I was never the type of artist that had an amazing traditional sketchbook, the spiral bounded diary of sorts that you didn’t want people to see, but in actuality, you kind of did. My books always had torn out pages, barely legible writing, and other poor attempts at witty sayings and bad poetry. In browsing the archive to transfer it to my new modern “sketchbook,” I saw the cycle of things over the years.
The inside of my book, for those who would care to look…
…a satchel full of prints given out freely in the past…
…collaborations with eager minds today…
…just the same as the marks from the same pen passed around before…
…a stack of unsold/unwanted drawings in the past…
…a stack of unsold/unwanted drawings in the present…
…sketching away at the airport, hoping to be taken somewhere…
…sketching when mired at home, hoping for that job to call back…
…how can a person graduate college and still fail? easy…
…comic book ideas still rolling around today…
…recalling the sting of yesteryear…
…use to paint gouache and watercolor on the charcoal…
…now I color digitally on the screen…
…tried to boil down people to the essentials back then, with ink and color…
…same thing with the palette of pixels today…
…back then used to be obsessed with negative s p a c e…
…still am…
…never really had a real studio back then…
…it was just wherever I felt like doing stuff…
…back then muses were found everywhere, and met face to face…
…comments and instant messages were spoken aloud and in person…
…not the nonsense that things have become…
…was unihibited by the old technology, no matter how grainy it was…
…today we don’t realize how good we got it…
…interlaced, jittery, grainy, but I still used anything at hand…
…fireflies then didn’t care what cameras we used…
…and they still don’t…
…trying to stay with the curve is hard and expensive…
…but making money is not the top priority of why I buy…
…in the beginning the cameras we had were simple, but the potential was there…
…to become the instruments of modern folk…
…in the early days, everything was novel and new, learning to attach humanness to circuits…
…it’s still the same these days, ain’t nothing changed…
