You Should Be Making a Million Dollars...

It's interesting to be sketching out like this. I see so few others with sketchbooks at cafes. Mostly, I see readers with their dog-eared bestseller throwaways that bore me to tears, sipping at their drinks, nibbling their food in a dull stupor. I see the same faces everyday, day after day and it haunts me. I feel like I'm in Dante's Purgatory, reliving the same exasperating events with the same mundane people, day after day after day, ad infinitum, with no reprieve except for God's mercy that allows me ascend into heaven. It's this kind of fear that forces me to move from one venue to another.

I can almost guess whose in the coffee shop or cafe before I even sit down. The faces are dull and cumbersome, but they know me and come over to look at my latest work, my dailies, so I can't be rude or obnoxious. They are actually well meaning fans and always wish me well. "Honey, you're so talented," the gray-haired lady tells me. "You should be making a million dollars. I sure hope someone discovers you soon." It's hard to get angry or cringe at all this optimism, even though I have to remember that most of these well wishers have no other reference points to make a viable criticism. Still, I want to answer "Gee, can you hook me up with that million dollar benefactor, cause I'm starving a little on my end."

I've heard tell that R. Crumb keeps a traveling sketchbook for his sketching jaunts at cafes that is a little more palatable, more PG-rated, for the curious on-lookers that want to peek in at his latest efforts. I try to keep my work a little mean and edgy and I get a cross section of people that either love me or hate me. I get the little side peaks that causes the more prudish to move on quietly and quickly. Or I get the real enthusiastic guy with tattoos with a shaved head that wants me to draw his latest tattoo idea on the small of his back. "Yeah, could you draw like a giant scorpion killing a snake with its pincers, man?" My favorite though is the little old gray-haired lady, the retired art teacher, that looks at my pages with utter fascination. "Did you draw that?" She pauses, eyes wide with wonder. "My word, look at all that detail. I used to teach art in high school and I think that you are very talented, young man. Keep it up."

"Yeah, but can you direct me to the guy that wants to pay me the million dollars so I can keep doing this stuff!" I put down my pencil and wipe at the graphite smear on the side of my hand with a damp towel.

"You know, young man, you shouldn't worry about the money, just do what you love and the money will come later."

"Oh, shut up." Is what I'd like to say. But for as much as they exasperate me, I still need my boosters. I'll move to another spot and look for new love, but I'll return to slake my ego and to refuel on that misplaced optimism to keep me going to the next page and the next.

Still, a million dollars wouldn't hurt.

Merry Christmas Trolleycar Joe...

I'm sketching at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in town, where there are lots of windows to let in the good light and keep me away from the smokers outside. Today, it feels like the Christmas season is upon us, with everyone wrapping up and drinking hot chocolate, peppermint flavored coffee and egg-nog lattes. Outside, Trolleycar Joe is getting harassed by the local cops again.

It's a regular occurrence to see Joe's trolleycar bus parked in a side street somewhere in Uptown. You can't miss it; it's conspicuous as hell. The cops come to shake him down...they know he sleeps in there with his young son after they lost their house several years ago. They know, too, that Trolleycar Joe has a lot of seedy friends among the homeless and the young street punks, and that he helps them out whenever he can. I've never seen him turn away someone who is hungry or in need of a dollar. The cops threaten him with a ticket and then leave, knowing that Joe and his friends have their 3 hour parking window timed out to the second.

Today, Joe is getting a haircut with friends. A young couple is outside the trolley, and the young lady is giving him a haircut and a shave. His straw hat rests on his lap as she lathers up his gruff beard. Her partner is also working on another seemingly homeless man on the folding chair next to his. There are three other older men waiting behind them, sitting on the low concrete wall, and they are chatting in the shade of the overhanging trees. People drive by and wave to old Joe and they honk. Some stop their cars and drop off baskets of canned goods...this time of year, they drop off extra blankets because the trolley is drafty and cold in the winter nights.

People are always giving Joe things...maybe it's all the good karma he's built up over the years. A ragged man offers a cup of brewed coffee to Joe, a refill perhaps, and then he walks into the trolley and I don't see him come out for quite some time. Even a couple of hours of unmolested sleep is a needed respite to someone sleeping on the cold streets. The woman finishes the shave, and gives a dab of hair oil to Joe's freshly clipped hair...he is still a handsome old man and you can see that he likes the attention and that he enjoys looking his dapper best.

Just before the hair cutters arrived, I pulled my car into my spot at the coffee house and took out a plate of Italian cookies my Italian mother baked that week. There were a variety of biscottis and traditional Christmas cookies that I knew Joe would appreciate because his parents were Italian immigrants as well. Every year I do this, and every year Joe gets teary-eyed and thanks me with a smile. But as soon as I give him the basket and he gives he a gentle warm thank-you, he immediately takes off the plastic wrap and offers the cookies to his son, his son's friends, and all the homeless that have gathered around. He samples just one of each and lets everyone else enjoy the bounty. I don't know whether to get angry or to laugh. "It's just Joe being Joe," I think to myself . Maybe that's his secret to his karmic good will, to give everything away and it returns back tenfold in friendships and in good deeds.

I'm sketching as the last of the old men are trimmed. The young lady and man take their portable plastic basins, dump the lathery water into the sewers, pack up their scissors and their folding chairs and cram them into their little hatchback. No money exchanges hands, only hugs and thank-yous are expressed and hats are tipped in appreciation. That's the magic of Joe. His son speeds toward the men and he jumps off his bike in a hurry and the men store the bike on a rack at the front of the trolley, locking it down in seconds as if this move has been practiced many times before. His son jumps into the driver's seat and beckons his father inside. Ever the showman, Joe takes off his hat as he waves from the double swinging passenger side door just before the cop cruisers slowly patrol the street.

Joe moves on to find a safer side street for another couple of hours. He'll be back, though.

It's Christmas time and the homeless guys emerge at the table near the window to where I'm sketching and they show off their new slick cuts to each other. One breaks out a cigarette and another emerges with a fresh, hot refill of drip coffee and shares them by pouring them into tiny taster cups that are free at the counter.

Life is good when Joe is around and the karma is flowing. I even get quite a bit of sketching done today and the hot chocolate hits the spot.

Isolation and the Lonely Life of Henry Darger...

I admit that I was curious about the film, "In the Realms of the Unreal," through the papers that praised Henry Darger as an outsider artist and troubled recluse. But I felt uneasy about going to the theatre and watching a limited release film that featured a grown man obsessed with drawing and painting pictures of little girls with tiny penises. It just seemed odd and perverse.

But catching the film on YouTube, I became fascinated by the lonely life of this sad, little man and how his obsession with his illustrated novel became the focal point of his entire life.

It really hit home when I began arranging my sketchbook pages into Mylar sheets and I started ordering and numbering the pages to scan into my website...I had a lot of pages. There were many that were too primitive and badly drawn that I scrapped, and there were the full page ones, the spot illustration pages, the inked pages...things that had characters I would pull out for future reference. There was a lot my brain was tinkering with. I began to feel that I have led an isolated, solitary life and that these pages were the legacy of that isolation.

I began thinking of poor Henry Darger, alone and abandoned at an early age, returning to his shabby little apartment after a day of scrubbing floors at his job as a janitor, returning to his one solace: writing and illustrating a book where he was leader of the Gemini Squadron, protector of the innocence of children, enslaved by evil forces in an unjust, un-Christian realm. He spent his entire lifetime writing over 15,000 pages of this novel, complete with hundreds of full color and black-and white illustrations done with a self-taught, naive hand.

That is a body of work. It is painful to watch the film and listen to narrator read the words that are gibberish and overwrought with the emotion of a novice writer. It is painful, too, to look at the pages and pages of missteps it took to achieve his finished art pieces. All those years, alone and searching to perfect his vision of his perfect and divine fantasy world, where all children were free and allowed full expression in a corrupt, deceitful adult world.

I think, somehow, that this is the steady decline towards a sweeping madness. This type of obsession starts little by little, becoming a daily preoccupation, and then a necessity, and then it merges into compulsion. This seems the way that the cat fancier slowly drifts into multiple cats and then finally to "crazy cat lady"...loneliness and compulsive need take over. This is probably the digression into most pack-rat behavior.

But, still, I can't help but feel that when Henry Darger died and his landlords finally entered his apartment and found thousands upon thousands of pictures, most beautiful, some disturbing, that they were like the first archaeologists unearthing King Tut's tomb. Such a visual treasure of papers and art and books and art supplies scattered in his tiny studio space. Here was a man who spent his entire life obsessively writing and drawing the visions in his head and no one saw his work or heard him speak of it at all, like the proverbial fallen tree in the woods. And now his apartment is a shrine to this lonely venture, his art depicted in books of outsider art and visionary thinkers.

I look at my collection of hundreds and hundreds of pages under Mylar protectors, and there are still more to shake loose from my brain, and I wonder if the isolation and the seclusion is really worth it all.

Here's the link to the first installment on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PMBVxJnoPw

Living Vicariously Through the Tattooed...

Sometimes I wonder why it is I like drawing characters with tattoos. I'm not a flamboyant person; I'm not one to stand out in a crowd or even to crave outward attention by passing strangers. Even when I'm sketching out in the open and a curious person comes over to my table to look at my work, I find myself growing increasing shy and inwardly quiet.

One thing is for sure is that drawing tattoos, especially multiple tattoos on a character, is a good design choice, because it draws the eye into specific tiny details and immediately identifies the character. I think it is the one thing I fear in getting a tattoo inked on my own body...that gnawing fear of being sidled with a single, specific symbol of my being for the rest of my life. No one exact symbol could define me because I'm constantly reading and living and absorbing different concepts that shape me. It would mean that I would have to accommodate a new symbol each time my world view shifted, and that would mean inking major portions of my flesh.

Still, I envy those that can commit to a specific identifiable symbol that empowers them or allows others to become attracted to their inner natures. There is that instantaneous hook that draws people closer, makes them curious enough to go up to someone with an interesting tattoo and begin conversing on the style, the content, the tattoo artist who inked them. And while I get a vicarious kick at looking at a nicely designed tattoo, I like that there is a story behind the art, that there exists a personal mythology, an enigma that can only be shared through a deeper intimacy.

A friend once told me that he buys a pack of cigarettes to keep inside his shirt even though he doesn't smoke. He gives them out to people when he knows they're hurting for a nicotine fix and that, for twenty cents or so, he makes an instantaneous friend or it becomes an introduction to start a conversation. I think tattoos do that, but in a more profound way. It is an immediate conversation starter, and "in" to closer contact, a gateway into a alternative mindset.

I like my characters to have tattoos and smirk and smoke and drink and do all the varied things that I decline to do, not because I'm not adventurous (okay, I may be), but outwardly I like to showcase my inward thoughts that are always changing and shifting, to the extent that my characters are swirling in a chaotic spiral on the page. When I analyze this, it scares me that the haphazard manner I draw is a reaction to needing that new stimulus, that new energy all the time. Either that, or I'm as neurotic as hell and I need to be psychoanalized.

I don't know whether choosing one set image or images would ever satisfy me. So, I start a new page with new faces on new characters brandishing their new tattoos in a vicarious existence that gives me peace of mind.

At least my invented friends on the page are changeable and malleable, too.

Amorality and Selfishness...

I'm reading the quote of Angelina Beloff, Diego Rivera's first wife, after he abandoned her for a series of other women, and I'm amazed how off-the-cuff, how disinterested, the statement sounded to my ears. "He has never been a vicious man, but simply an amoral one. His painting is all he ever lived for and deeply loved."

And then I thought, "Hell, the entire premise of TMZ and tabloid television is based solely on this reality." We admire our artists to the extent that we tolerate any amoral behavior, so long as they're not vicious or abusive or murderous. We live out our fantasies vicariously through their exploits and we crave the sensuous, the decadent, and the vivacious characters surrounding their worlds. We embrace that life force, that vitality...and that amorality, it just makes them more colorful and engaging.

Well, I am not so much the gigantic figure that lights up the room, that becomes the immediate beacon that all others cling to or gravitate towards. But I do understand the nature of selfish behavior and the struggle to maintain a balance with my art and the outside world. It's a part of my personality I don't always like confronting: I understand that my strong desire and drive to do creative things will take away time from my family, my friends, my loved ones, but the need to create supersedes all other connections. I succumb to my selfish whims every time.

But it's not like I shun all of humanity. I like to hold a table at a cafe and invite my friends along, to bring work, to enjoy the day, but few have the stamina to read a book or to draw or to sit for hours on end in conversation. I'm reading the stories of the cafes in Paris and Montparnesse, in the time where the great artists like Matisse and Picasso broke bread with poets like Apollinaire and played chess, talked art and ate themselves through menu after menu of good food and wine and fine coffees and pastry. These were the lean years of their youths, where they left sketches and paintings for the cafe owners for the loan for a meal or a bottle of wine. And they ate and talked and enjoyed life before the wars came and tore apart their idyllic worlds.

It's very hard to strive for a full, idyllic, artistic life. So much of reality pounces on that fantasy and pulls it toward the mundane tasks of living. And in those moments where I can find time to be with my sketchbooks and my thoughts and my omnipresent ipod, I guard them jealousy and savor them when they are good and productive. I understand my own selfishness at those moments and my need to be apart from the bustling crowd. During those times, slowness and contemplation are my well-worn friends.

Everything, these days, is increasingly connected with high speed, instantaneous velocity. After a day of zoning out on my PC or my laptop, I crave those selfish moments to tune out the rapid fire pace of life and relish the simplicity and slow ease of pencil on paper or ink on the crisp, tactile page. Good coffee or a cold iced-tea also helps to sustain me and gives me a boost, but my internal drive can chug along so long as I can maintain this invisible force-field to keep the manic world at bay.

I may not be amoral...but selfishness I understand.

Bucolic Ease and the Strawberry Marshmellow Butterfly Princess...

I'm reading about Diego Rivera and his return trip he made to Montparnesse where he meets Picasso, Chagall, Duchamp and Matisse and revels in the "bucolic ease of the cafes", and I think to myself, however joyous and satisfying my sketching excursions seem to be, they are always tinged with the ugliness of the modern world. In fact, I'm convinced that there is a marked cosmic conspiracy to rattle my cage on a daily basis.

If it's not the cigar smokers that repeatedly spew their stink in my direction at what was once my favorite cafe, then it's the little Mexican man on the scooter who continues to rub me the wrong way. Every day, without fail, he drives his Rascal scooter uptown and parks on the other side of the sidewalk, directly across from my favorite table. He never orders food, but he sets out water for the tiny chihuahua that rides in his basket, takes out a book, and chain smokes putrid cigarettes one by one and blows the smoke directly in my face. The wind always seems to be right. Day in and day out he does this...like the universe is in on this grand joke to see how long it will take me to break.

At a Starbucks I sketch at, there's an enormous man with the saddest face I have ever seen on a human being that sits down on the comfy chairs and falls asleep for four or five hours at a time. He sputters and gurgles and snores heavily, but he usually orders a sandwich and a coffee so they never turn him away. He slumps into the chair and his tiny, tiny striped shirt always rides up revealing a bloated, pink stomach with an enormous, bulbous hernia just over his belly button. It's huge, like a baby's head, and it juts out like a lighthouse beacon, commanding the attention of the entire room. There's no escaping it...it's like his second head is watching you. Teenagers giggle and point at it. Small children cry into their mother's arms at the strange mutation. It got to be so depressing that I had to move on.

Oh, and then there's the homeless guy (who might be a veteran) at Borders who brings in his duffel bag filled with war games and plastic army men. He takes armfuls of expensive books on World War II, cracks them open to a double-page spread of some explosive battle and sets up his plastic army soldiers, his movable tanks and helicopters and plays warfare out in the middle of the cafe. He takes up at least two tables to do this, but everyone sensing that the camouflage wearing crazy person just might be a wounded vet, give him a wide berth to carry out the strategic air assaults in his head. He's actually a kind, docile soul who'll ask very politely, very shyly, for money for a cup of soup or a coffee. They treat him kindly there, but when he gets going, he becomes a serious distraction, especially when he starts making airplane noises and dive bombs his coffee with half-chewed pieces of biscotti.

At one time, the cafe used to sponsor art shows...that is until the neighborhood artist colony took over the wall completely. Then it became a series of bad art done by retired grandmas and grandpas...lots of oil paintings of barns and pet cats and fruit baskets. There was one artist in the bunch who was good, but his sole subject matter, month to month, was a lone giant rooster on a four foot by six foot canvas. They were always beautifully rendered, right down to the intricate patterning of the feathers. They were quite nice, except for the fact that they dominated the space and the damned eyes seemed to follow you around, and the fact that someone, at least once a day, would say aloud, "Now that's a giant cock!" and set the entire cafe laughing. Hard to concentrate with that around...

And then it was bad folk singer night. Every night, at 7 or 8 pm, they would clear a makeshift stage for some acoustic musician that would entertain for a stipend of books. Most nights it was frightened kids trying out a list of new songs, or some bad bar singer that wanted to play a new venue...or it was the Strawberry Marshmellow Butterfly Princess. That wasn't her name, but it's what the cynical teenage baristas that had to work the cafe called her. She had to live close by, because she seemed to find a spot every time the cafe entertainment flaked out, which was often, and she became the resident fill in. Oh, she was an obnoxious New Age singer. Imagine the annoying girlfriend from Spinal Tap wearing a diaphanous, draped ensemble with flowing scarves playing an over sized Ovation guitar with inlaid butterflies in the design. She would artistically arrange her CD's on the table next to her, and by the time she was into her set of schmaltzy mysticism and her cloying goddess-theology songs, she would empty out the entire cafe except for the pissed off baristas, who got very little in their tip jars, and the old men who stayed until closing time reading magazines. At those moments, I would rudely tune her out with my headphones and my sketchbooks. And she played and she played the same songs over and over again. On many nights they would start to close down the lights on her...and it was sad to see this stoic, little red-headed folk singer in front of a painting of a giant rooster, singing to lonely old men reading magazines, an artist tuning her out with headphones, and a straggly, bearded, camouflaged homeless vet dive-bombing his plastic platoon with half-chewed Italian cookies.

Sometimes, I wonder if it's just karmic retribution...that we can't have joy come to us so easily in this world, that we are forced to endure the struggle in order to reach Paradise. I feel that it is either God laughing at me, or it is the Devil fucking with me, and I can't tell which it is from moment to moment. Or maybe it's the world at large that is too crowded with craziness to let us enjoy the "bucolic ease" of anything, anymore...

Chasing R. Crumb...

I was sketching in the Gypsy Den in Santa Ana a few months ago. I got there early so I could sketch for several hours before the gallery next door opened at noon. They were featuring a traveling show that included original work by R. Crumb, and I waited like an anxious fanboy for the chance to see one of my hero's works up close.

I came to be a fan of Crumb very late, but it was never for the perverse subject matter, the sexism or the racism that he detailed (with scathing irony and dark humor), it was solely about technique and the masterful way he handled the page.

My earliest influence (apart from Michelangelo) was Dr. Seuss. If you went beyond the whimsical poetry and studied his intricate, energetic cross-hatching...wow, the man was a force to be reckoned with. Such masterful pen strokes...such expression and verve. Every mark was joyous and funny and deft. Seeing his work up close at a gallery made me weep. A true master.

Then it was Maurice Sendak, who was much quieter, but a master, nonetheless, of pen-and-ink crosshatching. And then I got warped by the "MAD" geniuses, especially Jack Davis and Mort Drucker. I think they warped a lot of young artist's minds in the 70's and 80's.

But Crumb...there was something about Crumb that made me connect with him more fervently than any other cartoonist outside of Winsor McCay. There was something that was tragically human about the skinny geek, something that I felt brought us into a spiritual kinship.

I'm sketching at the Gypsy Den, and the atmosphere is thrift-store bohemian. There are cheap Persian rugs on the wall along with hanging paper lanterns, nick-knacks and dusty student art, hanging with frames and without, in a chaotic quest to balance the negative spaces. The coffee comes in heavy, bulbous cups that warm and soothe. The food is organic and healthy. And the waitresses seem like ultra-hip art students that pass by, taking orders, aloof and harried.

They take no notice of me...but when I break out the sketchbook, I attract attention. It's not always good, kind of like people who have interesting tattoos or piercings attract fans of those things. It's an immediate conversation starter. It buffers those awkward social moments and gives me an "in" to begin interacting with people that normally wouldn't give me the time of day.

That's what draws me to Crumb, I think. I remember seeing the documentary, Crumb, by Terry Zwigoff, his friend, and seeing that socially inept, geeky persona was not just a persona. There was some deep and dark hurt that isolated him. He was constantly being hounded by anauthoritarian father, a self-medicating mother, fucked-up siblings, and a bullying world that took one look at the scrawny, bird-like, weakling and tried to crush him at every opportunity.

I relate to that, being endomorph to Crumb's ectomorph. I'm the fat guy who no one pays attention to until they see me drawing. I related to that need to slink away and to escape into sketchbooks, without the pressure of doing fine, exact work, but letting the mind open up to explorations of the moment. I pictured him in cafes, drawing, keeping things internal...letting in only those that understood that same isolation or that same need for expression.

So when I heard those same dusty sketchbooks were traded to Fantagraphics publishing for a villa in France (where he still resides) and his sketches that he scribbles on napkins when he waits for food in French cafes command thousands in galleries, I think that his career was more about self-preservation than anything else. He struggled to find that bit of respect and dignity and live a creative life without apology. And he succeeded. I admire that.

As the gallery opens, I view Crumb's work; from his crude, linear early sketchbooks to his high point in the late 60's and early 70's, to his quieter moments of American nostalgia and deep love for the blues, jazz and early roots music, it is a good sampling of his career. It wasn't always the pornographic, prurient Crumb that enticed me...it was the artist that explored all facets of his psyche as well as keeping a keen eye on American society and dared to tell all of our dirty secrets.

But seeing the control of his medium, the delicate cross-hatching he mastered, he could be in league with Hogarth or Durer. I look at his work and it inspires me...but mostly, I see the skinny man, with the heart of a wounded child, entirely alone with his thoughts of the world, armed with only a sketchbook and a rapidograph pen...sketching to fill in the many voids of his life.