Eye Trouble is apparently a sketchblog of some sort.

Spent the day drawing and painting on boxes. 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….