Okay, so this one is called Maiden Fleeing from Death. I had to look it up myself. My best guess was just Maiden and Death. I sort of had the general idea from a very vague recollection, but what I did know – right from the start – is that it’s from the 1998 Pissers and the Fear of Death series. It had occurred to me that maybe it was just called Fear of Death, so either way, I wasn’t that far off.

But anyway, this one is from a series that I did, you know, 28 years ago now, so I can’t be expected to remember all of the details. These paintings were done in Buffalo, New York, and they’re all (mostly) fairly small. I doubt that this one is more than, I would think, maybe 15 by 12 inches or so. I don’t have the dimensions available to me right now, but most of these were less than two feet by three feet, and those were the biggest of them – the ones that were two feet by three feet. Most of them were done on scraps of canvas that I kind of think were salvaged from the 1994 paintings that had been damaged. I think that that’s what I was painting on when I made these – canvas scraps from previous paintings.

This one, Maiden Fleeing from Death, is similar to a couple of others. One of them is sort of a companion piece called Maiden Reaching for Death. There’s also one of Persephone, with the pomegranate seeds. They all have this same sort of red background with the female nude in the foreground (probably a bit of a reference to the similarly colored background in some of the Pompeii paintings – or was it Herculaneum?). This one shows some underpainting that looks like it was probably a completely different composition that I then worked over. I think that’s the case because the figure in the upper right doesn’t look like what I would ordinarily depict as death – although it works out pretty well here, I think.

I think that’s all, I’m gonna tell you about these. They’re small, they’re done with oil and then encaustic. They have grommets in the corners. And, um, I’ll talk about them more when, uh, when other paintings from this series come up.

Okay, here’s another one that I definitely would not have chosen had I been the one doing the choosing. But since AI has randomized this process, here we are, with Even Kaczynski. The implication is, even Kaczynski is a saint, and it says, Saint Ted, down at the bottom. The original plan for this Saints series of images was to try to find the beauty in the most unlikely places, and to use the process of portraiture in order to do that. With the underlying idea that… through drawing a portrait, through spending the time with somebody’s appearance, you develop a certain empathy for them. And so, the early saints were all sort of notorious or infamous characters, and the image was a documentation of the process of trying to understand (appreciate the beauty within) them. That is kind of what I was going for here. You know, to try to find some beauty in an unlikely place. Now, the way the series ended up though, was that all of my friends wanted to be saints, and so I ended up just doing a lot of portraits of friends – and that was fun, too. But the original intent had more to do with figures like Kaczynski, where… they were not, um, regarded in a kind way. I guess that is the way to say that. So, anyway, this is a St. Ted from the Saints series, which I did in the early 2000s. This one probably was from 2001 when I was first starting out.

Addendum: While I was checking, just now, to verify that the date on this was really 2001 (my recollection was right – It looks like May 2001 – I might have still been fiddling with it at the beginning of June), I noticed a couple of other states that I like – I think more than this one. The first, below left is already in the Saints gallery on the website:

The second (on the right), I discovered in the original Saints development folder on an external hard drive where I keep such things. The resolution on all of these images is embarrassingly low – both of them are under 600 pixels on the long side, I think back in those days 600 px was the maximum dimension size I’d upload onto my website – just goes to show how different things were 25 years ago when dial up connections were the only option and download times were universally slow.

By the way, This is the 11th of these Random Daily posts, and from here forward – for the time being anyway – I’m changing my workflow slightly. Rather than using the Google docs voice-to-text feature as I did for the first ten, I’m now talking into my phone’s voice memo app. It gives a more accurate transcript, and of course it also records an audio file. So, I’ll include the audio recording with the blog post. I’ll still be editing the text between recording and posting, so the text won’t necessarily match the audio recording, but with practice, I hope to need less editing – I just need to get better at talking! I’d like to streamline these so they become mostly effortless – we’ll see.

This looks like it must’ve been a very early iPhone drawing, which means it was probably done in 2009. That would be my guess and at the time I was drawing on my iPhone 3 which I didn’t know at the time, but had a very small screen. Nobody knew that the screen was so small back then, but since phones have gotten bigger since those days, we can all see clearly how small they once were.

I might’ve been using one of those terrible old rubber tipped styluses (styli?), or very likely, I might have just been using my finger. I played around, when I was first drawing on  thatiPhone, with that type of a stylus because that was what one used in those days. I actually started out with my finger, tried for awhile to use the stylus, then abandoned in in favor of my finger. Using a finger wasn’t great, but it was better than the stylus, and it was remarkable to be able to draw on a screen at all, so I was happy to do whatever I could. The way the rubber tipped stylus dragged across the glass screen was not pleasing to me at all – the thought of it, even now, makes me cringe.

These were just early explorations of what I could do with this new drawing tool, and this one’s not great. I mean, to be fair, it’s an interesting sort of motif with that figurative element, broken up there on the left, and suggestions of sky on the right, and I know myself well enough to think of that purple area as being, you know, a rock or some reference to landscape, you know. So when I look at it a second time, it’s got a certain charm. I’m not using the white space very well, but it could be worse. And I think that it’s maybe just because of the media in the early days of the iPhone – and whatever the resolution was, which was not very high – it seems a little hazy to me. What I’m trying to say is, I’m a little uncomfortable with the fuzziness at some of the edges. But you know, that’s how you learn and get better, and these sorts of experiments can’t all be winners. So yeah, it’s pretty bad really.

So again we got another one that I wouldn’t have selected for myself, but it’s sort of fun having the AI choose these things randomly and then just responding to them even if if they’re not what I would’ve selected if I was just trying to show off.

There are, by the way, better drawings from that group – I’m pretty sure – I hope!

This painting was done in Denver in 1994, but I’m having a difficult time recalling the exact details behind it. Here’s what I sort of remember: somehow I acquired a pre-stretched canvas, and it was not only pre-stratched, but also pre-gessoed (pre-primed). You can buy pre-gessoed canvas, but I’ve never done so. But somehow I acquired this canvas – it’s all a very vague recollection – I can’t quite recall how I acquired it (maybe I just found it discarded on the street? or maybe somebody gave it to me? I dunno), but this picture is what I painted on that canvas – but by the time I did so, I had removed it from the stretchers. 

I believe there was probably a painting either on the other side of it or underneath this painting. I can’t tell. I’m not quite certain. By the time I was finished with it, there definitely would have been, because all of the paintings I did in Denver in 1994, were two-sided. My guess, since nothing is really showing through, is that it was just painted on the other side, but I do know for certain is that the surface was very thick and slick – because of the pre-priming – which was different from the other canvases I was working on. 

This one was done – I’m sure – from a drawing, as were the other paintings I did in Denver, but this one is a little bit different from the others in that group of paintings. That treasure map up in the upper right hand corner is a very different sort of compositional element than I’ve usually used. I’ve never done anything quite like it – that diagrammatic – either before or since, but I really sort of like it. I wonder if the original sketch for this is in a sketchbook from that period – I’d like to see it. I like the mapping nature of it. I like the way that it all fits together. It’s really a nice composition. I’m sure that this painting was destroyed long ago because the paintings I did in Denver did not survive, which is too bad, but I’m glad I’ve at least got this photo of it.

Update: A sudden realization just came to me, which makes me conclude that the recollection above is either totally wrong, or I was right, but somewhat confused. The whole time I was writing about that pre-gessoed canvas, I had a sort of hard-to-pin-down memory of another painting lingering in the back of my mind. After I’d finished writing the above statement, it suddenly came to me – in one of those remarkable flashes of insight that our otherwise faulty brains are sometimes capable of – what that other painting was. So I looked on the website and found it. Here it is:

It’s really a pretty terrible painting, but this is definitely the one that was painted on that pre-gessoed canvas. The Treasure Hunt painting was likely painted over this, or maybe on the back, and something else from 1994 was painted over it – that’s my guess anyway, and if accurate – it was a tremendous improvement. I really do think that this is the correct recollection.

This painting from 1991, shows an evening by the fireplace with myself, my then girlfriend, and her roommate. The subject matter is pleasant enough and those were lovely evenings as I recall, but the execution of this painting makes me cringe. I’ve never been enthusiastic about the depiction of space, and here, I somehow seem to have trapped myself into allowing for it – I suppose in those days, I was still open to that sort of experimentation – especially when I was probably trying to please the subject. In hindsight – and I think even at the time – I knew this was not the direction to go. Eventually I learned to stick to keeping things true to the 2-dimensionality of the surface of the canvas. I feel much better about the results when I do so.

Further thoughts: I realize now, I had kind of forgotten – that the paintings in Denver were done on the unstretched canvases that held the painting I’d done in Venice in 1989, 1990 and 1991. Then as mentioned elsewhere – these paintings (The 1994 Denver paintings) were damaged because they’d been rolled up before they were totally dry, then had to be peeled apart, which caused a real mess – so the 1998 and 1999 – and 2000 – paintings were made on the (often torn down) scraps salvaged from those, I think. I hadn’t thought about that archeological history of the canvases for a long time. I actually think that some of the 1991 canvases, ended up being what I used for the Raising Cain paintings in 2006 – or maybe there were sill scraps from the 1990 canvases even then. I’m not certain – but I don’t remember priming anything new in 2006, so I must’ve been repurposing something. So much of this is so long ago, it’s just hard to piece it back together, you know.

Well, this one is much more recent. I would guess very late 2024 or early 2025. This was drawn on my iPad mini, which is my primary digital device that I draw on these days. It would have been drawn shortly after I had acquired it and was still just exploring some of the possibilities of the Procreate app. The image that’s faded into the background is just a drawing without – I would imagine – source material. Well maybe there was a source material – I don’t know, but yeah they’re probably was. I’d have to look back at the file and see.

The image in the forefront was certainly drawn from a photograph – and one that I’m sure I found on Instagram. A lot of times I’ll comb through Instagram for an interesting face or interesting outfit or interesting something. One of the areas that I’ve explored through drawing from those photographs is how to draw clothes because, of course, when I was first drawing and as I’ve continued drawing, I guess I primarily have always drawn the nude – whether from life, source images, or imagination. And so, when you’re drawing the nude, there are a lot of things that you can do that you can’t really do with clothes – anatomical reference points and whatnot. So I never really learned to draw clothed figures – particularly contemporarily clothed figures – until these past few years. I’ve started playing around with it a little bit more and so that’s one benefit of some of these drawings. Also just simply developing the surface, developing the line, learning how to use the digital materials and the digital tools. Those are the sorts of things that are really being explored in this drawing and the other ones from this group – that sort of explains why the collection is called Ways and Means – I’m exploring method probably more than I am, a message. I guess that’s the way to say that.

This is a drawing that I would’ve done in Buffalo – the first, no the second year that I was there. Yeah, that’s right, this was done in the second apartment that we had. I had my grandparents’ big metal desk that I used as a drawing table and I was drawing largely from source materials on 18 x 24“ paper, but I don’t know what the source materials for this drawing were, and I’m sure that not all of these images were from source materials – some are just out of my head. 

The figures on the right are clearly self portrait-ish, or autobiographical-ish – autobiographical-adjacent perhaps, but still a bit mythical. The figures on the left – there’s an angel and what I imagine as an old blind man and they – again – seem likely to have been drawn from sources, but I don’t know what the sources were… sort of symbolic/metaphorical, the kind of images that I would’ve been playing around with at that point. The central nude seems sort of like a stock pose to me from that time. So I’m not really sure what was going on with this, but I can remember sitting at that desk and doing this whole series of colored pencil drawings on the 18 x 24“ paper and, at that point, really colored pencils was still a fairly new thing to me. I mean I had only been drawing with colored pencils for probably three or four years at that point so it was still a tool that I was just kind of exploring.

Update: The title, which I didn’t notice at first, gives me some clue as to what I was thinking with this back then. I’ve written the word, “intangibility” down at the bottom of the drawing and then partially obscured it with purplish colored pencil. The primary instance of intangibility depicted here is the inability for the autobiographical figure on the right to be able to touch the fleeing nude (I’m sure there was a Noli me tangere reference to that – that’s a theme that I would’ve been playing around with a bit back then). There’s also the angel guiding the blind man, expressing the intangibility of blindness – the difficulty of grasping unseen surroundings. There’s a fish leaping – and out of water – and a self-portrait with a horse, I have a tougher time tying those images with the intangibility theme, but that’s the way it goes, you know.

Well, here’s another of those drawings from the YWCA from 20 or 21 years ago. This one I think is probably about 20 years ago. If I had to guess, the purple crayon drawing that I posted previously might’ve been from 2005 and this one from 2006. I don’t know if I have them dated somewhere a little bit more accurately. I’m not quite sure if I have a good idea of the progression but my recollection is that this one’s later. I wonder if they both might be from 2006. I think that when I was first over there drawing, I was not using crayons. I’d have to look at these collections and see. This mentions that it’s number 98 and of course I don’t really know what that means, but it suggests it’s later than the other one, which was numbered 28. I’ll have to look at the website galleries to get a better idea, but this one seems later. I think I was getting a little bit more bold and adventurous with the marks and colors and it looks like I was having a little bit more fun and being a little bit more confident with this one. 

I like this one more than the purple one,  but it’s a more involved piece of course. It still isn’t a long drawing. I’m sure I didn’t spend more than five minutes on it and maybe only three, but it captures a certain energy and vibrancy that I like. I’ve always really liked drawing with crayons when I’m working on a good sized sheet of paper. These drawings are 24 x 18” and I think you kind of need to have at least that much size to handle the width of the line that you get with a crayon. It’s been quite a while since I’ve worked like this, but I think that if I found myself in front of a model now… well I don’t know. I think that one side of me would want to work with crayons. I probably would do that – at least for the quick studies anyway. I’ve always been impressed at just the sheer amount of color you get in a wax crayon. It’s a lot of color for very little expense. It’s good cheap color. It’s like the onion of color – I’ve always been impressed by how much flavor is packed into an onion – you get a lot of bang for your buck when it comes to onions and crayons. I’m sure crayons can’t be very archival, but you know that’s sort of the least my concerns when choosing drawing materials. 

It’s very interesting to look at these drawings after 20 years. It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at them. Nice and interesting that the AI chose two of these from the first batch it selected for me – I guess that’s the way random works!

This is a figure drawing from I guess about 20 years ago or more. It looks like it’s probably just a 30 second croquis, done in purple crayon at the YWCA on 14th and Pico in Santa Monica. My friend, Tim and I used to go over there on Wednesday nights. Was it Wednesday night? I’m not certain it could have been Monday nights – I can’t remember, but I know they had a weekly figure drawing session there. It was a three hour session, I think, and it was held in the gymnasium or the basketball court area. So during the breaks, we could shoot some baskets and that was fun. I’ve always liked shooting baskets.

The first hour would usually be 30 second and one minute – maybe two minutes, maybe sometimes five minute – poses. Then we’d have longer poses for the second couple hours. I think it was only like $10 or so to go drawing there. I paid ahead and had a card that they would punch holes in to mark how many sessions I’d attended. and I think I’ve still got a big drawing board with that card binder-clipped to the top of it because I don’t think I ever used it up. That thought brings to mind my lifetime membership to Vidiots, the card for which I stumbled upon not too long ago – we all miss Vidiots – that was a good era. That lifetime membership might not have been a great investment – but it was a worthy cause. I can’t quite remember why we stopped going to those figure drawing sessions though, but things like that happen. 

Oh! I just realized I must’ve stopped going when I went down to Guatemala – maybe I went a few times after I returned, but I never got back into the routine of it – and it’s possible that they stopped doing it at some point – I’m not sure.

I got some good drawings out of it though. I think that the drawings, if I’m not mistaken, are in a stack of drawings that are underneath my bed right now. I should pull those out and see what they look like. 

I remember I had a rough time taking the photos of those drawings. I didn’t have, at the time, a good place to hang them and photo them vertically. So what I remember doing, is laying them on the ground outside and standing on a chair and taking photos of them from above. I remember the breeze would come by and blow the corners of them up and then I’d get a bad photo because I couldn’t keep it flat. I remember putting rocks on the edges of them to keep the breeze from carrying them away. It was kind of a mess, but I finally ended up getting the photos taken, so things work out. They’re not great photos, but they give you a pretty good idea of what I was doing in those days, so there’s that. That’s about all I think I know about this drawing. I think it’s an all right drawing, for what it is.

This is just a couple of pages of random thoughts jotted down, I imagine (because I don’t recall) one morning after waking up. I remember the thoughts, I remember being intrigued at how we find ourselves again after having forgotten ourselves in dream. I still think that’s intriguing, how we can completely forget who we are in a subconscious state, but somehow, with consciousness, find our way back. It’s amazing how the brain works and a bit – more than a bit – frightening, how it sometimes doesn’t. But those thoughts – even if they build on these written in the image above, are for another time.

This idea of finding our way back to ourselves after being lost in the forgetfulness of dream, somehow run parallel to other thoughts, I’ve sometimes pondered about how amazing it is that there exists a geographical location we call home, that we find our way back to most evenings – and when we do, there it is, reserved for us and waiting.

The reference, at the end of this scribbled note, to the midnight stumbles to the bathroom alludes to the thoughts that led to the Pissers and the Fear of Death paintings five or six years earlier than when this was written down. Old thoughts now, and not new even then, but apparently still fresh in my mind at the time.

This would have been written at my apartment on Altair Place, in Venice. I can remember doing a lot of drawings while relaxing on the bed in that apartment. I’d draw or write either in the morning or late at night or in the middle of the day, if I was home. I did a lot of drawing in this sketchbook – and writing apparently – on that bed. It wasn’t exactly a bed – it was a futon, but a futon’s a bed, right? It was a nice room that I had there and these thoughts just have to do with dreaming and waking, and who we are, why we are us. I suppose I was doing a lot of questioning back then – maybe still am. The drawings and notes in this sketchbook ended up leading to the 14 Questions for Eve paintings – questions of course that were never really asked – let alone answered.

I like this painting. It’s so different than really any that I did before or after and really it’s not just this painting it’s that whole group. I haven’t looked at these for quite a while. I haven’t really really thought about them for quite a while, but I guess these canvases must be rolled up in one of my closets. I’m gonna have to get them out – probably not now but – once I retire, maybe put some of them in frames and hang them on the walls or maybe not put them in frames and hang them on the walls. I don’t know that I really necessarily wanna look at this one every day, but it’s definitely one that I really like, out of the things that the AI is chosen for me to talk about so far. I think this is more along the lines of something that I might’ve chosen for myself, if I had been choosing for myself instead of having the AI pick them randomly.

This painting is called Buhriz after Buhriz, Iraq where a lot of fighting was going on in 2005-2006, which was when I was doing the prep work for this series. I have a folder somewhere on an external hard drive that is filled with images, news articles and information old and new (at the time, although this was 20 years ago, so it’s all old now) having to do with violence. One of the interesting things about this particular painting is that it’s one of the rare instances when I’ve worked on current events as subject matter, which is something I’ve always kind of wanted to spend more time with, but – aside from this and several others from this series – I haven’t really explored doing that. When the AI chose this painting, it caused me to go to the website and check out this group of paintings there.

This is from the Raising Cain series from 2006, which I painted in Cincinnati that summer after having spent the first part of the year down in Guatemala. While I was down there, I was doing a lot of the planning and prep work for these paintings – unrelated to Guatemala itself, despite its own experience of violence in the not too distant past – but my thoughts had really turned to violence as a topic in response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I had gone down to Guatemala just to get away a little bit and slow time down from the more hectic pace of my life in Venice (LA). And so, that’s where I planned this group and when I got back, I went to Cincinnati to paint, simply because I had a studio available there. I returned to Venice in the Fall and showed these in a couple different spots. It’s kinda nice to see the photo of this painting. I haven’t looked at these for a long time, but I think they’re really kinda good paintings – seen from the retrospective distance of twenty years.

Update: I decided to go check out that folder of source materials and research materials that I gathered in preparation for this series. Many of the photos are terrible and brutal and very hard to look at. The source image for this painting is much less horrific, but given the context of the other photos, it is still heart wrenching. I think I made a pretty good painting here, but I don’t think I captured the horrors of war that the photos did. I suppose I’m no Goya after all. But anyway, had I attempted a depiction of one of the other photos, I’d probably not have the heart to include it here – I wouldn’t want to impose that on a viewer, but I will go ahead and post this one, because it’s not especially gruesome, although it is hard to look at. I think it gives some insight into this painting’s origins and intentions though, so it seems like a valuable inclusion to this post – I’ll blur the subjects face though.