The Stone 2

Writing today sucked, but the art compensated. Here's the basic image I started out with, compiled from three different photos. The goal is to create something simplified, more painterly, and more coherent in appearance. It needs to be reproducible through laser printing in black-and-white. So here we go...

And there it is -- the first Swillistration for issue six. I am not satisfied, but I am pleased, and I think the technique worth exploring. I start with a neutral gray background, and then render up and down in tone, developing the image simultaneously as highlights and shadows. Next art? A turtle. Plesiobaena antiqua, to be precise.

The Stone 1

Swill is being a pain in the ass. We need more stories, and I am girding my loins to begin the process of begging. I've also recalled how much of a pain in the ass it was last issue when I had to do all the art at the last minute. It worked out well, but it was a horrid experience.

So I'm starting a little early this year.

As I mentioned in previous posts, I'm working on a new technique. I want it to look less photographic, more expressionistic. I want size-independent resolution. I want the option of easily reworking the images in color. And I want something that will allow me to use a wider variety of sources with less concern about the initial qualities of the images in question -- I want to be able to blend scans from the newspaper, sketches, and photographs from cameras bad and good seamlessly.

What I'm doing is making composite images in Photoshop, then rendering them as black, white, and .25, .50, and .75 flat gray images on separate layers using a combination of the magic wand selection tool and the pencil tool. Then I bring separate files for each layer into Illustrator, autotrace them, and Bob's your uncle. (First time when that phrase seemed right. Apologies to Bob.)


Here's an early attempt. It's still too photographic and busy.

This time around, I'm laying out color roughs first and only using the photograph as a guide, and the composition already seems a lot livelier to me. Now to find a few hours to noodle compulsively until the edges are clean. Or, rather, dirty in the right way.

So How Was The Reading?

On Thursday night, our stove went crazy and turned into a sort of jet engine. By the time things were settled, I'd called 911, burned my fingers, and so on. So I didn't get a lot of sleep, and I had a bit of a dose of anxiety at the start of the day on Friday.

I had my reading to do that night.

When I first began feeling the jitters, I assumed they were leftovers from the night before. But as the day progressed, I realized that despite my confidence, even eagerness regarding the reading, I was still experiencing stress.

But it didn't really bother me -- I was nervous, I was jumpy, I was stalking around the house, but I was in a good mood. I had no idea I was setting myself up for one of the most spectacular endogenous neurochemical events of my life. I will go into further detail in later posts, but I've been forced to rethink my positions on both the place of stress in my life and my relationship to the concept of hierarchy.

I showed up early, and there were few people there. As folks trickled in, I saw that people I'd expected hadn't shown up, but people I hadn't, had. Fair enough! It was particularly pleasant to see Chrissy from my last scriptwriting class and Chris Cornell from Viable Paradise, but I was very happy to see everyone.

There was an unexpected but welcome change in personnel -- Allison Landa was there, reading from her memoir. It was nice to hear how she'd been working with the material since I'd last seen it; Joe was lucky to get her.

Howard Zalkin read a marvelously hallucinatory piece about recovering from encephalitis. Pamela Holm gave us a look at middle-age adolescence and addiction in which warmth and snark mingled pleasantly, and W. Ross Ayers told us about how much fun it is drinking in redneck bars. Exactly as much fun as you'd guess.

And then it was my turn.

I'd been feeling more and more disconnected from my immediate surroundings as my moment approached. I felt strong, I felt confident, and I knew the actual piece was rock-solid. It deals with issues of racism and violence, and it is not intended to be a source of comfort. I'd spent the afternoon carefully re-formatting it so as to clearly establish a rhythm for performance -- lines which needed to be said alone were set apart, paragraphs broken up to ensure that I maintain eye contact with the audience, etc.

Because there are two things I'm using in conjunction here -- there is the quality of my actual prose, and then there is my ability to emote, to project, and to, well. Project a certain intimidating physical presence. It is my intention that this be not simply a reading but a performance of a piece intended to be read aloud.

The style of writing I used is more flowing, more musical, more polysyllabic, less concerned with word-by-word clarity than with the human voice; that said, it is as clearly and directly written as possible.

I've spent the show standing at the back; when Joe calls me up, I have to walk the length of the room.

When I reach the stage, I look back. Damn, the room a lot shorter from the other end. I can hardly see the people in the back. I take a second and make eye contact with Joe, give him a nod -- "Thanks for the chance, dude" -- and then...

I take a breath. I turn around slowly, inspect the entire room, the entire stage. And I take another breath.

I'm in no hurry. I'm claiming this place. Where I stand, what I see?

It's mine. This is my place and my moment and I own it.

Then I take a shallow breath, announce the title of my piece, and begin reading. The piece begins with a lengthy bit of exposition. My favorite part is when I look out at the audience and say, "You are all racists, and I am a racist, and that is how it is in a racially divisive culture." You cannot imagine how much I enjoy the little pause I give them after that statement. "How the hell is he going to get himself out of this?"

I find that it's taking an effort for me to stay near the mic, and through my performance one of the things that bothered me was drifting off-mic and then scooting back. I have the kind of voice you don't really need to mic, but this is being recorded.

I am loving this. There is an impulse to perform in me, and those who converse with me can testify that there's a point where I slip into performance mode. I struggle with this, even though folks seem to like it, because it's sort of loud and attention-hogging, and you know what?

I can fucking unleash up here. I hold nothing back. I am angry and honest and wretched. I do not tell people how I want them to feel; I tell them the truth and give them the space to react to it. The pressure is forcing laughter out of them every time a line reads as a little less grim than the ones around it.

Then the expository passage is over, and the moment I begin reading the actual story of my experience?

My brain blossoms, lobes opening like the wet, fleshy petals of an orchid.

(For the record? I was stone cold sober. Didn't even hit up the wine.)

My field of vision registers not as an assembly of solid objects, but as flat areas of tone, shifting and overlapping like so many cut-out pieces of paper. I have vertigo; more, a sense that my body is dismembered, each joint a real gap in space.

But I am a skull ranger; I know this is my brain fucking with me and I know how to cope. The sheer emotional pressure I'm experiencing blasts the associated hallucinations into the edges of my mind. I can see the writing on the paper, one paragraph crystal clear and the rest like gray ants warring, and I do not move my body more than I have to.

It isn't dismembered; I'm a four-dimensional creature in disguise, the visible 3-D cross-sections of my body cunningly arranged to give the impression of humanity. If I keep my hands within three feet or less of my shoulders they'll never know.

Again, these stray thoughts, like my visual flow of data, are blown to the corners by the massive, the concrete blows of emotion that travel through me. The cauldron of rage that I keep in my chest isn't a cauldron, it's a blast furnace and it's pointing right at the audience. All of my anger, my violence, it's all right on the surface right now nothing held back.

And the words flow smoothly, the contact with the audience constant, palpable. I am shattered but I am whole, more complete than I've felt in as long as I can remember. Everything about me that I hate or fear -- the rage, the bitterness, the judgment, the brutality, the madness, the capacity for violence -- all of these have been forged against the anvil of my morals, turned to tools, and now I am speaking the truth as strongly as I can.

The feeling of strength, of precision, is overwhelming. I cannot be wrong in this moment. I am absolute.

Fuck you all, this is Art, this is big Art, this is the real motherfucking thing, and it's blowing through me, pumping me fat as a firehose, rigid with pressure, the eternal explosion inside me finally powering an engine.

This is mine. This moment. This place. These people. This art.

And when I finish, I have an experience that I've longed for my entire life, since reading about it in childhood. Syneasthesia, interpreting input through the wrong sense. Smelling colors and so on.

The sound of a handclap is a white spark, like fireworks.

The applause blinds me like a burst of flashbulbs, I feel it as pressure, but when the sound dies down and my eyes clear, the first thing I see is the missus. And what I see in her face? It's not just affection. It is the face of someone who has just been completely blown away, who is amazed at what I am, and who likes what she sees.

And she ain't the only one.

So how was your Friday, motherfuckers?

Learning To Love Lichtenstein

My assignment? Criticize an artist! My choice? Roy Lichtenstein! My feelings when I saw a Lichtenstein painting in person? My God, look at the technical control here, the way he dominates the canvas -- I love this guy! I was wrong!

(Appropriated from art by Al Milgrom from Secret Wars II, Beyonder character copyright Marvel Comics. And for the record? This wasn't just a scan. I had to recreate the damned thing, down to the Benday dots, carving every edge of every ink mark -- this was more laborious than generating a painting from scratch. The print is two feet on the short side.)

But I always loved Chuck Close. I had a blast doing this. Why did one artist seem fraudulent to me and not the other?

Being able to look at my own work and have pleasant feelings makes it a lot easier to open up to new experiences in art. Defensiveness is a creative dead-end.

Glendon Mellow has reposted his critical piece on the subject of art, illustration, and the aura of a painting. He and I have been engaging in a conversation about art for some years, and I've found it quite useful -- my views of art have changed considerably since we've begun exchanging views. (Toward the end of Glendon's piece, he has links to the post at Laelaps where our conversation began -- scroll down to the comments -- and an earlier post of mine on the subject of art.)

The main changes in my attitudes toward art grow from my rejection of personal defensiveness. In order to feel some degree of strength or position in the world of art, it was at first important to me to say, "This thing you think is not art is, and this thing you say is art, isn't."

These days?

I would rather enjoy art than feel superior to it. And contrariwise, if I don't like something? That doesn't mean it's a fake, or inadequate. It is not art's job to live up to me, or vice-versa. I find myself responding genuinely to a much wider range of art than before.

That's because I don't feel like an outsider in this world any more. I've seen my work in a real gallery, a guerrilla gallery, and a number of kitchen walls, I've gotten praise from some very respectable sources, and more than that -- I've found that I can walk into a museum or gallery and feel comfortable, and if I talk? People listen to me with interest and respect. I've even been asked about my degree. (I learned art history the way I learned music theory -- I only know what I failed to avoid.)

Since I now feel part of that world, I no longer need to feel as though specific works or artists are somehow inferior to me, as if disregarding them lends validity to my own work. Instead, expanding the range of work that I'm willing to respond to has produced a corresponding expansion of my interior world.

Glendon's piece brought this to mind, because it was a face-to-face encounter with Roy Lichtenstein's work that initiated this sea-change. I'd always assumed that his appropriation of cartoon images was essentially a rip-0ff, that he wasn't really a painter, etc, etc.

But when I saw some of his pieces in the context of the museum, I was riveted. It wasn't just the painting, though. It was the entire context -- the gallery itself primes you for certain types of aesthetic experiences, the size of the work strongly effects impact, etc. It made me realize both that I couldn't judge art based on reproductions, and that there was something childish in my earlier reactions. That I was trying to prove something by disliking particular artists or works.

It is more than a little embarrassing to recognize that I 'hated' Jeff Koons the way I 'hated' Eric in the third grade. (With less cause -- Eric threw rocks.) To recognize that I dislike the works of Jackson Pollack out of defensiveness, on the basis of ignorance.

It's not a bad idea to dislike genuinely bad art. To assume that certain elements in the artistic canon are fraudulent, and that you maintain status by bad-mouthing them?

Terrible idea. Terrible. It doesn't matter if you're an illustrator bad-mouthing Pollack or a science fiction writer bad-mouthing James Joyce. You just look like a jealous idiot. You only appeal to those who are defensive in precisely the same way you are. I'm trying to cut it out, so I'm really noticing it in other people.

You build bridges when you act out of attraction. When you do something because you like it. Avoiding things, cutting off potential avenues of exploration? It's necessary. You can't do everything. But you will never fully express yourself if you pick and choose influences on a reactionary basis.

And that goes down the perceived hierarchy as well as up. I no longer feel comfortable dismissing a work for being a television show, for instance. When you see how serious and intelligent practitioners of everything from cute dinosaurs to cartoons to Star Trek can be, it forces you to do some re-evaluation.

To put it another way -- if I love the folk art and literature of other times and places, why shouldn't I knowingly, intelligently embrace that of my own? To try and imagine how the products of my time and culture might impress those outside of it?

Or to put it another way.

I know a good bit about criticism. I know how to take things apart.

These days I'm much more interested in appreciation. As an artist, it's a lot more useful for me to see how things get put things together.

Let Me Harden Myself With Ten Thousand Hours Of Labor

And finally, done! Every issue of Swill must pay obeisance to the Insect God.

And once again, a comment on someone else's blog ran wild, and turned into a post. Catherine Schaff-Stump wrote about that book on expertise that's got everyone all het up, and I figured that if I was going to accuse a pal of serf mentality I shouldn't do it on her turf. I'll do it here, where I'm familiar with the escape routes and can keep a table between us until I get a chance to explain myself.

I should read this book. All I know about it is what I've heard or read in other's discussions. So really, I'm not talking about the book. I'm talking about the reactions to it that I've seen in a number of creators of my acquaintance.

But there are a few things I wonder about. The premise under discussion is that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert in any given skill. I get the impression that what's meant by 'expert' is a world-class, top-grade, unquestionably significant and accomplished talent.

I've seen a common reaction to the ten-thousand hour paradigm. People see it as a sentence. They are crushed, then they nobly lift the burden up and accept it as part of their load.

Because the idea that this is something that must be done also implies that it's something that can be done. It takes a question that seems unfathomable -- how can I achieve greatness? -- and gives a straightforward numerical answer that is just barely on the acceptable side of impossible. Practice for ten thousand hours, and if you still suck, get back to me. We'll work something out.

Don't get me wrong. I am the poster child for compulsive woodshedding, and I think it's paid off. If you want to be good, you need to put the time in. And I think that a cold, sober look at the amount of time that dedicated professionals put in on their work is a damned fine thing.

But there are a few reactions that I've been developing as I've seen the ten-thousand hours join the hundredth fucking monkey and Catch-22 as part of the law of the jungle.

First off, it implies that there is a distinct point at which one says, "Yep. There it is." Ones skill is undeveloped, then ten thousand hours later it's in full bloom.

My favorite band is the Ramones.

By this I do not mean, "Craft counts for nothing." What I mean is, is that lack of expertise is not always a barrier to achievement. I don't think the world would be a better place if Blitzkrieg Bop had an interesting chord progression and some kinda life to the beat. Which is what would have happened if the Ramones had put in their ten thousand hours before they started working.

So that's the first point. Don't think of what you do as practice unless you are doing a deliberate exercise in order to develop some facet of your skill. If you are working on something that means something to you, you are not practicing.

Next is the ten-thousand hour figure itself. Let me tell you something. Practice is not as clear-cut as it seems. Are you doing the same routine every day, or are you challenging yourself? And what counts as practice? Maybe you spend two hours a day writing, but how many hours a day are you spending thinking about your work, or even just consciously using language? When my observational drawing skills are strong, I can draw without drawing -- I look at a branch and count the leaves, that kind of thing.

That gray area in practice, where unavoidable moments in life are turned to the advantage of art, is crucial. Those are the moments when art is not something you make yourself do, or allow yourself to do. Those are the moments when the artistic process is part of your process. When you've fully assimilated your creativity.

When your art is fully part of your life, everything contributes toward it. It becomes impossible to estimate practice time, because it is all practice. It isn't a chore or an effort, because if it is? You won't do it.

When I first heard about the ten thousand hours, it totally rocked my John Henry. I did a little math and felt better about myself.

In other words, I reacted the way Catherine did. Lots of people have reacted this way. One at a time, each is the result of an individual struggling with questions of dedication and achievement. Seen en mass, I find myself reminded of that Maoist-era toe-tapper, Let Me Go To The Mountain, Mother, And Harden Myself With Physical Labor.

I am not criticizing the concept of practice here. But I have noticed not just in myself, but in most of the serious beginning writers I know, a sense of stern duty, of feeling that we must steel ourselves for the rigors to come. Writing these days feels like a polar expedition, where we expect to lose a finger or nose to frostbite in the process of starving to death while surrounded by bears.

This sense of eternally plowing under gray skies (while wearing thick damp pants that chafe) is not an essential element of art. The grim satisfaction of dedication is a useful tool, but I worry that it has grown too important to too many of us.

Here is the secret of the ten thousand hours. You do not get through ten thousand hours of practice through grim dedication. Okay, you can -- but your work will reflect that grim dedication.

If you are one of the people who is actually going to get ten thousand hours of practice in, most of those ten thousand hours will be spent enjoying yourself. Yes, there are tedious practices and chores and so on, but give me a break.

For those of us who like to spend our evenings carving crude pitchforks with which to maintain our dungheaps, this is a bitter pill indeed. When you embrace the labor of art, you embrace the pleasure of that labor -- which is actually play. The moments when you are engaged, when you are loving what you are doing -- those are the moments when you are learning.

Ten thousand hours isn't a sentence or a guarantee. It seems to be an estimate of how much time people have spent doing something they love by the time they get noticed. And a lot of people do good, interesting work long before they clock in those hours. And a lot of people put in more effort than that without advancing. Practice is necessary, but it can only take you as far as you can go.

Bummer, huh? Once again, quantification proves of more apparent than actual use.

Yes Indeed, There Is A Plethora Of Swill-Related Posts

See, the thing about the way I work with Illustrator is that I think in ink. I can't fucking control a pen or a brush to save my fucking life -- but I've learned to use Photoshop and Illustrator in a way that gives pretty much exactly the kind of result I'd like to be able to execute in ink.

Which would make me feel terrible, and inadequate, if I didn't have to clean up brushes and pens and wind up with accidental tattoos all over my feet from dropping pens on them unlike the four or five Rapidograph dots I currently sport and rather than spending forty or fifty hours crouched over a drafting board to produce the above, which I cannot do with my back, I spent about twelve hours all told. Standing work, sitting work, walking around work. Good variety. If I can make this pay, it's a good job. Cool.

Swll Some More!

Deborah called me up yesterday and asked where we should go to sketch. I told her I needed to take photos and that I could use some inspiration for prints. She delivered, and here she is. Thanks, as usual, to a good pal.

This Is Your Brain On Art

There we go. Much better. And I've got a new one I might be able to finish today. It's got a new feature -- a human being! After all, what's the point of doing landscapes like these with no-one in them to feel distressed, alienated, and threatened?

So to shift the current focus of the blog a little bit, here's some information I recently received that gave me a fresh look at the relationship between mental illness and creativity. This is, as you may imagine, a subject of great interest to me. There are so many factors that come into play here -- everything from tenacity that looks a little like OCD if you tilt your head to childlessness to poor boundaries making characterization and dialog easier to write to vulnerability to sensory input to the stress experienced when one lives in a culture-hating culture -- on, and on, and on.

Look. I know healthy, stable artists who are sick of the 'crazy artist' stereotype. Sorry, folks, you seem to be in the minority. When people apply it to you, it's a stereotype. When they apply it to me, it's observation.

Artists of any kind tend to be a little messed up, and when they aren't, they are usually kinda weird. I used to go through phases of being upset when waves of mental illness seemed to sweep through my friends, and then I realized that I only like hanging out with driven creative people.

Well. I think I have figured out one of the reasons why art is so good for those of us who have a few screws rattling loose in the cranium.

The information came from two different sources. One was the book This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel J. Levitin, the other was an episode of the Mythbusters TV show.

The Mythbusters included a segment on the idea that you use ten percent of your brain at any given time. Bullshit, of course, but there was something very interesting that came up near the end. If you aren't familiar with Mythbusters, they're a TV show devoted to the scientific (on a crude but real level) investigation of everything from turns of phrase to movie cliches. They investigate the myth, and then when they're done, they try and either replicate it, exaggerate it, or completely reverse it.

In this case, they wanted to turn the myth around and have someone use their entire brain at the same time. Do you know what the subject did that used their entire brain simultaneously?

They told a story.

Memory, sensory details, emotions -- everything came into play. And as they described what was going on, I realized that if I had a chart of the areas of the brain, I could intentionally activate any of them through an act of imagination or memory. (They're pretty much the same thing, actually, or so it looks these days.)

You could do it too. It's not hard at all, it turns out.

And in This Is Your Brain On Music (a wonderful book, if you think you might be interested in it you should read it), it was revealed to me what part of the brain is used when you play music.

All of it. The whole meghilla.

Let me tell you a little something. I play bass, and before my music buddy became a father we were pretty serious in a garage-band way. Recorded an album that's actually listenable in a way. But my bass playing stalled out a bit, and I recently figured out the totally-obvious reason why.

With my back, I don't practice any more. The more I sit, the more I hurt. It's a simple formula.

But recently music has been taking off on me. I had a couple of baritone ukuleles that I found at yard sales. The nice thing about ukes is that with their short necks, I can play them lying down or sitting in my recliner. Well, a few months back I found something else. A pair of violin stands that are the perfect size for the ukes. I tuned one uke EADG like a bass, the other DGBE, which is standard baritone uke tuning, and then set them out on the floor. Where they stayed in tune a hell of a lot better, and they were there. I could just reach out, and there was an instrument that I could actually play. And I would.

In fact, I do. I've gotten in the habit of periodically breaking while working to play a melody or a scale or a few chords. Sloop John B is my current favorite, and those who remember the VPXIII singalong will be amazed to hear that I've got it sounding halfway decent.

It's gotten to be a habit because when I do it, it's like running a comb through my thoughts. The bristly stray cognitions that have begun to block my work in writing or visual arts are put back in place, and I can return to work refreshed and confident.

Very interesting, no?

And there is a feeling that I've been getting with my writing more and more frequently -- a sense of control. Of knowing that I know what I'm doing. It's actually intoxicating.

I think it's my whole brain going at once. I think one of the great attractions to art is that it allows the artist to fucking make their brain shut up and do what it's told.

Here's another anecdote. (I know, the plural of anecdote is not evidence -- but I am not claiming to do research here. I am saying, hey! You! Research this for me.)

For me, creating visual art does not feel like a complete experience in itself. I need music to fill things out. I don't want music when I write. People who write to music might want to ponder this a bit. Is this the reason I'm a second-rater in the visual arts? I need the music to propel me through the laborious parts of the process. If I was actually interested in each brush stroke I'd be a better artist. (Although Chuck Close works to music, so that theory might be blown right there.)

Last Saturday I was working on a print, and instead of playing music, I played an instructional CD on learning rhythm. Fascinating, delightful stuff -- here it it -- and it riveted me. I was chanting along unconsciously while I worked, occasionally taking time out to do a little hambone. It was a great fucking afternoon. I came out of it feeling euphoric. And I'll bet I maxed out my brain. Overclocked that son of a bitch.

I think I'm a whole-brain junkie. I think my brain is like one of those high-end sportscars where if you just drive it in traffic, it gets fucked up. You need to take it out on a track every once in a while and put that fucking pedal down.

Or so I suspect. Anyone got an EEG so we can check this shit out?

Second Cousin of Swill

Okay, so today I wrote a very odd essay -- inspirational surrealism, a rare feel-good piece -- edited it, redid the first Swillistration and greatly improved it, and executed the piece above. In addition, I purchased a book for a friend, walked the dogs, made lunch for the missus...

Swillmore

Four down, three to go. Tomorrow? I hit the street.

Swillagain

And here's the linework... Now for interminable tone fiddling.

Yes, it's Swill!

There we go. Now it's time for the fun part -- turning it into black-and-white.

Further Swillistration.

An interesting result from a simple drag and drop. One of those temporary images that's still kind of cool.

Swill Madnesss!

Swillistrate. Swillistrate, Oafboy! Sunday depends upon it!

The First Glimpse of the First View

So I need some sky up top and some greenery to fill the gap between the horizon line and the base of the image. So it's a photograph or two and then the fun part -- distorting and processing the disparate elements into a cohesive whole. I'm still hoping to finish tonight, but we shall see. It's starting to seem unlikely.

But we shall see.

Anyway. I now have a very nice CD player plugged into the mixing board, playing through the studio monitors. The sound is insane. It's like listening while the music is being recorded. I'm hearing stuff I've never heard before... This is very nice.

I'll pop back in when I've got the finished basic composition.

Progress!

Thank you, Warren!

So. Yesterday, after my bold talk I wasn't able to take the photos I needed to take to advance on the Swillistrations. I walked downtown, and ran into an old family friend. Honestly, aside from my dad? He's known me the longest. We were very close when I was a small child, and I still think of our times together with fondness.

Well, I mentioned an interest in photography, and he drove me to a camera store, where they stocked a remote for my camera at an affordable price. Doesn't that seem like fate? Like magic?

Of course, I got home and wasn't able to make the remote work. But in my attempts, I found out how to set the camera so the shutter clicks ten seconds after I press it. So I am now officially at work on the next series of prints, currently entitled Fifteen Views of the Downtown Area.

Plus, my CD player is here, and it took me less than ten minutes to get it unpacked, located, and functioning -- and in the process I solved a long-standing mystery. When playing music, we use a laptop running Reason for our drum tracks. We've found that different drum sounds need to have the jack positioned very specifically if they are going to come out of the speakers. And we have been bitching about this for literally years now.

Turns out we were running a stereo signal into a mono track on the mixing board. Haw! Haw! Haw!

(Insider humor is always the best.)

But today? I work on a print, and I've got tunes to play while I'm working. And I get to feel good about it.

This could be worse. This could be a lot worse.

Brand New Oaf

This looks awful on the screen, but in print it is dee-licious. I'll be talking up the Phantasm plug-in for Illustrator big time in the near future, but let me just say it produces the best halftones since those dudes that worked on Dore's stuff. I am not going to color for the large versions of these any more -- the black and white now has all the color the work needs, and more would be detrimental.

The Oaf: I dunno, I've got this horrible streak of competitive Alpha-male in me.

The Missus: I know. That's what keeps me interested. You're not a wimp.

The Oaf: WHAT?! They told me I was supposed to be a wimp! I thought masculine power was inherently loathsome!

The Missus: Well, I'm awfully hard on you, and it wouldn't be any fun if I destroyed you.


So. It's been a while since I posted. I've been focused on Swill and taking care of personal business.

I've also been undergoing a bit of a sea change. The process of growth I've been coping with recently came to a head, and I'm breaking in a new pair of metaphorical boots. I mentioned in my last post that I've recognized the fact that I am a literary rather than a commercial writer, and how that realization was empowering and liberating.

It was reinforced a few days later when -- I ain't giving details til it's set in stone -- but I may be participating in an NPR-level public reading, and I'd be alongside people who's work I've genuinely admired. The stuff the dude running the thing said about my writing? I'm still glowing.

Well, that kinda reinforced things for me, illuminated a few interesting corners of my life. What is true of my writing is also true of other aspects of my creative life. While I still have an infinite amount of learning and study ahead of me, I am now a mature artist and writer capable of operating both in fine art and commercial arenas.

It is time for me to leave school. It is time for me to fully engage the world. I do what I do well, and it is time to find a place for myself.

Part of this means taking care of myself. And part of that means creating an environment and life that is healthy and appropriate for me, rather than awkwardly fail to live the kind of life that 'normal' people live.

Right now I am, and have been, in a uniquely fortunate position for an artist. I have a small amount of cash, and a supportive spouse. I am making the choice to begin living the life of a professional artist, and if I hit the skids before things work out? I'll worry about that then.

Right now? My life, on my terms. Which are extremely flexible, it must be confessed...

So there are two big steps I'm going to take. First, the monetization of my natural, habitual creative acts. Writing is already firmly on the tracks. All I have to do is keep doing the next thing.

The prints from Swill -- sample above -- will be coming out about once a year. I need to find them a gallery, or possibly find an art agent, and this year I'll submit them to the Spectrum competition, and do a POD calender of the images.

Paleo art. A gallery outlet would be nice, but I think the natural place for my work in this area would be either working with paleontologists or doing children's books. And again, submit to Spectrum and do a POD calender.

Swill itself is starting to itch at me. I need to sit down with ol' Rob (You seen his new blog? I think he swiped the title from me -- I once referred to him as 'Rob Pierce, the man with two verbs for a name.'), but I have recently been spending a lot of time moaning about how there aren't any real gatekeepers for self-published fiction, and I want to do book design, and I want to do readings, and Swill has, over the years, developed an eerie credibility that might be of some use in...

Gotta talk to Rob. But I'm dreaming big.

So what this means, is that I'm getting to work on my big projects in a systematic fashion, and at the same time I will be actively seeking work as a copywriter or commercial artist. I will finish my scientific literature class, because it is providing me with a lot of topsoil -- it makes me feel smart and gives me good ideas and teaches me useful stuff. It is adding energy to my life, rather than draining it. But when that's done, classes will be taken in order to achieve specific projects.

Basically, given the response my work has received thus far, it is obviously time to take all the half-finished projects and send them out into the fucking world. This means I will be spending my time doing things I like to do, and do well. This is one reason I've been delaying getting my shit together for so long -- I shun pleasure instinctively, and the life I'm shaping for myself could be sweet if it works out.

Here is the immediate future.

1. Swillistrations. I've got a class in tabletop photography on Saturday, and I've got a work table for my studio on order. I will do fifteen pieces, and seven of them will go into Swill. When finished, I will submit them in a batch to Spectrum, and produce a POD calender based on the best of the old Bonelands series.

I will also do a tutorial based on one of the prints. I will try and make it as complete and professional as possible. When it's done, I'll send out a request for career information to as many different graphic software companies as I can find, and include the tutorial as a portfolio piece.

Then I will put together a portfolio, and look for galleries and art agents. Once I get a sizeable batch of portfolios circulating, I forget about it for a while.

2. Write a resume for my writing, and change my personal site -- seancraven.com, it's primitive but enthusiastic -- to a business site, advertising my services as writer, artist, editor, and designer.

3. Then I write the novel. Straight through, by myself, write it, read it, revise it, then it's line edits and off. No dicking around. I have a fucking plot, I've written it nine times already. It is time to be a pro.

4. Then I put together a round of portfolios to send out to ad agencies and so on.

5. Then I finish the script and get it off to agents, and possibly self-publish it as a book. Because I'm like nine kinds of crazy.

6. Then I find out about doing dinosaur books for children.

At that point, it's vague and fuzzy, which is fine. I'll be changing this as it goes along.

But I need to be focused on effective productivity. Part of that is recognizing that if I get too scattered, too worried, too unhappy, too stressed, etc. I stop functioning. So I need to eliminate sources of stress from my life to a degree that, yes, is not normal. Is not something that would be acceptable in most people.

I have the option of doing that. And I'm taking it. I think that the combination of focusing the bulk of my time on the large, ambitious, self-expressive work, while searching for commercial work in-between bouts, will produce some kind of positive result in the long run, even if it's something I can only keep up for a while.

I will be trying to find the balance between my obsessive need to do one project at a time, and my desire for a more systematic and predictable life, especially the money part. If I'm going to function, I need to respect and work with my obsessions.

I told the missus that I might make some decisions that will be wrong or crazy over the next six months or a year, and that we were going to have to live with that. Because it's time to do something different.

It's time to do it -- not Frank's way, not Sid's way -- my way. Folks, if you haven't tried it? Put yourself in a position to rub your hands together and cackle. It is scary as shit but it's hell of fun.

The Back Cover

Here we go, folks, another preview of the upcoming Swill. Again, going with the hard-sell theme I'm working for this issue, we establish that a failure to purchase our magazine will make a noted authority sad and lonely. You don't want that to happen, right?

When I met Nick Mamatas at a book signing in San Francisco (I was there to meet some friends and, jesus I disgust myself, network), he signed my copy of Move Under Ground (a note-perfect Kerouac-does-Lovecraft I actually enjoyed more than some works of his models), I mentioned an interview he'd given the Oakland Trib where he'd named Swill as a sign of the thriving East Bay literary underground.

When I told him that he'd bought the only copy of Swill that sold in Berkeley, this is what he wrote. He's graciously allowed us to use it. Plus, ol' Rob gives us a typical dollop of soul-crushing filth, and I engage in some ritualistic chest-beating. Honestly, you'd at least have to leaf through the damned thing after reading this, right?

Swill 5: The Start of the Back Cover

There's a certain visual quality that I associate with photography, and one of the great pleasures of Photoshop is that it allows me to achieve that visual quality in other media. Mixed black-and-white inks, in this case. Honestly, I can't imagine doing visual art without the global color adjustments and layers of Photoshop.

It's Coming! Run for your lives!

I just sent Rob an email telling him that we needed a fucking blurb for the upper-left corner. Last issue sold two fucking copies over a year in the stores, and it was a beautiful art object. This time I'm catering to the ignorant swine and putting things like a price and a confession as to the nature of the contents on the front, and a blurb is just what we need, since my Girl Cooties logo was horrible to behold.

So I have finally cracked and entered the tunnel. I have begun the design and typesetting process, and soon there will be a new series of prints in the works. That's right, I'm starting production on the next issue of Swill. This year has been so overwhelming that I've been dragging my feet badly on this as well as many other fronts. I mean, it's not like I haven't been keeping busy.

But the time has come. Expect a lot of graphics-related posts in the next little while.