After School

The following collection of ‘after school’ plans represent those ideas which I rehearse and revisit; that is to say these are daydreams. 

List: 

Visit Ephram Wolff on Vaschon Island and make intaglio with him

Visit David Byrne in New York

Produce stickers for sale 

Produce a digital sticker pack for facebook

Postcards for SCBWI eligibility

Cartooning career

Design enclosures for aquarium 

Do stage design 

Work for Hollywood scenic painting.  Connection- Dennis family’s friend Jane??

Work for D4 productions.. New Jersey Daryl, met at Balet X in Philly 

Work for mural production in Brooklyn through Franco’s Spanish friend. 

‘’ ‘’ through that company.. craigslist. Big wall i

Go to France to chill with lawyer John. Do the nudist colony for a couple weeks in Nice 

Go to Paris- hit up M law school about the artist arrondissement live there as a gleaner for a while- 4 months. Squatter

Hit up Taz. Live with his roving band or chill - tap in to that for a while. Ride trains 

Hit up Maine sustainable farm near Deer Isle.  Do a season’s work harvesting with them. 

Do a woofing program. Work on a farm in Chile, or one in California 

Take a class on Ulysses. 

Take German classes In Philly 

Go to grad school for painting in the Midwest after spending some time on the west coast. 

Buy a big nice printer to make a production of zines and such. Compile a mailing list though excel, physical and digital. 

Design Shirts and print and sell through a distributor.  

Apply for artist in residencies; especially for the national parks service and for institutions I’ve been in contact with prior. FSU, Haystack, outside of philly college Haverford, Cork, that one in Ireland that Shils was in.. 

Do the 100 paintings/ 100 square feet/ 100 days project. Make a book out of it

Live as a homeless person with a bank account- voluntarily. Making a painting busk show, selling works and prints for price points- especially from found objects- scissors, glue, twine, rubber bands, and detritus. A little bell I could ring with my foot would be a plus, like a Salvation Army worker.

Make a portrait series of homeless people ala prima, to hand over to them upon completion, for them to sell. Or keep? 

Make Plein air paintings in a public location to sell to tourists and or connoisseurs. Paint every day in the park for six to eight hours, with a small display of paintings arranged at the feet. Maybe two paintings a day. Or one. 

Make Plein air paintings in specific locations- memorizing the place as a motif, to ensure travel spots as income spots. I.e. memorize the city hall of Philadelphia, then the Grand Canyon. Paint them like cheap tourist paintings. 

Paint Florida landscapes like the Florida highway men, and busk on the side of the road as the new Florida highway men. Get some friends to join- recruit. Make an LLC and do as the highway men did. 

Situated self in the park as a portrait painter. Do half-hour alaprima portraits in acrylic gouache.. or oil- package them as to ensure their lasting. Also consider bringing a camera or scanner out there, for documentation of each picture 

Get a studio in a cheap town like Jacksonville, and hide away. No internet connection. 

Make a splashy zine to bid for attention from companies of a specific field- design work- and attend an international conference of such industry. Hand out zines as a sampler to your styles with a mention of ‘for hire’

Contact Aaron Brown and gf about production mural painting in west coast. Paint big walls through companies like she does, for billabong and all that. 

Hit up John from Jacksonville about production mural painting including through the companies he paints through, and also firehouse subs. 

Apply to open calls for mural like Cosby, with Cosby. Try to get on those big walls. 

Do the construction site project- where  you rent  a house in a town like Sarasota, then sign a liability waiver to a construction company, then wear a hard hat and hang out on site, using waste from the site to make improvisational sculptures and paintings. Comment on sponsored redlining, forced infrastructure through greed of local governments, and formalism in relation to homogeneity in relation to imperialism, capitalism, etc. 

Marry and get in touch with true nature- true love by the touch. Her touch is like death. Sex is so great. Marry and never question her. Let her swing but also give her tons of dick. Have babies. 

Marry and have babies and homestead somewhere in tick country. Level out and grow strong in forestry skills. Fuck the shit out of her and have babies. 

Marry and live a secluded life in the countryside near her family and paint conservatively and be cool about her paintings being better, and try to be proactive about getting her discovered, in addition to doing the same for yourself. 

Marry and have a babies and live wherever and treat her with reverence and respect 

Record a few albums using that tongue dum and fish out those old spoken word recordings and apply them and live record drums over top. Also, use a loop pedal and do some shows with the arrangements. Organize a tour. 

Live a residency period on a House boat- house-sitting as a residency. Organize a show from the works. 

Live somewhere near an ice lake, and learn to respirate in extreme conditions. 

Do a tour of horse paintings, going from place to place ranch to ranch painting horses, selling and squatting. 

Ditto yacht paintings

Do a tour of water tower paintings. Paint towns water towers after research about the locale.

Hit up crystal River for the big town wall for a mural 

Hit up captain Tim for that other mural, as well as the owners of Pete’s Pier for the back wall animal series paintings. 

Hit up the town of Palatka, FL which does historic murals and try to get a wall in that town 

Hit up same deal in that cow-town in northern New York State. Bovina. 

Also hit up the whale painter in Hawaii and go to him as an apprentice/associate/colleague. Wyland

Do some work for that artist you helped move in Brooklyn - that woman. That once. . 

Do more mural work for WTMA gym in Tallahassee 

Do a series of woodcuts for resale of Pennsylvania scenes with labor sourced from homeless populations through the shelters. Surely they’ve gotten propositions like this before. 

Paint more for Pyramid Inc. in Tallahassee. 

Do compassionate work with old people- workshops, nursing homes, or likewise. 

Do residencies in in- between spaces like Diane Collins and live in places being rehabbed. She’s living and working in a studio in an old hospital now.

Read read read read read read read 

Write zine about my education as an artist thus far and publish it a little painting book. To be revisited of course when I’m old and still doing it. 

Go back through Tallahassee and mentor Graffiti kids 

Alas a lot of these ideas are things I’ve heard of other people doing. 

Disappear to some place out west and live out of town, unknown and in hermitage- coming in for essentials- The Walden’s Pond plan. 

Do a massive collage residency at my Grammy’s house upon her death. Living in the house and processing all of the imagery through collage.  Likewise selling some of the valuable posters could be useful for money. 

Do a still life residency at Grammy’s house before she dies. Three weeks six -to - ten hour painting days medium and mid-large scale works. 

Do the directions home zine project in total. Bugaboo 

Sit quietly in my room in west Philly and pencil and ink and scan and print and assemble and scan and print comics zines without WiFi while working at a cafe or something four days a week. Live a meager life- super routine, while working on batched off days- try to narrow it to three days a week. Do this for a few years. Don’t let the popularity fool you, manipulate or play into your product or production. The outside influence will only weaken the work. Make something wicked but so thoroughly round. Read Moby Dick and Ulysses for inspiration or lattice. esp Moby Dick as it relates to Philip Guston 

Become a terrorist, disrupting the structures of capitalism for ecological relief. Ie dig up roads. Hurt trade. 

Buy properties and become a slum lord. 

Go to Detroit and fix up a home through the fix-to-own government programs. Invest time and energies in urban farming. 

In Detroit likewise get a houseboat and homestead it, fixing it up and waiting for ROI for thirty years like the Amsterdam canal houses. 

The hip hop animation. Art history graffiti beefing cross out names. . 

Residency at my mother’s beach condo in Panama City. Focusing on painting the sand dunes alaprima. Publish through the local newspaper, and put into a gallery in Destin or Mexico Beach. Ditto Sanibel Island and Captiva- target rich buyers with supremely good landscape paintings. 

Ditto Donna’s house- paintings of the lake, and or paintings from the Crystal Rivers springs. Frame up for the Franklin Anderson Gallery

Paint the side of that frame shop- landscape style in Crystal River. Mural. They want it. Little money. 

Paint the City of Crystal River City Hall- they want it. I’ve already designed the wall, and gotten approval, just no finance or guarantees of permanence. 

Residency at Eula’s house. Make paintings in an upstairs studio. . Of what I don’t know.

Go back to Europe and hike with a tent. Do backpacking Europe in a less yuppie way. 

Go to China and make ‘authentic’ American Abstract Expressionist work. Basically troll the westernization. Make a bunch of money out there. 

Hit up all sexual prospects and see if I can’t get laid. Roll the dice. 

Go on a sex tour where I woo and impregnate many women in one big sweep. Figure out the rest later. 

Hit up that dude Daniel McClendon in Asheville NC and see if he’ll give me the business he’s built, if he’s ready to tap out. 

Become a guard or a docent at the PMA, or ticket sales. Same goes for ICA, though I super doubt they would hire a SWM. 

Develop an art criticism column and write about and for friends. 

Do a video series over time, (daily for eight years) about studio life through which I could share my journey and process. Stay humble and build a community 

Go to grad school at Yale for painting and get to the center of post-modern painting rhetoric 

Wake up early and pencil and ink something each day & post- something responsible. Early Bird. 

Make a line of 3D vinyl toy models for distribution via those toy shops. 

Walk into the offices of high level interior designers and propose murals, privately commissioned. Be their in-house mural painter for kids’ bedrooms, etc. 

Get the best printer you can find

Flood the internet with my imagery and email (especially marinas?) offers for big walls. 

Snail mail Marinas a small portfolio and a business card with a small concise statement about why painting Marinas is important/inspiring to me. 

“ “ sports stores. Sports stores want big. Murals of athletes running across their walls. 

Trader Joe’s. Be a signage guy, or a mural tech. Be an art director. 

Do signs for Home Depot and work in the paint department. Do signage and work on calligraphy. 

Do/Finish painting of American Opossums for Sheila in Crystal River

Do/finish portrait of Bob and his wife Berger. Sitting in chair in front of them, hoping it turns out. In person. 

100.)Do animal paintings for auction sales to raise money for animal rescues ( I don’t like this as money is an abstract concept tied with a system. Exposure is better than money for the welfare of the animals in this regard. It would be a good thing do to maybe with prints or something though.)

Paint backgrounds for zoos (Sarasota Jungle Gardens, Big Cat, Botanical Gardens). 

Portrait of Cowboy

Portrait of Willie Rose

Collabo with John Collazos. Partnership with him and Cosby

Do the mural Circuit that Cosby has seemingly tapped into. 

Portrait of Emma Ballantine

Portrait of Yaffa

Yaffa’s Illustrations turn over in pencil

Apply for Vermont residency 

Apply for Skowhegan 

Apply for Cranbrook for visual arts and creative writing MFA

Hang out in the PAFA library each day and look at each picture in the entire catalogue- cover to cover each book and make a few copies a day. 

Hang out in the public library each day and look up and read about the most vile things you can think of on public computers and in books

Work on a mushroom farm

Clear up that license plate charge with the City of Jacksonville

Travel and camp with a tow-behind trailer; doing pleinair paintings along the way, and stashing them to dry and selling them in the town centers when I come across them. Business cards. 

Hit up Amsterdam connections and have a show (Edwin Suer). “ ” Wynwood guy.

Paint Florida Nature that would sell in Franklin Anderson Gallery, and pitch to Karen. 

Pet portraits. 

Hoof it and get a few walls in Philadelphia under control, then paint them with Cosby. Cosby wants to do some walls in Philadelphia. 

Visit Beehive Collective (again). Maybe for their Black Fly Ball; or even better, winter with them working shipping and reading through their library. 

Illustrate (dedicate one whole sketchbook to- for starters,inked) for the New Yorker (spots) and submit to the art director there. 

Contact those in Maine to go in on a punk house with. 

Do tiny pieces graffiti, and get internet famous off them, and vie for bigger walls based on the smaller designs. You’re a great graffiti writer, just there’s little incentive, and it’s so expensive. Use the little pieces like a laboratory, and even sell the little fine art pieces on found objects, or on more creative surfaces. 

Apply to many shows to try to get known. 

Become an expat in Columbia. Hit up that teacher from MXDF. 

Mom sees me as being the foremost artist in the world; creating our generation’s smiley face, or our generations ‘keep on trucking’. Being multidisciplinary and entrepreneurial. Do that.  

Become and expat somewhere very cheap. Huddle up some money and live off it for a year or two. 

Hike the ACT or the PCT through. 

Go to LA to carve out a living. 

Go to NYC to carve out a living. 

Make One Hundred Perfect Days zine

Make Mural Proposals Look Book Zine

Make Couch Paintings Zine

Make Exhibition Walls Zine

Caged Animals Zine with essay about containment

Mind Mapping Zine

My Education Zine

Make sealed room video from imagination from childhood

Finish up that big painting of Lexi 

Do that other painting of Lexi

Invite Lexi to Philadelphia 

Do a residency at a botanical garden, a series of watercolor paintings to be turned into postcards and to be sold in the gift shop. 

Collabo with Cami on that children’s book

3D model and bundle files of printable  reinterpretations of old motifs. Sell bundle. Entrepreneurialism.

Hang a sequel to the cigarettes show in Jacksonville. 

Hang a 666 serpents show, with large paintings. 

Make a book of collected clouds. Like Craphound zine. Downloadable pdf that shit. 

Downloadable pdf larger bodies of work and consider putting it behind paywalls. 

150.TEFL in Japan 

Residency at Jessica Glass and David’s sheep farm in Hartford Connecticut 

Apply for Peace Corps and do two years in Mozambique 

Work doing video production for a state department in house animations and editing. 

Work doing stop motion and miniatures building in a studio like moonbot, or see what the people who did that film Max and Sarah? That Asperger’s syndrome film. See what they’re up to. 

Make a series of figurines like precious moments about dilemma, dread polemic, etc. and mould them and produce them. 

Come up with an llc., a marketing plan, and research (for outsourcing and distribution), and build an understanding of networks (distribution and management) for a takeover 

Work for Hallmark 

Do a series of underwater paintings and merchandise them

Design a handful of murals for pollution awareness and pitch and install or just illegally install

Go to a place like where you dream about. I’m thinking Cranbrook. 

Do album covers and band merchandise and band posters. Focus on musicians and visuals, and be in a band. 

Be a drummer for a handful of bands and work a job to get by. 

Do sex murals for nightclubs. Like to go go club in Berlin. Black light art erotica. 

Spend a winter in Alaska in seclusion 

Day before spring semester 2019

The days since returning to Philadelphia are hard to characterize. I am at least alone, which is better than with subversive company. I have some guilt about winter break. I spent much time watching YouTube videos, and reading Reddit. I meditated and slept in all the time and regrounded my drawing practice. The big thing that went undid was ‘serious’ reading, specifically The DuBois Africa book, which is biblical in its lists of tribe names, and a reading from CJ at PAFA that regarded enlightenment thinking in the shadowy wake of the holocaust (The Dialectic of Enlightenment). I did get back into Ulysses on tape (this might be my fourth listen?) and was able to keep pace with Joyce for longer stretches than previously. I found a good YouTube Series about Joyce’s Ulysses called The Omphalos Cafe, and the ‘cafe’ owner, really has anti-academic take, which is fresh and refreshing. Among other things, he quickly touches on why Joyce ‘needed’ to bring in Bloom so soon, what he couldn’t do with Stephen, and how Bloom is the scientific to Stephen’s poetic. Bloom is suggested to be an Uber mensch. The host of the video series touches on Bloom in fact not being Jewish (how rich, for so much speculation rides on this assumption; and it represents an anti-Semitic booby trap for the academician!). Stephen is suggested to a be a young buddha-to-be, and Molly (though not stated by the host of the video explicitly, is a fully realized god being!)

I grew both closer and more distant to my parents. I became heated one night, and kind of fumed thinking about how I look forward to moving all of my things out and being alone and not needing to interact with them. They look forward to the same things. I must admit a projected audience for this blog is kids or grandkids, to sort through. I want to polish it up at some point, leaving in the ideas, while leaning up the verse. I don’t know who with or when if I were to reproduce, but it’s not in the foreseeable future. I can be rude when questioned about it by my parents. It would seem older parents make better parents, and art parents make the best parents. My career it would seem is not copacetic with settling down at all, so I’ll have to postpone until later on. I’ve got about ten grand in the bank now. I’ve whittled down an inheritance over the past seven years; made it stretch, and grow a bit, then plugged into and paid for four years of art school. I’ve seen some real mouth breathers get employed, and I love teaching painting, so I think getting out I might have a shot at getting some real money flowing back in in under ten years. I don’t think I want to sell my paintings yet. I think I want to collect my own paintings, and have them viewable digitally. I’m glad I gave away all of the paintings that I have, but there’s a time an a place, and my inventory is what I’ve traded my bank account for, and my time and years, and all that. My knees are a little bad. I’ll have trouble later on. 

Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama is not that good. I don’t think she has a thorough understanding of drawing in relation to the structures of the face. I looked up a handful of British painters today; the group I’m a little familiar with is that outlined in a book called Edward Bawden and his circle. I would like a copy of that book someday later on. I’m all about the Brits when it comes to painting, what a fresh group.

When I got back to Philly, I went to school, not to my apartment. I spent the night there, and took out a couple paintings, and resumed, after the two weeks intermission in Florida, working on them. I was fresh and lucid. The break did me some good. 

Also on the break I watched this godawful video called why Hitler hated the Jews. There was antisemitism throughout and large sections from Mein Kamf, but very informative. I hope to read Mein Kamf on my own. Probably there’s a PDF online. Suffice to say Hitler was delusional and the Jews to him were a scapegoat, and the Jewish people and the Romani and all that. Many have traded knowledge and understanding of the holocaust for blissful ignorance, but for some reason I found it very enlightening his inner turmoil nightmare-trip-coming-of-power thoughts. Media literacy; same with reading DuBois. Also on the topic of the holocaust, I’m reading Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil, Eichmann in Israel, which is a blessing in its clarity and force. Famously, this book got Arendt in trouble, and later she regretted the word choice of the title, which she surrendered caused her much unnecessary stress. 

I’ve got his neighbor who has a baby with colic. It wails for hours. I feel bad for him; poor kid too. 

My drums have yet to arrive in the mail. They are three days late tonight. I should call the service number. 

Trump has shut down the government and I don’t understand the situation in full, but we’ve been largely desensitized culturally at this point, myself included. I find it not wroth pursuing, which is how Trump I feel is so capable of moving along in his unique way. It’s divide and conquer, and seems to come naturally to him, in addition to his cultivating it. We have something similar to interwar Germany in disenfranchised and economically unstable populations. Our hegemonic dominance can collapse from within, and with Trump at the helm, it’s ever more plausible. Trump and the majority of his entitled generation are the toxic top of this country, bastards all of them. All I care about is plastics, and I don’t even care enough about it to change my life around avoiding them, I’m part complacent. Hitler blamed the Jews for bringing in basically smut and globalism. Of course I don’t think Jews are the problem. it’s funny about Hitler because what’s his beef but his fellow countrymen buying porn, and taking out loans and buying into individualism. “History is a nightmare I am trying to awaken from”, says Stephen Daedalus in Ulysses.

I’m on this big painting now. Ten feet by eight. It’s a snake on a garden bench. nice painting. People like it. It’s all acrylic, super flat and absorbent. I’ve spent the night with it twice, working in long 14 hour spurts, then a 4 hour sleep, then another 4 when the natural light of the sun comes up, then I’ll go home and cook and shower and sleep for 12 hours and repeat. School starts tomorrow and I won’t be able to do this routine (though I might be able to get in four hours in the morning) The painting might need some body in the form of heavy-body acrylic, and oil has been suggested too. I went in a direct painting approach, and I like it better than if I had projected up a big drawing or something like that. If I paint tomorrow, I’ll not do much, mostly look at it, maybe get supplies and mix a few colors and put them down in shapes. That’s painting I guess. Friday I might have some time on it, and spending the night would open up a long session on Saturday, and spending another night would do Sunday too, and I hope to finish it by then. I’ll have a critique on Monday and it would be cool to get it critiqued. 

I got a handful of cartoons that I’m really pleased with. Small and outlined with a rapidograph pen. Good ideas. One’s an old motif of a clown towing his little circus behind him, except in this rendition he’s on the edge of a cliff and doing a hailing a cab gesture. The hail is also like a heil, so I gotta acknowledge that; like, that I’m interested in being bad, like Philip Guston. Sad clown hailing an unseen cab standing on the edge of a cliff, and there’s another clown behind him too, with the same motif, and his little thumb sticking up like a hitchhike, also on the edge of a cliff. I stood on the edge of a set of cliffs in Iceland. It was windy and the ocean in that latitude is wicked. You can tell even from a couple hundred feet up. The grass and rocks beneath our feet were wet with rain and we took pictures by a cliff side. What’s the difference between that and towing around a bullshit ideology? That’s what keeps me up at night. 

Actually, that’s really the only good cartoon. I kind of got preoccupied with making a series, and ran out of sparkle I think, but I have eight inked drawings in total. 

In Florida I made a few collages, some inked drawings, some mock-ups of business cards, (I think I’m going to do the business cards on the school copy machine, zine style, and gluing a front sheet to a back sheet. I have nicely inked drawings for them, and I think the shitty/hand touched aesthetic will actually represent me and the work that I do much better than if I were to send off my drawings digitally to a company to be printed and cut etc. I’m accustomed to hand-done production- it’s my thing, so that’s the card). I worked a tiny bit on some essays for scholarship consideration, but those need much more work. I compiled a list of over 150 ‘after school’ plans as a project and I now feel free as a bird that they’re annotated. I might publish them here on the blog, because I think it could help out another artist, or might just be funny or interesting to some readers. That’s most of it! Wish me luck on a good semester! 

Addendum:

Also, some things I have to focus on in studio. I think I should work digitally for my cartooning work as far as inking and coloring goes, because it’s so much faster and intended for reproduction anyways. I think I’ll be spending much more time on the ipad in procreate. I’ve been playing with it over the break and it’s been going well so far. Otherwise, I get lost in the transfers and scale-ups and redraws and tracings of traditional cartooning and lose momentum and motivation. Digital means I can keep the freshness of the thumbnail, and its proportions. It’s time to stop being ignorant to this fact- what’s important to me about the work is not the product but rather the image. I’m most used to the image. The product is secondary in the age of mEchanical reproduction . . . Walter Benjamin. 

Another thing, I should learn how to get great captures, and to edit well photographs of my studio compositions. Again, it’s the image that’s important and my metabolism is much too fast to hunker down to paint every still life I find inspiring. Rather than beat myself up over how slowly I paint and constipated I get in my stream of ideas in relation to time (there’s not enough time blah blah), it would serve me better I think to flik it and be over it and edit in post. 

Another other thing, I should be sensitive to when something needs to be a big deal, and when a simpler image will do. I’m thinking of my ‘studio block’ cartoon page, which hit it spot on in a stream of consciousness tour de force versus the couch painting, or other projects that I scaled up or took too seriously. What did I need from them and why were they a wash? Most things can be said simply, (my ideas at least). Small is fine. As is going over the original sketch. As is using pencils as inks, fuck it, that’s what you’ve trained in.

Next Semester Plans

Plans when returning to school 

Upon returning to school I hope to have a chill semester, and not be carried away by fear. If I can keep my head on straight, I think some good might come from it. I will take much more sculpture than painting courses. Painting takes so long to learn, and I have a good head start, and sculptural techniques are specific. Sculpture at PAFA is very strong. I will take a mould making course, and a 3d printing course. I will take a sculpture studio course, and attend an extracurricular sculpture studio. I have oil based clay, and I’ve gifted some out too, so not enough for something larger than two or three feet, but it would probably be best and easier on my hands to work in water based clay mostly, and to work small. Sculptural anatomy is so much more precise, and I’m excited to get more deeply into it by taking an echorche class with John Horn. I’ve already taken an Ecorche class with him over the summer, but I’m not sure to what extent it’s burned in there, especially the lower arm, and muscles of the face, and I hope to dig in and challenge my teacher in this department, and to generally set myself hard tasks throughout. Briefly I’ll outline my sculptural studies forthcoming: 

Mondays: 3D printing with Rob Roesch. The head of our sculpture department, well versed in digital and public installation art. 

Tuesdays: Extracurricular figure sculpture session with Elizabeth Heller. I should work small (actually, medium, 10-18 inches) and fast in here, and in water based clay. I should make sure my armatures will fire, so I can have fired figurines as product from the sessions. Just a thought. Otherwise, oil-based and use potentially for casting class. 

Thursdays: Ecorche class in the morning> Figure open studio class in the afternoon. 

Fridays: Mould making in the morning with John Horn. 

As for painting, I’m taking a Wednesday landscape class with Doug Martenson. Doug is a jolly madman I think. He’s thoroughly in your corner, no matter who who are as long as you’re respectful, which I think is the perfect figure for an art school. I was weary to take classes with him as I sustained a polemic that his school of painting was inferior, or not rigorous or thorough, but having taken a class with him last semester, I can say that his guidance was invaluable and I made way more interesting work with him than in other classes. I tended to take his advice, and I felt free to riff on it too. He is a reader, and recommended me a few good books and articles most of which I dutifully read if it didn’t bore me to tears. The landscape class will be two sections, both the morning and the afternoon. It will interfere four times throughout the semester with my crit times with Jan Baltzel, but somehow we’ll make it, (maybe I’ll stay in that day, or commute on my own to the spot where the class is, outdoors somewhere). In this class, (of which I think of second most frequently, after the Moving Images MFA class I got accepted into) I hope to live-truly-live out one of my paths. Doug is so accepting of a person, I think he might think it’s cool.  Many of my post-school daydreams are centered around painting outdoors, and interacting with curious onlookers or patrons. I’ve done it before, and it’s one of my favorite things to do. In Miami in 2013 at Art Basel I hung out with Willie Rose- the Rose Man, who taught me how to make Palmetto roses, and we hawked them on the street. That experience of busking with him was a rush. He chided me for giving out an inferior product one time, and taught me about the flow of the day; when to give one away, when not to, etc. Since, I’ve set up a shanty store a handful of times; and every time I think I sell something, and these are my fondest memories of art; on the street; making something while waiting like a fishing trip I for someone of a curious mind to come by, and to interact with them. I did it in New York, and Amsterdam, and Berlin by the wall, and in Jacksonville a handful of times, in Sarasota, and yes even in Philly before I went to school there. I sold a drawing in the Rodin Museum. How fondly I think of these times! For Christmas I got a metal tongue drum from my mom. It can fit in a backpack. This is the first true ready-to-go full percussive sounded instrument I have had, that I can bring into a busking situation. I want to, on these trips with Doug Martenson’s class, bring along a tongue drum and a little gopro camera (for the film class, for nature captures), and probably my ipad with it’s pencil. This is the yuppiest pleinair/busking setup but, eh, fuck it. What superstitions are worth getting rid of if not the last one- that of being considered a fucking yuppie. So I hope to make landscape studies in a sketchbook with a pencil, and bring them to solvency, then to photo them into ProCreate and digitally paint them. The digital painting I’ve been doing recently has been fruitful in terms of those things in painting I rarely am able to get to by nature of other problems arising, or shortsightedness. namely, these are edges, edge quality, textures, and color. Truly color is dependent on what you take out there in regards to tubes, and textures (arguably) come from tools you take out there. The French easel weighs in at about 40 pounds fully loaded, and you’ve got your brushes, and your palettes, and your tubes (which,can limit your range if you don’t bring a good combination of pigments) etc etc., and your painting surfaces, and then once you paint the scene out of doors, you’re tasked with bringing the wet painting back somehow to a safe location where it can dry, and also if someone wanted to buy it off you, it would be terribly wet, and you’d in selling it risk someone else’s destroying it with miscarriage. And say, as I do, you work in a series, so you have five paintings each outing- you have to house 5 wet oil surfaces somehow. One solution obviously is to build a carriage, but then you will be shackled to a specific size. Another solution (one which I’m fond of ) is improvisational construction of a carrier from found materials. This method has one diggin through trash cans and looking for boxes behind stores, and making improv sculpture en-Plein-air, yielding a learning and physical experience. Okay, so that’s a plus to this side of the argument, but I digress. 

The alternative to all this is to just use the ipad and ProCreate, and the luxury this affords me naturally is to bring along an instrument to relax, which may in turn lure people in where I will have taking points, and business cards, and printed matter to gift and printed matter to sell. I truly hope to learn about life! Life in the Landscape class! 

The other painting I will be doing will largely be in studio, and my critics will respond to it. I’ve selected and gotten Clint Jukula, a grad of Yale School of Art and our Dean; Jan Baltzel, an abstract painter; and Sarah Peters, an in-her-stride sculptor. From Clint, I don’t know. I’m taking him for the ‘I don’t know what will come of this factor’. It could go badly. He’s very stern looking; maybe cold like a nihilist. Since he’s so high up in the chain of command, if it goes well, the move might be a politically advantageous one. We’ve spoken a bit. He’s approached me with some foreknowledge somehow of me, and with respect, and I reciprocated. I’m curious how sharing I  can be with him. Perhaps he’s wicked and self-aware, to which I would be interested to dig around in ugly polemicisms. His work is potentially wicked. I wonder about his paintings because they’re like monadic and archetypal figures, with patterns and colors- all the boxes are ticked- yet they seem to give a heavy ‘get fucked’ vibe and I’m curious if they’re mean-spirited. What motivates this work? It’s not ugly. 

Jan Baltzell I would like to interact with because she’s broad minded it seems. She is interested in keeping a ball rolling I think, and I’m taking her fro that reason, like a cypher; perhaps we can riff and ad lib through the crit process. I didn’t take a class with her that was a field-trip drawing class, (maybe negging) because it sounded so unstructered and schleppy; moving all your stuff hither and yore, and convening periodically for group critiques- kill me. But I think she will make for a perfect critic. 

Sarah Peters is a wild card, but I understand she looked at my friend’s work which was a photo of a classmate lying in a forest with sculptures laid over her, and said “you know what people will think, right?- They’ll think this is a dead black body in the woods etc. etc. , so just know that that’s what they’ll think”. This is such a retarded comment, yet, perfect for a critic in a way, so I signed up for her. I don’t mean to speak negatively about Sarah in any way. I imagine she’s speaking from being burned moreso than idle speculation, as her work might tread towards appropriation etc. Just the idea that she’s awake to the entanglements of contemporary multicultural inclusivity and is making strong work makes her a great candidate to me. This in addition that I will be investing heavily in sculpture this semester, and that’s her specialty, and her proximity (in) the New York scene (informed), and that I understand that she’s kind perhaps in a legendary way. I wonder. 

I haven’t mentioned a class I’ll be taking with Bruce Samuelson. First, I was skeptical upon seeing his work. Then, I looked up a video of him done by a Jonathan.. something, who was an alum. The video interviewed Bruce at an opening of his in Philadelphia. Bruce mentioned that he stopped working from the figure 30-40 years ago, and blah blah. I was more skeptical, in a tensiony way. He did not die in my imagination, and I wonder if he’s got something. He seems to. He’s ungrasping, it looks like. I’ve heard good things, and that he’s broad thinking in his classroom. A student friend of mine was making relief sculptures in his figure drawing studio class. His poses I’ve seen other student’s paintings of are often of figures lying prostrate; is he masochistic? Or chauvinistic? If it’s anything art school has taught me, it’s that painting is quiet and subversive, and in time might turn any one into a doll-painting, beheading, taboo-delving depicter of what’s most perverse. Perhaps to be misunderstood is the currency. A modernist fiat? Perhaps; and the postmodernists have returned in response to a radically democratized form-aware illustration. To flip unless, as my experiences have thus far proven (I’m usually entering the curve at the lower third- true to my socioeconomic placement), riding it up and cashing out before it’s too hot, might mean to return to a modernist/romantic digression language. Yikes, I’m on the side of modernists. It’s all the same and tops turvy. I was smart to study Illustration and fine art both, both at the foremost schools of their disciplines. I’m a switch. All this to say I don’t know what I’m going to do in that class. 

The class I think about the most is a class called Moving Images, taught by David Dempewolf. It’s an MFA class, which is just like its BFA counterpart, but with more theory reading, and potentially I’ll be in a more diverse and older and different pool of people than I’m used to seeing in a room. Okay, so there’s a couple undergrads that get on my nerves. I’ll be kicking myself if the undergrad section fills with brilliant people, which, now that I’m thinking about it, it very well could. Oh well, the section is right after the MFA section, so I could sit in or spy a bit. I’m hoping in this course to incorporate musical recordings into videos. Gosh, there’s so much tech. I’m doing good to write this down. I’ve been thinking about this class all break. Shots are one thing but I don’t think that’s going to be the class time concern, and I have to stay vigilant about wherefrom I source my imagery, so that I don’t bring to the table just shots of school hallways, or other cliches. I’ll have to take my gopro around everywhere, as mentioned before about my landscape class plans. I have some footage of diving in springs in Crystal River that I could use for something. I did that neo-benshi poem assignment a year ago and that’s what I’m thinking about doing in the class over and over basically, little talky-poems over video, or percussion-over-video poems- like playing drums and recording and editing etc. in response to video. Something. I’ve shipped my drum kit from my parent’s house in Florida to Philadelphia and it will arrive a few days after I do at my address in West Philly. It cost $157, already worth it, unless it gets lost or destroyed in the mail. It’s three boxes. I also have footage of me meditating for 20 minutes one morning from last semester sometime. I think I’ve been thinking in video since 2012. I’ve sketched out video art pieces in my sketchbooks in response to some video art I was exposed to long since. I saw Paul McCarthy masturbating with his feces in the Tate Modern in 2008. I saw Carry Upson’s ‘House Hole’ video sometime in 2016, and No Nose Knows. I saw Tameka Norris’s Monkey Banana video sometime in 2014 in New Orleans. In 2013 I made and posted a video piece of me rolling up a giant joint in Amsterdam, but the joint was made from craft paper and filled with studio garbage. This was after being a lover to a filmmaker, and preceding our trip together to Iceland, where we talked film. I made a video performance piece last year, and posted it, and got it critiqued by Didier William, who mentioned I had too much junk cluttering up the composition- that it did not look very intentional. Yet, I don’t think this type of work will be the meat of the course. Dempewolf makes his living between teaching and doing VJ sets (video jockey) to avant-garde jazz music performances. I walked in on his ‘Avant Garde Video’ class last semester (the aforementioned undergraduate section of the ‘moving images’ I’m taking), and I saw a live VJ-type setup, with an overhead projector and a camcorder live-feeding to a screen, and students huddled around an under lit glass plate moving glitter and bullshit around like a trash-ocean fun art divination table. I loathed what I saw in that room, and that again is what accounts for my choice to stick to the MFA group. I intend to be let down if I focus too much on my comrades however. I think Dempewolf will give a talk about possibilities in the softwares employed, and give demos, then let the class work on their projects, and come around to give one-on-one help is needed. I am familiar with the format. I think I will be in between Adobe Flash for animation, Final Cut for compositing/ video making, photoshop for html5 animations and gifs. I want to do some work in a program like c4d, or animate from 3d models somehow; maybe in Sculptris, or in sketch-up via screen record. I want to do some cell animation- recording moving parts like a puppet show. I have some good materials to try out for this, but the scales are incongruent sometimes. So, for this I would like to do digital rotoscoping in flash. I have parts cut out for this. Maybe I could do some talky poem with some all-traditional captures of my sculptures, and rotoscoped animations (both traditional puppetry and digital), with also some percussion improv. I’m thinking a trash-ocean nihilism commentary poem about wading into waters, dreamlike, and a high fidelity shot of my rubber moulded sculpture of Felix panning around, and some overlay of some divination-table-like paint and glitter fuck stuff maybe, and some found rope/cordage in there too. This clip only about ten seconds. In html5. Looping, drum kit no wave. Maybe one kick and one snare/hh flam that loop. Okay, so that’s one piece. I would like to accomplish something of my take on Ringling’s motion design department. They did stop-motion, and parabolic arches, and moving sculpted type. I would like to do some traditional and digital sculpted type. What program was “we minded” done in? I also want to do a specific couple of projects. One is of a beaker, with cut out silhouettes adhered to the outside. A light shines from above and dirt and detritus spins from inside the beaker filled with water by means of a stir bar. This has to do with a dream I had where bodies for rebirth were encapsulated in the sacs of leopard shark eggs, around the perimeter of a large blue above-ground pool. The mood transfers, and that’s what I’m going for. Another is a clear plastic dome (I have) with kokepelli-like silhouettes adhered on the perimeter, in a zoetrope fashion. Underlit by a heat producing element, and its heat dispersement to be captured by a fan, spinning the zoetrope, like a roof turbine. I have the silhouettes mapped out. The turbine part is the stumper but maybe I could use the venting of a building in center city, there’s a few good alleyways. Bad clarinet would be useful to go with this. Another project which is dear to me is the graffiti beef animation. The goal would be to screen capture graffiti handstyles of well known artists through history and overlay spray can sounds and overlay a hip hop beat over top, and periodic ‘shit’ commentary maybe, ‘oh’. Maybe I could put my own name in there, though I just thought of that now. It’s about a pissing contest. This to-do list in conjunction with the reality of the course-to-be and also whatever theory will be introduced. (I asked for reading over the break, but the teacher did not respond over email, so I let it go). I’ve looked over a little William Kentridge last semester. Hopefully I can keep a ‘less is enough’ approach to the whole thing, and make moving images. 

Concerns with the public blog:

My concerns with the public blog format have to do with how it affects my relationships and reveal those thoughts I hadn’t had the wherewithal to voice in the moment. Suffice that this blog is like a superhero comic- those utterances which might get me in trouble, and also a sort of tell-all users guide to anyone who would care to know or read about how I write, (and maybe therefrom try to think about how I think). 

I play both protagonist and antagonist on here. I try to suss out my thought’s in isolation, though usually I’m thinking about steps of a project. 

Sometimes I delay posting because I’m in the middle of some social cold war, and temperance dovetails with procrastination. Other times I’m just busy, even for months at a time. I think this blog serves a social function for an imagined wide base of support, though it is not so wide. Sometimes I get six views. Have I alienated people? What is it about this content that does not encourage a bookmark or a revisit?  

This seems blasphemous to write, because I would tear the blog apart if it got too big. I’m part alienator, somehow. Maybe it’s a learned behavior. I think of it as fueling my practice. Maybe I’m attached to my anger, something I’m very critical about in others. The artist is that one who listens to the blend of sounds that come from a radio tuned neither to one station nor the other; hearing both and nothing and something else too; dredging from ether, and wearing on the patience of anyone else who might like to tune into to some specific thing. What an annoying person.

When the artist leaves home, he cannot return. This quote has been on my mind recently. Even at home I cannot return, it’s over in a way. 

My student colleague and I were joking that our experiences mean more for having questioned them. That’s about the same sentiment as stated above- it’s a way of making something from nothing. Polemic. I love polemic. I think I seek it out, and it’s natural for others to too. This curiosity precedes social justice et al, which I think accounts for the inflammatory rhetoric of those of privilege, who also consider themselves romantics, myself included. Only upon returning to reality do we have a chance at humility. 

What could it mean to have humility as a goal? 

I went to bed upset last night. I feel put down here.