There is a great alternative rock band I love called, Blonde Redhead. I saw them live once. I was in a Japanese ramen place one time and the lead singer, Kazu Makino came in and sat next to me. I didn’t want to bug her but I did say how much I love her band’s music. Last week, Yun and I went to one of our favorite Japanese restaurants, Sobaya, for lunch. We ended up being seated next to Kazu and her guitarist Amedeo Pace. Seems I have the same taste in Japanese restaurants as Blonde Redhead.
Pussy Riot
Pussy riot.
Lion
I’m posting my lion drawing so you can study it just as if you were standing in front of it at the Guggenheim.
Crossdress
Symmetry.
Labudu
Art doesn’t always make sense. There are times it’s not very linear. This piece is a fine example. My mom turned 90 in September. Recently she took a spill and cracked her head needing eight stiches. I drove to North Carolina to check her out. She was unfazed by her brusing. This is the drawing I created as a result of that trip. My niece’s Labudu doll and a Stay Puft sculpture that was living in my sister’s kitchen made it in. Maybe one of you can explain it to me.
No Fur
I’ve run into a terribly odd thing on the streets of Manhattan. Suddenly women are wearing furs again. On a single day I counted a dozen. As I dug into the why, I discovered that this is now done under the auspices of vintage and upcycle. No animals are freshly killed if you are buying old clothes. The problem; it’s still endorsing the idea of wearing clothes that crushed animals' bones in traps or electrocuted or gassed them. There is also the very slippery slope of not knowing if someone is actually wearing a used fur or recently purchased one. To give you an idea of the numbers, 140 million cute animals were slaughtered for fur in 2014 and in 2023 it was down to 20 million. Still shockingly high. I have a feeling we are backsliding into some bad habits. The buckets of red paint and spray cans may be making a comeback soon.
Tooth Pull
My wife and I were randomly scheduled to each have a tooth pulled in the same week. How weird is that? Mine was pushed off to a later date. It’s still weird though.
Podcast
Recently I was a guest on The Sneaky Podcast. The host is the intellectually curious Nishant Jain. He’s calls himself the Sneaky Artist. Nishant and Danny Gregory are the two smartest and most articulate people I’ve ever heard talk about drawing. I was in a cafe once with Nishant and he was pontificating about the current state of the world of art. A woman in earshot of his talk came over and told him his views on art were blowing her mind. I have a feeling this happens to him all the time. The problem with having me on a podcast is that I’m an idiot and no one wants to hear what I have to say. My blabbing is so inarticulate that you will know less about drawing after hearing me then when you started. Listen at your own risk.
Runway
I was able to draw the front row of a top runway show during fashion week. The animals were out in full force.
Old Man
Someone was looking through my winter sketchbook and commented that I didn’t draw people. I said that particular sketchbook housed my Natural History drawings and outdoor achitecture. Then she got to this page which put an end to her doubt. It’s a recent addition.
Owls
The first book I read by Jennifer Ackerman was The Genius of Birds. I followed that up with her book, What An Owl Know. That inspired me to make this drawing. While hiking in Olympic National Park I was able to identify some owl scat on the base of a tree or two, letting me know an owl was perched way up high somewhere in that giant tree. I also know that after the Harry Potter films came out, too many people in too many countries bought owls as pets only to release them into the wild weeks later because they didn’t realize how difficult it would be to maintain them. Scientists made JK Rowling issue a statement to folks not to buy owls.
Lemons
My wife bought me a John Derian book. He’s a decoupage artist extraordinaire. He owns a shop in the East Village where he sells his stuff. He’s obsessed with eighteenth and nineteenth century natural history prints. After staring at this book a few days, I came up with my lemon concept. There was nothing like this in his book but somehow it kick started my brain to concieve of this. Now I can go back to hypnotizing myself in his pages again.
Pinocchio
Patti Smith was on Ezra Klein’s podcast talking about her new book. Since she published, Just Kids, I’ve read everything she puts out. She was telling Ezra about her favorite books. A major one happened to be Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. It had a big impact on her when she read it as a child. I only knew the story from the movies which always seem to veer from the novel. After reading it, I’d wished someone made me do it as a kid. I might not have gotten involved with doing so many dumb things in my youth.
