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here is the drawing about how i couldn't do 100 in November.
like every other thing in the world, it's meant to speak for itself, and like every other thing in the world, it has a context too massive to even begin describing.
i guess what you need to know, if you don't know these things [about me] already, is: pop music has saved my life ten zillion times. so has pop art. one time i was working in a job i really hated, in a place where i didn't want to be, inside a narrow stairwell, sweaty, carrying an armload of giant textbooks up 14 flights of stairs. [the elevator was broken.] somewhere in the building there was a tinny radio, and i heard Thom Yorke's voice. 'the best you can is good enough.'
for a long time i wanted to write a book called Good for the Dead. maybe i will still write it. the title comes from a... dream, visionary truth, whateverthefuck. a slogan that carved itself a home inside my mind: Art Is Only Good for the Dead.
as usual, it turns out that the universe is so much simpler. this isn't to say it makes it kinder or easier. it's just simpler.
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i am really proud of this one because i feel like it expresses something i could only say in an image. most of my other drawings are essentially explicable in other ways, in addition to the image itself. this isn't to say that i couldn't talk about this drawing or explain why i made certain choices while doing it, but; this is one of my first designs that stands out to me as something i really don't know how to say another way, and don't want or need to say in another way.
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Port Authority Nyc, 12:45pm, 23 November 2006. near Snacks N Wheels eating establishment, basement. teenage boy in absurdly puffy brown jacket selling pills. our eyes lock. 1:13pm: skinny, muscled punk boy about my age walks up to the kid. they talk. they walk off together. the punk is smirking like he just won the lottery and a brand new pony. probably all that happened is they went off to do a drugdeal, but i imagine them fucking all the way to Baltimore.
damn. it just dawned on me that i really have no fucking idea how i'm going to finish 100 drawings in November. in about 9 hours from this moment, my beloved boyfriend and i are boarding a Greyhound bus to spend Thanksgiving weekend with his relatives. they're not the type of people that i can draw trippy porno drawings in view of, plus more importantly, i think we have a bunch of sightseeing-type activities planned. plus i still gotta do my dayjob through all of Thanskgiving weekend. prospects for art are not looking exceptional...
but still. i really really really really want to do this. i really really really want to do 100 drawings in November. i'm tremendously behind, but for the moment, here are three recent ones.
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whewee. so this is what i look like when i'm artistically spent. fucking arted out.
i'm definitely still going to finish 100 drawings by the end of November, but i'm gonna take another 2-3 days and just kinda breathe. i'll probably post my next set of drawings midweek.
oh, and i decided to grow out my hair some. my goal for the winter is to get my muscle tone back [i haven't been to a gym in, like, a year] and then get an 'Alex Kapranos 2003'-style 'floppy fringe' haircut.
first try at color and fields on big paper... i have a lot to learn, obviously, but it came out alright. in the rest of the drawings today, the Big Halfway Day!, i tried to do better stuff with color. not so much fields though.
i realized i would never catch up on my drawings unless i did a whole bunch of simpler ones on 1 day. these are basically studies for later, bigger works. they're finished as drawings and everything, but i don't plan to title them.
basically these are the symbols from some other world that i can visualize when i'm extremely spaced out. it's a world i want to draw for a lot of reasons, one of which is that i think it would turn out cool. i don't know how to draw the people/residents of the world yet. drawing their symbols is simpler.
in the world where these signs exist, their relative complexity is something like: more complicated than a letter of the alphabet; less complicated than a family crest. these are the kinds of things that are on t-shirts, soda cups, billboards, signs, labels, buttons, etc. soup cans. yougetit.
on all of these drawings, the words below it aren't the title, but instead the place where i imagined seeing this sign. also i'm not sure if another 'world' is the proper term; it could just be another city or something like that. i'm not sure yet. here we go
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only recently did i learn that a lot of gay boys wanted to fuck Simba when they were kids. i feel very sexually unimaginative for never having had a crush on a cartoon character. i drew this from a photo of a hustler who dressed as Simba this past Halloween after his plans to dress as a 'trash bag' somehow 'didn't work out.' it seems like it should have happened the other way around, but go figure.
and what kind of weird faggoty shit is Mario's FIREFLOWER, anyway? something straight out of Genet.
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a point of reference. the Radiant Baby was actually born sometime around 1981, but i combed through my Haring books, and amazingly, this was the only decently scannable image of it that i could find. it's from the Icons set that was produced posthumously.
it was pretty startling to go through my Haring books and find only 1 decent Radiant Baby. but sure, of course. for a time, that image was so ubiquitous that yeah: who would want to see it in a Haring book? it was Absolutely Everywhere: the street, the museum, and bootlegged Japanese t-shirts.
to me the Radiant Baby will always be yellow, but i didn't want to recolor the scan using my computer. i think Keith H must have drawn them in pretty much every color he ever used. it remains his major symbol, and it was the second tag he originated after the laughing/dancing dog dude.
talking about the Radiant Baby in his official biography, Keith H says it started out as a cartoon drawing of 'a person down on their hands and knees' and it developed into a baby. to do Radiant Baby 2006, i basically thought: Radiant Baby's about 25 now, so what does s/he look like?
for me, probably Radiant Baby is a he, and he's living in New York still, and in fact, he's back on the streets again because the Pop Shop has closed. he's thinking about all the countries he hasn't visited yet, and he's wondering if he'll ever get there. at the moment, he's a little bit desperate, and he's doing something naughty for money. if you ask him to pick a number any number, he will pick the number 5. he trusts in the lines around him; he always has and he always will. he thinks about the subway like it's one enormous cock.
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wow, that goldish Tombow marker photographs so poorly, again and again. anyway;
back to New York, my immediate context. i was on the subway and i overheard this gay dude talking to a female friend about how he wants to be able to legally marry his boyfriend _because he wants to have a wedding cake_. i was flabbergasted. i could barely think of a dumber reason to want to get married. it also got me thinking about how Nyc is a big slice town. slices of pizza, slices of cake- so much takeout comes in slices. in L.A., by contrast, and San Francisco too, it's much more about wraps and burritos.
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i can understand, to a degree, people's need to bitch about 'hipsters', although i personally find such a tendency deplorable. when someone starts dissing stripes, however- one of the most basic methods of decoration- just because stripes have been associated with several generations of 'hipsters'- well i get really pissed. one, i love stripes, and two, fabric is innocent.
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drawings that refuse to be photographed well, like this one, surprise and interest me. i mean jesus, it looks like it got beat up or has tuberculosis or something. i guess it's telling me its real home is on paper. maybe it doesn't want to be on the internet but tough shit.
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here is what i recognize as basically my style in a nutshell. a 'for example'. it's: future-primitive/80s-pop-art/ or whatever my line would be properly called; it's sexual, aggressive; it has text rendered as shapes; its line is only 1 color. all variation of color is fundamentally blasphemy. still: elsewhere, talking to people about my drawings, i see that so far, people seem to respond much more strongly to the colorful ones in general. and i mean yeah. it's color.
i'm attracted to this... democracy?, or whatever, of line, where it's all one thickness, all one color, and the fields/shapes all bleed into one another [which isn't conducive to coloring them in]. at the same time i'm totally attracted to the idea of pleasing an audience, 'my audience'. another kind of democracy?, or whatever.
basically i plan to keep doing 1-color drawings and 2-color drawings and many-color drawings and so on. the 1-color drawings are the ones that are most 'for me'.
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i'm a traveler by nature, with persistent wanderlust. jumping on a plane to land in a totally unfamiliar country, where i don't know the language, and simply seeing what happens, is probably my major idle daydream. of course, i don't ever actually do it, so there's also that. i mean, i do travel impulsively, but not to such extremes.
one destination that appears almost totally inaccessible to me is London. surely, maybe my feelings are totally unfounded. but to me, the apparent expense of that place looms enormous. i mean, holy fuck, just tube fare! i read it on the website!! they don't call Britain 'treasure island' for nothing, right. American kids i know who've gone to London generally report: 'things cost about twice as much.'
so, whether any of it is true or not, London appears as this very romantic destination in my mind. and i have a few London obsessions. one is the entire Barking/Dagenham area, especially the Becontree estates.
i decided i want to draw boys- well, people- but to start, basically these weird mutant prettyboys i've been drawing because they keep me interested- i want to draw these boys fucking in the Barking/Dagenham area. or just being sexual or whatever.
so these next drawings are of boys in Barking+Dagenham, maybe at Becontree. the drawings themselves have no particular indicators of this locale, except in this first drawing above, the building is some Barking housing office that was one of the first Google image hits for 'Barking'. but that idea is where these next few drawings came from. oh, and a previous drawing as well, It's Nice to Be Wanted.
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even more than black. somehow skinny blue lines like these promise truth to me, in any context. i write all my letters and journals in blue ink that looks pretty similar to this. on this drawing though i used an ultrafine Sharpie.
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so, 100 drawings in a month is about 3 + 1/3 a day. naturally i can do different amounts on different days, but November got off to a really slow start for me. headaches, stomachaches, lots of sleep. i didn't do a '100 in November' drawing until the 3rd, and i only did one that day, so, i've been trying to catch up.
i'm drawing in an 8x8" and the 11x14" sketchbook. with the way i resize images to put them online, the two sizes end up looking close to the same size, which is cool. but in real life, the square ones are a lot smaller than the rectangular ones, and that's why the square ones are so much simpler.
on the one above, i used watercolor pencils for the first time. they were the most interesting thing i could find at Staples tonight, w/ all the art supply stores closed already. i actually have this kind of in-built prejudice against watercolors, i'm not sure why. but i thought it would be cool to experiment with watercolor pencils and it ended up being pretty fun.
right now it's early morning on the 6th. i think i have about 16 drawings to post. i've done a few more than that total, but some ended up being too personal to share, which was a really novel experience. usually i share everything.
so here we go for this set. also keep in mind;
the smaller square drawings are scanned, the bigger rectangular drawings are photographed; scanning looks better
like several of my recent drawings, including the one you can kinda see behind this one, this drawing is unfinished because i don't have the colors i want. it's 5:30pm on a Sunday and i just realized basically every art supply store in the city has already closed. fuck. i'm going to walk over to Staples, as they're open til 7pm, and see if i can find anything approximating the light yellow and orange brush markers that i had in mind.
i'm finally pretty close to caught up on the drawings. today being the 5th, i should have about 16 done, and if i can get hold of the proper colors tonight, i should have about that many finished... if i can't find the right colors to finish the ones i've done, i'll try to do enough others tonight. like little simple ones or something. 100 drawings in a month is actually a totally lofty goal. i mean, that is to say, i find it difficult.
scanning party late tonite! get ready to see lots of mutant boys fucking!
