. He understands why I chose the comic format, and immediately has a deeper connection to my choice of medium than if I'd chosen something else. But today I have an adult audience (0f one), so the format no longer speaks as to children. Here, themes concern the notions of dreams as opposed to work; love as something that happens in the midst of life... and the human capacity to render even the most outré and specialized activity banal.

But, let's just say he couldn't "get" all of it. But if you are of a certain age, you'll understand if I say that Darren McGavin and James Clavell made an impression. And Ben Stein has been a disappointment.

But as a letter, father to son, it embodies my qualms about the future (his future, I guess), a few nods of the head to his childhood, and still manages to be a personally soul-searching endeavor, if comic-book action-opera and humor qualify as soul-searching. I did get some decent psychological benefit from the exercise, but it may have cured me of my notion to make a body of work consisting of single pages from mythical comics... those guys (and they're almost all guys) work hard for the money.

*Ray Johnson, the likely originator of mail art as a massively interactive work of collaboration and unlimited reproduction, had a different notion. Call me parochial.
** Reproduced here with permission of the original audience.