Catching a wave

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

In today’s newsletter is a zine about The Beatles, surfing, and the creative process.

Street art

Thursday, November 25, 2021

Walks around my neighborhood have been extra-good lately. After declaring it art, I decided this Budweiser can needed its own museum label:

The text is from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium:

My method has entailed, more often than not, the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight from human figures, from celestial bodies, from cities. Above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of the story and from language….

When the human realm seems doomed to heaviness, I feel the need to fly like Perseus into some other space. I am not talking about escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I feel the need to change my approach, to look at the world from a different angle, with different logic, different methods of knowing and proving.

Calvino is talking about writing and reading, but he could also talk about my approach to walking.

If I go for a walk, the day never feels like a waste. Each walk is a little adventure with a beginning, middle, and end. On your walk, you never know what you’ll find or who you’ll bump into. This week I met Cindy Schiffgens, who was on the sidewalk painting one of my favorite houses:

Many are disenchanted with this city we live in. I find that a neighborhood walk is a method of re-enchantment. “Outside lies magic.”

My gratitude zine

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

I made a zine about gratitude you can print and fold and fill out. The link to download it is in today’s newsletter.

A partial eclipse of my heart

Friday, November 19, 2021

Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.”
—Lauren Groff, Matrix

Here is the moon as it looked through my telescope at 3AM this morning. Less than 12 hours earlier, I looked up while I was raking leaves and saw this:

Yes, that’s right: Coconut the Owl has returned to his owl box. I watched him fly off at dusk last night, but there he was again this morning when I woke up.

Looks like he and Mrs. Coconut weren’t lost after all. The drawings worked. My spirit has lifted. We’re so happy to have him back.

Lifted type collages

Thursday, November 18, 2021

“I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them.”
—Ray Bradbury

I’ve been working on a series of collages made from type I (literally) lift out of magazines. They’re sort of inspired by the word paintings of Wayne White and printmakers like Amos Kennedy, Jr.

What I do is, I keep a list of phrases in my notebook I want to make and then when I have a minute or I’m burned out, I make one.

Sometimes they’re phrases we say a lot around the house. (This one is stolen from one of my favorite movies, Withnail and I. I say this in mock outrage a lot to my kids.)

Sometimes they’re more abstract. (I took the Target tape off a package.)

Sometimes it’s a phrase I can’t stand. (“Don’t get me wrong.”)

Sometimes my wife suggests one like “They can’t all be winners.”

Sometimes I notice a phrase everybody starts saying.

I like to do conversational shortcuts and the passive-aggressive phrases you hear a lot in the South and the Midwest.

These pieces are very different than my other work, so it’s not exactly clear to me what I should do with them. Not sure they’re right for a book, but maybe I can work my way up to a dozen or so and make a notecard set or a series of posters out of them.