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...Today was my last day of work at my current job in the centre of London (c'mon it's London; I have to spell it "centre"). When I came out of the Tube station, it was rainy and overcast. People's heads were down as they ducked along from doorway to doorway trying to keep out of the rain,
I was subdued because I will miss the people I've been working with for the last year and a half or so. I was full of thoughts of what I needed to get done today, thoughts of the trip back to the states I am about to embark on for a buddy's wedding, and just generally being stuck in my head.
As I was making my way from the Oxford Circus Tube station, across Regent Street to head down to work, I heard something completely out of place. Echoing off the grey stone of the monumental old buildings on that noble old shopping street was the sounds of horses' hooves. What sounded like hundreds of them...
I looked north along Regent Street and there, clattering down the road were around 50 gigantic, beautiful, unsaddled horses. There were trotting down the road, their metal shod feet clacking on asphalt, being driven by six or seven men on horseback. Their great backs were glistening in the rain as their muscles pumped and throbbed with each stride.
It was sublime. And somehow the silent awe of that moment was reflected in the awe I felt in leaving my place of work and being applauded by a hundred people whom I call colleagues and friends and whose daily presence in my life I will miss.
Have you seen the movie Laurel Canyon? It has one of the most erotic sex scenes I have ever seen in a movie and nobody gets their kit off. Natascha McElhone and Christian Bale just sit in a car in a car park talking about what they would do if they were to engage in an affair that sorely tempts them both.
Or have you seen Steven Soderbergh's remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris"? Whoa. A movie about love and loss to take your breath away. Natascha McElhone's in that one too, playing the corporeal memory of George Clooney's dead wife Rhea, brought back to life by the power of a sentient planet. It's the stuff of crazy Russian mid century sci fi, but it is also quite moving.
Anyway, I've found myself quite moved by Ms. McElhone and her performances, the few that I have seen. Thus I found myself a little giddily star struck back in January when Lyndsay and I were waiting for our Eurostar train back to London from Paris' Gare du Nord and we saw her making ready to get on the same train. We watched as a small drama unfolded. There she was, hair blonder than we've seen in any movie, distressed because she and her husband seem to have lost their tickets. She is tall and statuesque, and he is tall and heroic; together, even is a place as mundane as a train station they seemed together to cut an otherworldly figure between them. I think they eventually got on the train.
Today, Lyndsay tells me that as she is coming home on the tube, she reads over someone's shoulder in one of the free papers they plaster the city with each day, that McElhone's husband was found dead last night, slumped against the front door of their house, dead of an apparent heart attack. He was 42.
There is a word that has come down to us from old English: fey. As it is most commonly used now, it refers to someone or something that is vaguely otherworldly. But in its original sense, it meant "fated to die."
It is so strange to think back to that brief brush with a star and to watch her and her husband engaged in such a banal task as looking for tickets and to think of him breathing his last breath against the door to his house last night, unheard and unnoticed, while his eight year old, four year old sons and as yet unborn third child played or slept somewhere oblivious; a heart breaking tragedy coming home to roost.
I am saddened and unsettled. I think what moves me most, is not that this was the tragedy that befell someone famous, but more that I specifically remember looking on this man, thinking that "Of course a woman that beautiful is married to a man that impossibly handsome"; a man who, at that time, had a scant few months left to live.
It makes me think of W.H. Auden's poetic response to Breughel's painting "Icarus."
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
1940
It's just so sad...
I had one of the most relaxing Saturdays in recent memory. Went with Lyndsay to see friends newly with a child.
Liesl, their nearly four month old, passed out on my arm like a napping airplane. She is adorable--that's such an abused term, but so she is. Who'da thought crying, soiled nappies and spitting up could still be so fascinating (mostly it was the reward of her occasional beaming smiles...)?
Anyway, saw a picture of this guy in an art magazine and just liked his slightly wall-eyed, crazy old man look. Doodled this while trying to figure out who did what to whom, where and with what in Cluedo while the baby napped.
One more day to crank before heading back to work on Monday...
Didn't have to work this morning... quick fiddle in photoshop...
...but I didn't know what.
I went to Forbidden Planet tonight to look for some good comic art inspiration. I know I wasn't in the groove, but I just wasn't feeling it. I guess that's a good sign that I need to keep working on my book because I just don't see anything like it out there.
Anyway, these are doodles in a little Moleskine sketchbook I found I had in a desk drawer yesterday. Just small enough to not make a show out of on the Tube when you draw, and just noticeable enough to make Brits really paranoid when they see you look at them and then scribble in it...
Found this photo on my buddy Dene's website. Loved this guy's expression. Did it as a doodle to warm up this morning. It is a cheat, however, because drawing from photos to warm up is like using one of those 1950's fat jiggling belts to lose weight. Ah well...
I had made a promise to upload something once a day. The best laid plans, as they say...
Anyway, this thing visited me in my dreams. But somehow although this is essentially what it looked like, creepy finger and toe nails and all, it registered in my brain under the label "Basset Hound"...
Weird...
What I drew tonight for a warm up sucked, so I decided to post another. Saw this guy drawing over Christmas, oblivious to his parents sitting on either side of him chatting about shopping. He sat there moving his hands over the paper with the determination and sense of importance of a brain surgeon. I'm not sure what I was like at that age, but I'd like to believe someone could have seen me there, navigating a line with my pencil that felt like the weight of the world lay on where I plotted it....
At home, taking a few minutes out from freelance. Was reading about Javier Bardem on a blog and am really looking forward to seeing No Country for Old Men. He has such an interestingly brutal face, craggy and misshapen in a fascinating way. Anyway, made me want to play with Lyndsay's Muji multipen...
Just spent a good part of the weekend hanging out with this milk-devouring, sleep-consuming supernova of baby cuteness.
I know dudes don't have biological clocks, and I would be singing a different tune if I had to battle my way through a series of catastrophically soiled nappies, but...
Messing around with old ink sketches. Would love to find some resources on doing really painterly stuff in Photoshop... Any hints from people would be greatly appreciated.
...used photoshop as painting tool. But after some of these things I've been seeing other guys do on other sites, thought I'd give it a whirl. The idea of the three guys came from seeing three suits on a street corner all checking their blackberries--all together but oddly alone...
At work tonight, I think my daddy instincts kicked in like nobody's business. This little boy, who couldn't have been more than six or seven was wandering around the store. I looked down, said hello, and he gave the bloody great exhale that said, "Finally a big person has figured out I need a little help." He'd lost his sister so he and I wandered off to find her. It was all I could do to not want to pick the little guy up and throw him on my shoulders so he could get a better look....
...the thickness of my own plywood lined skull frightens me.
I've fallen face down in Leopard, finally upgraded on my laptop. Ever since, I've become an RSS feed reading fiend. A couple of great sites that remain a tasty bite of creative inspiration are now feeding directly into my MacMail. I love it.
But having looked at the sites of other illustrators, a lightbulb finally went off. For months, I've been having a bitch of a time getting down to the grunt work of churning out pages to finish my Magnum Opus comic(us?). Was reading a collective blog the other day and a bunch of the members were posting their warm ups for the day. They're concept designers or animators or illustrators, but they were all putting up this great rough messy stuff.
Yes, Nye, warm ups. I wouldn't do anything strenuously physical without a warm up (christ, in rowing we used to do a 45 minute warm up for a 6 minute race). But I've been trying to go without "stretching and warming up" with my work illustration work. Silly rabbit...
Anyway, off for more doodling....
Went to Paris and then Angouleme last week. Loved it. Finally taking advantage of the fact that I can get to continental Europe from England in the same amount of time it would take me to get from Los Feliz to Santa Monica during rush hour back in LA.
Though I'm no a card carrying member of anyone's religion, this image of Christ was really moving. The original was of course far more beautiful (and in color), but it was the drama of this lighting that got me (a piece that was a little screwed out of non-viewing because of its proximity to Ol' Mona...)
(from a 2007 Commencement Speech at Stanford)
"...Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world—equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being—simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory, and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images.
"Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions. And it remembers. As Robert Frost once said about poetry, "It is a way of remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget." Art awakens, enlarges, refines, and restores our humanity. You don't outgrow art. The same work can mean something different at each stage of your life. A good book changes as you change."
--Dana Gioia,
current head of the National
Endowment for the Arts,
published poet and winner
of the National Book Award
tell me this isn't the coolest thing you've ever seen
Backstory: I was having a pint in a pub, this came on the TV... and beer shot out of my nose....
Just got back from my first proper European holiday since I moved over here 11 months ago. Lyndsay and I went to Cinque Terre on the northwest Italian coast. I now get why Brits are pathologically obsessed by holidays in the sun--the human version of photosynthesis (let's call it humosynthesis, shall we?)--cannot happen on an island that gets 8 days of sun a year. Pasty-white, melatonin-deprived, mayonaise-skinned monster that I am, I still loved it.
I've posted a gallery in the photography section called Cinque Terre, and another in the sketches section called (mond-bogglingly) Cinque Terre Sketches. I didn't do as much drawing as I'd like, but did have a little bit of fun.
Also, these guys from Monterosso al Mare are my heroes (3rd movement of "Winter" from Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"...)
I took advantage of a funky new sketchbook to do super wide drawings. Problem is, on a vertically oriented site, they look a little weird in the galleries. So I have there here as pop up images for you to get a better feel for them.
Went to see Modigliani at the Royal Academy of Art when I first got here on Oct 7th. Got stood up by a friend meant to meet me there, but ended up having more fun by myself with Mr Modigliani. Such amazing simplicity. The man was a true cartoonist--if by that we mean an artist who distills and perhaps broadens features in order to make a point, eschewing similarity and reality for the story beneath the picture... Cool shit. Sad though that he was another one who died perhaps long before his true potential was reached. Them's the breaks for the bohemian life I guess...
...to London.
Right before I moved to the East coast to go to college--jesus--14 years ago, I remember being wracked by a dream that shook me for days. In the dream, I'd been convicted of a crime and sentenced to death by hanging. All the loved ones in my life wept for what would be my imminent departure, but no one would tell me what crime I had commited and no one tried to help me avoid my fate. I remember my friends and loved ones, my sister and father and mother, all weeping for me. But no one could tell me what I'd done. And in the irrefutable logic of the dreamscape, fleeing was not an option.
Horrified, on a beautiful morning, I climbed the steps of the scaffold under a glorious sun that gave no warmth. The noose was put around my neck. I screamed for someone to help, for someone to at least tell me what I'd done. But the members of the crowd below the gibbet--friends and loves ones all--merely hid their faces in their hands as they cried for me, for my passing.
I snapped awake in my bed nearly screaming as my dream neck snapped.
I was horrified for days afterward. What on earth could that have been about? What had I done? Why would no one help me?
And then in a flash of understanding days later, I realized that the gibbet, my unknowable crime, my sentencing had been part of one of those all-too-perfect dream metaphors. I was in fact dying; my time in my hometown was ending and I was never going to return (and haven't since) in the same way. Those who cared about me wept for my departure but knew that it was the only thing that could happen. There was this slow, melancholy turning away. They felt as though they were leaving me before I left.
It feels as though the same thing is happening now. People I care about seem to be turning away, slowly shutting down, turning off the valves that connect them to me. I find myself thinking about the last time I may see a person again. Nostalgia strikes me at times with the force of an earthquake. I've had fights with people I love and found them throwing what we had down in front of them, like a porcelain doll whose face now horrifies them, doing all but spitting on the wreckage between us.
I look forward to London and a new life, being the stranger in a strange land, the observer, the outsider. But I am sad for the loss of this life, of this time, of this me...
All images, unless otherwise noted
are © 2003-07 Aneurin Wright & Welsh el Dorado Press