Sloth and Manatee

OK a little something different because this happened early one morning this week:

The majority of figuring out what you are doing, whether it is sculpture or biology or what-have-you, is figuring out how you, you in particular, do what you are doing.

Like, say you are a musician. Okay, how do you do music? Do you strum wistfully on a guitar? Do you write soundtracks for movies? Do you jam with your buddies on weekends? Do you invent electronic instruments? Do you teach kids clarinet? Do you beat the crap out of drums while people dive off the stage onto their heads? Do you revive centuries-old pieces on period instruments? Are you these people?

My journey as an artist has been confusing and muddled and troubling and complicated and weird and messy. I am only now getting to the point of saying a lot of things to myself out loud about how I make things, and that has come from observing myself In The Wild. Why do I do this or that? How do I get started? When do I get stuck or depressed? What is going on? Why does this thing go and this other thing not go? Why do I pick some things up sometimes years later, and why do I finish some things in a couple minutes?

The tiny story up there at the top is a micro version of all this. I started that because I had these watercolor pencils out by where I eat breakfast. I had a thought about a big fellow who had the earth inside of them because I love things like that. So I started that, and then after a while, I added a wee bird. I drew the bird just in pencil, meaning to go back, but then I liked the bird being in pencil and the big fellow being the world, and then a story came out. This is the order in which this came together. Which was pretty much a function of having the pencils out where I eat breakfast. And some conversations I have had lately. I think. This was not analyzed along the way.

This is a glorious journey, learning about how you do the things. And why. And how you get started, and then what happens. Maybe you hear a song playing at the record store and then you go home and figure out the chords on your ukulele. Maybe a backyard gardening project springs fully-formed from your head and then you go about assembling it down to the last detail. Maybe you rearrange your shoes in a particularly satisfying way. Who knows?

And then, whatever that is, it changes you.

When we see a result or an amazing thing, what we see is that this is a culmination of a whole lot of other things, and we see and experience how cool that is. The art piece or the championship or the short film. Like the people in the Olympics who clearly grew up hurling themselves down mountains, sometimes head-first, and here they are doing that, and it’s really involved, and I get to peek in for a minute.

Anyway, Sloth and Manatee love to peek in, too.

Sloth and Manatee Page

Reminder that I am teaching a class at Richmond Art Center in Richmond, CA, starting later in March! It’s about sketchbooking and journaling and stories and creating a space of art and community and safety for ourselves. Come join us!

Brainwaves

Best of Brainwaves Volume One: The Fountain of Stuff

Best of Brainwaves Volume Two: Mom, Dad, I'm a Cat

License Cartoons from CartoonStock

Art!

It is the season for story field trips at Chapter 510 in Oakland, where classes of third- and fourth-graders come in and make up stuff and I attempt to draw it. They add their own endings and even drawings and it all gets put in a lil book for them. We even have the Prime Minister of Far-Off Ideas who approves each story. It is marvelous.

This week, the story featured a frog with pink hair who works as a janitor at Costco, and who accidentally falls through a magical portal and thus meets a talking cup, who gives advice.

The story also had a Cake Monster (Cake Muncher?) who wanted cake and was purple and had a brain made of jelly which was green.

Print Shop

BunnyFrogCatSnake

Things Of The Week

Draw a horse the way you draw a horse and then let it run around with the other horses!

There’s a whole audio library from NASA from the Artemis mission, for you to use however you want

There’s also a whole Dictionary of Slang. Here’s the entry for “Tubular.”

Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.

May you do a thing, may you that thing in the way that only you do that thing, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy