Do you think about the future?

Does it get you excited? Or maybe it fills you with fear and loathing. Maybe your outlook is shaped by the possibility of higher returns from your investment portfolio, driven by extractive and deregulated technologies, inhumane policies that ignore the needs of the commons, while rewarding the private sector and willfully ignoring climate and vaccine science.

Lol. How pessimistic of me.

Maybe it’s a constant thrill because you’re just some dude/ette who instinctively knows that the only relief any of us will get is when sweet death takes us because we can’t afford to survive a burning planet suffering under the crushing weight of a right-wing, techno-accelerationist fever dream. (“BTW, we found your data in a recent security breach. Have you updated to our latest software release, powered by AI? You don’t have to think anymore. Your cognitive abilities are now our IP.”) Death is the only certainty in life, and if there is one thing humans love, is rigid and fixed belief in things we can’t control.

Dead Sharp is now on all streaming platforms

My last email announced my latest solo album release Burzum Funtime. Thanks to everyone who checked it out. Those of you who purchased a copy are the world’s greatest humans (If you have not, you can get my whole discography for $14.95). I understand bandcamp.com is not the most accessible for those who don’t purchase music regularly, but prefer the convenience of streaming services. Well, you are in luck. Hit this link to find me on all the majors.

Hiya. I know. I’ve been away. To catch you up real quick - Summer was great. Fall was fine. Holidays were busy. Things have breaking all over my house. I discovered rats in the attic. A billionaire sociopath and his spray-tanned lapdog are scamming Americans one government agency at a time. Everything is fine.

Let us proceed.

August is Courtney month and I’m your feel-good hit of the summer

I haven’t written in a hot minute because I wanted to give everyone a breather. Honestly, too much of me is never bad for you. But I wanted to make sure that by the time we get to August, you are like, “DAAAAAAMN GIMME SOME OF THAT SWEET SWEET COURTNEY NECTAR.”

Grab a straw. The time is now.

This past week or so I’ve been thinking about the components that make up my art practice. Not the various media I work in, or materials I use, but rather the things I think about and pay attention to when I’m not making art, but end up informing my work. I’ve even gone so far as to break it all down in a mindmap to help “see the forest” as it were.

I needed to remind myself of what the core of my practice is. Work and family life have been more busy and distracting as of late. I’ve still been drawing pretty steadily, but in the last month felt myself “detaching” from my work. I’ve been feeling constrained by my studio space in a way I find irritating at the moment. Some of that has to do with some day job upheaval, and sharing studio space with my jobby-job workspace. Some of that, I think, is just reaching the end of the runway and not feeling the plane lift off the ground in a way I feel good about.

Prologue:

Over the winter holiday break I had some time off work and instead of lazing around, I finally cracked the seal on excavating a large number of boxes we’d been storing for an embarrassing number of years. We moved into our current house 2.5 years ago, and as we unpacked the final van load and settled in, my wife immediately began grad school. This halted any energy to get rid of all those boxes we didn’t have time to look through before we moved. Long story short, I’m excellent at creating stacks and piles of things, and very bad at sifting through, and getting rid of, said stacks and piles of things.

SO, as a gift to my wife and my future self, I started the new year right and eliminated dozens of cardboard boxes and plastic tubs full of everything from old artwork and desk items from past jobs, to dead media and random cleaning supplies from the move. Among the anthropological artifacts were several bins containing items from my childhood: school papers, photos, yearbooks, and all kinds of collected paraphernalia that had meaning at one point, but now had the musty film of time coating its browned edges.

I was reading about disaster capitalism this week. A term coined by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine (2008) to describe how corporations and private interests exploit vulnerable countries and cities in the wake of crises. It was referenced in the book Caps Lock - How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design And How To Escape From It (2021) by Ruben Pater, which I am in the middle of, and quite enjoying.

Anyway, the author was making the point that while whole industries benefit from war and natural disasters, graphic designers have been right there alongside those opportunists helping them hone their messaging, or refine the life-saving products they need to survive. It's true. Designers have been getting paid by the wealthy to help them stay wealthy since the first scribes chiseled Hammurabi's code into stone. Branding irons used to stamp crates, cattle, and other humans were "designed." So has been money, the shape of a bomb, and even that horrible stench that blows out of a Sephora when you walk by. Economic models aside, creative energy is often operating at its highest and most focused levels when something has gone wrong, or resources are limited.

Hello dear friends. I have a lot going on since the big wheel in the sky clicked over to 2024. I figured I’d get back into the writing groove with an update on some studio/life things. I’ll try not to over-think or linger. You are busy, and time is money.

A side / B side

Yesterday I worked on a painting - the first bit of visual art I’ve touched in many moons. The last several weeks have been very busy. I’ve found moments of time to do things here and there but these have typically been “studio tasks” - updating, fixing, throwing out - rather than focused making time. For example, last week I wanted to put together some new contact mics to use in my music projects. I had my soldering iron setup near my work desk, so in between meetings or breaks in the day I could pop over to my table and solder a couple of things in place. During another free moment I went to my mixer in the next room, plugged it in and tested to see if it worked. Then I went back to work. That contact mic is still sitting there, unused, but I had an idea and I found 15 minutes to fit it in.

Another example: I had a couple weeks ago with my project Free Static. We played at the New Music Festival in Eugene downtown on that Friday night and my partner and I had not been able to get together for a couple of weeks prior. Again, busy. I didn't really have time to touch my Eurorack case to work out a new patch before the show except for 20 minutes that Friday afternoon. I had a new acoustic sound box that I made over a couple of weekends (also in between other house projects) and I knew I wanted to integrate it into my set. I had a rough idea how the patch might need to work, so I quickly just hooked it up, tested it to make sure I had signal, and packed up my stuff and went to get to sound check.

Think, paint, rinse, repeat

Try not to think while you are making artwork. Just make it. Think before. Think after. Sometimes take a break during the making. It’s okay to think then. But don’t think while you are making. Just make.

Back in the summer I released a series of thirty paintings and put them up for sale on my shop. After a solid couple years of just drawing, I wanted to make something small, using only graphite and gouche. They also needed to be affordable for people to purchase. They ended up being two separate groups of 15 pieces each, respectively titled “Minor prophets, nobody cares about your flame thrower (blue series)” and “Our abandoned privacy policy read aloud as an ancient saga (gold series).”

Get new art at rock bottom prices.

The kids are out of school and laying around like bored panthers at the zoo. Summer is cooking the sidewalk. I made a bunch of new small works on paper and they will be available for purchase this Friday. You can preview all the available pieces at my shop now.

Visit the shop

Splitting the difference

I work remotely as a user experience designer, and have been remote full time since the pandemic. My day job desk is in the same space as as my art-making desk. It’s just “Dad’s studio” around the house, but from 8-5 Monday through Friday, it’s my office where I am currently managing a small UX team and fixing a website for a state department in Louisiana. There is a constant battle for the purpose of my 12’ x 24’ workspace in my mind. Some days I see more of my drawing table behind me in the background of my Zoom meetings than I do by actually sitting there making work. Currently there is a mix of drawing and soldering equipment covering my drawing space - I was soldering some contact mics for a musical experiment, and left everything out, and now it’s all a mess and I’m letting said mess prevent me from making drawings.

One thing leads to another

In the last Index post about my work, I unpacked the ghost figure I draw all the time. One of the forking paths the ghost image has taken has turned into another basic, yet recognizable shape. Around the time I started making images of draped fabric and architectural distortions (between 2008-09), a friend of mine lent me his painting studio to use while he was out of the country. Feeling minimalist (lazy actually), and more interested in the opportunity to work in a new space than in conceiving of some big new project, I packed up a few water colors, a stack of paper, and a collection of 1960s Japanese Batman comics for inspiration. I cut a view finder out of a piece of card stock and started sliding it around the pages, looking for small areas in the comic panels for interesting shapes that I could blow up as bigger drawings.

Unsurprisingly, Batman’s cape, being the most prominent shape in almost every panel, dominated my little paper window. After making a few line drawings in watercolor, I realized the cape was more interesting without a body - movement and intention were more ambient implications. I made a handful of these watercolor drawings, and then left them alone for awhile. They were too obviously Batman, and I wasn’t interested in giving something so pop-culture-obvious space in my work. Besides, I told myself I was just experimenting and trying something new in a new space.

It’s middle of March. Almost the end of Q1 for all you ledger-addicts out there. Since my last post was back in December 2022, let me be one of the last in the world to wish you a Happy New Year.

For me the last few months have been packed with a new project at my day job, busy family life, and a bunch of new things I will tell you about below. Right now I’m writing from the living room easy chair with a swollen knee elevated, recovering from stem cell injections. So it seemed like a good time to catch you up on all the things. 

Nothing gets you more exhausted than the holidays. In spite of the energy being expended towards the last month of the year, I have a handful of creative things sustaining me as we spin towards 2023.

Free Static Live at Epic Seconds, December 9th,

With the Eugene Difficult Music Ensemble and Juice Machine, $8 at the door, time TBD.

As I mentioned in my last post, I am performing along side Chris Ruiz as Free Static this Saturday in Eugene. If you are in the area it is a free performance as part of the New Music Festival put on by the Eugene Difficult Music Ensemble.

A couple of weeks ago, EDME interviewed Chris and I for the first broadcast of their new monthly show The EDME Radio Hour on BewaretheRadio.com. You can listen to the whole show below. Our bit starts at the 26:57 mark with our track Glassssalg, followed by Chris and I talking about our process, and our live score work on the 2019 film View of the Red Forest.

Business first, and then some personal updates

Free Static will be performing Friday, Oct 15th at 7pm in the new downtown Eugene Farmer’s Pavillion as part of the New Music Festival being put together by the fine folks of the Eugene Difficult Music Ensemble. 

Free Static performing the live score to Julia Oldham’s film “View of the Red Forest” in 2019 at Woodshop Projects.

Summer is here. The kids are out of school and laying around the house like there is a carbon monoxide leak. My wife and I are both working from home (she’s in grad school too), and now we are are passing Covid around like it’s a candy dish at a holiday mixer. Three out of five of us have it as of this writing. Other than being unusually tired and congested, we seem to have a pretty mild case and are grateful for our vaccines and the fact that we’ve managed to dodge it until now.

When only a couple of were testing positive, I had been isolating for a few days in my basement sleeping on the floor next to my music gear. I figured I’d take time to design an album cover for a track I’d been sitting on for a while. I had intended on this one being part of a full album I’ve been slowly chipping away at. I guess I’m feeling impatient and found some visual inspiration that made me want to see it go out into the world.

I actually created this track pre-pandemic. For a while I was using a Roland RC-505 loop station (which I no longer own), using it to make my own samples and recording other sounds around the house. I pulled in a drone loop from a cassette I had made and some short wave radio sounds and did a few improvisational takes.

PhonoMorphoIdiot at ANTI-AESTHETIC

Life has been so busy I didn’t even get around to announcing on my own blog that I have new work in a group exhibition at ANTI-AESTHETIC in Eugene.

PhonoMorphoIdiot is a group exhibition that considers the uncertainties and absurdities of our verbal, written, and text-based communication. We exist between a shared understanding and the sensory and cultural edges of language which are shaped by everything from bodily states, fantasies and in-group signaling, to predictive text, targeted advertising and character limits. Whether through image-making, objects or sound, the artists in this show engage with language’s flexibility – often to its breaking point. Channels become convoluted, noise increases, the signal is misdirected or lost. By staying with these failures and frolicking in their wreckage, we may stumble upon alternative modes of signifying and connecting to one another.

Featuring work by Andrew C. Lorish, Stephanie Parnes, Alyson Provax, Madeline Maszk, and Courtney Stubbert.

PhonoMorphoIdiot will be on view at ANTI-AESTHETIC, 245 W 8th Ave, Eugene, OR, from April 16th through May 29th, 2022, with open hours on Saturdays and Sundays, 12–4pm.