paper, bears, and pixels

It's been a while since I've written anything here. I spent all last week working for the Saskatchewan regional tournament of the Canadian Improv Games (hosting the event every night) and I'm surprised I'm not sick or hoarse. I was also, simultaneously house sitting for a friend who lives 20 minutes out of town, which was pretty relaxing though inconvenient. For doing this, I was given a pack of 100 sheets of 22" x 30" stonehenge paper, which is a pretty sizable gift. I pretty much don't have to worry about buying art paper for a year or two (depending on how prolific I feel like being). I haven't cracked open the pack yet, but I anticipate great work coming from this stack.

Starved from art for a week, I started a short comic for an upcoming issue of Valuable Comics, as well as my comic for Caravan. I've also started a smaller project (18 pages, though it's a mini-sized comic) that came to me at random. It's a development of a strong image I had in my mind for a while of a boy finding a wounded bear in the woods. I sketched out two pages tonight, and I'm super-excited about it so far. I've also realized that at least one of my ongoing projects requires me to create a fictional 8-bit videogame to feature. I set up my NES and Genesis again to get inspiration and was disheartened to discover my Sega CD does not work. I might just have the wrong AC adaptor, but hopefully it is not dead, since I just bought it a few months ago.

I think that the nostalgic ties to these old video games from my childhood is a central feature of my art practice. I'm looking at an unfinished image I drew a few weeks ago and can't help but pick out all the game-related choices I made in drawing it. That's a pretty important thing for me to realize as it gives me some much needed direction. The trees I started drawings a month or so ago were an important turning point. Like anything, it's just important that I keep working.

And speaking of work, tomorrow I need to spend all day putting together an application for a job giving 50-minute workshops in rural Saskatchewan. It sounds like a pretty enjoyable job, and it affords the opportunity to make about $10,000 in two months. I would like that very much.

video games are fun

Spent the evening beating Mega Man 2 and Super Mario Bros 3 on my new NES with my brother. Why do I like playing old games as much as newer games? I pretty much bought a new Sega & Sega CD a while ago solely for the purpose of playing Lunar the Silver Star and Lunar Eternal Blue. Meanwhile my Xbox remains AWOL and I play through RPGs on my Wii. My brother and I went over ways to aproach aspects of video games as art and settled on something that may require further investigation.

Storyboard work is slow but entertaining. I wish I could sleep through February. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel food-wise and can't justify leaving my work. I need sleep, but wish I could stay up forever without being tired and dropping so drastically in productivity. This post has been many random thoughts strung together. in sleepiness.

Another week and I'm beginning to miss my Xbox 360 an inordinate amount. Not that I play it all the time, but it's kind of the central nervous system of my home media centre. Seriously, I've barely been in my living room since it crapped out on me. Maybe that's not the worst thing, since I've spent so much more time in my bedroom/studio/computer-place.

I put my trees aside for the time being and have moved on to develop this body of work I spoke of one or two posts ago. To elaborate, it's a series of drawings based on my sketches that are based in some kind of personal mythological canon. I'm loathe to draw the comparison to Marcel Dzama, but since I did countless projects and presentations that drew on the work of the Royal Art Lodge throughout my degree, I think it's pretty unavoidable. At least if I'm not totally unique in subject matter I can at least strive for uniquity in aproach and execution. I threw some panels and a talking bubble into one of the drawings which firmly sets my reference point in the world of comics, so maybe that'll be enough for now. I don't know, I'll post some drawings after I resolve some of the content.

The comic conference/festival is fast aproaching and aparently me and my brother get a free table since he's on the comittee. Hopefully I can sell off the rest of my mini-comic Morning Comics, and this issue of Caravan will be printed by then. I feel like I should be working on something else to have printed, but part of me doesn't believe that's possible. That part of me is also extremely lazy. I should really push myself harder.

Let's shake some dust!

I finished watching Carnivale last night, and found myself fully satisfied. Then I found out the series was supposed to run for six seasons instead of two and got sad. Why is it that the best that television has to offer is always canned in it's prime?

Of course, taking in good media, I got excited about some of the concepts and ideas in the show, which flows over into my art-making. There's a very thin line between validity and invalidity when it comes to certain subjects. The occult has always been ripe for parody, so to see it dealt with in such a natural way is encouraging. I think directly about my Caravan comic project and am forced to reevaluate what I want out of it. Then I think of other comic projects of mine and am just overwhelmed with the work that needs to go into them. I suppose there's only so much planning you can do, and a hundred pages still starts with one...
I need to start using my time better. I'm hoping to keep a nine-to-five schedule to see if that works any better than what I've been doing (whatever whenever). Hopefully by forcing my work into certain hours I'll be able to accomplish what needs to get done and start chipping away at the list of tasks.

I'm getting a car. My employer/artfriend John is moving away soon, which is too bad, but I'll be able to buy his second vehicle off of him and finally own a car of my own. Maybe then I'll find more ways to avoid work, like road trips.

Maybe I'm still ill?

I had my ass handed to me at karate tonight. Mostly I just found myself short of breath for most of it, which is a sure sign that my body is overexerting itself in the simple task of respiration. Also the bone chip in my knee seems to have been smucked somehow, so that's gross.

Hung out at my parents' today where I was invited to join them briefly in BC this year on the family vacation. My family has traveled west yearly since I was ten years old, and I joined them until last year when I opted to stay at home and house sit for them. My little brother is the only one going this year, but when you've been on the road for two months every year for more than a decade, something sort of pulls at you to go when you miss out. I figure I'll bus it to Penticton for a week to get in some rock climbing and mountain biking in August. I'd really like to spend some time in Summerland--a town just outside of Penticton that I am drawn to for some reason--so I'll see, maybe a week won't be enough.

I also had a good discussion about art with my dad, and he's encouraging me to create a body of work out of a series of improvisational creatures I was making in university in my spare time. The important thing that I took away from it was the fact that one needs to standardize one's practice (whatever it may be) to create a recognizable product. Sage advice. I hadn't touched these kinds of drawings in forever, but the visual language I use is implemented in everything I do, so maybe it's an inevitability that I revisit these things.

In the same breath I have more than enough work with this storyboarding job without inventing new projects to occupy my time. Hm...

So despite my last post, I am in fact in high spirits and have been for a while. Life is good albeit complicated (and I've never known an interesting life to be anything but complicated) and I've been feeling energized by something I cannot quite put into words. Of course, I'm writing this post at about three in the morning on a Sundayevening/Mondaymorning, so take that for what you will. I always get to the point where I have to decide if it's more worthwhile to stay up all night or get the paltry -five hours sleep that is necessary to maintain functionality. I always end up screwing myself over in the long run, but it seems like a good idea at the time, and I'm all for making good decisions now rather than bad ones later, so there I go.

In the course of a week, I suddenly have more money than a humble bum such as myself knows what to do with--or rather the knowledge of a steady income for the next six months or so. I can continue living life in the fast lane (and in this context "the fast lane" entails buying video games and staying up late watching Scrubs alone in my one-bedroom apartment while sketching out comic ideas in the dark).

I like walking. Especially in the cold. Even though the -40C weather is gone (for now) there is still plenty of snow to satisfy this urge and I have set tomorrow aside to walk wherever my feet take me in this city. I enjoy the ambulative meditative state I arrive at as I plod through knee-deep snow with my iPod blasting Talking Heads (David Byrne is winter music) or cLOUDDEAD or Dosh or any number of other Anticon artists I'm in love with. I'm realizing more and more that these treks afford me the opportunity to be alone with my thoughts and ideas, which is surprisingly necessary considering I live alone and sometimes see no other humans for days at a time. When I think about it, I achieve a dream-like state that I used to depend on for similar introspection as a child. I don't dream in the same way I used to, but there's always been something ephemeral and dreamlike about the art I make. Hell, most of the comics I make are inspired by dreams from a three-year span in my youth (ages four to seven).

I bought a sweet graphic novel the other day to get me inspired to sit down and draw at some point. I haven't had a chance to even really look at it yet, but it's Swallow Me Whole by Nate Powell. I also borrowed a few books from my brother which I will hopefully work my way through in the next month or so. I hadn't really considered it, but I suppose I'm making good on my resolutions for the year.

Let us digress for a moment and look at this objectively: I am twenty-two years old and not much is bothering me. I'm out of food and money for the time being forcing me to a diet of bannock and peanut butter and tea (I'm not really complaining). My Xbox 360 met me this evening with flashing red lights denoting a general console error that needs to be repaired at Microsoft headquarters (where unicorns and rainbows go to die/be recycled into game systems in the abattoir-like facility I picture in my mind). My ex-girlfriend (whom I haven't talked to in two months because of feeling considerably jilted in having her suddenly end the relationship I was willing to totally commit to) recently decided that the only decent apartment for rent in the city is two floors above the one I was so stoked about getting three months ago. I've been more than a little ill for the past few days with what can only be described as a head-cold that has spread to all extremeties while at the same time siezing up all muscles and glands throughout the trunk of my body.

Still, these things are inconsequential at most, and at least: completely amusing in their own right. I've been working on art, and don't need to justify that to anyone. Even if I can't stream video to my xbox anymore, that's just one less distraction keeping me from working on stuff that actually matters.

A wise man once said: "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke."