A transitory writ

Well, I haven't been up to much.  In terms of painting, at least.  I finished this a few days ago and haven't really done anything since.  But I've got some ideas stewing in my guts, so we'll see how it goes in the next day or so.


It's the third of these, with one other ready to be painted.  It turned out alright.  Actually, after I finished it I was ready to throw it off a pier, but after waking up in the morning I liked it a little better.  I'm terrible at feathers.  I need to change that, because I love the hell out of feathered things.

In other news, things down south went quite well.  I was expecting misery, awkwardness, maybe a fist fight with the ol' pater familias, but none of that really came to pass.  I enlisted the assistance of a good friend and the drives down and back went by without notice, embroiled in discussion about ethics and materialism.  Capital.  The funeral for my uncle was heartening and well attended.  Some salty dogs there, for certain.  But I patched things up with my father and got a giant cow skull in the way of peace offering.


I've strung it up with some of my other bones, and now one corner of my room looks as though I rent it out to the Predator.  I'm happy about that.  I've added a beaver skull to the bundle since the picture was taken, but you get the idea.  Otherwise I saw an old friend who I haven't seen in ages.  Our oppositionally hermetic natures prevent us from interacting much.  Whenever we do everything feels right in the universe.

I've decided that I need to start working on a larger scale.  I'm going to make a strong effort away from the moleskine sketchbooks I've been painting in and invest in some giant watercolor blocks.  Some of the ideas I'm putting together will benefit by more space.  It'll take some time to adjust, but we'll see.  I'm going to have to get a better camera to get these things onto them ol' internets, but seeing as how they don't even exist yet I'm not worried about that stage of the process just yet.

For the past week or so, things have been tentatively great.  Things are moving anyway.  I guess I'm still unsure if they are moving down the well trod path of eventual and inevitable solitude or if the footfalls are heading upward, but I'm not about to retreat.  Dismal optimist, that's me.  Until next time.

Disinclined to action

Well, it's been a few days.  Productive ones, after a fashion.  Book store today, I replaced my copy of The Prince finally, and found a Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Dead Souls that I'll start reading after I finish this tawdry account of 17th century episcopal mayhem.  I finished a number of things in the works (although not the last panel of this story, which is infuriating me and I might throw it out of something.  A window.  Or a moving car.), started a few others, finished a couple of those.  Behold-


The fourth and (despite the description there) possibly last part of that line of things.  Seen before, but now finished for real.  The middle bear turned out the best.  The thing is now lined up on my wall, eight feet long and looking weird.


This is revisiting a nostalgic idea a bit.  I find myself doing these when I'm particularly bearing-less.  It's tied to memory that makes me feel better.  A different chain of causation that fired off in some direction that I didn't follow.


And then I did this.  I am actually very pleased with this.  It may well be my favorite.  I've started using gouache in certain ways.  I can't paint in the stuff for shit, but I can use it to highlight certain things.  I haven't done any particularly bloody images in a while, what with this story business being largely bloodless (and the bloody frames done first), so I felt I needed to balance that out a bit.  It worked out.  More blood.  More entrails.  More shattered bone.  And more of this faun.  Definitely more of that faun.


And at long last!!!  A month or two ago, my friend and fellow skull enthusiast RJ Adams informed me that he had a gift to bring into town on his next sojourn.  He visits the hostel every few months to write and (the lucky bastard) examine the Cal Academy's basement specimen collection.  Yesterday he arrived, with a plastic basin in tow full of isopropyl alcohol solution and baby cougar skull.  I am very pleased with this.  I'm still mulling over exactly how I want to mount it.  I'm probably going to go with the bell jar, half exploded and half intact.  I'm just loathe to start taking it apart, because it's 100% complete and in amazing condition.  I'll get to it.  In other bone project news, I'm now soaking my beaver skull and my goat spine in peroxide, so I'll be getting to those soon as well.

Tonight I'm still chasing a ghost.  Waiting here on a suggestion, a hint, the possibility that I might be visited is enough to keep me riveted in place.  Even as I doubt it'll come to pass, I invest myself in that slim probability.  I'm goddam hopeless.