Natural, unnaturally.

Apparently the only time I can be convinced to actually sit and draw comics is when there is an enormous, scary deadline looming where I might find myself humiliated and/or blacklisted if I don't pull the work out of somewhere in time. Over the last five days I have finished up (completely) seven pages of Ivy, and gotten three out of four of the Nerd Burglar story well on their way (two almost complete). I need to keep this pace up for the rest of this month and the next to have something new to show at Stumptown. Also on my wish list, besides completing the third chapter - which needs to be done a week early so Matt can get it printed - is to do the art and color seps for a new series of small prints which can be sold as a set or individually. I've had the idea in mind for quite some time, and yes, they will be featuring sort-of erotic nudes. And llamas.

So now I've got about a month to start and complete nine pages of Ivy, finish up the other six that remain half-done, do the cover, do the prints, finish this short story, and please oh please NOT TAKE ON ANY MORE WORK before I have a chance to finish the rest o' this stuff. Fortunately people aren't exactly knocking on my door for more projects - I've turned down a few just due to time constraints, though perhaps if any of them were paid I might be convinced to take them on (just sayin'). I'll still have a few original pages displayed up at the Portland Center for Performing Arts until May, go check 'em if you haven't yet (there's plenty of other incredible work up besides mine). And I got my first request by the fabulous Nate Beaty to write a blurb for the back of his upcoming BrainFag Forever book, coming out in August from Microcosm. You know you've hit the big time when other people give a shit what you think!

As far as personal shite goes, I've been occupying myself with daily deals and not looking too deeply within, but one recent change has unexpectedly brought up some issues. I recently made the decision to go back to my natural hair color. No big deal, right? But it's been ten years since I had anything approximating "real" as far as my hair goes (it's sort of a light mousy brown). I went to my stylist and she pieced it out, so it's got stripes of brown and stripes of an almost silvery toffee color - the overall look is close to my roots at first glance, but completely artificial under scrutiny, seeing as I've been bleaching my strands to within an inch of their life for the past year plus. I have no problem with artificial, obviously. But now when I catch my reflection out of the corner of my eye, I see glimpses of someone I'm not exactly comfortable with:


Her.

Little me, at twelve, in seventh grade. Perhaps the most miserable year of my entire life. And the following four years - no better. It wasn't until the summer before senior year that I started living life the way I wanted to - staying out late with friends, having sex, smoking weed, and dyeing my hair. Once I climbed into that funnycar I never looked back. Yet I dug a lot of these old photos out and scanned them in to see how I felt about, literally, returning to my roots - and the old skeletons still aren't settled. I didn't realize how much fake hair affected my self-perception. Bleach blonde? Life of the party. Red? A sexy wise-mouthed vixen. But now? I'm going to have to reclaim this mousiness and turn it out. I'm not Little Me any more, goddamn it. I call out people who shit on me instead of accepting it quietly. I'll hit back. I'll get myself out of harmful situations instead of slogging through. And I'll let my mouth do the speaking for me instead of chemical-process signifiers.

Finder.

Guess what was waiting for me on the curb, in the rain?


And apparently it works, too! Some sad garage-sale leftover pile was just waiting for me to come along and grab this. I left it at Ryland's (hence the stock photo), but I can't believe someone would just throw this out. I already have one - my original one from when I was eleven, still in its original packaging - but it never hurts to have a backup (until I trade it to Ry for... something). These little tanks just keep on working, despite being technology old enough to legally drink. Can you say that about your 5-year-old Playstation 2?

Also found in the garbage - an antique, hand-carved wooden end table. I pulled it out of a St. Johns dumpster and then had to let two buses pass me by before finding one that had the room to take it. Cleaned off, it looks perfect with the remnants of the hand-carved wooden circular mirror I inherited from my mom, who picked it off the curb of Providence herself back in the 70's. I can't even bring myself to rant about society's waste when I am so often its beneficiary!

Not to mention the last two trips I've taken to the Bins this week with my friend Greg. Holy moley. I've saved some serious time-capsule outfits from the landfill (see my Flickr set of Bins finds to truly get the magnitude of some of these "pieces.") Well, okay, here's a preview:


As Heather so rightly put it, "Old Orchard Beach, here we come!"

All this bad fashion, neon and acid wash must have gone straight to my brain, because I've been revisiting some old photos and books I've left untouched for a few years. I recently picked up the furry-porn series Omaha the Cat Dancer, something I used to be embarrassed to own but could now give a shit. I never read more than the first few issues, but I'm getting deeper into the story and looking at it less as a reader and more as a creator. Sometimes comics that were beloved to me as a teen fail to hold up under today's scrutiny (see Johnny the Homicidal Maniac), but Omaha still rules. I think it might have been the first example of furvert art. Super early-80s styling on all the characters, too!

Now the big question: should I give up on comics altogether and just spend full time mining the Bins and operating an Ebay store of my finds? Your call!

Small fish, smaller ponds.

I have been struggling these past few months. That much might be obvious to those of you who know me, or an inferred fact due to my lack of posting blogs, progress on my book, or updates to any forums/art sites/etc that I frequent. Part of it is personal problems, some of it is creative blocks and the like. But like any of the millions of bulbs in my neighborhood forcing their way up through the cold, wet ground into the clean, sharp air, I'm starting to emerge from my crisis mode into something more manageable, and hopefully, more productive.

However, when out with my friend Heather yesterday, I saw something that summed up a problem with Portland (and its art scene) that I didn't even realize I had. Something dimly lurking in the back of my mind that had existed for a while but was finally making itself known. A strange feeling that this "West Coast city" in which I had picked to live the rest of my foreseeable future was not a City, per se, but a town. And not a particularly large town at that.

Perhaps that's what I liked about it at first. I remember wanting to go to RISD at seventeen over Parsons or the Art Institute of Boston because Providence was smaller, more manageable, more like the tiny Portland Maine that had raised me and spit me out when I came of age. Fortunately RISD offered me no money, unlike Parsons, which floated half of its insane tuition and allowed me to work part of the rest off for $5.25/hr over the course of four years in its Records Office. Thus, little scared bird lands herself in NYC, the great metropolis - the wilds of urbanity, where she never would have migrated on her own. And it changed me for the better. It was the best decision out of what was offered. Cut ahead to the early 2000s, faced with an even more limitless choice - I had $1500 in the bank and wanted to cut out of New England forever - and saddled only with my cat herd and my zine collection, I picked Portland Oregon and set out. Portland felt like "home." But now I'm wondering.

Cut forward to yesterday, walking along Alberta. Coffee shop A was out of the question, having failed to hire Heather and thus ending on her permanent shit list. Coffee shop B had a wait list. C was closing as we entered. So I chose option D, not my favorite but with empty tables and low music. While waiting at the counter, I checked out the art on the walls. Usually this particular place had a decent display up - perhaps the best I'd seen on Alberta. But this month... EPIC FAIL. I leaned over to Heather and whispered "Worst... art show... ever!" She agreed.

Forty or fifty "pieces" hung on the walls. I use quotes even though "piece" might be the best term to describe the unframed, thumbtacked scraps of randomly-sized paper bits festooned randomly over the tables. Each was a simple pencil drawing of a skull. The same skull. Sometimes there was a little more, a little less, but nothing so skilled or ambitious as a background entered the scene - the most was an occasional figure added to the Skull. It looked like a metalhead's notebook in detention. I wish I was exaggerating. Perhaps most telling of all was the artist's statement, printed out as a banner twice as large than any of the other "works." The lack of craft, senseless repetition and unfinished, lazy, sub-amateur messiness struck me. If THIS guy could get a show, why the fuck was I bothering?

If I put my mind to it, I could rotate my work through a different coffee shop or gallery space every month. I get invited to shows here and there and usually try to put something together for it. This means selecting work that I spent more than five minutes shitting out, going to Michael's and selecting frames, sitting down to mat and frame the work, then laying it out on the wall with some sort of aesthetic idea of the presentation and display. My name is attached to that work. I have no idea who might see it. But if something, good or bad, is coming back to me from the show, I want to be able to stand by it and feel proud of what I've done. Does Skull-sketcher feel the same way? What sort of thought went into this "collection" before vomiting it up on the wall? And why does so much of Portland support "shows" like this?

Ugh. I'm pushing my own elitist buttons by typing this, and I'm sorry if I've lost you. But come the fuck on. If you were there I think you'd be with me. Why push for a 10 when a 2.5 will get you in the door?