Poor Margaret

Oh, the practical jokes our bodies play on us in adolescence. If you're male, maybe you leave eighth grade as a boy and return in ninth as a braying, acne-peppered jackass with the libido to match.  For the girls, perhaps you experience an awkward growth spurt where you're taller than the boys' basketball team for half a year, and in 3-D. 

We all pass through that budding stage of youth, but there are those who experience the changes more acutely in a sort of biological boot camp.  I felt sorry for those kids in school even while I was almost one of them.  To those genetically unlucky juveniles, life's just a hot, humid storm of hormones, man.

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Duh

I am in the minority of American males: I do not like beer (another Jack and Coke with lime, please), nor do I follow team sports (though it seems I exercise more than many athletics-obsessed guys).  I do enjoy watching from time to time, especially the intensity of solo contests like boxing, arm wrestling, or tennis. There should be full-contact tennis. Anyway, I typically spend the first moments identifying the underdog and then root for that person. 

While I appreciate sports, I have never related to the ferocious, laser-seriousness of the dedicated fan. Add gambling, and it becomes as strange as any piece on this site: placing your existence at stake, in the form of time used to make the gambled money, for the outcome of a contrived, inconsequential competition of which you are not even a physical part.  Weird!  

Of course, sport fulfills an important primal need; we've replaced hunting and gathering with punting and clamoring. ;- ) >  People's sports heroes become their avatars, soaring to corporeal heights that the fans themselves may never reach, so they fly through the wingspan of their idols.

On the other hand, there are those... "less intellectual" men who just hunger for the irresistible buzz of drunkenness, financial posturing, and watching other people bash into each other for points.  While the character in this image is no one in particular, he certainly represents an archetype I encountered regularly during my years at one of the biggest football universities in the nation.

Here's to protruding brows with cash on the line...

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Leaving Saul

I’ve always been moved by the dreamlike unknown. In sleep, our minds conjure imagery and plotlines with enough coherence and linearity to make some sense, but enough strangeness to make our imagination tingle! That synaptic in-between space is the sweet spot of creativity, the place I live to inhabit.

Engaging art balances clarity with vagueness, allowing room for the viewer to contribute. Without that dynamic personal investment, the expression is a static, closed loop, and I’ve yet to experience a deeply affecting fiction that spells out the mystery, the monster, or the motive.

So, I’ll leave it to you to compose this backstory...

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The Teleported

The creative process from empty canvas to finished piece takes many paths.  One scenario is when I sit with a blank drawing pad and a pencil (pen, marker, wet hoagie roll... whatever) and begin making marks on the page.  My environment and mood have some influence over what I produce, but I don't enter into the drawing with any premeditation. I let it unfold. 

At first, the marks are random improvisation.  Gradually, the page begins to look like something to me, which in turn directs the next set of marks, and so on.  Finally, it all adds up to a specific visual concept, and then I consciously work to revise and polish the image in that direction.  Once the drawing is complete, I compose a related text and add it in, like an artistic Rorschach test.

"The Teleported" is a good example of this particular approach. What else might be fun to send through a teleportation pod together...  James Earl Jones and a giraffe?  Coke and Pepsi?  An entire drum's worth of yogurt and a single human toe?

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