Wrecked Woods 12" x 18" oil on panel

Magus, oil on paper, 12"x15"

Grad reviews are done with, its been a long ass few weeks. Here are some pictures of my studio!

both 11"x8.5", ballpoint pen and cut paper

These are Slow Whales. They are what make deserts happen. They eat the chemical that bonds water and light (light is naturally wet- you must know this) so certain places get really bright and really dry.

WE GOT SICK
oil on paper, 6" x 4"

This stuff is mostly playing. I like it.



These are not done yet. They are supposed to be giants. They are really fun to make.


I drew these on my studio wall. They are hungry spirits. They remind me to get to work.

Bad Omen: The Meat-Turd is a Shameful Breach of Trust

A Dogs Arm/Spirit Dong/Daily Snatched Bits of Joy From the Hell-Mouth of Bullshit Oblivion
oil on paper, 12"x18"


lol i literally have no idea what i'm doing

this is a bad thing looming. this is also photo-realism. it looks exactly how i painted it. how scary is that?

Just so I have something to update, here is an in-progress painting. I have an awful lot in the works, some of which might fail spectacularly, but nothing is ready to see yet. So there we are.

anthropomorphic anticacti. these are also postcards that i made!

anticactus.

school stuff starts tomorrow. hopefully it gets me off my ass!

Bugs Bugs Bugs. Probably not going to do much with these, but I am out of practice and need the workout. If I draw whatever I want for a little while it becomes less and less of a big deal to start more legit projects. Bugs Bugs Bugs.

Gay Ass Ghost

Found this bug on my balcony. It was like a cross between a yellow ladybird and a cockroach. I froze him. Southern fauna is blowing my mind.

Movt Soth

This blog is going to be UNABANDONED and REBIRTHED. I just moved from Las Vegas, Nevada to Knoxville, Tennessee. Since everyone I know is scattered to the winds I feel the need to mass communicate, massively. I am starting grad school next week, so more to come and more.

Probably my favorite maker. I like thinking about old time religion, and about sacrifice. The idea that a sacrifice can fail or be improper or unsuitable is really kind of intense and sad. I'll probably repaint some of these on a large scale- they work at this size, but just barely, and they aren't very imposing.

These seem to be succeeding or failing based almost entirely on their formal qualities which I'm not cool with. There needs to be something else present. Not sure, not sure.

Another maker. I like this one OK as a technical exercise. I'm still working on giving these context beyond that though. It is even more terrifying if you think of it as the underside of a shark.

Insider bonus I ate like 5 oreos before I took the reference for this one so my mouth was really filthy.

He wakes up quaking with a start but something is missing then goes to yell but something is soft where it should have clacked. His teeth are gone. They were stolen by ghosts in the night. Why? He can’t imagine. He was always pious: didn’t complain or curse the howls from the forest when the weather turned foul, didn’t dump his trash in the bottomless ditch where they lived (everyone could hear them muttering Down There) or shit in it out of spite. But his teeth were gone. The ghosts were bad, not the odd and indifferent wildlife he thought they were. They knew no consequences! They couldn’t be hurt, couldn’t be hobbled with a stone. You couldn’t tackle one and make him explain himself. They did it because they could (they didn’t even keep the teeth. They buried them. Ghosts have their own rituals) and because they wanted to hear the sound it would make if a toothless man screeched vulgarities into a bottomless hole. Who knows?

This is from a semi-failed body of work called Makers, centering on interactions with the supernatural. I like the idea of ghosts, especially the possibility that ghosts or demons or whatever can be dumb or shallow or graceless rather than the typical archetype. Technically, these are pretty OK but they need alot of work and development before anything good can happen.

I have a rule that I can only watch movies or TV if I am drawing at the same time. It only works well for big, mindless projects or sketchbook doodles. These are doodles. Just dicking around, so there isn't much to these. A feral cloud and a screaming mountain. Maybe they will find a place in some legitimate work, maybe not. I like them and I am content to let them be dumb.

To be the sacred apprentice to the Saints of the Hole was the worst job. The story went (the outer saints said) that they could trace their lineage back to the cavemen before cavemen. The old ones were kind but weak, picking berries and shitting wherever they wanted. But the new cavemen were unkind. They wrecked their huts and killed their kids. So some of the old ones died fighting, while others fled to the Cave in the Mountain.
The Cave was enormous, but shaped like a funnel that went on forever. It got narrower towards the back till the Cave turned into the Tunnel and into the Cranny. Time went on, and the old ones made their home in the cave, killing bats and salamanders and drinking treacle. But to be close to the light was a privilege, and the weaker creatures were forced to move further and further back into the Cave. They kept getting squished! Time went on, more were born, more were pushed back, and the hindmost old ones had to be born thinner and thinner to survive, and they kept getting pushed into narrower and narrower places.
Now (after time went on) you can’t see the old ones. They turned themselves into the Saints of the Hole, and live too far in cracks, are too thin to fit in your eyes. A sacred apprentice was supposed to crush himself daily, to fit just far enough in to get food to the outer saints, who passed it on down the line. It hurt so much, but the apprentices were all proud. They all thought of the saints in different ways.
Some thought the saints were within the mountain, narrowing themselves to be closer to the earth, to talk with the rocks and moss. These apprentices worshipped the saints and wrote manifestoes based on two-dimensionality. Others thought that enough time had gone by that the mountain was now made entirely of saints. These apprentices worshipped the mountain, set up shrines and blood sacrifices. A few apprentices (and these were the happiest) thought that the process had been going on forever. The saints had made themselves the mountain and surpassed the mountain, fitting themselves into the earth and the air and the mist. This is why the apprentices tolerated being crushed: they were feeding the saints who were feeding the saints who were the world. They were feeding the world endlessly.

He gave up his eyes to the Soul of the Screaming Mountain for the promise of undisturbed adventure. What’s more, the mountain said, through mouthfuls of rattling gems: he would live through the danger forever. After traversing the City Made Only of Mirrors (he can’t see-what does he care if everything is everywhere) and doing battle with carnivorous swarms of gargantuan germs (brandishing knives and swinging flagella, he thought they were ants and dunked them) he comes to rest by the roots of the Wandering Genius Tree. Eventually he will come to regret his blindness. The Wandering Genius Tree, in an unprecedented act of kindness, gives him spot-on directions to the elusive Tit Fields, where his lack of sight causes unending frustration.

I am really attracted to things that can maybe be interpreted as bad omens, or signs of approaching badness. Anything in this body of work was done fairly quickly (less than a day) and using rudimentary materials.

I am never quite sure how to talk about bodies of work while they are in progress. These are pretty dumb conceptually, and I'm not entirely comfortable leaving them that way. Letting things be simple illustration tends to make my thought process lazy. I guess I will see how it goes- more to come. any input would be valuable.

She told him not to bother the ink-full stewpot but he went ahead and fucking did it anyway. Two messes now: smudge-faced imp (he likes it, thinks it makes him look HARD, man) to clean before the gathering starts up and delicate mixture (fragile to tamper-even the cat must be sent away to prevent for danger) ruined utterly by nose dunk. Potential embarrassment ensuing: they’ll all know the ink-full pot was wrecked. Filthy scamp unrepentant despite causing no end to trouble. Like when he got drunk and pissed the laundry basket and tried to hide it. Like when he scaled the roof and bothered the ever-suffering neighborhood dogs. Like the eggs he hid in the closet. The burglar alarm he built that covered the floor with soap. He fancies himself Trickster, and he is. His messes serve no master.

Somehow the plague came out. Now Reverse Cataracts are wrecking everything! The towers are gone and everyone is in trouble. The germs were something new. They were actually kind. They didn’t eat you or shut you down or dissolve anything. They didn’t make you crazy with mixed up chemicals. Were they actually germs? I’m not sure. All they did, which ruined the world, was improve your eyesight.
But too much of anything too fast can be bad! People’s brains were not prepared for their eyes to become perfect tiny telescopes. Everyone could see so well they just had to concentrate and their eyes would ZOOM IN to infinity and the smallest details of the world revealed themselves. Maybe before you had to wait until you were close to see if a road sign said Mosswood or Millstone. Not a problem anymore! Now you could ZOOM from wherever you wanted and see the words or the flaking of the paint or the tiny blobs of metal all joined together.
But just like dying eyes make one big thing out of lots of small things (a man with a hat petting a cat in a rocking chair is just one nervous blur), telescopic eyes made too many small things out of things that should have been complete. Maybe you can’t see the forest for the trees? These new ZOOMLINGS can’t see the trees for the bark, or the bark for the wedges for the bits for the motes, etc. Most of them just lie down screaming and can’t stop screaming once they see how many things are happening. If they were to stand, they would see all the things that had to get out of their way: the pieces of air, the pollen, all the bug eggs. Most become hypnotized by how the forces of their yells make whorls in the nonsense. So the cities died as one to a howling chorus: It’s so busy! It’s too busy!