Eye Trouble is apparently a sketchblog of some sort.

Drawing and painting on boxes today. Apparently, I’m extremely fond of triangles.

All right, so, as usual, today’s one of those days where I have next to no time for any type of cyberspatial activities. What I’m doing instead is, I’m spending the day out in the actual realistic world, painting and drawing and writing and also maybe studying, if my eyes and brain’ll cooperate, which is always an open question. Plus I guess I’m gonna try to take care of some paperwork that badly needs to get taken care of. Plus, perhaps today’ll be the day I catch up on politics…it’s been a while since I last heard or read anything about the primaries and I need to see how Chris Dodd is doing.

Anyway, since all of that sort of stuff is not, of course, the sort of junk worth blogging about, I’m gonna go ahead and not blog about it. Assuming “blog” is now officially and not just casually a verb, which I guess it’s been for a while now.

Oh, and here are a few old drawings I’m sort of tossing overboard from out of some ancient sketchbooks. Sometimes I have a very foggy notion what I wanna draw, but usually what I end up drawing is way, way far from whatever the first idea was. And also usually not a tenth as “good” as I’d pictured in my head. Which I suppose is normal, although who knows, I’ve only ever known about 1.5 other visual artists in person, so all I’ve got to go on for how to do this stuff is just various sorts of hunches.

Before I go, I need to mention (’cause I forgot to mention when it happened), congratulations to Sophia Camille for getting born into this crazy world! You’re a lucky kid, on account of hundreds of reasons, but especially ’cause your parents are very good people, and also ’cause you’re gonna grow up near one of the best taquito places on the whole entire planet of the Earth.

Okay, back to work.

Except: the idea for the butterfly drawing was stolen from an original artwork by one of my nieces. Sorry, kid, but your uncle’s one of those type of pseudo-artists who steals ideas from wherever he can steal ‘em. I totally always admit I’m not original, though. If that helps. Which I’m sure it doesn’t.

Here are some fake folk art signs I worked on today. About half the time, these things come out almost just like I dream for ‘em to come out, while the rest of the time, they’re sort of only barely in the neighborhood of the various mental sketches floating around my inside my messy headspace. Especially today, especially for “Motel,” I was thinking of doing something a little different, something blockier and more uneven than what I ended actually doing. Guess that shows how much my art abilities atrophied while I was away doing other work. Plus, the eye trouble’s not entirely a joke, but is also a real thing, on account of how I see everything sideways, although not always as much sideways as I’d like. Whatever, though; there’s more salvage and scrap lumber laying about to draw on and paint on and so I’ll maybe do another motel sign soon. Although, as usual, I’ve got an extra-long list of words and phrases I want to paint just as much, all inspired by vague memories of signs I’ve seen but didn’t get pictures of or couldn’t buy off whoever made ‘em, ’cause sometimes you simply can’t find that part out, since signs like these, when you run across them in whatever odd corner of the country, are almost always sort of mysterious objects left over from a long-gone world. Like, a real life folk art sign rarely ever has a provenance, except if you want to just imagine what the provenance might be, which is what I like anyway, imagining stuff.

Yet more silhouette style imagery, which I’m posting ’cause, first of all, I just refound this stuff in my crowded, chaotic storage space, which is more like a digitized Salvation Army than anything remotely like The Matrix or those Tron-inspired datascapes in William Gibson’s books. Plus, I need to remind myself about some work I need to do, painting-wise, and this here blog-like thing’s better than a bulletin board for that kind of stuff, since I otherwise tend to sort of pointlessly fill up sketchbooks only to end up sticking ‘em on a shelf someplace, where of course the alleged art inside slowly gets more and more forgotten. Anyway, these drawings are drawings I did right after spending about fourteen Ice Ages not drawing, and they look weird to me now, looking back. Or maybe not weird enough, who knows. But, in any case, they were made for a super-happy occasion and at least doing ‘em made me start to feel vaguely imaginative again. Maybe that’ll get to be a less vague feeling in a few more thousand years. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, just came back from an amazing neighborhood walk with my wife and her friend, who’s visiting from out-of-town. The walk included lunch at an extra-amazing new delicatessen, which opened up a few weeks ago in a space that was formerly the home of a very down-market beautyshop. Which, stuff changing, I guess, is a symptom of how gentrification is bleeding out past the borders of the yuppie neighborhoods to the south, which is in a lot of ways a somewhat disturbing thing, ’cause we like living near plumbers and bricklayers and retired preachers, instead of in a monocultural neighborhood full of designers and webmasters. But, whatever, the sandwiches at the deli are crazy delicious, which goes a long way toward making me not worry so much about how many houses in the area now have Honda Elements in their driveways (although that’s still not completely un-scary when you think about it too much).

Everyone’s out mowing their yards today, except me, I’ve got work to do, which is always a nice thing, and anyway we did our mowing the other day, all of which is probably not information anyone actually wants or needs. So, since that’s the whole entirety of what I know right now, I’ll wait to come back here until I know something else.

And, yes, this sketch is a hyper-realistic true-life sketch of a lady from down the street who is at this very moment steering her rickety old mower up and down her bumpy, tilting yard.

Okay, again with the snakes.

Yesterday, my wife and I watched a glossy black snake sort of take a shortcut through our backyard. We figured out pretty quick it wasn’t a dangerous type of critter, but, still, it was kind of amazingly huge. Or, well, all right, not exactly humongous like a python or something, but nevertheless a whole bunch larger than the usual garter snakes and whatnot we sometimes see lurking around and about. Anyway, there’s really nothing much more to this story, just wanted to draw it real quick, ’cause it was a lot of excitement for us both to have all at once in a fairly quiet-type of neighborhood like ours. I need to mention, though, that my wife is much, much braver than me, despite how it accidentally looks in my sketch, and it’s usually my own personal inclination to get a stomach full of quivery feelings whenever I’m within half a mile of any sort of natural phenomena. Thank goodness for Google and how it can answer questions super-fast about whether or not a particular animal is poisonous…I mean, ’cause of how I grew up totally inside of cities, I can’t really give even the most harmless creature the benefit of the doubt, which is shameful thing, but there it is.

So, that’s all I know for now. There are what sound like interesting conversations happening on the back porch, and it’s way past time for me to quit work for the day. And, yeah, the other drawing isn’t anything in particular. There was an article on Wired about the impossible science of Iron Man, and it was in a lot of ways a fun read, but also 1000% beside the point, ’cause we all know it’s impossible, all the cool junk that iron suit can do, but we also 1000% don’t care, on account of the inner-kid part of our brains that’s just flabbergasted to see it flying around on the big screen. Right? Anyhow, I have one more page in my moleskine and I’ve gotta think about how best to spend it. So, until then….

As usual, I have zero time for this sketchblog thing, although I guess I should be making time for it, ’cause that was the original idea, to draw something new every single day. But, you know, time is always running away down different furrows in the earth. Plus, there’s forty tons of other work to do, all of which I’m glad to do, but still. Anyhow, the big distraction recently was, this weird orange car that kept showing up in front of our house was out there once again on Saturday, so we had to deal with that, meaning we waited for the driver to show up, so we could ask him who the heck he was and where the heck did he actually belong? Turned out, he was just this poor confused kid who was all tangled up in a messy romance with a girl from up the street. Apparently, the girlfriend’s mother didn’t like him parking in front of their house, so he parked in front of ours instead, even though we live hundreds of feet away. All of which, I guess, is a pretty exciting story, which is over now anyway, ’cause it seems the mother must’ve had a change of heart, ’cause now the confused kid’s parking up by his girlfriend’s house. We kind of figured he wasn’t too bad of a person, ’cause his weird orange car had a Stevie Wonder sticker on the back window, and who nowadays has the nerve to drive around with one of those?

Otherwise, I haven’t been sketching much worth posting, except this one thing, which was me just working out patterns for some objects I’m making. When I was doodling it, I was thinking about aerial views of farms and cities, and about various kinds of maps, and about ritual patterns, and also game boards. Plus, I reckon there are a lot of germ forms in this kind of drawing, too, cells and organelles and the shapes of various imaginary viruses. And also, I was thinking about Sixties SF book covers, especially the ones from Ballantine. All of which, of course, is totally un-original, but whatever. I think it’s possible I even had Pucci patterns in the back of my head, although who knows how or why I ever have patterns like that anywhere near any part of my brain.

The objects, meanwhile, are kind of hard to explain at the moment…they’re vaguely for a future project that’s vaguely called “Martian Destination,” which is a term for misdirected internet traffic (sort of). Maybe I’ll post pix of ‘em later, if they ever shape up to be anything more than a glimmer of an idea.

Oh, and I guess I did do this one other thing, which is a very simple little drawing based on a fairly ancient memory. According to a story I heard a long time ago, one of my extremely distant cousins once had a motel way, way out on a State Highway (I don’t know which state). Anyhow, supposedly, once a year or so, this guy would come through town with a traveling Snake Show. And, so, besides showing off different kinds of snakes to motel visitors for whatever loose dimes they had laying around, he also would get in this kind of aquarium-style contraption and let rattlesnakes roam about all over him. I suppose that was the capper to his whole little roadside attraction, the snake-tank bit. I actually have no idea if the story’s even true, but it sounds at least half-true, knowing the odd types of folk I’ve encountered down the years. I do know I kind of like the idea of some old character roaming mid-century America making a living off his talent for charming snakes. If I could write, I’d write about him, imagine a whole back-story and everything, but drawing’s slightly more my thing.

P.S. Here’s what I’m reading now: an interesting article about the Egyptian novelist Alaa al Aswany in last Sunday’s New York Times; Swimming Lessons by Rohinton Mistry; and Production for Graphic Designers by Alan Pipes, to refresh my memory about some stuff I haven’t dealt with for a while, but expect to deal with again soon.

Also, this painting’s from Tuesday, which was during my recent Critter Period. I think the red shapes are sort of symbols for buildings and clouds and sounds. I think I was thinking about stray cats in places like Ouagadougou and Conakry and Colombo. Like, how they wander around in the noise and dust and heat, all hungry and grumpy and yet not wild anymore. Or, who knows. Anyway, now I’m back to drawing airplanes and cosmonauts.

While I know it’s pretty hard to imagine, I actually have 13 or 14 things I’d like to write about, although I’m not sure “writing” is actually the right word. But, anyway, I’m super-busy at the moment, so I doubt a lot that I’m gonna have time today for any sort of writing or scribbling or whatever at all, which is a shame (for me, not for you), ’cause I wanted to write about this weird orange car that keeps getting parked in front of our house, and about the book I’m reading right now, which is a good book for learning arcane graphic design terms like “beard” and “nick” and “quoin.” Also, I wanted to write about book covers I’ve known and enjoyed down the years, and how it’s really strange I dream so often of golf courses, ’cause I’m not remotely fond of golf or the way it uses up the surface of the Earth (with all due respect to my dad and to the memory of my grandfather…I mean, I guess golf was a pretty solid family tradition until it took a detour around me).

Like I said, though, I have zero time at the moment for all that kind of stuff. So, instead, here’s a painting. Which, you know, I guess I’m trying to paint as much as possible, to maybe try and rediscover how to do art. The goal’s to do maybe five of these things a week, but I am, as usual, behind. Anyhow, I think the idea of this one came from spending time in Phoenix, where the sun is sometimes kind of relentless (although I love Arizona), and figures can sometimes look kind of like silhouettes against the bright, bright air. Plus, I remember from Texas how people would often carry around parasols for portable shade, which is a cool visual. Plus I draw in silhouette anyway, ’cause it’s a cheat for how I don’t actually know how to draw the right way. Okay, enough, I’ve gotta go.

Or, well, I reckon it wasn’t all that awesome, more just kind of funny, in a good way. I dreamt that my mother-in-law had the new R.E.M. record and when my wife and I went to visit her, she played it for us and asked us our opinions about what all the lyrics meant. I didn’t, of course, have an opinion, ’cause I never ever know what lyrics mean, but my wife’s a writer, so she knows how words work and she and her mom had a pretty good discussion about the songs. If I could remember what all they concluded about this or that turn of phrase, I’d report it here, but I can’t remember, which is how it goes.

Last night I dreamt that my wife and I were in London and that we, for some reason, were under the impression that Joyce Carol Oates lived in a little white house tucked away in some odd corner of Hyde Park. So we were looking for the house, just to see it, not to bother Mrs. Oates, which we would never do. Anyhow, we couldn’t find the house, although we wandered from one end of the park to the other (it wasn’t really much like the real Hyde Park, but was instead some sort of weird Isamu Noguchi-style futuristic land-sculpture sort of park, with funky swingsets and a bunch of Constructivist pavilions). What we did find was this extra-cool bookstore that was filled floor-to-ceiling with graphic novels and contemporary fiction paperbacks with way better covers than the covers usually are in the States. Which, 90% of my dreams end in bookstores, so that’s not unusual, I guess, unless it’s just unusual in general to dream about books and how they’re designed.

Anyway, I’m posting some old landscape drawings just to sort of have ‘em out where I can look at ‘em, which might help remind me of some work I’ve gotta work on sometime soon, in the middle of all the other work I need to get done.