Alright. Welcome to my blog page. Well, Let me tell ya how this is gonna work. I’ll be chiming in here from time to time to update you on my artistic goings on as well as other things that might interest you. I am also going to use this as as a glimpse into my personal sketch book. My goal is to put up every little scribble I make from this day forth. You know how that goes though. I said it’s a goal, not a guarantee. I will be creating little challenges for myself along the way just to push myself and allow myself to grow. I’ll probably be interjecting slices of my life in here as well. I am also a musician and am equally proud of the work I create in that field. I’ll let you know where I’m playing or if a new album or article come out. Say, I finally get my chile rellenos cooked right? You might hear about that too. Pictures and all. In other words, if you look at this page, you’ll get to know me, my life and my process pretty well. Maybe even better than I know myself. Boy, are you lucky. Congratulations!!!
Alright. Enough about that. Personal challenge #1. Musical Illustrations.
As I said before, I love music. I listen to it, play it, write it, roll around in it, brush my teeth with it even. I decided that if I am going to get some editorial jobs I had better show that I can draw people so I picked musicians. I like them better than other iconic figures, so there. I chose Tom Waits as my first subject because I think he is, hands down, the greatest musician on the planet. As for the rest, I turned on my iTunes and shuffled to see what came up. I got a good batch. In this order I was handed: Jenny Lewis (That will be fun.), Bob Dylan (Better do something original. He’s been done a billion times.), Death Cab for Cutie, (Hmmm?) and Blind Willie McTell (Double Hmmmmm?). Then I listened to a few tracks from each artist and decided to incorporate images from those songs into the backgrounds of the images. Just scrawled some things down. Let’s see what happens. Here’s my first Waits sketch for my studying phase.
Well, I’m proud to tell you that Tom Waits and Jenny Lewis are done. Tom was pretty easy, but MAN is it hard to capture Jenny Lewis. I think I got her pretty well though. I’ll post them as soon as I get them scanned. They are too big for my scanner. I also finished Bob Dylan which you CAN see in the gallery.
Let me tell you a little about how the Dylan piece came to be. I read a couple of articles recently about Dylan that infuriated me. The first was asking the question, ‘Should Dylan retire?’. WWWWHHHHAAATTTTTTTTT?????? Idiot. It argued that he is too old and his voice is suffering and he plays too many live shows. Granted, and I did somewhat agree, that 150 shows a year is a lot. But retire? I mean… He isn’t selling youth. He isn’t selling sex. He’s selling a long tradition of American music. Mick Jagger waving his geriatric junk in peoples faces, maybe. But not Dylan. They didn’t tell Mississippi John Hurt to retire. In fact, they found him as an old man and brought him back from obscurity. They didn’t tell Howlin’ Wolf or even Johnny Cash. I wouldn’t say he gets better with age but he evolves appropriately and may he play ’till his hands are stumps and he needs to be propped up. The 2nd article was from a speech Jack White gave to some college or something, somewhere. To whom and where are not important. What he said was supposedly something like Brittany Spears may be more authentic than Bob Dylan or Tom Waits. I am going to assume that his comments were taken way out of context because I really want to like Jack White. I do. The writer of the article went on to say how they give false accounts of themselves to reporters and thus are not the real deal. That reporter can artfully suck it. Anyway it got me to thinking. What would the young Bob Dylan think of the near 70 year old Bob Dylan. Sure he hasn’t written a society altering poem in song such as ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in damn near 40 years. But I’m not sure that was ever his intention. His lyrics are far more playful now than they ever were. Perhaps he realized that one man cannot bear the burden of holding the world’s hope for change on his shoulders all the way back when he wrote the line ‘I was so much older then, and I’m younger than that now’, in My Back Pages. Anyway. I think Young Dylan would admire and love older Dylan. See? I made a picture of them shaking hands.
January 19th, 2011
I promised I would put up pieces from my sketchbook as I went along so here you go. I did the princess a while ago but just finished the elephant yesterday. I don’t normally bring pictures in my sketchbook to such a level of completion or with such detail but it’s a practice I will probably try to keep up as the results have been pretty good. Enjoy.
