Okay, this is from the 2003 Leather Sketchbook, and that seems about right to me. Um, the drawing on the left page is a goofy little stick figure holding up a lover on a pedestal, which I recognize as being inspired by a little clay sculpture that I made. We used to take a research boat out into the ocean and pull up samples and things. The Vantuna was the name of that boat, previously owned by, I believe, the president, or CEO, or some leader of the, um, Van de Kamp, canned goods, and Van de Kamp tuna, I don’t know what Van de Kamp made. But this was his yacht, which had been turned into a research vessel.

Note: Follow this link for more (and more accurate) info on the Vantuna – I was mostly right, but apparently the spelling is Van Camp – and they were the ones who sold “Chicken of the Sea” with the memorable television ads from when I was a kid.

And we had  access to it. If we raised, if we got a group together to raise up enough money to take it out, we would do that fairly often back then – with the Venice Oceanarium. And on one of those outings, we pulled up some really fine sediments – some clay from the ocean bottom – and I sculpted a few pieces, and… this is a drawing of one of those pieces that I then mounted on a base, and had a wire that, you know, suspended it up above that base. 

So, what I’ve done here is I’ve drawn a sculpture, and then written next to it – this idea of putting a lover up on a pedestal. The, um, the little, um, I’m guessing that that drawing might be a sculpture too. That might be a wire sculpture that I had next to it. The whole thing might have been, yeah, actually drawn from a little setup that I had, because I can think of no other explanation for why I would have drawn that wiry stick figure like that, except that maybe I’d put some wire together and made it look like that. That must be what that is. 

On the right hand side, is a drawing of, yeah, just awkward lovers, you know, just, uh, yeah, particularly the autobiographical character there. Clumsily trying to, you know, awkwardly make love, which, I think, was sort of a self deprecating, but true, circumstance that I was depicting. 

And then I’ve written, Is this so difficult? and How do I remember? And of course, it was difficult, I guess, that was the problem. But that was 2003, 23 years ago. 

This is a nice couple pages of drawings. Apparently done on September 26, 2003. I love these sketchbook drawings that have dates on them, so that I know exactly when they happened. At this point, I would have been living in the apartment on Altair, probably drawing in this sketchbook on the futon, which is, um, where I did a lot of drawing back then. That’s it.

Postscript: I hunted around a little in an old hard drive and found a couple of related images – a not so great photo of the little sculpture and a digital print based on the not so great photo. So here they are.

Okay, this, I think, is a pretty nice digital painting. This is from the most recent series called Liminality. And I guess it’s natural that I like this, because it’s a more recent painting. Yeah, I run into trouble with some of these Random Daily posts, because the paintings are old, well, I can look back at them nostalgically, and very often, I think they’re very good pieces. You know, they’re still things that I did years ago and they’re not necessarily the kinds of things I’m interested in doing now. This, however, is a really nice image, I think, for a variety of reasons. 

This group that I’ve called Liminality is a group of pieces that I’m doing with the anticipation of using them as springboards, I guess, anyway, if not studies, for things I would like to do once I retire. My goal for several years, anyway, has been to, in a couple years, retire and have some time to get back to painting and painting full time and painting on some larger things, getting someplace where I have the space to do that. I’ve got my eye on New Mexico, which is a place that I’ve always liked and thought was a beautiful landscape. And I’m hoping to be able to scrape together enough money to get a place there and get back to full time painting work. But in the meantime, I do a lot of artwork with the intention of exploring these things later on. 

So liminality is a term that refers to that liminal state, that, in between. It’s used, sort of anthropologically, to refer to a coming of age, and usually that’s, you know, an adolescent sort of coming of age. But I see no reason not to apply it to the sort of coming of age that I am attaining as I move towards retirement. I mean, I’m transitioning from my sort of, you know, middle life, and really, in many ways, you know, that working era, productive period, into what I hope is a much more productive, but, nevertheless, final sort of phase of my life, you know. If, I’m optimistic, and I certainly usually am, you know, I’m moving into the final third of my life, if I can hope to manage to live into my 90s, which is what I’ve got my eye on. We’ll see how that turns out. 

But this particular piece, I think, is very nice. I do these digital drawings, but with the intention of painting in this manner. And so, the digital tools allow for, you know, really anything. You can do whatever you want to, but I know myself, I know my interests in actual tangible physical paint. And so I try to make these images by using the digital materials in a way that could be done with, you know, paint on canvas. And so that’s what this is. This is an image, and I’m pleased with the way the whiteness works. I’m pleased with the way the gestural line works. I’m pleased with the color relationships and the linear elements. The piece, um, yeah, I like the fact that it is non objective, and yet references both, the physical, human form, and the landscape, and just line for the sake of line, you know. It’s the essence of drawing, and I’ve packed a lot of – allowed a lot of meaning to be apparent in it. 

You know, in a lot of the drawings I do these days, my intention is to document that moment, and that person that I am at that time, and so there’s a great deal of handwriting involved, and documentation involved – and a great deal of allowed meaning, but not especially intended, meaning, you know, and I would like to think that any meaning or interpretation, or appreciation, or response that a viewer might have to it, would be their own. 

There’s plenty in this piece to please and intrigue and satisfy me, and there’s plenty in it that is undefined and ambiguous, and yet there are certainly elements of it that are… familiar to me, if not referential. I mean, I don’t think there’s intentional referentiality. I don’t really know that that’s true. I think there probably is. But it’s really an allowed meaning that’s going on – I hope. And so this is a pretty nice piece. I think this is one of the better pieces from the liminality group, and I think that the liminality group is a pretty good group. And we’ll see, I expect that I’m going to carry on with that sort of a theme, as I approach retirement, because, really, everything that I’m doing is, right now, reflective of that idea of, in between states, you know, a coming of age. I’m doing a lot of things with the intention of exploring them further when I’ve got the time and the wherewithal to do it after I retire from my current teaching occupation.

This one is from the Loving G series I did in 2000. This series was in response to just a terrible breakup – and that sort of explains the subject matter of this, with the, How can I heal myself? title written on it.

I tend to not really look at this group much, even on the website. As far as the paintings themselves go, I’m a little bit uncertain where the paintings are, they might be in my brother’s attic – I think that… well, I’m not certain. But, uh, but I tend to not look at them. I tend to not think that they’re especially good, but I really like this painting. I think that this is a pretty nice painting. I’m glad to be reminded of it. It’s, um, it’s better than I would have given credit to this series for being, I’ve really kind of put it out of my mind and haven’t thought about these for quite a while.

This is the first series that I did at the studio in Cincinnati. And that part of it was very good. The working of these paintings, the paintings, you know, came more or less after the relationship. And so I – and I guess it’s funny because when you think about, you know, this painting is entitled, How Can I Heal Myself? And of course, the painting itself, I’m sure, comes from a drawing (see below), because there are a lot of drawings from that group. And so I’m sure that I had done a lot of drawings and then selected the drawings and made paintings from those. And, of course, yeah, that is how one can heal themselves from this. I mean, there are lots of ways to heal a broken heart, but painting is not a bad one. So that’s what I’m doing here. I’m painting myself, painting my way out of a heartbreak.

Note: This is a bit hard to follow in the transcript form, the audio version is probably a little more communicative. The gist of it though is that, this painting probably came from a drawing, done at a time when I was in the midst of the pain of the heartbreak, but by the time I was painting this, I would’ve been well on my way to recovery, and was completing the healing process through the act of painting about it. I healed up just fine, and of course this all happened more than a quarter century ago. And, while I really think I did heal just fine, I’m rarely inclined (as mentioned above) to revisit these paintings, and I must admit that this breakup is probably responsible for my having kept pretty much single ever since – so there’s that.

I looked around and found a couple preliminary drawings related to this one. Here they are:

It’s a little interesting that both of the preliminary drawings included “G” looking at me as I suffered there, but by the time I made the painting, she was literally out of the picture. I don’t think that was consciously intentional at the time, but looking at them now, it’s definitely noticeable:) Also, if I’m going to give in and analyze my own painting – because, why not? it’s a pretty distant memory at this point – I notice that in both of the drawings, I’m holding on to my heart, but in the painting, I’m letting it go. So there’s that.

All right, I had to do a little looking at this to figure it out. My first thought was that it was a part of the Junk Mail series, and I was right that it is. But at first, when I looked over on the website to make certain of that, I couldn’t find it. Um, because it turns out that the thumbnails in that group are all sort of vertical, and this is clearly a horizontal image. So that was sort of puzzling. And I know that there are a lot of these junk mail drawings that I never got around to scanning or putting on the website. So there are not nearly as many of them on the site as there are in, you know, boxes around here, somewhere.

But, this one puzzled me a little bit, because when I look closely at it, it’s not on junk mail, as the rest of them are. This is on a dollar bill. So this is a pretty nice little drawing on a dollar bill. I like it quite a lot. I don’t quite remember how I happened to do this on a dollar bill. I feel like there’s more to it that I’m forgetting. Like, maybe that dollar had some significance, but I don’t really recall. But this is a nice, sort of drawing, and it is from that Junk Mail series, and I really should do more of those.

I’ve got just boxes of junk mail that are drawn on, and then others that are not drawn on, that I always sort of want to draw on. I like drawing on junk mail. I won’t go into that too much right now, but it’s at least something to do with junk mail, which I detest, and so I try to, you know, make some use out of this horrible imposition that people have imposed on us. I’ve got whole categories of various kinds of junk mail. I look forward to some future when I no longer get junk mail. We’ll see whether that works out.

But, nevertheless, pretty good drawing. I like it, and, um, that’s what this is.

Oh, I just put this link here, and I realized there’s a subheading for this group – so, I guess that’s what this dollar bill painting is – it’s an “other obligation” – that checks out.

Here’s another one of the Printer Paper Nudes, I think from 2021. And there must be a lot of these. They show up pretty frequently in this random selection project here. I should count them. There’s probably a lot of them. There’s probably a couple hundred, anyway. And so, it’s not unlikely that they will appear.

This is just a purple colored pencil drawing. Nothing to complain about, nothing out of the ordinary. You know, it’s a good drawing. These, Printer Paper Nudes, I don’t know what to tell you about them – other than the fact they’re just a lot of them. And I’m glad.

I like this one. It makes a big difference when doing these blog posts, for me to like the things I’m doing. That last painting, I don’t really like, and, you know, it’s sort of, it’s difficult to talk about. This one, I like a lot, although I don’t know what to tell you about it. So I guess it’s all sort of difficult.

I’m trying to get ahead of the game a little bit on these. The first 30 of these blog posts, I did, I did them more or less 10 at a time. I had the AI choose 10 drawings, and then I would work on them. Um, talk about them, and then clean up the writing (the audio transcript). Now, I’ve gone ahead, and I’m working further ahead now, but I’m still just gonna do 10 at a time. I think, for a little bit, but the AI kicked out – I had it do all the way up to 100, still in batches of 10, but I went up to 100, and it looks like there are a lot of good things coming up, as I glanced down at the selection. But something as simple as a little drawing like this, I can enjoy it, but there’s nothing too exceptional to say about it. So, I’ll wrap this one up here, and I guess maybe, you know, when I come across just a little drawing, I’ll not talk quite as much as I am this time. And just leave it to be looked at, I guess, that’s the strategy.

Okay, I was puzzled by this when it suddenly came up because I thought, didn’t I already do a blog post about this? And then I thought, Well, I remember doing the blog post about the painting that I think might have been on the back of this, and I’m sort of confused about the whole thing, but then I looked back at the blog posts, and the Random Daily #9 is a painting called The Treasure or the Treasure Map, I think. Treasure Hunt, maybe? And… when I was talking about that, I was remembering this, and in my mind, these 2 paintings are sort of connected, although that one is a painting that I really like a lot, this one, not so much.

Uh, it’s a, yeah, nice depiction, but it’s just not at all what I was really interested in doing then or interested in what I’m doing now. And it largely comes down to the depiction of space. I mean, even though the space is really flattened here, it’s still, there’s a reference to space. The boards of the floor go back into space, and open this up a little bit, and there’s, you know, some three dimensionality to the figures, and those are sorts of things that I’m just not inclined to do. You know, I’ve always really sort of embraced the integrity of the two dimensionality of a canvas. But, for whatever reason, that’s the way this painting ended up coming about. And, you know, that’s, there’s room for all kinds of paintings in a career.

But anyway, I did end up already talking about this because I went back into that blog post after I remembered that this was the painting I was thinking about (so you can read more there, if you like). And I honestly don’t know, I don’t know whatever became of either of these paintings. I imagine they probably got painted over at some point. I suspect that… Well, I don’t know. It’s been a long time, and it’s tough to keep track of these things.

This was painted in 1991. That’s totally accurate. Um, and it shows my girlfriend at the time, and her roommate, and we used to, uh, sit around the fire, and, um, and drink and hang out, and it was very nice. It was a very nice time. And that’s what this is about. It was a long time ago. And I’ll end it there. Go to that random daily number 9 for a little bit more, probably inaccurate guesses about this painting.

Another Nudes and Études drawing. Um, ink on paper. I don’t know what to tell you, uh, yeah. Nice little drawings, nothing too much.

Sometimes I feel like the drawings that I’m doing are a little facile, a little um, I don’t know how to describe it, but a little overly confident or overly simple. And these, I think, I was probably making an effort or an attempt to just roughen them up a little bit, and that’s kind of what’s going on here. I would… Yeah, I think that rather than it being two figures, I think it’s two attempts at the same figure, taking some pretty big liberties with it, but the poses are similar enough that I imagine that’s the same figure.

Um, hair is always something that I’m kind of willing to change from whatever the source is, you know, I’ll change up the hair to suit my needs, and you can see that the hair is different on these two figures, but I still think it’s from the same pose, the same source. So, that’s it.

I, um, you know, nice page of drawings. I’ve got nothing against it. And I’ll leave it there.

This is Cain and Abel #3. I had to look it up myself, because I was not 100% certain, but it all kind of checks out, um, now that I see that, I can realize that in this group, there must have been, I would say, probably three Cain and Abels. I mean, the group is called Raising Cain, and so it’s only appropriate that this subject matter show up more than once.

Let’s see, I don’t know why Abel’s there wearing a toga, I suppose, I guess, it’s because his mom ate the apple, right? That’s why you are clothed (I don’t know why a toga though, but what else, I guess). Uh, Cain is inexplicably unclothed, but, you know, I guess, um, that’s what was going on.

It’s a nice painting. I like this painting a lot. Working horizontally is one of those things that I guess I used to do fairly often. I’ve gotten so inclined in recent years to tend to work on the square if, um… If not, and if not square, then vertically. But I like this. I like what’s going on. It’s really a pretty nice painting. I’m looking at it, trying to figure out what it’s on, and I really think that what these Cain and Abel paintings were painted on were the remnants of the 1994 paintings that had been damaged by being poorly stored. And by having the oil medium being too oily, as opposed to, you know, turpentine or something, and so they didn’t dry very quickly, and they stuck together. But by the time I was painting on these, the oil was pretty dry, and it makes her an interesting surface, because these are acrylic over oil, which is a dangerous sort of way to play it, but I don’t think they’ve particularly cracked or anything, and I wouldn’t care, particularly if they did. But I’ve got to dig these out at some point, and see how they are. They’re rolled up somewhere now.

But this is a nice drawing (drawing with paint, you know). I was pretty well into it, I think, by the time I did these. In another blog post, I mentioned that a lot of times, I have painted groups of paintings, sort of simultaneously. And, um, and that way, they’re all sort of more, um, alike in the sense that the methods used are very similar. But with this group, the Raising Cain series, my goal was to paint one a day, and I did exactly that. And some days, the painting would come together right away, and I’d be done, take the rest of the day off. Other days, I’d work on that thing all day long, and it was in Cincinnati, and it was in the summer, and it was hot. And I remember just the sweat dripping off me some days, and I just couldn’t get it to work, and then I’d go over and over it. But this one looks like it came together really nicely, although I could be wrong about that. I have no recollection. But I think that it ended up really good. So, that’s my thought.

All right, this one is from the 14 Questions for Eve series, and it says it’s number 15, which is funny, since it’s 14 questions for Eve. Um, I kind of feel like, Well, I don’t know what the count on these was. I’m not sure. I would have guessed that there were 14 paintings in this series, but… I don’t know. I don’t know why this one says number 15. And I know there were a lot of supplemental little paintings, but the main group of paintings from the 14 Questions for Eve series were done on these metal shelves that I had found by the dumpster in the alley behind the little, I guess, strip mall is what you would have to call that, up on the corner of California and Lincoln. That’s interesting, just the last blog post I made, I think, I was talking about Lincoln Fabric, which would have been on the other side of Lincoln, but right across from there. And all of this, of course, in my neighborhood, back then, in those days, this being painted in 2005, that seems believable, to me, that this is 2005. I was living there on Altair from 2001 till the beginning of 2006. No, 2002

• Note: I was living there – on Altair – the whole time, from December 2000 through February 2006, but I moved a half block down that little street in January or maybe February – probably February 2002.

And I had a little bit of a studio set up on the front patio, and there was a nice place to work. It was a small space, but I spent a few years painting on these metal shelves. I was working full time, and so I wasn’t painting as much, but I was painting fairly often, but they were painted over and over, kind of. And, um, I ended up with this and some of the others, that I still, I have one hanging in my bathroom right now, uh, and others are stuck away in a closet, but it’s not a bad group of paintings, and definitely was very, thought provoking, just because it was such a long time coming. I mean, I worked on these metal shelves for, like I said, a few years. So, that’s what this is, and, uh… And I’ll leave it there, I’ll talk more about these 14 Questions for Eve paintings, maybe, when another one happens to come up in this random selection.

OK, so the file name doesn’t tell me, so I had to just look it up. I looked it up over on the website, and this is from another little leather sketchbook – and on the website, I’ve identified it as the Tea Stained Leather sketchbook, because it looks like at some point or other, I’ve used it as a coaster for a cup of tea (possibly the whole pot?). And that’s good, because it gives it a distinction. It’s a slightly smaller, I think, and different format, leather sketchbook.

I think that I acquired a bunch of scraps of leather from Lincoln Fabric. That was a fabric store that used to be up on Lincoln Boulevard, sort of on California and Lincoln, I think. And I don’t know if it’s still there. It was a funny, strange story. I’ve got some stories about the Lincoln Fabric that I won’t go into now, but, at some point, I bought these pieces of leather, and then used them to bind these sketchbooks, and they worked really well. And maybe I should see if I can acquire some more leather, either from Lincoln Hardware (I meant “Fabric” Lincoln Hardware is a whole different – although close by establishment – also with lots of stories associated with it) or someplace else, to make more sketchbooks.

This, I would have drawn, um, the website says from 2010 to 2018, is what this sketchbook is, and what that means is, I started it when I was living in Venice in 2010, and I don’t know, I kind of think [that I would have started it] even earlier, really. I mean, I don’t know how I came up with those dates when I put it up on the website, except that 2018 sounds very believable, and I probably had not worked in it for quite a while and then finished it up in 2018, and then put it up on the website. But this drawing, I really feel like this drawing would have been done when I was still living on Altair, which would have been, you know, no later than 2005. This seems believably 2005 to me. Uh, maybe 2006, but I don’t think as late as 2010. I could totally be wrong, though. It’s hard to tell. It really is.

But I like this, um… spread of drawings, the page on the left, you know, sort of a nice stock, running nude, and then the page on the right, being another running nude, but much more abstracted, uh, or broken apart, I guess, yeah abstracted, you know? Um, I like it. I like what’s going on there. And, um, that’s it for now.